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Where were her wits? Lucy asked herself fiercely. What had she so far done to try and sort out this gruesome situation concerning Fidelio’s money? One big fat nothing, she conceded, shame and guilt engulfing her. This very day she had seen Joaquin on two separate occasions and she hadn’t even raised the subject, never mind tried to talk him round into agreeing to a workable solution. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would do what she should have been doing from the start…
As soon as Lucy had had breakfast the following morning, she got dressed. The contents of the suitcase that had been left behind at the bar at San Angelita now hung in the wardrobe, freshly pressed and pristine.
Lucy chose a pale blue suit. The skirt was short, the jacket very fitted, but it was a smart combination and infinitely better than wafting around in skimpy nightwear, she told herself censoriously. No wonder Joaquin had picked up the wrong signals from her! She could scarcely condemn him for assuming that she was the sort of woman who was willing to employ sex as a persuader. Now that she was properly garbed, he would naturally take her far more seriously.
Her strappy shoes were so perilously high that it was a challenge to descend the stairs with grace. Yolanda was crossing the magnificent big hall below, looking stunning but also a little startling in an incredibly tight scarlet skirt and a beaded crop top adorned with strategic cut-outs.
‘Good morning,’ Lucy said awkwardly to attract the brunette’s attention. ‘Could you tell me where I could find your brother?’
Yolanda whirled round with a frown. ‘In his office, down there…’ She stabbed the air with an imperious hand to indicate the branch corridor at the rear of the hall. ‘But I don’t think it would be a good idea to bother him right now!’
‘Why?’
The volatile brunette focused smouldering dark eyes on her and ignored the question to ask another. ‘Do you have a father, Lucy?’
‘He’s dead—’
‘A brother?’
Lucy shook her head in denial.
Yolanda’s sultry mouth compressed. ‘Then how could you ever understand our macho-dominated culture?’ she demanded with unconcealed bitterness. ‘A Guatemalan woman must obey first her father, then her brother, and finally her husband. All male relatives take precedence over her. What I want doesn’t come into it. No, I must still do as I am told, like a little child! Have you any idea how that feels?’
Involuntarily, Lucy heard the echo of her late mother’s constant controlling criticisms which had marked out very effective boundaries in every area of her own life.
‘Lucy, you’re not a teenager any more and you look ridiculous in that dress…’
‘Lucy, only street-walkers wear make-up like that…’
‘Lucy, you’re not bright enough to go to university…’
‘Lucy, how can you expect me to sit here on my own while you go to some silly evening class…how can you be so selfish?’
‘I know exactly how it feels,’ Lucy heard herself whisper.
In the act of already moving away, Yolanda turned back in surprise at that confirmation.
‘My mother was rather…er…domineering,’ Lucy confided in a rush.
Their eyes met in a moment of shared understanding. This time Lucy turned away first, feeling horribly disloyal for having expressed that opinion.
‘My mother remarried soon after my father died and had a new family,’ Yolanda framed curtly. ‘I was in the way, so I was sent off to school.’
Lucy stilled, and would have responded, but Yolanda grimaced. ‘Poor little me!’ she completed with cool self-mockery, and started up the grand staircase.
As Lucy headed in the direction which Yolanda had indicated, she recalled that brother and sister had been arguing the previous night as well. At least, the brunette had been arguing, she adjusted, for Joaquin had stayed cool as ice. But Lucy’s sympathy quite naturally lay with Yolanda. Since she herself found standing up to powerful personalities an enormous challenge, she assumed Joaquin’s sister had a similar problem, worsened by a cultural bias which suggested that women were not the equal of their male counterparts. And there was no denying that Joaquin Del Castillo laid down the law like a born autocrat.
She knocked on the door and then, after waiting a moment, opened it. The room was large and imposing, more of a library than an office, with the bookshelves and the darker decor imposing a pervasively male ambience.
