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From the look on Juan Carlos’s patrician face it was as if Lily had said she was a high class hooker. His brows rose almost into his distinguished grey-streaked hair.
‘My dear, how fascinating. What surprising people my son seems to mix with. And where did you meet?’
‘At Tom’s,’ Tristan said coldly. ‘At a party in the summer.’
Allegra’s exclamation of delight sounded almost genuine. ‘How romantic!’ she exclaimed a little too brightly. ‘And how sudden. It must have been love at first sight!’
Frowning a little, Tristan tucked the stray lock of hair behind Lily’s ear. ‘I don’t remember it being love at first sight. I don’t think that came until we woke up the next morning.’
Lily was aware of the brittle tinkle of Allegra’s laugh, but only distantly.
A shiver of helpless longing rippled across Lily’s skin—skin that still tingled from the ecstasy he had awoken in her earlier. But she was aware that beside her Juan Carlos’s face had taken on a bland and dangerous look. Giving an abrupt nod in the direction of the ladies, he turned to Tristan.
‘A word in private, if you please.’
For a moment Tristan hesitated, as if he was going to argue, and then Allegra stepped forward and tucked her arm through Lily’s.
‘You men go and talk business! I’m going to show Lily around our home, and get to know her properly.’
‘I assume she’s pregnant?’
In the masculine enclave of Juan Carlos’s wood-panelled office there was no place for such feminine refinements as champagne flutes and cava. Picking up a solid, square cut decanter from a cedarwood tray, Juan Carlos sloshed dark liquid into two glasses. He held one out to Tristan, who ignored it.
‘And why would you assume that?’
Juan Carlos looked at him over the rim of his glass. ‘Because,’ he said with slow, unpleasant relish, ‘I can’t think why else you have married her. Women like that are mistresses, not wives.’
Don’t react. Don’t show him that he’s got to you. Don’t let him see that it hurt. It was the mantra that had echoed through Tristan’s head countless times before when he’d stood in this room. No doubt at some point during all those years the ability to conceal his emotions successfully had gone from being an effort of will to being a habit.
With deceptive nonchalance he leaned against one corner of Juan Carlos’s impressive desk and raised his eyebrows slightly. ‘Women like that?’
‘Women with no breeding,’ Juan Carlos said dismissively, taking a mouthful of his drink and giving a grimace that Tristan understood was not directed at the excellent brandy. ‘A model, Tristan! Such a cliché.’ He looked down into his glass, swirling the liquid around for a moment before saying quite conversationally, ‘I take it you are doing this to deliberately undermine me?’
‘Just like you undermined me at the meeting this morning?’ Tristan said with quiet contempt. ‘How did you get those men to vote with you—against me—on increasing the interest on the African loans? That money is going to come straight out of that country’s healthcare budget or education, or farming subsidies, as everyone in that meeting knew. How much did you have to pay them for their votes?’
Juan Carlos moved round to the other side of the desk and sank into the huge leather chair. ‘Not everything comes down to money,’ he said thoughtfully, examining his manicured fingernails. ‘Most things, but not all.’ ‘Oh, Dios… Sofia.’ Tristan got up from the desk and took a few paces, thrusting his hand through his hair as his mind raced. ‘The deal was to do with me and Sofia, wasn’t it?’
‘Would that be such a bad idea? Do you think I married your mother for love?’
‘No.’ Tristan’s laugh was edged with bitterness and despair. ‘No, I never thought that.’
Acid burned at the back of his throat and the darkness that he constantly felt crouched around him encroached a little further. It was something that he was used to—he had lived with it for as long as he could remember, without ever really wanting to look directly at it, or give it a name. Until now. Standing here, in the room that had been the scene of so much suffering, he remembered again Lily’s soft voice, the warmth of her hand on his heart. The emotion you’re most in touch with at the moment is fear…
He hadn’t wanted to admit she was right. He hadn’t even wanted to consider the possibility.
But suddenly he knew she had been absolutely spot on. Looking into the empty eyes of his father, so similar to the ones that looked back at him from the mirror every morning, he was afraid.
