CURIOUS ABOUT MY BOOKS?

Nate was in his sister’s flat. It looked the same, but certainly didn’t feel the same. There was a glass of wine in his hand, but he couldn’t remember how it had got there, and nor could he smell the rich fruity scent of what he was sure would be a Beaujolais. His vision was fuzzy at the edges and his sister was saying something, but he couldn’t hear it. Sound was muffled, as if his head was wrapped in a blanket. His vision was tunnelled and her eyes widened in alarm, her mouth opening in shock, just as he was drowned in blackness…

     ‘Mr Harcourt, can you hear me? Mr Harcourt?’

     He was being shaken roughly, pain slicing into his head. Something was wrong. His sister was sobbing. Begging.

     ‘Please help him. Please do something.’

     His body rolled viciously and he landed on a bed with a thud. A light shone in his eye, blinding him, but he couldn’t close it. He tried to smack the hand away, but his arm wouldn’t move.

     ‘His left pupil’s blown.’

     Words like ‘CT’, ‘angiogram’, ‘bloods’ swam as he tried to find his sister, but he couldn’t move a muscle. He was in hell, his body on fire. He felt everything: each needle-stick, each poke and prod, the knuckle against the arch of his foot. But his body wasn’t reacting. Nothing.

     Numb, but not numb.

     ‘What’s going on?’ 

     Hope sounded so scared that it terrified him. He knew that fear, the incomprehensible touch of death come to steal away loved ones, and he wouldn’t inflict that on her. He couldn’t.

     The high-pitched moan of the monitor screamed until it descended into irregular pips.

     ‘You’re going to be fine, Nate. I promise. The best doctor is flying in right now to do the operation.’

     What operation? What had happened?

     ‘Nate, you’re going to be fine,’ his sister whispered into his ear. ‘I promise.’

The cabin door on his small private jet slammed shut, yanking him from the nightmare that wasn’t a nightmare. Nightmares were baseless fears: terrors of the unknown, irrational monsters dredged from the unconscious. What Nate had just experienced was a sleeping memory. Events that had been real and had happened more than two years ago, the night he’d returned from the disaster that was the Casas deal. The night a headache that had started in Madrid had ended with him collapsed on the floor of his sister’s London apartment.

     Of course, it had never crossed anyone’s mind to announce to the world that Nathanial Harcourt, English billionaire, had suffered a cerebral aneurism. It hadn’t even required discussion. It was imperative not only for Harcourts, but also the three businesses that he owned personally, that news of such a weakness not threaten the financial bottom line.

     It had been somewhat bitterly amusing to Nate that the idea that he was taking a self-indulgent journey of discovery in Goa was favourable to a near death experience to his board members and the public. So it had been kept secret because of vultures, economics and public perception.

     All of it: the successful operation done in London that very night, the medical flight to the private Swiss hospital where he would not only receive round-the-clock medical attention, but also intense and expert rehabilitation until he could return with absolutely no evidence of any mental or physical incapacity.

Only his sister and his grandfather knew that instead of sunning himself on a beach he’d been learning how to ‘make pain his friend’.

     Bugger that.

     The initial operation had been a walk in the park compared to the long-term fallout. He might have been in the best private medical facility that money could buy, but it didn’t mean a thing. The rehab, the fatigue, the headaches, the clicks he heard whenever he moved, the hearing loss, the jaw pain, the back pain, the slowed reaction times? These were untenable to a man who had been raised to see weakness as anathema, an abomination to be rooted out, cut out like a cancer before it could impact stock share prices and public perception.

     They were daily reminders, taunts, cruel and constant, in those first twenty months, reminding him that he was not the man he’d once been. That he needed to be careful, watchful of his health, his diet, his exercise…his stress levels. For a man who’d rarely denied himself a thing, his life had become about strictures and rules: scheduled medications and vitamins, check-ups booked in the diary years in advance.

And his grandfather refusing to meet his eye.

     ‘You should consider reducing your workload. Considerably.’