Joaquin had already risen from behind an immaculately tidy desk. Across the room, French doors stood wide on the lush grounds. Sunshine flooded in, gleaming over his black hair, luxuriant as polished silk. Even in the more casual garb of a short-sleeved white shirt and cream chinos, Joaquin contrived to look incredibly exclusive. The beautiful cut of his clothing exuded faultless designer tailoring and elegance. His deep-set bright eyes arrowed in on her and narrowed, his lean, dark forceful face settling into impassivity.
Lucy’s heart sank in the forbidding silence which he allowed to continue. Her nervous tension increased. She dragged in a foreshortened breath. ‘We need to talk about Fidelio’s money,’ she pointed out tautly, hating the note of apology she could hear in her own uncertain voice.
‘I have already said all that I have to say on that subject,’ Joaquin countered with intimidating authority and finality. ‘When you sign that document, you may go home. You have no other options.’
‘But there’s got to be another option…it would be impossible to come up with that much money all at once!’ Lucy protested in a burst of desperation.
Joaquin looked hugely unimpressed by that plea of poverty.
Lucy bit at her lower lip. ‘Surely the offer of a substantial first payment followed by instalments would be sufficient proof of good intentions?’
‘Without a legal agreement, you would back out on the promise as soon as you got back to London,’ Joaquin responded very drily.
‘No, I wouldn’t. There’s actually a property of…er…mine up for sale at the moment—’
‘The only property you own is the one you live in, and it’s not on the market.’
So he didn’t know about the flat which Cindy had bought for her mother and her sister. No, of course he didn’t know! Had that connection been made, he might well have discovered that Cindy had an identical twin. So persisting on the subject of that property could be downright dangerous. Lucy closed her restive hands together in front of her, for the first time admitting how much she hated the necessity of pretending to be her sister. But Joaquin had personally ensured that telling the truth was out of the question when he had all but threatened to tell Cindy’s bridegroom what she was really like. At least what he thought her sister was really like, which would be a very biased and cruelly unjust report!
‘The remainder could be repaid in instalments,’ Lucy proffered a second time, standing her ground and squaring her slight shoulders.
‘At Fidelio’s age, such an arrangement would not be viable.’
‘But I can prove that it was all a horrible misunderstanding and that there was no intent to cheat anyone out of anything!’ Lucy exclaimed, thrusting up her chin. ‘If I had known that Fidelio was working as a ranch foreman, why would I have been under the impression that he was wealthy enough to give away large amounts of cash?’
‘Specious,’ Joaquin styled that argument, a sardonic ebony brow elevating at her persistence. ‘Naturally Mario must have told you that my father had left Fidelio a legacy in his will.’
Lucy paled as she finally understood how Fidelio Paez had amassed such a healthy sum for his retirement years. He had inherited the greater part of it from Joaquin’s late father, which no doubt gave Joaquin an even more personal stake in the affair. His family resources had ensured the comfort of the older man’s retirement, only for Cindy to take it away. But her sister had been guilty of selfish and opportunistic greed, not of fraud! There was a distinction and he had to be made to see it. Cindy would not having knowingly injured Mario’s father.
‘But Mario never menti
oned that legacy!’ Lucy argued, curling her taut fingers into fists. ‘You seem to forget that Mario and…’ She stumbled, as she had almost slipped and said her sister’s name. ‘Mario and I,’ she stressed, ‘were only together for a very short time.’
‘Not even long enough for you to play the grieving widow,’ Joaquin agreed, studying her with immovable calm.
‘If that’s another one of those nasty cryptic remarks angled at making me uncomfortable, I’m not listening!’ Lucy shot at him in shaken reproach.
‘Start facing the fact that I know you for the con-artist you are,’ Joaquin countered with unblemished cool, letting his brilliant green eyes roam with insolent thoroughness over her small stiff figure.
Beneath that appraisal Lucy squirmed, with an awareness of his raw masculinity that filled her with furious self-loathing. She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks and the sudden dryness of her mouth but she couldn’t afford to stop focusing on the subject at hand. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about—’
