AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
JAVIERCASASLEFTthe extravagance of In Venum—Madrid’s newest and hottest nightclub—two marble steps at a time, rubbing at his tired eyes.That’swhathappenswhenyoupushyourselftoohard, taunted the warning his closest friend had uttered only days ago. Javier huffed. Santi was filming his latest blockbuster hit during the day and finishing post-production on another in the evening—he was hardly one to talk.
‘Casas!’ a predatory female voice called, halting his steps. He couldn’t claim not to have heard her in deserted Spanish streets at two o’clock in the morning, even though he was tempted.
He turned. She was two steps above him, but barely at eye level with his six-foot four-inch frame. Behind her, he caught the eye of the bouncer framing the door at the top of the steps and discreetly shook his head. Javier would deal with the woman himself. She’d managed to ignore all of his subtle and then not so subtle refusals so far that night, making the entire evening a practice in avoidance. He hadn’t even wanted to come tonight, but he couldn’t miss the grand opening for a bar that he owned forty-nine percent of—silently.
She reached out, red-nailed fingers gripping his shoulder. ‘I thought that we could go somewhere.’
She licked her lips in a move she probably believed was sensual, but to Javier was deeply disturbing. The light from the club’s entrance created a painfully bright aura around her, illuminating rather than disguising her ravenous desperation.
‘You need to go home, Annalise.’
‘There is a lot that I need, Javier, and I think you could help me with that.’
‘Annalise—’
‘I want your hands on me,’ she whispered, leaning closer, and before he could stop her she had her finger on the zip of his trousers. He cursed, twisting free of her clutches.
‘Basta ya!’But she didn’t stop. He clasped her hands to keep them from grabbing other parts of his anatomy and stepped back as she tried to press herself against him. ‘I’mmarried, Annalise,’ he growled between gritted teeth.
She rolled her eyes. ‘You are never seen with anyone on your arm, so we all know that’s just a ruse. Unless you keep her locked up in your house and never let her out?’
He frowned, his brain trying to work out who ‘we’ was and whether she was joking or not.
‘You could keepmelocked up, if you like?’
He didn’t have time for this. His driver was waiting and he had a meeting in five hours. He didn’t bother responding. Instead he nodded to the man by the entrance, who appeared and gently prised her from him.
‘Make sure she gets back to wherever she’s staying safely,’ he ordered over his shoulder, knowing it would be followed without question, and continued towards the car waiting for him.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Javier groused when he reached Esteban. His driver’s expression hadn’t changed a bit, but wry amusement came off him in waves.
‘Didn’t say a thing, sir,’ his chauffeur replied.
Once settled in the back of the car, Javier checked his phone for the upcoming day’s meetings, making sure that everything was on track to start bang on seven a.m. He scanned the two hundred emails his personal assistant had already filtered and checked the family message group he had with his half-sister and his mother—but neither distracted him from the sudden unwanted thoughts about the wife he hadn’t seen for six years.
Angry with himself for not having more restraint, he pulled up the newspaper article that had been published last month.More Than Just a Pretty Paintbrush—UK’s hottest new interior designer making waves.He scanned the puff piece that was more patronising than it was illuminating. He’d read it almost ten times now and each time his gaze snagged on the photograph of the woman who had left him on an evening that should have changed their lives for very different reasons.
The black and white picture showed her in a white shirt, holding a cup of coffee, looking towards the camera as if she had a delicious secret to share. Her eyes sparkled in a way he barely recognised and it infuriated him beyond belief that the way her hands cupped the mug concealed her ring finger.
Did she still wear it?
The car slowed and took an unfamiliar turn. Javier frowned, catching the flicker of his driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror.
‘Badly signed roadworks. We’re going to have to—’
The entire world shifted in an explosion of screaming metal and shattering glass. Swept up in a wave that crushed the confines of the car, Javier found himself upside down, choking on a vicious pain in his side. Time jerked back and forth between shocking speed and incomprehensible slowness. A piercing light cut between blue and white, making him wince as a figure he couldn’t be sure was actually there knelt in glass. Blood dripped into his eye, but he couldn’t move his hand to wipe it away.
Something bad had happened. Something awful even, but he couldn’t understand what. He caught words like ‘hospital’ and the oddly irritating reassurance that everything would be okay. To the left he saw his phone, a shatter across the screen and, beneath the broken shards, an image of Emily about to tell him her secret, just before everything went black.
‘Okay, that’s it, ladies and gentlemen, time to leave.’
‘But, boss—’
‘It’s one in the morning. Don’t you have bars to drink in? Dates to go on? Homes to get to?’ Emily teased. She loved her small team; they were eager and hungry, just like she was, but she knew how quickly hunger could morph into burnout and a healthy team was as important to her as their income.
‘But we haven’t finalised the tiles in the bathroom, the colours for the third and fourth bedrooms, and—’
