Chapter One
Agustin Delgado prided himself on his ability to conceptualize and enact a successful plan. He had excellent self-awareness regarding his own skills—what was best left to him and what was better delegated to those he hired. He considered himself an unabashed success in every way.
He was not quite the monk many thought him to be.
Perhaps this would not be the prevailing thought if his brother hadn’t been so…
flamboyant in his cheerful recklessness and many, many high-profile love affairs.
Regardless, Agustin kept all his private matters private.
None of his affairs or predilections had ever made it into the news cycle.
He hired the right people to keep any and all personal matters completely hidden from public view.
Ms. Valdez chief among those right people.
She was younger than he usually preferred for his assistants, but he’d justified that choice by reminding himself that a young woman did not retire and leave him in the lurch.
Besides, he kept her too busy to have a social life, so no husband or children were likely on the horizon.
He might have felt some guilt over this if he’d given it a second thought, but he believed that his compensation package more than made up for it.
Besides, Ms. Valdez was an adult woman, more than capable of making her own decisions. If she wanted a social life, she could quit.
He hoped to God she never quit.
Over the past month since his brother’s death, she had gotten him invitations to all the splashiest royal events, per his request. She had ensured him time with his three royal prospects.
She had arranged everything, as she always did, with her laser focus, precision and no-nonsense demeanor.
Even in his worst of moods, he could not blame Ms. Valdez for the way things had not gone quite according to plan.
Agustin had never intended on being the kind of man who needed to make a splash.
That had been his brother’s purview, and it had suited them both: Agustin the serious and studious heir to the Sosten business and fortune; Felipe the bright, charismatic socialite who could happily live off the family fortune and their mother’s distant royal ties.
But Felipe’s brightness had been chaotic, impulsive and in the end deadly. The whispers surrounding his death were weighing on his mother, and Agustin had known the only way to stop the gossip and media fervor was to give the parasites something else to feed off of.
He looked down at his phone and the travel itinerary Ms. Valdez had sent him in her usual perfect detail.
Together, they would fly out to the tiny private island that was his mother’s inheritance and housed an old castle.
It was no longer used as anything but a vacation home, but he thought it might impress the countess.
The woman he’d chosen to be his future bride, should all go according to plan.
Everything would go according to his plan.
Over the next few days, he and Ms. Valdez would make sure everything was in place for the proposal, and after that the countess would arrive on the island.
Agustin believed he had made the right choice. Of the three candidates he’d entertained, the duchess had been the first and easiest to eliminate—she was always late, always on her phone and had laughed at him for being stuffy.
Laughed.
He’d only spent two events with her. Then he’d moved onto the princess from an island nation. She would have made more of a media splash due to her higher standing and brighter celebrity, but she had been…dramatic. A little too taken with talk of poor dead Felipe.
The countess from a tiny principality near Greece was more in keeping with the type of people he preferred to do business with.
She was prim, quiet and had no romantic designs about the Delgado name.
She had no romantic designs at all. She had seen Agustin’s attention for exactly what it was: business.
Perhaps if it could have just been a high-profile affair, he could have suffered through some dramatics with the princess. But being seen at social engagements had not been enough to shake the insatiable gossip fiends from stories of Felipe’s death.
Conspiracy theories, celebrities mourning on social media channels, the public’s obsession with tragedy only fueled more and more talk of Felipe.
It had to end. For his mother. For the business. And perhaps, he could admit in the quiet of his own mind, for himself. He had not understood his brother, but he had loved the fool.
“You would have rather enjoyed this, I think,” Agustin muttered. “Me in the midst of a frenzy.”
Because it had become clear it was not enough for Agustin to be seen in social settings with high-profile women. He needed to make a spectacle in order to quiet talk of Felipe. He did not have time to cycle through more women and more events.
So a wedding it would have to be.
Mara rolled her suitcase to the waiting steward, her phone cradled between her neck and her ear.
She hoped accidentally crushing her earbuds this morning wasn’t a terrible omen for this whole trip.
