Kitabı oku: «Modern Romance October Books 1-4»

CHAPTER ONE

JAVIER CASILLAS KEPT his eyes fixed on the wide corridor ahead of him, jaw clenched, feet working automatically. He could feel the eyes upon him; had felt them all evening in the private box he shared with his twin. He’d steeled himself for it. His wildly infamous parentage meant the media spotlight was something he’d learned to endure but the past two months had magnified that spotlight by a thousand.

He would give them exactly what he had always given them. Nothing.

He had not allowed a flicker of emotion to pass his face throughout the performance.

Inside, the rage had built. He’d watched Freya, the woman he’d intended to marry, put on the performance of her life, listened to the rapturous applause, and all he had wanted to do was go home and beat the hell out of his punching bag.

Tonight was the culmination of a long-standing dream between Javier and his twin brother, Luis. A decade ago they’d finally had the funds to purchase the crumbling Madrid theatre and ballet school their prima ballerina mother had spent her childhood learning to dance at, buying the ballet company with it. They’d renamed it Compania de Ballet de Casillas in her memory and set about turning it into one of the most eminent ballet companies in Europe. They’d then bought another parcel of land close to it and built on it a brand-new state-of-the-art theatre and ballet school. Tonight was its grand opening. The world’s media was out in force, but instead of focussing on the theatre and ballet company and celebrating Clara Casillas’s memory, their focus was on Javier and his ex-fiancée.

The whole damn world knew she’d left him for his oldest friend.

What the whole world did not yet know was that Benjamin Guillem had stolen her in a sick game of revenge and that Freya had been happy to be stolen.

They were welcome to each other. Freya meant nothing to Javier. She never had.

The corridor he walked through on his way to the aftershow party forked. About to turn left with the group he was with, which included members of the Spanish royal family, Javier felt a hand settle on his shoulder and steer him firmly in the other direction.

No one other than his twin would have dared touch him in such a manner.

‘What’s the matter?’ Javier asked, staring at his brother with suspicion as they walked.

‘I wanted to talk to you alone,’ Luis replied.

There was something in his brother’s tone that lifted the hairs on the nape of his neck.

Tension had simmered between them since his twin’s foolhardy trip to the Caribbean. How Luis thought that marrying Benjamin’s sister would restore their reputations was still, well over a month on, beyond Javier’s comprehension. Although wildly different from him in both looks and personality, his brother usually had excellent judgement. His opinion was the only one Javier ever thought worthy of consideration.

Fortunately his brother had seen sense at the last minute and returned to Madrid as a single man but things had not been right between them since.

Luis was his only constant. It had been the two of them, facing the world and everything it could throw at them, together, since they had shared the same womb.

Luis waited until they were out of anyone’s earshot before turning to him. ‘You knew we were ripping Benjamin off all those years ago, didn’t you?’

The rage that had simmered in Javier all evening blazed at the mention of his nemesis’s name.

Seven years ago the Casillas brothers had invited Benjamin to invest in a project they were undertaking in Paris, the creation of a skyscraper that became known as Tour Mont Blanc. They had invited his investment only because the seller of the land, to whom they had paid a significant deposit, suddenly told them they had until midnight to pay the balance or he would sell to another interested buyer. They didn’t have the cash. Benjamin did.

‘We didn’t rip him off,’ Javier reminded him icily. ‘He was the fool who signed the contract without reading it.’

‘And you should have warned him the terms had changed as you’d said you would. You didn’t forget, did you?’

Javier might be many things but a liar was not one of them.

Luis had been the one to invite Benjamin onto the project. His investment was worth twenty per cent of the land fee. In the rush of sealing the deal Luis had told Benjamin it meant twenty per cent of the profits. Their lawyer, who drew up the contract in record time, had been the one to point out that the Casillas brothers would be doing all the work and that Benjamin’s profit share should be only five per cent, a point Javier had agreed with.

The contract had been changed accordingly. Javier had emailed it to Benjamin expecting him to read the damn thing and negotiate if the new terms were not to his liking.

‘I knew it.’ Luis took a deep breath. ‘All these years and I’ve told myself that it had been an oversight on your part when I should have accepted the truth that you never forget. In thirty-five years you have never forgotten anything or failed to do something you promised.’

‘I never promised to email him.’ Javier never made promises he didn’t intend to keep. People could say what they liked about him—and frequently did, although never to his face—but he was a man of his word.

‘Not an actual promise,’ Luis conceded. ‘But look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t a deliberate act on your part.’

Luis had asked him to give Benjamin a heads-up about the changes in terms when Javier emailed the contract. At no point had Javier agreed to this request and Luis should be thankful for it. Benjamin’s failure to read the contract before signing it had made the Casillas brothers richer to the tune of two hundred and twenty-five million euros. Benjamin had still made an excellent profit—profit—of seventy-five million and all he’d had to do for that substantial sum was transfer some funds. That he’d had the nerve to sue them over it was beyond the pale. That Benjamin had refused to accept the court’s judgement when the judge had thrown the case out, and then stolen Javier’s fiancée from him, was despicable.