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A guy that wasn’t that keen, her brain told her bluntly, but then why was he so reluctant to let her leave his house? It was simple: Ruy wanted her to be on the spot and immediately available when the desire to sketch assailed him. Convenience meant everything to Ruy, who seemed to have a terminal objection to having to wait for anything.
‘I’ll run you back home,’ Ruy volunteered when she said nothing.
Suzy breathed in deep and slow to ease her constricted lungs, knowing that she needed a little space to figure out why she felt so tied to Ruy. Because he had been around to save her when she was terrified? Because he had advised and supported her and made her feel safe? Was her brain, were her very emotions, really that basic? Or was she catching feelings for a man who would never catch them back?
She sat up late with her father and then went through her cases, discarding anything that seemed superfluous. Her father took her back to Ruy’s the next morning and by then the wedding dress and her outfits had arrived and she went straight upstairs to try everything on. She walked downstairs in the feathered dress and Ruy sprang off the sofa where he was using a laptop and stared at her. In the gown, her fiery curls tumbling round her shoulders, she was a vision, a distinctly beautiful vision, not at all what he had originally planned.
‘Do you still want me to dirty it up a bit?’ Suzy enquired doubtfully.
‘No, that idea won’t work with that gown,’ Ruy conceded. ‘You could end up looking like a bedraggled bird after a rainstorm.’
Suzy giggled. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘I’ll come up with something else.’
‘From that non-existent fertile imagination of yours,’ Suzy teased absently.
Ruy merely quirked a brow. He would still paint her in the gown, but he would also paint her in her own clothes, immortalising those lovely delicate features of hers, the glow of her translucent skin and the grace of her. ‘Let’s do some work now,’ he suggested with renewed enthusiasm.
The following day, Suzy rose early. She put on capri pants and a silky tee teamed with a short boxy jacket, aimed at giving her a more finished look. Her very high-heeled red sandals necessitated a slow descent of the stairs. She was surprised to see Ruy already downstairs, sheathed in a dark business suit that just screamed personal tailoring and expense. It fit him like a glove, accentuating his broad shoulders, narrow waist and long powerful legs.
‘You’re very formal,’ she remarked, sitting down for breakfast.
‘I like the pompoms on the shoes,’ Ruy replied, evading that comment as he passed her a ring box. ‘Very different.’
Suzy opened the box, removed the ring and slid it onto her finger without ceremony before eating with appetite. She had only been abroad once and that had been a trip to Greece with a school friend’s family the summer that she was sixteen. She was excited about visiting Spain, her late mother’s birth place, but striving to act mature and hide the fact. When her cases had been carted away and she walked out of the house to see a limousine awaiting them, she was startled.
‘Is this what you call travelling in style?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Which airport are we heading for?’
‘I use a private airfield nearby. It’s not far and it’ll speed up our journey.’
A private airfield? How did that work? Reluctant to betray her ignorance, Suzy said nothing while wondering if he knew someone who had offered them flights on his plane.
They drew up at the office at the airfield. Ruy requested her passport and it was handed out of the limo to the man who emerged from the office. Suzy idly appraised the sleek white jet parked on the runway nearby. It bore a V logo and the Spanish flag on its tail.
‘Time for us to board,’ Ruy advised as the passenger door was opened by the driver.
The pilot and two stewardesses greeted them at the foot of the steps. There was a lot of what Suzy regarded as bowing and scraping and the ladies were very flirty with Ruy. Suzy frowned as she mounted the steps and moved into what struck her as the very last word in opulent cabin interiors. There were reclining seats, coffee tables, polished wood, pale leather surfaces, and through the arch at the foot she could see an actual conference table surrounded by chairs. She stepped back as the four men she had seen at Ruy’s secluded home passed by them and headed towards the back of the plane, where they disappeared from view.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Ruy advised.
‘A private jet?’ Suzy queried, settling stiffly down into a reclining seat but keeping it upright, quite unable to relax in so sumptuous a setting.
Ruy vented a rueful laugh, raw charisma in the lazy half-smile he angled in her direction. ‘I suppose it’s time to come clean.’
‘I think it is,’ Suzy agreed with a dangerous glint in her clear green eyes. ‘You have access to a private jet or is some friend allowing you to use it?’
‘Strictly speaking the jet belongs to Valiente Capital, the Spanish investment firm. I am the CEO of Valiente Capital. That I also paint is a secret, a diversion from my normal life as a hedge-fund manager and I use the pseudonym V for my portraits to conserve that privacy,’ Ruy explained with cool precision.
Investment, hedge funds? Suzy’s brain swam. She would probably have been less taken aback had he announced that he was a bullfighter. But some sort of financial wizard? That was so far removed from what she had so far seen of Ruy that she was wildly disconcerted, and then her thoughts took a step back and she recalled that cool, arrogant side to his nature. ‘Why weren’t you honest with me about who you were from the start?’ she demanded tightly.
‘My two identities are kept very much separate and few people know the truth. Cecile is one of the few. I’m not sure our investors would be happy to learn that I’m an artist as well. I bought the house in England as a bolt-hole where I could paint when I take time off and I see no reason to tell anyone that I’m also involved in the financial markets.’
‘How rich are you?’ Suzy shot at him thinly, an unpleasant thought suddenly occurring to her. ‘Rich enough to have paid me that fifty thousand pounds I mentioned that night in the pub and think nothing of it?’
