Chapter Three
XAVI’S EYES SNAPPED open to pitch black. His phone was ringing. He groped his bedside table until his hand fell on it.
Bringing it to his face, his heart slammed into his ribs and all sleepiness fell away when he saw the name on the screen.
‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ he murmured. He’d thought she would make him wait a minimum of a week just to play with his mind.
‘I’ll marry you.’
He expelled a long breath and smiled. ‘That is the best news a man could be woken to at two in the morning. I assume you timed it deliberately?’
‘Naturally.’
‘You always knew how to keep me on my toes.’ And always in a good way.
One particular memory stuck in his mind of Beth flopping onto her back after making love and deciding she wanted to go for a drive.
It had been three in the morning. Thinking she just wanted to take it for a spin, he’d thrown some clothes on, indulgently given her the keys to his sports car and jumped in the passenger seat beside her.
She’d put the soft top down, turned the music up and hit the accelerator.
Three hours later, they’d been sat on La Malvarrosa beach eating churros and watching the sun rise.
Their impulsive trip had resulted in him missing a board meeting and being on the receiving end of his grandfather’s anger and disapproval for the first time.
There was a long pause. ‘Xavi, are you sure you want to do this? I’m not the Beth you remember. I haven’t spent eight years in a silo. Things have happened that have shaped me.’
‘What things?’
‘Things I will tell you about when the time is right. I just need to be certain you understand that you won’t be marrying the Beth of old.’
He laughed. ‘You’re still Beth, but I already know you’re not the Beth of old, and I know we’re going to have to get to know each other again, but mi vida, that kiss we shared proved the spark that was always there still lives.’
There was another long silence before she murmured, ‘Okay, on your head be it. Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.’
He laughed again. Dios, it felt good to laugh.
It felt even better to know he’d soon have Beth back in his bed.
The buzz in his veins since their kiss wasn’t even close to abating.
Just to imagine her head on the pillow next to his and her gorgeous red hair fanned over it made the buzz tighten and thicken in anticipation.
‘Where are you? I’ll send my driver for you. ’
‘Let him sleep,’ she dismissed lightly. ‘I need to go home and sort things out in England, but if you meet me at my grandfather’s villa after breakfast, we can get the ball rolling for our wedding before I leave.’
He sighed and then grinned at his impatience.
Just five minutes ago, he’d been asleep and expecting to wait days longer for her answer.
If she’d said no, he’d have been back to fighting wars to retain his control of the Rosbel Group.
Beth’s agreement meant that fight was won and he had her back in his life.
Dios, all he’d thought about since their kiss was how good the sex had been between them.
All their years apart, he’d forbidden himself from thinking about it, but now he was free to let the memories unleash and remember how incredible it had been between them.
To break apart from her, he’d needed those days in Milan without her sexy, distracting presence to enable him to think clearly, had needed to block the receptors in his brain from switching on once he was back in his bedroom delivering the words he knew would break her heart.
The blocked receptors were back in full working order, and very soon, once she’d wrapped up her affairs in England, she’d be back in his bed permanently, and they could make up for all the lost time between them.
‘I will get my team on it… How long are you going to make me wait to be my wife?’
She laughed, that old infectious, joyful sound that had never failed to bring a smile to his face. ‘I’m happy to marry as soon as it can be arranged.’
‘That makes me very happy.’
The tone of her voice changed slightly. ‘I do need to ask a favour of you.’
‘Anything.’
‘Would you mind sorting out all the taxes and stuff on my grandfather’s estate? I know it’s all different to how it works in England and I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.’
‘Your grandfather named me as his executor, so consider it done.’
‘Thank you.’
‘De nada. What time tomorrow?’
‘Nine?’
‘That works for me.’
‘Great. I’ll see you then.’
‘Sweet dreams, mi vida.’
Beth threw her phone across the hotel room floor and grabbed furiously at her hair.
The lying bastard! How dare he call her by that endearment?
Mi vida? My life? More like my expendable life.
Well, now it was Xavi who was expendable; Xavi who was going to learn how it felt to lose the most important thing in his life and for his life and dreams to be ripped apart.
By the time Beth was finished with Xavi de la Rosa, he would hate her every bit as much as she hated him.
