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His bitten acknowledgement of who was speaking was followed by an immediate descent of arching black brows as he handed the instrument to Zoe. ‘Your grandmother’s companion.’
Puzzled, Zoe took it. She’d had no contact with Grandmother Alice since her wedding day except for an unchatty card at Christmas time.
The usually taciturn older woman was alarmingly garrulous, not allowing Zoe to get a word in edge-wise. ‘I’m not supposed to be telling you this but your grandmother’s failing fast. Nothing specific. Just old age and a feeble heart. I know she wants to make her peace with you before anything happens. She’s fretting and it isn’t good for her. She’s got the idea into her head that she didn’t treat you as well as she should have done. I did suggest that I might ask you to visit with her but she all but bit my head off. She’s adamant that if you wanted to see her you’d come without being asked. Very stubborn, your grandmother. So, if you do come, don’t tell her I contacted you. She’d be furious with me and that wouldn’t do at all, not in her state of health. It might finish her off.’
Watching the colour leach out of Zoe’s face, Javier reached for the phone, gave his name and listened to a repeat of the sorry tale. Eventually he spoke. ‘Zoe will be with you as soon as is humanly possible.’ And cut the connection, the strong slant of his cheekbones taut as he turned to her, wanting to take fate by the throat and throttle it for stepping in and ruining his plans for the wooing of his wife, pushing him in a direction he didn’t want to travel.
Forcing a deep breath into his lungs, he made himself relax, stop beefing. An old lady was fading; what right had he to get in a selfish strop about it?
He had never approved of the way Alice Rothwell had treated her orphaned granddaughter but if she was regretting it now, then she deserved to know that at the end she was forgiven. And it would help Zoe, too. That was the most important thing, knowing that the cold, outwardly unloving woman did have some affection for her.
His voice cool, carefully unrevealing of his feelings, he resigned his definitely hopeful-looking plan of seducing his wife until she was inredeemably hooked on him to the back burner and said, ‘We’d best get a move on,’ and punched in the numbers required to put the company jet on standby.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS dark when the sleek company car finally drew up outside her grandmother’s house. With a feeling of foreboding Zoe glanced at the neat façade, the scene of so much childhood unhappiness. But if the stern, unloving old lady wanted to clear her conscience then she was prepared to do all she could to facilitate it.
With a terse instruction to the driver to wait, Javier handed Zoe out and extracted her small, hastily packed suitcase from the boot. Two firm strides brought him back to her, and strong yet gentle
hands were positioned on either side of her face, tilting her head so that he could look directly into her eyes by the light from the street lamp. ‘Sweetheart, would you like me to stay here with you? I’ve a feeling this won’t be easy.’
Zoe would like nothing better but she smothered the desire to say yes, please. She couldn’t be that selfish. There would be no point in him kicking his heels in this gloomy house with two dour old ladies whose idea of a fun evening was criticising the neighbours.
‘No. Honestly, I’ll be fine.’ She loved the touch of his hands against her skin, adored the way the lamp light threw his strong bone structure into such stunning relief, felt so strengthened and warmed by his kindness. The inherent kindness she’d instinctively picked up on as a child and had benefited from—admittedly with one or two blips, which had been all her own fault—throughout her time of knowing him.
‘I guess this—whatever this is—is something Grandmother Alice and I have to deal with ourselves. You’d only feel like a spare part.’
Javier’s thoughts exactly. Little as he wanted to be separated from her, not even for a night, when things seemed to be going in the direction he wanted them to go, he knew that she and Alice Rothwell needed the space to at least reach some kind of understanding.
‘I’ll only stay a week.’ Zoe’s voice sounded very small as she contemplated that length of separation. But if Grandmother Alice was coming to the end of her life she deserved the relief of getting what she apparently now saw as past wrongs off her chest, to find absolution. After all, the old lady hadn’t wanted the responsibility of bringing her up after the untimely and tragic death of her own son and his wife. But she had taken her in when she might have had her put in a children’s home.
Javier gritted his teeth and swallowed his stinging objection to what seemed more like a life sentence than a week out of his life. Curving his fingers around her delicate cheekbones, he lowered his head and, unable to stop it happening, captured her lips with raw passion.
Instinctively, desperately, Zoe kissed him back, fiery desire flooding through every inch of her body as she strained against him, tiny tremors racing through her veins as she clung, fingers lacing into the soft silkiness of his hair, lifting her hips provocatively against the all-male hardness of his. A low moan broke from her throat and then, without warning, he dropped his hands and stepped away from her.
‘I’ll see you safely inside,’ he virtually grated at her, avoiding the shocked widening of her fantastic golden eyes, just about loathing himself for having started something he couldn’t finish.
Lifting the suitcase he’d abandoned on the pavement in one hand, Javier placed the other firmly on the small of her back, urging her into the driveway. His body felt as if it were on fire, burning for her, aching for her. One more second and he knew he’d have lost all hope of control, stripped her beautiful body naked on the pavement and made passionate love to her in full view of his driver and any passer-by. No other woman had ever brought him to the teetering brink of losing all control, but, oh, the things his Zoe did to him…!
Glancing up at his tense profile, Zoe felt cold and abandoned, shivering as the sensation of nausea claimed her stomach. Why had he kissed her like that then pushed her away as if he disgusted himself?
Or was her immediate and over-the-top eagerness in the response department what had disgusted him? Did he prefer his women to be more laid-back and coolly sophisticated where his sexual advances were concerned?
His women! The image of Glenda Havers’ sultry face pinged into her mind. Was she, Zoe, just another female for him to slake his lust on? Was that all she meant to him? Was she already beginning to bore him?
He’d certainly pulled out all the stops when it had come to grasping the excuse to get her out of his hair when they’d received the news of Grandmother Alice’s frail and fading condition. Hitching a ride in the helicopter, transferring to the company jet in Madrid, the car waiting at the airport to ferry them here—
Oh, put a sock in it!
Zoe gave herself a furious mental kick for her dreadful habit of putting the worst possible interpretation on everything he did. In getting her back to England before she could catch her breath he’d only been doing what he automatically did best—clicking his fingers and making things happen.
And he’d had that fabulous selection of rings flown in for her, hadn’t he? How could she possibly forget that? Sometimes she really despised herself!
Another savage mental kick had her deciding she was behaving like a mixed-up brat. Apart from her lost parents, no one had ever loved her, so she’d assumed no one ever would.
Oliver had said he loved her, but she was clued-up enough to know that the only thing he loved was the thought of her future inheritance.
And as for Javier—well, even employing positive thinking she just didn’t know! Not beyond a shadow of a doubt. Did he want their marriage to last beyond the two years he’d stipulated, or didn’t he?