     For more than two years, Nate had worked harder than he ever had before to get back to where he could resume his life seamlessly, so that he didn’thave to reduce his workload ‘considerably’. He had grown his hair out a little—attributing it to his self-indulgent adult ‘gap years’ and not down to the fact that it now hid a scar line. He had lost weight which, according to the latest headlines, was from partying too hard rather than a loss of appetite from diminished aptitude for taste and smell.

     But the impact on reactions, his decisiveness, the things that had made him a truly excellent businessman? Utterly devastating. It was as if he were constantly wading through liquid amber: holding him back, slowing him down, making it hard to think and breathe sometimes.

     He saw it in the faces of his staff, his sister, his grandfather. The confusion, the doubt, the frustration with his slowness… He just wasn’t the same as he’d been before. The doctors insisted that it wasn’t ‘a cause for concern’. That it would ‘go away with time’. And he could see it; they just didn’t understand. Didn’t get what it was like to have your whole life change with the flip of a switch. A switch that had flipped the moment he’d returned from that damn business with the Casases.

     ‘Flight time to Madrid is just over two hours from London, Mr Harcourt.’

     Nate nodded to acknowledge he’d heard the air stewardess making her way towards him. He closed his eyes, hoping to relieve the ache left by the nightmare that wasn’t a nightmare, and leaned back against the headrest.

     ‘And if there’s anything,’ she continued, ‘at all,’ she said, pressing a hand on his shoulder, his eyes opening quickly enough to see a flash of fire engine red talon against his white shirt, ‘I’d be very happy to oblige.’

If there had been any doubt about the intent of her words, it was obliterated by the lascivious look in her eyes.

     A little over two years ago Nathanial Harcourt would have smirked, caught her wrist, pulled her into his lap and given her, in vivid Technicolor, her heart’s desire, uncaring of what the captain and his co-pilot did or didn’t see.

     Back then, he’d been in his prime, the enfant terrible of the British business scene. He owned three companies personally and was the CFO of his family’s business, Harcourts—a brand and name synonymous with luxury, exclusivity and opulence. The international department store had been in his family for generations, and he was hotly tipped to be the next CEO. After all, he’d been groomed to lead it, first by his father and then, after his parents’ death, by his grandfather. But in order to prove himself to the board, he’d been on his way to Madrid to secure a deal with a Spanish fashion conglomerate, Casas Fashion. And success had been within his reach…

     Until he’d met Gabriella Casas.

     Nate looked down to find his hand fisted on his thigh and the air stewardess still waiting for him to respond to her invitation.

     ‘Thank you, darling, I’ll take a whisky,’ he said, purposely misunderstanding her, his voice full of a gravel dragged from bitterness the air stewardess was utterly oblivious to.

     She withdrew her hand from his shoulder and, masking her disappointment, disappeared towards the jet’s impressive galley.

     Nate looked out of the small round window, seeing the moon painting clouds in an unearthly glow.

     Gabriella Casas.

     Even now his body betrayed him, reacting to the memory of her in ways that he couldn’t control. Erotic tension teased him into an arousal he didn’t want. His stomach clenched as the small private jet taking him back to Madrid hit an air pocket and dropped him back into the first time he’d laid eyes on her, when he’d not known her name. When he’d arrogantly thought it wasn’t even important.

     She was, simply put, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And Nathanial Harcourt, who never made the first move, had been completely unable to stop himself. Large, startlingly hazel eyes locked on his and he felt as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. He’d spent years thinking over every single moment of that night, unpicking where he’d gone wrong, where he’d failed to spot the warning signs. Wondering if the cerebral aneurism had perhaps already started affecting him even then.

     ‘Would you like a drink?’

     ‘I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.’

     ‘I only asked you for a drink—nothing more.’

     Nate could still feel the heat of her gaze on him, seemingly as unable to look away as he’d been. He, who had seduced countless women in countless countries, had been utterly seduced by what he thought was an innocent.

     ‘I want to talk to you.’

