CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TEN
Javier stared out of the window of his vast office down to a crowded London street several storeys beneath him. The office was empty. Why wouldn’t it be? It was Saturday, it was a little past five on a sunny afternoon and most people with anything resembling a life were out there enjoying what passed for the great outdoors in London. The parks would be crammed, the cafés would be heaving, the pavements spilling over with crowds drinking and enjoying the ongoing fine weather.
He missed her. For a few days after she’d left, he’d gone back over what she had told him and had picked apart every word spoken, every admission of how she felt, every valiant declaration of love. Then, for a few more days, he’d told himself that she’d been spot on when she’d said that he’d dodged a bullet because the last thing he wanted was the sort of love and romance that was always riddled with complication and disappointment.
Javier grimaced now as he thought back to the optimistic dates he had set in motion—potential candidates. They’d been easy to source, because he knew almost everyone who belonged to the elite social set in which he’d always mixed in Spain. He’d had one conversation with Isabella and the rest had been a matter of the grapevine. It didn’t matter about the marriage that had never been. All that mattered was that the most eligible guy in Europe was single and ready to settle down.
He’d been on one date and had backed off after an hour of surreptitious watch-looking and thoughts of Caitlin that wouldn’t leave his head. He’d told himself that he just needed a bit more time. He knew what was good for him, knew that love was not something he wanted, or indeed was even capable of subscribing to. It was good that she was no longer in his life because that inevitably would have led to demands for things he couldn’t give her.
What was the point of lessons learnt if they got thrown down the drain just because he got caught on the back foot? He wasn’t built for love and that was the end of it. So it wasn’t a case of any genie let out of any bottle, no wayward emotion that accounted for his restless nights and lack of concentration at work. It was just that he needed a bit more time.
But how he remembered the way she smiled…the way she laughed…the way her blue eyes had lingered on him…the flush in her cheeks after they’d made love and the way she could touch him so that in seconds his body went up in flames.
And he also remembered stuff he maybe wanted to forget: the way he’d felt comfortable talking to her; the way they’d lain in bed in the warm afterglow of good sex and he’d talked to her about anything and everything.
He’d intellectually accepted the sort of woman he would need to replace Isabella—the wife who understood everything he had to offer and accepted it. It was the same mental picture he’d planted in his head from a young age, when he’d understood the dangers of loving too much, loving so much that it made a person weak instead of strong. She would be wealthy in her own right, able to manage the life he led without need for guidance, because his work life would have to remain uninterrupted. She would be happy to enjoy the fruits of his vast fortune without nagging for attention, clinging or needing validation. She would be as emotionally independent as he was. The last thing she would want was romance .
But, rubbing alongside that mental image was the reality of a woman who was the complete opposite to that. A woman who wanted and needed love and devotion. A woman who hugged, cuddled and snuggled, and did all the things he’d always made sure to discourage in past relationships.
And even before they’d become lovers…
She was a woman who grounded him and could tease him out of his stress. He’d accepted it all as part and parcel of her proficiency at her job but it had been a whole lot more than that. While he’d been busy thinking about the boundaries he’d set down, supposedly never to be breached, he’d failed to realise that she’d spent the weeks, months and years slowly breaching every one of them in small, incremental steps.
He thought of the times when she’d worked late, when they’d shared a takeaway and she’d somehow managed to convince him not to do an all-nighter. Thought of the anecdotes about Benji, the softness in her voice when she’d talked about him, the way that softness had pierced into the heart of him and lodged there.
And then later, when he’d found out about her childhood…everything had come together. The warmth had flooded him then; he’d felt tenderness. Realisation came slowly because he fought it tooth and nail. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that love had crept up on him, ambushing all the self-control he had thought would always protect him.
But all those dots being joined up would not allow him the luxury of pretending that he felt nothing for her. What he felt was the despair of denying the love that had blossomed inside him, eating up all his objections and turning him into the kind of guy who closed his laptop and stopped caring when he next opened it.
Javier stared down blindly at the busy roads below and felt a sickening churning in his stomach, the pain of turning his back on something he should have grabbed with both hands.