It was hard to feel hate for someone when you walked into a villa and found them sitting around a dining room table looking all sexy in a dapper navy blue suit, pale blue shirt and thick checked silver tie, and with a large brown Spanish Water Dog on their lap, gazing at them adoringly whilst having the undersides of their ears rubbed.
Beth supposed it proved that dogs could be as stupid as humans.
She’d once been as big a sucker for affection from Xavi as Diego.
Still, it gave her perverse pleasure when Diego took one look at her from beneath the shaggy mane of curly hair on his head and jumped off Xavi’s lap to charge over and run around her like she was his personal maypole.
‘He likes you,’ Xavi observed.
‘He likes everyone.’
‘Yes, but he really likes you. He clearly has excellent taste.’
‘Clearly,’ she agreed, laughing lightly, biting back the comment that if Diego really did have excellent taste, he wouldn’t have given affection to Xavi. She would make sure to give the dog a stern warning of the danger of showing affection to Xavi when she was next alone with him.
To buy herself time to compose herself from all the memories that had started slamming into her before she’d even walked through the villa’s front door and the slamming of her heart at the first glimpse of Xavi, she crouched down to cuddle Diego, taking much-needed comfort from his soft warmth.
This was the home the mother she’d never known had grown up in, the villa Beth had first walked into as an unworldly eighteen-year-old hoping to forge a relationship with the grandfather she’d never known.
The villa she’d met Xavi in. The villa they’d made love in every room of except her grandfather’s bedroom.
Even this dining room came prefilled with memories. Xavi had lifted her onto the sideboard dancing in her eye line, and taken her with such exquisiteness that she’d had to bite into his shoulder to stop her cries of ecstasy sounding through to the other rooms.
The room directly above this dining room was the bathroom she’d sobbed in when she’d miscarried their baby.
Still fussing over Diego, she forced herself to meet Xavi’s warm brown stare and willed her racing pulses to settle. ‘You know he’s going to have to live with us?’
His lips curved. She imagined he’d carried that smug, self-satisfied smile since she’d agreed to his proposal.
He thought he had his future mapped out to his exact specifications. Let him enjoy the delusion while it lasted.
‘I’d assumed as much.’
‘I hope your home’s not got too many valuables at low heights. Diego still behaves like a puppy at times.’
He stretched his long legs out and hooked his ankles together. ‘I will get my staff to Diego-proof it.’
‘Where do you live now? I assume you don’t live in the family home anymore?’ When she’d met him, he’d not long returned to Madrid after six years studying in England. Back then, it had thrilled her to think he’d lived only forty miles from her home in the heart of England.
There was the slightest hesitation. ‘In Salamanca.’
She only just managed to stop herself from visibly blanching.
Xavi had once taken her shopping in Madrid’s Salamanca district.
The nineteenth-century neighbourhood oozed charm, glamour and beauty, and for Beth it had been love at first sight.
So smitten had she been that when Xavi suggested buying a home for them there, she’d thrown her arms around his neck and kissed his face off.
‘Oh, right,’ she said as if she hadn’t just had another knife plunged into her heart, and tried desperately to think of something light-hearted to add to cover the coldness of her shock.
When they’d been together, Xavi had been making plans to buy a place of his own. Their own. She was supposed to have moved into that place with him. In Salamanca. Moved into it and made a family of their own in it.
‘What about your sisters?’ she ended up plumping for. ‘The last time I spoke to Carlota, she was still living at home…when she’s not off on one of her archaeological digs, that is, but I haven’t spoken to Blanca in years.’
Blanca was the human rights lawyer sister.
Beth liked her very much, but had found her a little too earnest. She’d much preferred Carlota’s company, Carlota being of a similar age and temperament to Beth.
The two young women had delighted in ganging up on Xavi and teasing him mercilessly, teasing he’d always taken in the spirit it was given.
The two women had kept in touch over the years, meeting up if Carlota was in Spain when Beth visited her grandfather and when Carlota visited England.
By unspoken agreement, Carlota’s bastard brother was never mentioned.
‘She moved to Brussels a few months ago but uses home as her base whenever she’s in the country.’
There was a tap on the dining room door, and then Salma came in with a tray of coffee, followed by three men and two women in suits: lawyers who most definitely did not concern themselves with human rights.