Chapter Ten
‘YOU CAN SIT in the car while I nip into the off-licence,’ her father wheedled. ‘Save me parking across the road.’
‘You usually go on your own... I’m kind of busy here,’ Suzy argued, barely lifting her head from the academic website she was studying.
Roger Madderton frowned down at his daughter. ‘I’ll be blunt, then. I’m tired of you moping about the place like a wet weekend. Two weeks of that is enough. You need to get out of the flat, even come down and help behind the bar—’
‘Flora’s managing fine,’ Suzy reminded her parent stiffly, because it had been something of a shock to discover on her return that her place had been filled more than adequately by the older woman, who was also cooking up a storm of popular meals to sell to their weekend customers.
That had stung when Suzy had only contrived to serve up pizzas and paninis, her catering skills being rather more basic.
And then there had been the mortification of all the tales about Percy Brenton that had come her way whenever she was seen.
The locals seemed to think it was their bounden duty to tell her anything that related to her ex.
Percy had been charged and arrested. As soon as he had got out on bail, he had put his house on the market and he had not been seen since.
There was a rumour that his assault on Suzy had not been his first offence and that he had a bitter ex-wife now living in York.
It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that Suzy couldn’t have cared less and that she was merely grateful not to have to see the man again.
‘Come on,’ her father urged, and with great reluctance Suzy rose from her seat at the desk in the lounge of the flat and followed him downstairs to his car.
She wasn’t moping, she thought resentfully.
She had done her best to be cheerful and helpful since she came home.
But most of her attention had been reserved for the different educational courses available to anyone planning to work with children.
The variety of options had made it hard to choose because she wasn’t sure how high to set her sights or whether or not to settle on a short course or a lengthier one.
In short, she had done everything possible to avoid moping and stay busy and if she was miserable she had done her best to hide the fact.
A broken heart was a broken heart, and she couldn’t eat or sleep without thinking about Ruy and feeling a great gush of pain and hollowness engulf her until she felt as if she were drowning.
In truth she had left her heart behind in Spain and she remained furious in her bitterness with Ruy.
He hadn’t wanted her enough to fight for her!
He hadn’t wanted her enough to defend himself!
It was even more galling that she had shut him down before he was forced to define exactly what he had meant by asking her to stay in Spain with him.
After all, if you didn’t have a relationship to begin with how did one move on from that point, particularly with the complication of a fake engagement in play?
Yes, Suzy would very much have enjoyed hearing Ruy explain what he was asking her to consider.
Not, of course, that she could have overlooked what she had discovered about him, but she was only human, she would still have liked to know.
Her father was unusually quiet on his way to the off-licence and when he emerged she was surprised that he was only carrying a little crate of beer.
‘That was a small order,’ she remarked as he reversed the car and drove off again.
On the drive home, she said, ‘Have I really been that hard to live with?’
Roger Madderton groaned. ‘You’re inconsolable. How am I expected to feel as your dad? I want to fix it for you.’
‘You can’t fix it. He wasn’t the guy I thought he was,’ Suzy sighed, patting his knee soothingly. ‘I’ll get over this. Don’t worry about me.’
‘I can help you fix it,’ her father asserted, disconcerting her. ‘You’re very stubborn. He’s very stubborn as well but he’s also a few years older and a little less short-sighted than you can be.’
‘Why are you talking about Ruy like this?’ Suzy twisted in her seat as her father turned off the road down a familiar lane. ‘Why are we driving down here?’
Her father stopped at the electric gates that secured Ruy’s house in the woods. The gates whirred open and Suzy stared in disbelief at her parent while he marvelled out loud at the camera-recognition technology that had given them automatic entry.
‘Dad!’ she gasped in frustration. ‘What are we doing here?’
‘You had a row with him, and you didn’t talk it out. This is your last chance to get it sorted,’ her father told her squarely.
At the realisation that Ruy was back in England, Suzy froze in consternation. ‘I’m not going in there!’
‘If he’s made the effort to fly over here, you can make the effort to at least listen to what he has to say. You don’t have to forgive him for whatever he’s done,’ her father pointed out levelly.
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!’ Suzy protested, shooting him a shaken glance.