What the hell happened now? That was what he was thinking. How did he approach the situation? Did he leave it? Climb back into his ivory tower and tell himself that it was for the best?
Nearly a month had gone by! She’d said her piece and disappeared off the face of the earth. He hadn’t even had a company contact him for a reference. Was she looking for another job? Was she still living in London, come to it?
Had she turned her back on him for ever?
He had her mobile number, and he knew that he could simply call, but he hadn’t… had he ? He’d lost count of the number of times over the passing weeks when he’d looked at that number in his phone and backed away from calling it while he’d stupidly carried on the pretence that he was still in charge of his emotions.
For the first time in his life, Javier was scared: scared of opening up to her about how he felt; scared of not opening up to her about how he felt; scared of emotions that were so big he barely knew how to handle them or what to do with them; scared at the thought of a future without her in it.
And, most of all, scared of making a move only for her to turn her back and walk away from him as he sickeningly suspected she would. She’d laid her cards on the table, and so had he, and he doubted she would want anything to do with him, having been firmly knocked back and shown the door.
He had never been a guy to succumb to creating scenarios in his head but Javier now found that creating scenarios in his head was just about the only thing he seemed capable of doing. He had no idea how to approach her and he knew that, with every passing day, the chances of her listening to a word he had to say became more and more remote.
Fed up with the state of indecision which had been his state of mind for weeks, Javier swung round, picked up his mobile and began scrolling through it while walking to the door.
It felt good to take charge of the situation and, in the end, what would be would be…
* * *
Caitlin hit Kensington Gardens at pace because she’d been held up every step of the way, and it had sounded urgent when Angie had made the arrangement for them to meet. Which, frankly, wasn’t like her friend at all. She was the most laid-back person on the face of the earth. So, when she had called the day before and asked her in a hurry whether they could meet at a designated spot in the park at a designated time, and that it was important , Caitlin had been instantly concerned. She’d asked questions, but in the background she could hear dogs barking, so she hadn’t been surprised that few of her questions were answered because Angie was in a rush.
Anyway, she’d been glad that the conversation had been brief. There’d been no time for Angie to pry into how her time out had gone because Caitlin wasn’t sure how good she would be at pretending it was all fine and dandy in the world.
It wasn’t. The past few weeks had been hell. Like an addict with the supply of the love drug she had overdosed on severed without warning, the withdrawal was agony; no other word for it. She hadn’t even been able to get her act together to start job hunting. She was relying on her savings to get her through the temporary apathy which was all-consuming.
It made her desperately sad to think that this was the sort of time when a daughter might flee back to her mum, but in the absence of any family all she could do was try and fix herself with no shoulder to cry on.
She tried to remember every passing expression that had crossed Javier’s face when she had blurted out how she felt about him. When her memory refused to play along, she became adept at filling in the gaps herself: horror; dismay; probably revulsion, which he had hidden well, because he would have been conscious not to hurt her feelings. Still, he had swept her out of his life like some debris he’d needed to clear asap, and that hurt, however much she tried to rationalise it.
Had she made a mistake in pouring out her heart? That had not been the original intention but, the minute she had got it into her head that his feelings for her ran deeper than he thought, she had thrown caution to the winds and started building all sorts of stupid fairy-tale castles in her head. She had been so blinded by her own love, and so heady at the thought that what they had was the real thing, that she had conveniently forgotten everything he had said about the sort of person he wanted in his life until that call from Isabella had come through. That person was not her. He had to marry, but never to a woman like her, because his emotions she’d thought she’d tapped into had been a mirage.
She hadn’t heard a peep out of him since leaving his yacht and that hurt. Yet why would he contact her? What would he say? That he was sorry she’d misread the situation, and have a good life ?
She sprinted from the bus across the busy road, tugging Benji, who was looking around him with ears cocked, tail wagging, tongue lolling and a sprint in his ageing step. The change of scenery had got him going and he was looking madly around as she stooped to let him off the lead. He would follow her; he always did.
