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This. She’d missed it. The teasing, the lightness, the way the fun back and forth made her feel younger, happier, free. The years after she’d left Javier had been dark and heavy and hard. And being the boss of the small team meant that she’d had to make difficult decisions and pull rank occasionally. It hadn’t exactly made space for...fun.
She took his arm and looked up at her husband. ‘We can go anywhere?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘And it’s just us?’
‘Just us.’
She knew exactly where to start. She led Javier towards the Nasrid Palaces that had first caught her attention in school and held it, but even that years-long infatuation couldn’t prevent the question that had been waiting impatiently on the tip of her tongue.
‘Javi,’ she whispered, ‘just how richareyou?’
He looked at her for a moment, then threw his head back and laughed. Big, loud, joyous laughter that confused but delighted her.
‘Very, is the short answer,’ he managed with a rueful smile when he had just about recovered.
Emily, no wiser, simply waited and Javier nodded once and looked up over to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the distance.
‘No one expected Santi’s film to be such a roaring success. Not even us.’
‘If it was such a shot in the dark, why did you do it?’
‘Because Santi is my brother,’ he said simply. ‘Not by blood, no, but we’ve known each other since we were six years old when we went first went head to head in the playground.’
‘Who won?’ she asked, entranced by the image of the two powerful, handsome men she knew as children.
‘Cariño, you have to ask?’ Javier scolded.
‘Santi then,’ she concluded in a tease.
He smiled begrudgingly before the smile dimmed a little. ‘It was a huge gamble though.Huge,’ he repeated as if he was still shocked by it even now. ‘But it wasn’t just because Santi had asked,’ he admitted. ‘I needed something that wasn’t from Gael, or Renata. Something that couldn’t be taken away on a whim. I needed tosucceed.’
And for the first time in six years Emily felt the stirring of understanding deep within her. No, back then she wouldn’t have understood. But now that she had her own business, poured blood, sweat and tears into it, she knew the sense of self it provided, the confidence, but she was surprised to hear that he’d needed to feel it too.
‘And when Santi’s film made over one hundred million at the box office...’
Javier opened his hand to the sky and shrugged. ‘It was an incredible windfall. I invested again with Santi but also in other things. Over the years, I have lost some money but made an incredible amount more. Now I work with a group of people to try and put as much of that money back into the world as possible, but yes. I still have a lot of money.’
Emily knew Javier well enough to know that it was less about money and more about reaching that private, secret internal goal he’d set for himself. He had always been driven, in every single thing he did. Driven to a point of ruthlessness that bordered on selfishness. The thought turned something in her chest as they made their way towards the heart of the Alhambra.
‘It is amazing what you have achieved, Javier. Really,’ she said, her palm resting on the bare skin of his forearm sending sparks right to his chest. ‘The success you have become is incredible.’ His wife’s simple words struck him with the full force of a punch that stopped his heart. His mind flatlined at the realisation that no one had ever said that to him. They had celebrated it, desired it, envied it more often than not. But recognising his achievements... Emily looked at him with silver sparks in her blue eyes that were all the more powerful for not being sensual. And then...
‘Your mother must be happy,’ she said ruefully.
Javier looked away. ‘She doesn’t know.’
Emily frowned, her steps stalling a little. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It is better that she doesn’t know.’
Renata was a black hole that he could pour money into for the rest of his life and she’d never be satisfied. Whether it was for the business she’d inherited from her father, or for herself, money made Renata’s cruelty vicious, the memory of it passing a cold shadow across the warmth of the morning.
But he knew that Emily deserved more of an explanation than that. So there, despite the gentle burn of the morning sun against his skin, he chose to walk into ice.
‘She is...’ he struggled for words that were honest, despite the familial guilt that nipped at the truth ‘...dangerously selfish. Oh, she can be gregarious and dramatic to the point of comedy—’ he gentled his words with a small smile ‘—but beneath that is something...much more complex.’
He could see that his oblique descriptions were not enough to clear the confusion in Emily’s eyes and suddenly he wanted her to understand, as much as he feared that understanding. He led her to a bench and gestured for her to sit.