     ‘And I want to hear everything you want to say, but first…I need…I want to do…this.’

     He hadn’t been able to stop himself. He should have asked first, but the sheer shared desire he could feel between them made the air so thick with want it was almost impossible to think. A kiss…just a touch of lips, that was all he’d intended. But he hadn’t realised, hadn’t known that he’d not be able to stop at that. And even then, he’d wondered whether he’d be able to spend the rest of his life without her in it. It was like heaven, just before it turned into hell.

     The next morning he’d opened his eyes to an empty bed and he’d been shocked. A cynical part of himself now mocked the irony mercilessly. The number of beds he’d sneaked away from hardly stacking up to the single time it was done to him. He’d sat up, looking around at his clothes strewn about the floor, each one a sensual memory and a censure at the same time.

     He’d caught sight of a small glittery clutch beneath the side table and reached for it. With no compunction whatsoever, he’d opened it, looking for some sign of who he had spent the most spectacular night of his life with. No phone, no ID, just a credit card and a room key: G Casas.

     He’d stared at it numbly for moments while his usually rapid-fire brain made sluggish connections it didn’t want to make. Anger poured through his veins and he dressed with furious, jerky movements.

     After he’d realised who he had spent the night with, he’d paid his investigators more than triple their rate to find out whatever it was that had been missed the first time, because he’d known that they must have missed something. That was when he’d discovered the depths of Renata Casas’s treachery.

     Gabriella Casas had been, he could only presume, sent by her mother to seduce him, probably because her own stomach-churning attempts to do so had failed spectacularly. He should have paid heed to the gleam in Renata Casas’s eye as he’d informed her they would be keeping things strictly professional. But he hadn’t expected her to send her own daughter to distract him from the fact that they were trying to fleece him out of millions by selling him shares in a company they didn’t own.

     But confronting Renata and Gabriella Casas that afternoon had been a mistake. That was the conclusion he’d come to after reliving the events of that twenty-four-hour period over and over again through the merciless sessions of physio and rehab.

     ‘Get her out of here. I never want to look at her ever again. She’s no better than a whore.’

Gabriella’s mother’s words stung like a vicious slap. And he’d hardened himself against the image of Gabriella standing there shaking, her eyes full of pleas, regrets, apologies.

     Lies, it was all lies.

     Renata had illegally tried to sell him shares she didn’t own in a business that wasn’t hers. Her son’s business.

     ‘Lady, you’re crazy. My lawyers are going to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb and when they’re done…’

     He’d left them with that threat and returned straight to his sister’s apartment in London. And then a small blood vessel had ruptured everything he’d ever known.

     Nate knew that it was irrational to link the two together—emotional rather than evidentiary. But he kept telling himself that once he was done with Casas Textiles, his whole life would get back to normal. Just like it was before.

     Which was why, two years later, he was flying to Spain to be a key witness in a fraud and embezzlement trial against Renata Casas. Nathanial Harcourt never made a promise he didn’t keep and now he was here to make good on it.

     Renata Casas and her daughter would rue the day they’d tried to make a fool out of Nate Harcourt.

     ‘Are you okay in there?’ Gabi’s brother worriedly called through the toilet door. Javier Casas was worried about the idea of her giving evidence at her mother’s trial, but that wasn’t why she was hiding in the bathroom.

     ‘Yes, just a minute,’ she replied.

     She stared at herself in the mirror. The long dark tresses that she had once taken so much pride in were now pulled back in a chaotic bun—not artfully designed by a stylist, but thrown back with little time or care. Clothes that had once been so much of her focus—fabric, colour, style, cut, design—were now chosen by cleanliness level and, even then, the top she wore betrayed a spatter of tomato sauce from lunch. Cheeks that had once been flushed pink with youth and excitement were now thinner, cheekbones pronounced from lack of opportunity rather than diet or contour. She looked pale, putting it kindly, she thought as she skirted over the thumbprints of darkness smudged beneath her eyes.