At five in the afternoon, it was still hot and the place was packed. And she was late, by ten minutes. She kept looking around as she headed to their meeting place, making sure Benji didn’t decide to start exploring their new, exciting environment.
She knew exactly where to go because she and her friend had met many times in the same spot over the years, Angie for her dog walking, and she with Benji, because the company was great. But when she peered through the crowds, there was no sign of Angie, and she frowned, tapping into the message on her phone to make sure she’d got the place right, when she heard someone calling from behind her.
They were calling for Benji. And it wasn’t Angie’s voice. In fact, it took a couple of seconds for Caitlin even to realise that it was a man’s voice, and even longer for her to realise who the man in question was.
She turned around slowly. Shock made her numb. She could barely breathe and her thoughts clouded over as she balanced a fine line between disbelief and dawning realisation.
Javier. After no word from him for weeks—radio silence. She’d poured out her heart to him and, not only had he politely sent her on her way, but he hadn’t seen fit to send so much as a text to ask her whether she was okay. It was obvious that he hadn’t given a jot about her in the end. He’d cared a lot about the sex, and he’d been affectionate enough when they’d been together, but that affection had been generated by the physical relationship they’d shared and, when the physicality had ended, so had the affection.
She felt the colour mount in her cheeks as she looked at Javier in the distance, her treacherous dog bounding towards him like a long-lost pal. He wasn’t walking towards her and he was dangling… were those sausages? …to tempt Benji, who would have needed next to no temptation, because he had developed a shameful attachment to her ex-boss.
Caitlin felt the shock and disbelief coalesce into white-hot rage. How dared he, after all this time, seek her out via her lily-livered dog ? How dared he just show up without warning? How dared he ambush her when she was still fragile and hurting and desperate to forget all about him?
Yet, on one very important level, she was aware of that dark current of excitement underneath her anger, an excitement that had continued to simmer, unabated, all through her sadness and disillusionment. Which only made her more furious.
As she looked, he dangled a sausage before tossing it to Benji. His eyes were fastened on her. God, it was unfair how drop-dead gorgeous he still looked. Couldn’t he have gone downhill in the interim—stacked on some weight, lost all his hair? Could he have done anything, become anything , that could no longer hurt her the way he was hurting her right now?
Why was he here? That was the question that raged inside her as she remained glued to the spot for a few seconds. Had he come to try and get her back into bed? Or maybe her replacement wasn’t living up to expectation and he actually thought that, with some time now between them, he could woo her back into her old job and they could both pretend that nothing had happened between them. Either way, she was going to put him straight on both counts!
That would mean walking over there on her leaden feet. Benji was showing no sign of returning to base camp. He was zooming around Javier with crazy fervour and Caitlin lacked the nerve to yell for him to come back, mostly knowing that there was a good chance she would be ignored. Besides, people would stare. A lot of people were already surreptitiously staring at Javier. He had that effect on other people, male and female alike.
Caitlin propelled herself forward and, the closer she got to where Javier was reaching into a bag to produce another treat, the more her heartbeat quickened. Seeing him again was like seeing him for the first time—the time when she had walked into his office for the interview that would change her life and had forgotten how to breathe because she’d never seen anyone so beautiful.
‘What are you doing here?’ were her opening words as she pulled to a stop in front of him and glared, first at him and then at Benji. ‘How did you know where I would be?’
‘I phoned your doggy friend.’
‘She had no right to tell you!’
‘It’s a public place, and besides—’
‘Besides what ? And stop giving Benji those sausages! He’s not allowed them! Did you purposefully come here armed with treats for my dog because you knew he wouldn’t be able to resist? That I would have to come over here and talk to you? Because I don’t want to talk to you, Javier. I’ve done enough talking to you to last a lifetime!’
Caitlin looked away quickly because she could feel tears begin to prick the back of her eyes. She stooped, reached for Benji’s collar and began putting his lead back on. She was only aware of Javier stooping to her level when she felt his shadow on her and the warmth of his body so close to hers that she could have reached out and stroked his beautiful face with no effort at all.
She looked up and her blue, glassy eyes collided with deep, dark ones; she felt a jolt of agonising awareness.