‘I hope you don’t still feel that way in ten minutes—’
‘Ten minutes?’
‘I’ll wait here for ten minutes. If you aren’t back out again by then I’ll go home.’ Her father switched off the engine with a flourish.
‘Did Ruy somehow force you into doing this for him?’
‘No, he was planning to come to the pub, but I didn’t want to find myself in the middle of your drama and it’s not very private there. This is the better option,’ Roger Madderton opined and leant across her to swing open the passenger door in invitation.
Suzy snatched in a sustaining breath and leapt out. ‘I’ll be out in less than ten minutes!’
‘Famous last words, my love,’ her father said equably as she slammed the door shut again.
Furious with Ruy for using her dad to do his bidding and mysteriously contriving to shift the older man’s loyalty away from his daughter, Suzy stomped up the steps.
Ruy opened the door himself and her heart skipped a beat straight away.
His black hair was still damp from the shower, his jawline freshly shaven.
Sheathed in jeans and a shirt, he should have seemed familiar but he was definitely changed with his lean, strong face rather fined down, his spectacular dark eyes under-shadowed.
Her first thought was that he had been ill, and alarm clutched at her and only with the greatest difficulty did she resist the urge to demand proof of his health.
‘Ruy...’ It was all she could do to squeeze those syllables from her dry throat.
‘Don’t blame your father for this. I phoned him last night and persuaded him that this meeting was for the best.’
‘But it’s not,’ Suzy whispered, sidling past him, careful not to brush against him.
‘Hear me out and then say that,’ Ruy framed harshly.
What Suzy wasn’t about to say to him was that seeing him again and refreshing her memories only made their separation more painful for her. ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll listen.’
Ruy strode into the spacious reception area. ‘I told you about my stalking ordeal eight years ago.’
‘Well, you didn’t tell me how you settled it,’ Suzy remarked in a brittle voice.
‘I didn’t settle it, but eventually I involved the police and she was charged.
I had to do something. The longer it went on, the worse it became.
She assaulted a woman I took out to dinner.
When the police arrested her and searched her apartment they discovered that she had gathered a huge amount of information about me long before I met her.
She had deliberately targeted me in the club the night we met. ’
Suzy was frowning. ‘That’s creepy. What happened to the poor woman she assaulted?’
‘She was shaken up, but she managed to get away from her. Although I was convinced it was my stalker who had attacked her, we weren’t able to prove it.
The assault made me bring in the police,’ Ruy admitted.
‘After she was arrested, her parents approached me and begged me to drop the charges. They said the prosecution would ruin her life. They promised to get her psychiatric treatment and swore that I would never see her again. I dropped the charges and to this day, I don’t know whether that was the right or wrong thing to do. ’
‘I don’t understand what all this has to do with your brother’s wife—’
‘Bear with me,’ Ruy cut in. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘A white wine.’
Ruy filled a glass for her, his lean brown hands deft, and she watched him, studying his sculpted profile, his black hair gleaming as it dried in the sunlight arrowing through the tall windows.
‘I was sympathetic towards my stalker’s parents because my brother also had mental-health issues,’ Ruy explained.
‘Rigo had a nervous breakdown in his teens. He got hooked on prescription drugs and eventually he had to go into rehab to get clean. Six months after that he phoned me to tell me that he had got engaged and that he wanted me to meet his future wife, whom he had met in the same clinic. He was besotted with her. She was a beautiful woman. Her name was Liliana, my former stalker.’
‘Good grief!’ Suzy croaked, finally grasping the connection. ‘What did you do when you realised?’
‘I was honest with him. I told him that I had had a one-night stand with her, which quite naturally angered and upset him. No man wants the woman he loves to have already slept with his brother. I also gave Rigo chapter and verse on her stalking activities and I went to see her parents and asked them to be honest with him as well. They flat out refused. They believed Liliana was in love with my brother and that he was the best chance she had of a normal life. At the same time Liliana gave Rigo some nonsensical story about how I had led her down the garden path and broken her heart, which of course made him sympathetic towards her. I, on the other hand, was convinced she had chosen him because he was my brother...and in the end I was proven right on that score.’