For a long time he had accepted that because of the man in front of him he wasn’t able to love. Neurological fact. But for the first time he allowed himself to look right into the blackness and confront what had been lurking there all the time; the fear that where there should have been love, all the cruelty and the coldness of those crucial early years had been hardwired into his brain instead. What if it was there, waiting for an outlet, and when Lily had this child…?
Dios, oh, Dios, what had he done?
He had forced her into this out of his innate sense of family honour, but what about her? What about his duty to her and to the baby? He had promised to protect her and keep her safe, but how could he do that if the biggest danger she faced was from him? She made him feel things that scared him. Things that he knew he couldn’t control.
He had told her that he wasn’t a monster. But what if he was? What if he was just like his father and he didn’t know it yet?
His fists were tight balls of tension, and he pressed them to his temples as Juan Carlos’s quiet, eminently reasonable voice washed over him.
‘It would have been a brilliant match, surely you can see that? A link between our bank and the largest privately owned bank in Greece. Sofia would have been a good wife, and you could have had your sordid little affairs with models on the side.’ He paused and shook his head uncomprehendingly. ‘But instead you married one. It’s a shame, Tristan—I thought you were more in control of your emotions. I thought you were too sensible to get carried away by stupid notions of romance.’
‘I didn’t,’ Tristan said icily. ‘You were right first time. Our marriage has nothing to do with emotion or romance. Lily is pregnant, and I’m doing my duty—to her and to our ancient, rotten, noble family.’
From the other side of the desk he saw something gleam in his father’s cold eyes, and thought it might be triumph. ‘She trapped you into this deliberately,’ said Juan Carlos harshly.
Walking towards the door, Tristan laughed—a sound as hollow and bleak as his own heart. ‘I think she’s the one who’s been trapped, don’t you? Trapped into a loveless, sterile, dutiful marriage.’
‘Hardly,’ said Juan Carlos pompously. ‘You are a Romero—the Marqués de—’
Tristan opened the door. ‘Exactly,’ he said, with bitter resignation. ‘Who in their right mind would want anything to do with that?’
‘You have a lovely home,’ Lily said awkwardly as she stood in the small sitting room in Allegra’s private suite of rooms. It seemed that they had come a long way from the large, crowded place where the reception was being held. This room, with its thick, thick carpets, quilted sofas, acres and acres of swagged silk curtain, was in a different world entirely: still opulent, still expensive, but warm and comfortable to the point of being suffocating. Lily was beginning to feel faint.
Allegra smiled and took another mouthful of cava. ‘Thank you. I hope that in time you will come to think of it as your home too. None of the children spend much time here any more, but maybe…’ She faltered, and Lily glanced sharply up.
‘None of them?’
‘Sorry.’ With a little laugh, Allegra shook her head and waved her glass in a sweeping arc. ‘I mean neither of them. Maybe now he is married Tristan will have more time. He’s always so busy, you see…’
The words faded and she looked around, as if trying to remember why they were there. Lily was wondering the same thing. Allegra Montalvo y Romero de Losada was beautiful, glamorous, generous and wel coming, but she was also extremely drunk. From the fact that this hadn’t been immediately apparent at the reception, Lily realised that it was a state of affairs Allegra was obviously quite used to. She also thought that it probably explained the rather large bruise that was discernible on one of her elegant cheek bones, beneath the pancake makeup.
‘I think,’ said Lily carefully, ‘that perhaps I’d better be getting back. Tristan will be wondering where I’ve got to.’
Would he?
Once again her mind wandered back to the afternoon. There had been a fervour to his lovemaking that was almost fierce in its intensity. A ripple of profound, private delight shimmered through her as she recalled it…
‘Wait! You can’t go until I’ve given you what I brought you up here for,’ Allegra said, sashaying into the bedroom and disappearing into another small room leading off it. Left alone, Lily pressed her palm over the tiny roundness of her bump and silently pleaded with the baby to ease up on the sickness. The waves of nausea were getting closer together now, each one threatening to tip her right over…