‘I was afraid that, if I called you, you would refuse to see me,’ Javier murmured in a low, shaky voice. ‘And, Caitlin, I needed to see you.’
‘I’m not falling back into bed with you, Javier, and I’m not returning to work for you as though nothing’s happened because you miss my skill set. I said that when I walked away weeks ago, and nothing’s changed since then.’
She forced herself to stand, to break the electric connection between them. He remained where he was, stooping at her feet and idly rubbing behind Benji’s ear, who dug in his canine heels when she tugged the lead.
* * *
Javier, playing with Benji, could feel her hostile eyes on him and he couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t asked to see him and, now that he had shown up, she wanted him gone.
Would it have been easier if he hadn’t been such a blind fool for so long? If he had tried to see her sooner? Was it possible even to begin to fill the hole left behind in those weeks of stubborn silence on his part? And how could he begin to explain to her that, when he’d lived a lifetime being rigid, it had become the only thing he knew?
She’d fallen in love with him, but love could turn to hostile resentment at the flick of a switch, and he had deliberately flicked that switch weeks ago when he had scurried away from her declarations faster than a rat leaving a sinking ship. How could he begin to explain just how much things had changed for him? He could barely look at her.
‘Tell your mistress,’ he half-whispered unsteadily to Benji, who was panting in anticipation of something more exciting than conversations, ‘that I love her.’
* * *
He remained where he was but raised his head to look at her.
Caitlin drew in a sharp breath. What could she read in those dark, fathomless eyes? She was scared to trust her instinct, which had spectacularly let her down before, but she had stopped tugging at Benji’s lead and she found it hard to tear her eyes away from Javier. He said something to Benji in such a low voice that it was a strain to hear, and whatever he’d whispered was gluing her to the spot.
‘What did you just say?’ she asked tightly. Her blue eyes were narrowed and suspicious as he slowly stood up so that now he was gazing down at her, his handsome face darkly flushed. ‘Because I’m done with you feeding Benji sausages.’
‘I said that I love you.’
Caitlin loosed a laugh of pure disbelief. In the space of a few weeks, he’d gone from the guy who’d been relieved to see her walk away to the guy who suddenly loved her?
‘And pigs fly,’ she shot back. ‘I don’t need this. I don’t want to talk to you!’
She spun round and, damn it, tears pricked the back of her eyes again. She yanked at Benji and began striding off, half-dragging the stubborn, resistant dog, knowing that Javier was following her and not quite sure how to deal with that.
Why was her reluctant heart yearning to hear what he had to say? Was she a glutton for punishment?
‘Please, my darling, please let me talk. I’m begging you…’
‘Don’t!’
She stopped dead in her tracks.
‘There’s a tree over there. Let’s go sit under it for five minutes. Let me say what I have to say and then, if you tell me to go, I’ll walk away and you’ll never be bothered by me again.’
Of course she was going to walk away! She refused to let her heart get the better of her head this time…
‘Five minutes, then,’ she said warily, turning round and walking at speed to the shady tree, while her heart picked up pace and her pulses began to race. She sat down and tried to focus on Benji while Javier sat at a respectable distance.
When she reluctantly and finally looked at him, her heart constricted, because he looked miserable and uncertain, and those were two things she had never seen in his repertoire before.
‘I let you go,’ Javier said hoarsely. ‘And I should never have done that.’
‘Because you miss the sex?’ Caitlin mocked, but her heart was doing it again—beating like a sledgehammer and sending stupid thoughts racing through her head.
‘Because I love you, querida .’
‘You don’t love me,’ she said fiercely. ‘And I told you not to call me that!’
‘I understand why you might not want to believe me…’
‘I poured my heart out to you and you were nothing but embarrassed for me—and then you got me the first ride back to London—so no, I don’t believe a word you say.’
‘Caitlin…’
‘Are you going to deny that?’