     She’d spent too long staring at the newspaper she’d sneaked in here with her. The words had long ago become blurred and the only thing she could see clearly was the eyes of the still handsome man she had spent once spectacular night with, a little over two years ago. The picture was black and white, but she would have sworn she could see the espresso-rich depths of his gaze, staring straight at the camera—staring straight at her.

     Nathanial Harcourt.

     He’d grown his wheat blond hair out. That night, it had been short, efficient. She remembered the feel of his scalp beneath her nails, the way he’d unfurled beneath her as she’d done that while they’d kissed. Her breath caught as she remembered the feel of his tongue, his touch, his need for her. The way his skin had pebbled as she chased the goosebumps with her kisses, fascinated by his reaction to her all the while he was trying to distract her with her own responses. She blinked back tears, remembering how they’d laughed, how he’d let her get things wrong. He’d let her explore him, learn the feel of things, of them together, the way her heart pounded, passion sighed, her legs trembled, her hands fisted, the way she had gasped, the way he had growled. The way that—

     No!

     She swiped at a tear with one hand as the other curled the paper beneath her fingers, clenched and furious.

     No. She’d tried to reach him every day for nearly two years.

     Every. Day.

     Emails. Phone calls. If she’d had a fax number, she would have tried that too. At one point she’d been half convinced that there was a conspiracy, that people were actively trying to keep her away from him. She’d tried everything she could think of, bar getting on a flight, and the only reason she hadn’t done that was that she simply hadn’t been physically able to. She’d reached out to contacts in the fashion industry, anything to get a message to the CFO of Harcourts department store. She’d even gone to the Spanish flagship store in Madrid and they’d eventually called security. And the shame! The shame at abasing herself like that had laid fresh hurt over old scars in her battered self-confidence. And all that time he’d been sunning himself on a beach in South Asia.

     But now he was here. In Madrid. Having been called as a witness in the trial of the century, if the gossip rags were to be believed.

     No one had thought that Nathanial Harcourt would actually do it, least of all her mother. But apparently the last thing he had done before disappearing on his extended ‘sabbatical’ was file charges against Renata for what she had done.

     Gabi hadn’t been surprised though. She’d realised what would happen the night she’d met him—the fateful night that had changed the entire course of her life. And no, she could never bring herself to regret it, not for a second. But so much had happened because of it.

     That night, her mother had sent Gabi to Nate with every intention of having her daughter seduce the rich English businessman in order to distract him from her illegal wrongdoings. Instead, for Gabi it had been the final straw. She had gone there to tell Nathanial Harcourt that her mother didn’t have the ability or permission to sell shares in her son’s company and that he should leave without looking back.

     She’d wanted to tell him, but she’d been so stunned by him, by his apparent interest in her, she’d been struck silent. She tried, several times, but it was as if she couldn’t say it and he wouldn’t hear it. His flirtation had undone her, and her innocent responses had strangely delighted him, and for just one night she’d thought she’d found someone who had seen her, understood what was at the core of her. Otherwise, she never would have done what she did.

     But when he’d tracked her down at her mother’s house the next day, after she’d fled the hotel, the betrayal she’d seen in his eyes before the mask came down was the first of many blows her heart would receive that day.

     ‘You send her after me like some Mata Hari and now you want to get rid of her?’

     ‘Why would I want her? She’s no better than a whore.’

     The vicious shock of her mother’s accusation had struck another blow. And when Nate had refused to even look at her, defend her, argue that what they’d shared had been more, it had scattered those broken pieces to the four winds.

     ‘Sweetheart, are you okay?’ Emily whispered, gently knocking against the bathroom door. Her sister-in-law’s concern finally nudged at her conscience. Gabi shook off her thoughts, gave herself a stern pull yourself togetherglare in the mirror and opened the door into a familiar, loving, chaotic mess.

     ‘Mamá! Mamá! Mamá!’

     The sound of little feet running down the long hallway towards her lifted her heart at the same time as bringing a damp heat to her eyes. Her babies, Ana and Antonio, with matching grins, pink cheeks and dark mahogany gazes, raced towards her on feet only just becoming steady.

