Chapter One #2
‘Trust me, it is better you hear it from me first.’
How she didn’t punch him in the face for that she would never know.
Trust the man who’d promised to love her forever?
Trust the man who’d been her earth and her sun, and then broken her?
But Beth hadn’t spent eight years carefully curating social media posts—Xavi had never stopped following her on them, his frequent ‘likes’ and comments proving he kept an eye on them—and turning Photoshop into her best friend for nothing, and she made another point of looking at her watch.
‘I can give you ten minutes, and then I’m really sorry but I’ll need to make a move.
’ She didn’t need to make a move anywhere.
Her flight home didn’t take off for another six hours.
It was Xavi she wanted to escape; Xavi and this villa and all the memories tying together, memories making the past feel like she could touch it, and if she could touch it then she could feel it, and God help her if she ever had to feel any of that again.
‘I’ll be as concise as I can,’ he promised in his shamefully excellent English. ‘Walk in the garden with me?’
‘I don’t have sunscreen on,’ she lied as a strong memory of falling asleep on the sprawling de la Rosa lawn beneath the shade of an olive tree and being woken by a kiss smashed through her.
The de la Rosas had been having a family summer party, and Beth had got all sleepy after too much sangria.
With voices floating in the distance, Xavi had woken her with a kiss and then silently brought her to orgasm with nothing but his hand.
It had tortured her imagining him doing that with the women who had come after her.
Her third trip to Madrid after their break-up had been to celebrate the New Year with her grandfather.
He’d taken her to a party thrown by one of Spain’s leading art dealers, and the first person Beth had seen when they’d walked into the villa had been Xavi with a blonde bombshell attached to his arm.
Beth had made a point of going over to them, throwing her arms around Xavi as if they were long-lost best friends and befriending the appendage.
She’d kept her happy face going the whole night, dancing, drinking and making merry like everyone else.
The next day she’d flown back to England, detoured to a supermarket on her way home, then sat in bed eating her weight in chocolate ice cream.
It had taken her months to recover from the painful shock of seeing him so clearly happy with someone else.
It was a shock Beth had never understood as she knew damned well he’d replaced her with that Ellen bitch days after breaking off his relationship with her.
‘Let’s talk in the study,’ she suggested. That was one room they’d never done anything dirty in.
In their time together, they’d made love in every room of this sprawling villa.
It had been a game to them, their own playful version of sex bingo.
Only the occupied bedrooms had been off-limits.
The only room they’d failed to christen and so get a full house in before Xavi had dumped her was the study, so at least there wouldn’t be any sex memories to slap her around the face in it.
As soon as she crossed its threshold, though, and the door closed them inside the intimate space, Beth knew she’d made a mistake and cursed herself for lying about the sunscreen.
They could have talked at the front of the villa by her hired car, and then she could have driven off, ‘accidentally’ screeching the wheels so he got a face full of gravel in the process.
Determined to give away nothing of her inner turmoil and to continue projecting the carefree image she so carefully curated on her social media feeds, she hitched her ample backside onto the highly polished mahogany desk and folded her arms loosely across her stomach rather than wrapping them in the tight hug she so desperately needed to hold herself with.
She looked him in the eye with a smile. ‘Well?’
Instead of telling her about her mysterious legacy, he strode to a cabinet, looked through its contents and pulled out a bottle of whisky and two crystal glasses. ‘Drink? Or shall I have one of the staff make up a strawberry daiquiri for you?’
Beth’s cocktail of choice. Her social media posts showed her enjoying them at regular intervals.
‘Thank you, but I’m driving.’
‘Very responsible,’ he said drily, filling a glass for himself to the brim.
‘Practising to be an alcoholic?’ she asked with a grin she only managed by imagining herself throwing the whisky all over his ultra-expensive hand-tailored suit.
He raised the glass to her and drank half the contents. ‘Dutch courage.’
‘You are full of intrigue, Senor de la Rosa, but I’ve got a flight to catch so tell me about this legacy.
Has he left me one of his paintings? Or maybe a car?
