Chapter Six #2
Suzy opened the box, removed the ring and slid it onto her finger without ceremony before eating with appetite.
She had only been abroad once and that had been a trip to Greece with a school friend’s family the summer that she was sixteen.
She was excited about visiting Spain, her late mother’s birth place, but striving to act mature and hide the fact.
When her cases had been carted away and she walked out of the house to see a limousine awaiting them, she was startled.
‘Is this what you call travelling in style?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Which airport are we heading for?’
‘I use a private airfield nearby. It’s not far and it’ll speed up our journey.’
A private airfield? How did that work? Reluctant to betray her ignorance, Suzy said nothing while wondering if he knew someone who had offered them flights on his plane.
They drew up at the office at the airfield. Ruy requested her passport and it was handed out of the limo to the man who emerged from the office. Suzy idly appraised the sleek white jet parked on the runway nearby. It bore a V logo and the Spanish flag on its tail.
‘Time for us to board,’ Ruy advised as the passenger door was opened by the driver.
The pilot and two stewardesses greeted them at the foot of the steps.
There was a lot of what Suzy regarded as bowing and scraping and the ladies were very flirty with Ruy.
Suzy frowned as she mounted the steps and moved into what struck her as the very last word in opulent cabin interiors.
There were reclining seats, coffee tables, polished wood, pale leather surfaces, and through the arch at the foot she could see an actual conference table surrounded by chairs.
She stepped back as the four men she had seen at Ruy’s secluded home passed by them and headed towards the back of the plane, where they disappeared from view.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Ruy advised.
‘A private jet?’ Suzy queried, settling stiffly down into a reclining seat but keeping it upright, quite unable to relax in so sumptuous a setting.
Ruy vented a rueful laugh, raw charisma in the lazy half-smile he angled in her direction. ‘I suppose it’s time to come clean.’
‘I think it is,’ Suzy agreed with a dangerous glint in her clear green eyes. ‘You have access to a private jet or is some friend allowing you to use it?’
‘Strictly speaking the jet belongs to Valiente Capital, the Spanish investment firm. I am the CEO of Valiente Capital. That I also paint is a secret, a diversion from my normal life as a hedge-fund manager and I use the pseudonym V for my portraits to conserve that privacy,’ Ruy explained with cool precision.
Investment, hedge funds? Suzy’s brain swam.
She would probably have been less taken aback had he announced that he was a bullfighter.
But some sort of financial wizard? That was so far removed from what she had so far seen of Ruy that she was wildly disconcerted, and then her thoughts took a step back and she recalled that cool, arrogant side to his nature.
‘Why weren’t you honest with me about who you were from the start? ’ she demanded tightly.
‘My two identities are kept very much separate and few people know the truth. Cecile is one of the few. I’m not sure our investors would be happy to learn that I’m an artist as well.
I bought the house in England as a bolt-hole where I could paint when I take time off and I see no reason to tell anyone that I’m also involved in the financial markets. ’
‘How rich are you?’ Suzy shot at him thinly, an unpleasant thought suddenly occurring to her. ‘Rich enough to have paid me that fifty thousand pounds I mentioned that night in the pub and think nothing of it?’
Steady dark eyes with only a gleam of gold in their depths rested on her as Ruy compressed his lips and jerked his chin in confirmation.
‘And I laughed and asked if you thought you were Mr Rockefeller or something!’ Suzy recalled with a shudder of humiliation, her cheeks burning. ‘You’ve had a lot of fun at my expense!’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Ruy countered, taken aback by the charge.
‘I may not have the right to know your secrets, but I did have the right to know the identity and status of the man I slept with. I was entitled to be told who you really were before that happened,’ Suzy condemned.
‘Because I can tell you right now that if I’d known you were some flash hedge-fund whizz-kid, I wouldn’t have gone to bed with you in the first place! ’
‘Why the hell not? What possible difference could it have made?’ Ruy slammed back at her, angry for the first time in her presence, thoroughly nettled by that word, ‘flash’, which seemed to suggest that he was some sort of untrustworthy braggart.
‘I don’t even know your real name!’ Suzy yelled back at him above the roar of the engines as the jet rolled down the runway.
‘Ruy Santiago Valiente,’ Ruy supplied with icy precision. ‘Rivera was Cecile’s mother’s surname and I borrow it when I don’t wish to be identified.’
‘How convenient to have an alternative name!’ Suzy snapped between clenched teeth of scorn.
Ruy exhaled slowly, cocked an ebony brow and murmured, ‘I really don’t see what the problem is. I’ve told you now.’
Suzy gripped her right hand with her left because she wanted to hit him. ‘You deceived me. You betrayed my trust.’
‘Those are serious accusations,’ Ruy bit out, his temper stirring even more.
‘And they’re true. You didn’t give me a choice. I feel like an idiot for not seeing that, the way you behaved, you couldn’t possibly have been the forthright artist you were pretending to be!’
Ruy gritted his teeth. ‘Most women would be ecstatic to find out that I’m a wealthy man.’
Suzy’s hands both flew up in the air to emphasise her furious frustration with him and his refusal to look at the situation from her point of view.