“Sí, Senor Silva,” she said into the receiver. “We will need three bedrooms ready for the stay. Two in the royal wing, and one in the staff wing.”
There was a long pause. The kind of long pause that did not bode well.
“I am not sure how we will make this so.”
Mara smiled thinly at the steward as she handed off her luggage. She took the stairs up into the plane, letting her own silence stretch out, hoping it filled Mr. Silva with the same kind of foreboding he was giving her.
She found her seat, then pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. “Senor Silva. You will have to make it so. We will be there in less than two hours. You’ve had this directive since last week.”
“Yes, but there are some unexpected infirmities in the castle. The types of repairs that could not be done in a week’s time. We’ve prioritized the royal wing, under your direction, but the staff wing is quite rundown. We have not been able to make things suitable just yet.”
“That is fine. I’ll deal with less than suitable.” She closed her eyes, trying to will away the headache drumming. A rundown castle couldn’t be any worse than some of the hovels she’d lived in as a young woman. “Just ensure the royal wing is ready.” She ended the phone call.
On a sigh, she opened her eyes, only to be surprised to find Mr. Delgado standing in front of her. She had not heard him board the plane. He wore a suit, as he almost always did. He did not like to be caught looking casual, he’d once told her.
She’d been his personal assistant for over two years and run many a personal errand for the man. She’d been in his house, his kitchen. She’d even been in his bedroom a handful of times—though never at the same time as him.
Sometimes she thought she knew him better than he knew himself, and still she had never seen him anything but perfectly pressed. Even in those first few hours after the news of Felipe’s death had been delivered.
She smoothed out the frustration that had no doubt been evident all over her face, straightened in her seat and fastened on her business smile. “Buenos días, Mr. Delgado.”
He did not return the greeting. “Is something amiss?”
“Not at all.” She beamed at him. “Everything is under control.”
He stared at her for another moment, his dark eyes sharp and assessing, clearly not quite believing her. But in the end, he did not belabor the point. He walked past her to his seat.
It was set up just as he liked—she’d ensured that before she got to the airport this morning.
Any and all charging cords needed, a mug of coffee in a cup that would keep it to the exact temperature he preferred the entire flight if he so chose, the pens he liked, his legal pads and a whole slew of other things a rich man thought he needed to make it through a one-hour flight.
Mara sat off to the side, and her chair rotated just enough she could swivel to give him her full attention or look out the window as the plane began to move. Mara didn’t love flying, but as long as everything was smooth, she didn’t get too anxious.
So, of course, this flight was particularly turbulent, as if the day was just out to get her. Bad omen upon bad omen.
And you will put everything to rights once you’re on solid ground. Omens be damned. If she let bad luck stop her, she’d still be in Seville, trying to scrape by not just for herself but for her family.
Instead she was the one who’d gotten her mother out of the terrible neighborhood Mara had grown up in.
By the time she’d been able to afford it, it had been too late for Río, the brother only a year younger than her.
He was currently in jail for burglary. Ivan had gotten into some trouble too, but she’d secured him a position away from his criminal friends in Barcelona on a construction site, and he’d started to turn his life around.
Lucía was pregnant with child number three at only twenty-three, and Mara couldn’t say she cared for the father of her nieces and nephew since he refused to marry Lucía, but Lucía didn’t seem flat-out miserable.
At least with their other sister Natalia acting as live-in help, paid for by Mara herself.
But her youngest sister, the one Mara had raised the most herself, was her great hope. Daniela was actually going to start university in the fall. She had goals and dreams, and Mara would bend over backward to make sure they came true.
Not that she’d seen anyone in ages. Work always got in the way. But as long as she gave them a chance to succeed, she was happy. If she could give them what they needed, it was worth missing birthdays and holidays.
The plane bucked and shuddered as they moved through another pocket of turbulence. Mara had to close her eyes and grip the armrests, making sure her seat was swiveled away from Mr. Delgado as far as it could.