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Once that happened, would she ever have the strength to escape again? She’d already lost her heart, left it battered and bleeding when she’d turned her back on Alejandro the first time. If she didn’t keep her head now, she was on track to lose what was left of her pride. She had to get out of there.
She rose slowly from the table, trying unsuccessfully to tug her hand out from under his without creating a scene. ‘I don’t think there’s any point continuing this conversation. I want to go home. I’ll get the maître d’ to call me a taxi.’
His eyes glittered dangerously across the table from her, his hand refusing to let her go, even tightening around hers with a slow intent that told her he meant business.
‘You’re leaving before you’ve eaten?’
‘I’m not feeling very hungry any more.’
‘And before we’ve even discussed your brother?’
‘Why should I stay, when you’ve made it plain that once you tell me you expect me to leave anyway?’
‘No, I said you could go. The choice would always be yours.’
‘And why should I choose to stay?’
‘Because you love your brother and you don’t want to see him get hurt.’
Disbelief was her first reaction, closely followed by outrage. ‘What are you suggesting?’ she fired at him in a whisper. ‘That if I don’t sleep with you, you’ll break Jordan’s legs? No wonder you thought I would leave once you told me. I knew you were ruthless, but even I didn’t realise you could stoop to those depths.’ She tugged on her hand, still imprisoned within Alejandro’s. ‘Let me go! I’ve heard enough.’
His jaw was set as if it had been chiselled from granite, his eyes unrelenting. ‘I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about the people he owes money to.’
‘What people? He told me he’d got a bank loan.’ She blinked, the feeling of foreboding she’d been carrying around all week becoming a chill that jagged down her spine and threatened to buckle her knees. She dropped back into her seat before she fell down, her mind fitting the pieces together: the panicked phone calls asking if he could borrow money, his increasing anxiety as the date for the repayment of his loan approached. ‘Oh, God, please don’t tell me he went to a money-lender?’
Across the table, Alejandro nodded, and her heart fell like a stone. She’d been trying for days to think up ways of appeasing the bank, of trying to work out some schedule of repayments. But it wasn’t a bank they were dealing with. She swallowed. She’d seen reports in the papers about people who had fallen foul of money sharks. She could not let that happen to her younger brother. Not when she knew it all came down to her.
‘This is all my fault,’ she said, staring unseeing over the ever-changing reflected lights on the darkened harbour. ‘I should never have stayed away so long. I should have come home and helped him with the business like he wanted.’ Instead she’d fallen for a Spaniard with flashing eyes and a too easy charm, who in a chance encounter on a brief Mediterranean holiday had swept her off her feet and into his bed in a h
eartbeat. And now they were both suffering the consequences…
‘Your brother is a man. Old enough to make his own decisions.’ Alejandro’s voice was rough, unforgiving. ‘He should not need his sister’s help to avoid such foolhardiness.’
‘But if I hadn’t left him alone—’
‘Then it might be both your names on the loan documents instead of just his, and the thugs who loaned him the money might have you too, in their sights.’
She shuddered with the knowledge of what might be in store for her brother. She’d known Jordan was certain he was on a sure thing with his internet used-car trading scheme, but how could he have been foolish enough to have succumbed to such apparently easy cash?
‘I have to call him,’ she said, half rising once again from the table. ‘Talk to him, make sure he’s all right.’
‘There is no need. He is safe. I have made sure of that.’
‘You have? I don’t understand. What’s going on here? How do you know all this?’
He smiled then, a smile that warmed its way all the way into her soul, and just for a moment she felt her resistance to him crumbling, felt the once familiar warmth of his smile and the tug of sensual heat that came with it. How she’d missed that look!
‘You knew me for six months, querida. You watched me at work, you watched me at play. You must know I never embark on either without doing my homework.’
Business—always business. It was just what she needed to banish those unwanted stirrings, to force them back into a bottle and ram the stopper in tight. She couldn’t afford to let herself be swayed by his potent sexuality. Not when there was so much at stake.
She forced her head away, brushing aside the uncomfortable knowledge that he’d had her brother’s financial affairs investigated—and no doubt her own as well—if only because now she was getting some clue as to Jordan’s real financial circumstances. Goodness only knew when Jordan had been planning to tell her the whole sorry tale.
‘He told me he’d borrowed forty thousand dollars. But if he got that from a money-lender…’ She frowned, her teeth making tracks in her lipstick. Easy money came at a high price—but how high, exactly? Her tiny bedsit wasn’t worth a lot, but maybe she could borrow enough against it to help Jordan out. ‘How much does he now owe?’
Alejandro reeled off the balance—a six-figure sum that had Leah thinking she’d misheard, blowing all thought of covering it with a second mortgage. ‘Oh, my God! There’s no way I’ll ever get that amount together in forty-eight days, let alone in forty-eight hours.’
He let the full impact of her dilemma sink in, his fingers idly spinning the stem of his wine glass, not needing to drink the fine vintage when victory was almost at hand and tasted so much better. ‘There is, of course,’ he said at last, pausing for effect, ‘one way.’