‘If they’re greedy, if they want you to spend your money on them, but I don’t!
Now I can see that you’ve used your wealth like a weapon against me from the moment we met! ’ she framed with bitter resentment.
The jet was finally in the air and Ruy released his seat belt and vaulted upright to his full intimidating height. He stared down at her with scorching dark golden eyes. ‘Valgame Dios! How do you make that out?’
Suzy released her belt and got up as well, moving away several feet before spinning back round to face him. ‘You tried to bribe me.’
‘And it would have worked a treat had you known who I was at the time because you were desperate to save your father and his livelihood,’ Ruy reminded her drily.
Suzy stamped a pompommed toe. ‘That is not the point!’
‘That is exactly the point. Everything has turned out very well for you and your father...why?’ Ruy prompted expectantly, as if he were a teacher giving a young, not very bright child a lesson in life.
‘Because I have money, and I was able to use that money you deride to protect you and your father from further interference and intimidation from Brenton. Don’t you dare snipe at me for telling you the truth you don’t want to hear or accept! ’
As Suzy angrily parted her lips the cabin door opened and a stewardess appeared.
Deeply flushed, Suzy backed down into her seat again and sat there frozen in place while refreshments and snacks were served.
She was so angry she was trembling with the force of her feelings.
On one level she knew that Ruy was right.
He had saved the pub from her ex’s machinations.
He had made her father’s life a lot easier by releasing him from years of worry about money.
But, ultimately, she was convinced that Ruy had bought into the pub to ensure that Suzy agreed to model for him and accompanied him out to Spain to pose as his fiancée.
‘Yes, what you did may have delivered a happy result for my father, but it doesn’t change the unscrupulous way you operate. You bought into the pub to put pressure on me.’
‘I bought into the pub to take pressure off you,’ Ruy stressed curtly.
‘I had the right to know your true identity before I slept with you,’ Suzy sliced back at him sharply.
‘It was casual sex, Suzy...not a life-changing choice!’ Ruy raked back at her cuttingly.
Her face flamed at the wounding reminder.
What had meant a great deal to her had meant considerably less to him and that hurt, yes, it did, no matter how hard she resented that reality.
Ruy had lied to her and that scared her and made her very wary, particularly after she had innocently chosen to trust Percy.
She had already suffered the knowledge that she was not that perfect a judge of character and she knew she needed to be more careful.
‘Yes, it worked out so well for you when you ended up bedding a stalker!’ Suzy reminded him helplessly, needled by the statement that their encounter had been casual on his terms when it had been anything but casual for her when he had become her first lover.
A muscle pulled taut at the corner of Ruy’s unsmiling mouth. ‘You slept with me because you wanted me. It would have been wrong had I been married or concealing some other relevant fact that you needed to know, but I wasn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t have chosen to become intimate with a guy so far removed from my own world!’ Suzy retorted fiercely.
‘That’s inverse snobbery,’ Ruy countered, marvelling at the stubborn manner in which she held onto her ire, refusing to be soothed or to accept that he had done nothing wrong.
‘No, it’s not. You’re rich and I should’ve worked that out for myself because you don’t really hide it that well.
You’re very arrogant. You think you can buy whatever you want and that your wishes and needs are more important than other people’s.
You rearranged my life and my father’s purely to suit yourself. ’
‘It suited you as well,’ Ruy incised coolly, all logic and calm, which only increased the frustrated rage she was suppressing.
‘Oh, shut up!’ Suzy finally launched at him in exasperation, ramming down the hurt feelings tugging at her that he was not the man she had naively assumed he was.
Once again, she had made the wrong judgement call and that scared her.
‘I’ve heard enough of your smooth, specious arguments.
You could probably talk your way out of murder but I’m not listening any more! ’
And with that ultimate strike, Suzy rose from her seat, swiped up the magazines the stewardess had brought her and stalked to the end of that section of cabin to sit out of his view.
Ruy brooded on his rage, even white teeth gritted.
He was very wealthy, he had always been wealthy, and he supposed a certain level of arrogance and selfishness afflicted most men in his position.
He was accustomed to getting his own way.
He was used to paying more to get it too, it being his experience that those he dealt with expected him to pay more because he could afford it. How was that wrong?
What difference did his status in life make to her?
Would she honestly have rejected him had she known that he was rich?
And why was she the very first woman in his life to fight with him over the reality that he was as rich as Midas?
The first woman to criticise him...aside of Cecile.
And his sister adored him and only offered occasional nuggets of unwelcome truth in an effort to improve his character.
‘I have a business call to make,’ Ruy informed her as he came to a halt in the archway next to her seat. ‘But before I leave, allow me to have the final word.’
Suzy lifted her head, green eyes glittering like emeralds, soft pink mouth flattening with tension.
‘You had sex with me for the same reason I had sex with you, querida,’ he imparted softly.
‘Which was...?’ Suzy dared, enraged by the heat she could feel hotly flooding her cheeks.
‘Hombre! Reason had nothing to do with it. We were so hot for each other we couldn’t control ourselves. At least I’m honest about it,’ Ruy told her mockingly.