She crouched down to meet them and took them both in her arms, and after letting the moment soothe the ache in her heart, she reached to tickle them both until they all descended into giggles. She bent her head to their crowns and inhaled the sweet smell of her children and then gently pulled back.

     ‘What mischief are you two up to then?’ she demanded.

     ‘They understand that? In English?’ Javier asked in Spanish, leaning against the doorframe, wiping his hands from washing up after lunch.

     ‘They know that while we’re here we speak English,’ Gabi replied in English.

     Emily slipped beneath her husband’s arm, carrying her own daughter Lily, a pretty curly-haired one-year-old, and for a second Gabi’s heart ached. She breathed past the hurt of the sight of her brother with his arm around his wife and child. It was the family unit that she’d always wanted but had never had, not only for herself but for her children.

     ‘I’m fluent now in Spanish if it’s easier?’ Emily offered.

     Gabi smiled and stuck to the lie that she wanted Ana and Antonio to be bilingual for their sake. Javi, her brother, had never pushed Gabi to tell him the name of the twins’ father. She was sure that he had figured it out, but he’d never said anything. Their relationship, so much better since she had left her mother’s, had involved a lot of support and a lot of work, and so much of it was built on trust. Trust that when she needed to she’d tell him. Trust that he would be there when she did.

     Her brother had given Gabi absolutely everything—he’d needed to, because when she’d left Renata’s house she’d left with nothing but what she’d been wearing. She’d not gone back since the night of the argument between Nate and Renata. There was not a single thing in that house she’d wanted. And while Javi wouldn’t have it any other way, there was a huge part of Gabi that wished she could find some way of being independent.

     ‘Cara, you have twins. They should be your focus, not worrying about money or housing. Especially not when I can give those things to you.’

     She knew that what her brother had said made sense. She would neverdeprive her children of any kind of shelter or support just because of her own stubborn desire to provide for her family herself. But still…it cut her deep.

     It hadn’t been easy—discovering she was pregnant just when she had lost everything she had known. Realising that the father of her children wanted absolutely nothing to do with her. Becoming a mother at the age of twenty-three and losing what few friends she did have to partying and clubbing and travels around the world. Watching the hopes and dreams she’d had for her fashion designs slip through her fingers had closed something off within her.

     But no matter what imaginary future she’d once dreamed of, the moment that she’d held both her babies in her arms, she knew—knew—that she’d never have had it any other way. She would protect these two innocent children with every single fibre of her being. She would love them so much that it would make up for any lack of father figure. These two children would not have the same upbringing that she had. No matter what she had to do to make that happen.

     ‘Is it the court case?’ Javi asked, the concern etched across his features in frown lines. ‘You don’t have to be a witness for the prosecution, you know. They’ve got enough evidence and even if they didn’t—’

     ‘It’s fine,’ Gabi dismissed, easing herself up from the floor and watching her twins run off into the sitting room of Javi’s apartment in Madrid. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ she said with a simple shrug. And it really was. She wouldn’t shy away from the horrible truths about her mother. ‘I’m just sorry it meant uprooting everyone from Frigiliana to come here.’

     Emily shushed her with a wave. ‘I’ve been wanting to come back into town for ages.’

Gabi smiled at Emily’s use of ‘town’ for Spain’s capital city. Her Spanish was almost perfect now, but the Britishisms she used still identified her as a foreigner. Emily, who had been estranged from her brother for five years at one point, was now almost as close as a sister. But there were still some things that Gabi needed to keep to herself. And one of those things was Nathanial Harcourt.

     The same Nathanial Harcourt who was due to give evidence. The prosecutor had assured her that they wouldn’t meet as they were scheduled at different times for the day. He’d explained that the delays court cases often experienced meant that it was highly likely she’d be pushed back to the next day anyway.

But Gabi wasn’t so sure. She couldn’t shake the feeling that, having put him firmly from her mind and life when the twins turned one, a reckoning was upon her, one way or another.