‘Like I said, I was an idiot. I… I didn’t believe in love. That was something meant for other people, fools who got taken in by fairy tales only to wind up disenchanted and a hell of a lot poorer. My father rushed into a relationship that cost him dear. He wasn’t there for me when I needed him because he got lost in his own grief, his own uncontrollable emotions. He never saw a son who was hurting. I vowed I would never let my emotions blind me. Duty and eventually a marriage of convenience was what was in store for me, and I liked the predictability of something that made sense.’
He raked his fingers through his hair.
‘Marrying Isabella made sense. It killed two birds with one stone. It sorted out her dilemma and it gave me the wife I needed to get the vineyards I wanted—which by the way I wanted because they hold happy memories of my childhood with my mother. I know it sounds ruthless that I was pursuing an inheritance but…most people aren’t like you. Your childhood experiences… Somehow they didn’t make you hard, bitter, I don’t even know how—’
‘If I could have had that protective covering,’ Caitlin snapped through gritted teeth, ‘do you think I would have ended up where I did?’
‘I like where you ended up. I like where we ended up. I like the softness inside you, the honesty, the lack of guile. I think I always did. I just never acknowledged it.’
‘Don’t you dare say anything you don’t mean,’ Caitlin warned shakily, and Javier reached daringly to stroke her cheek, encouraged when she didn’t push his hand away.
‘I’m not. Everything I’m telling you is coming straight from my heart. From the start, you appealed to me in ways I never consciously registered. When Isabella broke off the relationship, it wasn’t my intention to sleep with you but, looking back now, it feels as though fate had finally decided that I need to wake up and start seeing what it felt like to jump into the thing called life.’
‘Fate came for me long before,’ Caitlin haltingly responded. ‘I always had a crush on you and it just didn’t go away, even when Isabella came on the scene. I kept thinking that you getting married would open my eyes up to how stupid I was, but I still couldn’t look at you without my whole body going up in flames.’
‘I wish I’d known…’
‘Why?’
‘Because we might have started this thing between us, this amazing, wonderful thing, long ago—and maybe I wouldn’t have wasted my time with women who came and went, in a mindset where the only relationship that seemed feasible was one that made sense. Nothing makes sense about the way I feel about you, mi corazón , and I never knew just how much I like it that way. When we were together…I forgot everything.’
‘Even work.’
‘Especially work. All I wanted was to be with you. I kidded myself that it was all about the mind-blowing sex, but there were times, so many times, when I looked at you and in my gut I knew that there was so much more to what I was feeling than lust.’
Every ounce of hesitation in Caitlin vanished at the utter sincerity in Javier’s eyes and she reached forward and leaned into him. The cool feel of his mouth against hers ignited an explosion inside her that went straight from her head to between her thighs, and she sighed into his mouth before pulling back to trace the outline of his lips.
‘It’s what made me say what I did,’ she confessed, hand flat against his chest. She stared past him thoughtfully. ‘I thought that common sense would protect me from you, but I was wrong, and I realised that pretty quickly after we became lovers. And then… I sensed more than just lust. Maybe I was picking up some of the vibes you didn’t know you were giving off, but the minute you offered to bring Benji over… Well, my imagination went into overdrive.’
‘You came out with everything you felt.’
‘It was a very comprehensive confession.’ Caitlin grimaced.
‘And my knee-jerk reaction was to run away.’ He sighed and, when he kissed her, it was slowly and tenderly and their noses touched when he next spoke, voice low and quiet. ‘But over the past few weeks I began to read all the writing that had been on the wall for so long, began to realise just how much I’d fallen in love with you and just what a fool I’d been to deny what was in my heart. I had no idea how I was going to get up the courage to come and see you, but then I figured that Benji might work as my intermediary.’
‘He seems to have been a cheap trick when it comes to sharing his allegiances!’ Caitlin laughed.
‘So what I want to say…’ Javier pulled back and looked at her gravely.
‘What you want to say is…?’
‘Will you marry me?’
Caitlin felt the damned tears again but this time tears of joy. There was no holding her back this time. She flung her arms around his neck, buried her face into him and whispered against him,
‘Yes! Yes, yes, yes! My darling, wonderful Javier, for ever…’
* * * * *