through the other two. ‘It wants to be eleventh century, but I would hazard a guess at only sixteenth century.’
‘Seventeenth,’ another voice intruded. ‘In a fit of pique, when his biggest rival for the hand of a certain lady won the lady’s heart because of the size of his home, our ancestor came home here to the valley and built himself his own impressive structure—then married the lady’s younger sister. History has a habit of repeating itself in this family—as you will soon learn, I predict.’
Caroline had frozen where she stood, the voice familiar enough to send her floundering in a sea of confusion as a tall, dark, very attractive man appeared from way down at the other end of the long drawing room.
He paused and smiled at her stunned expression, and—completely ignoring Luiz—went on in that same light, self-assured way which had repelled Caroline so much the first time she’d met him.
‘Felipe de Vazquez,’ he announced himself. ‘At your service, Miss Newbury.’ It was the man from the lift in Luiz’s hotel in Marbella. ‘We never did get around to introducing ourselves, did we?’ he added with a lazy smile.
‘Señor,’ she acknowledged. And it was only entrenched good manners that made her accept his outstretched hand.
His fingers closed around hers, cool and smooth and infinitely polite. ‘Felipe, please…’ he invited. ‘We are going to be related very soon, after all…’
Instinctively her other hand tightened in Luiz’s and she moved a small fraction closer to him.
It was strange in its own way, but as she found herself making comparisons between Luiz’s bone-crushing grip on one of her hands and his half-brother’s light clasp, on the other, she knew which grip she felt safer with. But then she was remembering the last time she’d met the man, and the suspicion she’d had then that if she’d tried to break away his grip would have tightened painfully—a sensation that was attacking her again right now.
‘Felipe,’ she acknowledged politely, and used the moment to slip her hand free and place it flat on Luiz’s chest. It was such an obvious declaration of intimacy that no one, not even Luiz, missed that fact. ‘Luiz, isn’t this a coincidence?’ She smiled, keeping her tone light with effort. ‘I met your half-brother in the hotel only the other evening, and had no idea he was related to you.’
‘Yes,’ Luiz drawled. ‘What a coincidence.’
It was too soft, too smooth, too lazy to be nice. She knew Luiz, knew the way he worked, the angrier he got the quieter he became.
Did Felipe recognise that? she wondered, when his dark eyes eventually moved to clash with his long lost halfbrother’s eyes. ‘So we meet at last.’ Felipe smiled ruefully.
At last? The words hit Caroline like a punch to her solar plexus. Because surely if she had first seen Felipe at the hotel then Luiz must have known he was there?
Obviously not, she concluded, when Luiz replied dryly, ‘Not before time, maybe.’
The atmosphere suddenly became very complicated as a confusion of rather unpredictable emotions went skittering around all three of them.
There was ice—a lot of ice. There was curiosity. There was mutual antagonism born from an instant burst of sibling rivalry where both men carefully judged the weight of the other.
She wasn’t sure which one of them actually came out on top in that short silent battle, but she certainly knew which one of them held the position of power—no matter what the mental outcome.
‘Welcome home, Luiz.’ With a slightly wry smile that told her Felipe was acknowledging the same thing, he conceded the higher ground to his half-brother. ‘May your next twenty years be more fortuitous than your first twenty…’
It was such an openly cruel thing to say that even his mother released a gasp. So did Caroline, her fingers curling tensely into Luiz’s shirt in sheer reflex, as if she was trying to soothe the savage beast before it leapt into action.
But Luiz, to everyone’s surprise, laughed. ‘Let’s certainly hope so,’ he agreed. ‘Or this place could be in deep trouble—as we all know.’
Tit for tat. Cut and thrust. Luiz had won that round. And he hadn’t finished, not by a long shot. ‘Which reminds me,’ he went on in the brisk cool voice of a true business tycoon, ‘I have a lot I need to get through here before our wedding takes place next week. So can we start with a tour of the place, before I settle down to some good old-fashioned household accounting…?’
CHAPTER NINE
CAROLINE was sitting quietly in the window of her allotted valley-facing guestroom when a light tap sounded at her door. For a few precious moments she seriously contemplated not answering.
It had been a horrible few days. Days filled with wariness and tension and eyes watching everything she did and everywhere she went as if they were worried she might decide to run off with the silver!
On top of that, Luiz had taken on the mantle of responsibility here as if it was just another new acquisition in his multinational group. He was quiet, he was calm, he was cool and he was exceedingly businesslike. People—staff, mainly—were already in complete awe of him. They scuttled about like little rabbits earnestly eager to make a good impression. And, all in all, the changes he had put into place already were enough to make the average person gasp.
But this wasn’t a business proposition, was it? It was a home—though admittedly a very unusual home. But how did you attempt to point something like that out to a man who barely acknowledged your existence?
Luiz wasn’t talking to her. He was angry about something, though she didn’t know what. It was difficult to find out when he seemed to have locked himself away inside a suit of armour that wouldn’t look out of place in the castle hallway!
She had an itchy feeling his mood stemmed from the fact that she’d met his half-brother before he had. He’d quizzed her about that chance meeting. No—grilled her was a better word.
‘Where did you meet? How did you meet? What did he say? How did he say it?’
When she’d grown angry and demanded to know why it was so important, he’d simply walked away! Five minutes later she’d seen him standing in the castle grounds with a cellular phone clamped to his ear. Whoever he had been speaking to had been receiving the lash of his angry tongue. Even from up here in this room, looking down into darkness, she had been able to see that.
Since then she had hardly set eyes on him, except to share meals across a dining table with others there to squash any hope of meaningful probing into what was rattling him. They even slept in separate rooms. Now if that was a simple case of maintaining some old-fashioned values here in this time-lock of a valley, then Caroline could understand and accept that. But his cold attitude towards her on every count hurt, even though she kept on telling herself that it shouldn’t.
The tap sounded again. On a sigh she got up, and went to answer it. It was one of the little doe eyed maids. ‘Excuse me, Señorita,’ she murmured. ‘Don˜a Consuela send me to tell you that the padre is here wishing to talk to you?’
The padre. Her heart sank. ‘All right, thank you, Abril. Will you tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes?’
Where was Luiz? she wondered heavily as she crossed to her bathroom. But she knew where Luiz was—or least where he wasn’t, she amended. Because Luiz certainly wasn’t here in the valley. In fact, Luiz had flown off in the helicopter that had arrived to pick him up early this morning and hadn’t been seen or heard of since.
The helicopter landing pad was just one of the changes Luiz had brought into being since they’d arrived here. He’d had ten men from the village clearing a spot over in the far corner of the garden before Caroline had even got out of bed on that first morning. Another addition he’d had put in at incredible speed was the telecommunications mast erected at the top of the valley—to