’ A thought made her blanch. ‘Not Diego? I’m not allowed pets.
’ Not in her apartment building. And she had no garden.
Surely, he wouldn’t have left his Spanish Water Dog in her care?
Surely, he’d have left him in his housekeeper Salma’s care?
‘He’s left you the lot.’
She blinked, unsure of what she’d heard. ‘He’s left me a pot?’
‘The lot. Everything. The villa and all its contents. All his cars and holiday homes. His personal helicopter and his shares in the business. Diego. Everything. It’s all yours.’
She studied his serious face a long moment before bursting into laughter. ‘That’s a good one. You nearly had me going for a minute. Go on, tell me, what’s he really left me?’
Not a flicker of amusement crossed his face. ‘Your grandfather has left you everything, Beth.’
Still grinning widely, she shook her head. ‘Not a chance. He took great delight in reminding me of his intentions for his estate every time I visited him—he was leaving his Rosbel Group shares to your family and everything else to charity.’
‘He kept saying that in the hope it would entice you into changing your mind about working for the company. He never seriously intended to disinherit you—it was just a threat, a ploy for you to give in and comply with his wishes. You were his only living heir, and that meant everything to him.’
She laughed to cover how unsettled she was with the whole situation and jumped off the desk. Snatching the glass from Xavi’s hand, she tipped the remaining whisky down her throat.
Beth hated whisky, but right then she needed something to cut through the effect of being in an enclosed space with Xavi and the shock of what he’d just told her. The hefty measure burning her throat wasn’t enough, and she refilled the glass and drank it in three swallows.
‘I thought you were driving,’ Xavi said, eyebrow risen.
‘Stuff it, I’ll get a taxi. After all, you’ve just told me I’m rich.’ And with that, she burst into another peal of laughter.
Rich? Possibly the biggest understatement in the world.
Beth’s mother, Lorena, had died in childbirth.
Beth had been raised by her father and her grandparents.
Her childhood had been happy. She’d missed having a mother, but in a very abstract, curious way.
She couldn’t miss her as a mother because she’d never known her, but she’d been filled with curiosity about her.
Everything she’d learned about her had painted a picture of a fierce but happy, loving Spanish woman who loved to dance and run barefoot. A free spirit, much like Beth.
One thing, though, that Beth had never been told about was her mother’s family. The impression she’d been given growing up was that her mother didn’t have any family.
This impression had been a lie engineered by her father. She’d only learned the truth on her eighteenth birthday when an elderly Spanish man knocked on their door and introduced himself as her grandfather.
Lorena, it transpired, had been estranged from her father since her late teens. Her own mother had left him when Lorena was only twelve. When Lorena had moved to England, she’d never seen either of her parents again.
Beth’s father had respected his dead wife’s feelings and had refused to let her father have any involvement in their daughter’s life until she was eighteen and old enough to make her own judgement about him.
Learning of her Spanish grandfather’s existence had come as a huge shock. A lifetime of barely satisfied curiosity about her mother, and all along she’d had a grandfather? To then learn her Spanish grandmother had died only two years earlier…
That had been a huge blow, but she’d swallowed her hurt and anger at the lies of omission from her father because he was her father and she loved him, and even through her hurt, she’d known he’d acted for what he thought was the best. Her English grandparents had felt compelled to go along with his decision on the matter.
The second shock Beth had received that fateful day was learning her grandfather was rich.
Not just rich but stupendously rich. Raul Belmonte was co-owner of the Rosbel Group, one of the wealthiest companies in Europe, making Beth’s grandfather one of the richest men in Europe.
His wealth, though, had meant nothing to her, not when she was gazing at the face of the only living biological link to the mother she’d never known.
Her desire to know him had been strong, but she’d known before she agreed to spend a summer with him that he wasn’t the fluffy, kindly old man he was trying to portray himself to her as.
After all, her mother had been estranged from him for a reason, and just because he’d not been allowed to see her didn’t mean he couldn’t have helped her father out financially or put some money aside for her.