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‘Your plans. Cancel them.’ He began moving towards the door expecting her to follow him, which she did. She grabbed a couple of things and caught up with him just as he was about to head down the stairs.

‘You can’t waltz in here and tell me what to do!’ She glared at him and began winding her scarf around her neck.

‘That’s true,’ he murmured. ‘That’s why I hope you’ll understand just how important this situation is as far as I’m concerned. My brother vanished over three weeks ago. Since then I haven’t been able to get hold of him. I had a brief text before he disappeared telling me that he’d be in touch at some point. If you have any information on his whereabouts, and I’m guessing that you do, then our chat isn’t going to be a fifteen-minute question and answer session in a noisy pub somewhere. So, your plans? You might find it helpful to rearrange them.’

His voice was low and mild but there was no doubt at all in Hope’s mind that there was any way she was going to be able to avoid talking to him. She slanted a sideways glance at him and shivered because he was so…implacable, so forbidding…so physically compelling.

He and Carlos might have come from the same gene pool but there was an ocean of difference between them.

‘There’s a restaurant that would be quiet because it’s still quite early. An Italian. The food is very nice.’ She offered the information grudgingly.

‘That will do.’ He waited until she’d switched off all the lights and locked the door. ‘Might be helpful if we get to know one another a little,’ he said, stepping aside so that she could brush past him as they headed down the staircase with its ornate wrought iron railings.

‘Really? Why?’

‘I’ll be blunt,’ Javier said, stopping just before they hit the bottom of the staircase and walked into the buzz of the creative department on the ground floor.

Hope paused, span round and reluctantly walked back towards him. He was waiting for her, leaning against the wall with the sort of indolent arrogance that set her teeth on edge.

She knew that every single person in the huge room had stopped to stare at them and she was burning with resentment when she finally looked up at him.

‘I want to find out exactly what’s going on here,’ Javier continued coolly. ‘And I won’t be walking away until I’m satisfied that you’ve told me everything you know about Carlos and where he is.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Hope said through gritted teeth. ‘If he contacted you before he left and told you that he’d be in touch sooner or later, then why don’t you trust that he will?’

The perfectly reasonable question hung in the air between them for a couple of seconds.

Javier lowered his eyelashes, shielding his expression.

Trust his kid brother? After everything that had happened?

Carlos had been five and Javier had been fifteen when they had abruptly found themselves orphaned. Of course, there had been relatives swarming around them and people had been helpful. The company, after the initial shock at suddenly being rudderless, had quickly steadied. Lawyers had leapt into action, directors had rallied and everything had been kept ticking over until Javier, the eldest son and heir to the family empire, was old enough to step into the role he had always been destined to inherit.

On the surface, matters had been dealt with efficiently.

However, for Javier, in their small and devastated world, there had only been him and his brother. He had become more than a brother to Carlos. He had become his father figure. Perhaps unconsciously to start with but the habit of looking after his brother had become ingrained over the years.

With that role had come unforeseen responsibilities and those responsibilities had sometimes carried consequences.

When Carlos was sixteen, he had done what a lot of teenagers do. He rebelled against the authority of the only parental figure he knew, which had been a twenty-six-year-old Javier, who was still finding his feet in the sprawling family empire.

Carlos had started dabbling in drugs and had gotten himself kicked out of school. He had fought against Javier’s authority and the harder he’d fought, the more determined Javier had become that discipline had to be enforced.

Javier had learnt, from experience, the art of self-containment. Having to absorb his own grief at his parents’ deaths when he’d still been so young, and with no time allowed to really recover, he’d been abruptly thrust into the role of looking after his much younger brother.

He’d known he had to remain strong and that implacable strength had been his ally when it had come to dealing with Carlos over the years.

Had their relationship ever really recovered after those turbulent years? No.

So now, the clear and simple answer to Hope’s question was—no, he didn’t trust his brother sufficiently to leave him to his own devices. Or to get in touch with him to let him know in due course what was going on.

What if he was back on the drugs? It had happened once. It could happen again.

At the end of the day, for Javier, there were just the two of them. He loved his brother, even if he was guiltily aware that he had not always known how best to show it.

Standing in front of his brother’s girlfriend, with those clear, green eyes watching him, he felt all that pent up, suffocating guilt wash over him again.

‘Right now…’ he said smoothly, moving once again towards the door, ‘…you should understand that I’ll be the one asking the questions.’