His voice was like gravel, and the warning in it was blatant. She ignored it. A small frown creased her forehead beneath her sleek platinum hair, but other than that her expression was completely calm as she said, ‘Of course you do. Everyone does.’
He gave an icy smile. ‘Maybe in your world, but my family background was wiped out when I was five years old, when I came to England.’
Her frown deepened. ‘Why did you come?’
The pressurised, climate-controlled air seemed suddenly to be charged with tension. Tapping one finger against the polished table top, Alejandro looked out at the blue infinity beyond the window of the plane. He wanted to tell her to back off, that she had strayed into territory that he kept locked, barred and guarded with razor wire, but somehow to do so felt like a denial of who he was and where he’d come from; a betrayal of his father.
And hadn’t his mother betrayed Ignacio D’Arienzo enough for both of them?
He kept his tone neutral and his explanation brief. ‘Argentina was a troubled country at the time that I was born. There was a military dictatorship. My father and uncles were taken for their involvement with a trade union, and my mother was afraid that we might be next. She was half English, on her father’s side, and she booked us on a flight to London the next day. We took nothing with us.’
‘What happened to your father?’
The pure, clear sunlight filtering in through the moisture-beaded window of the plane lit up Tamsin’s face, turning her skin to translucent gold. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and propping her chin upon them. Her eyes were the cool, shady green of an English woodland in summertime, and they seemed to draw him into their quiet depths.
‘Who knows? He’s one of thousands of los desaparecidos: the disappeared. Neither living nor dead.’
‘That’s an awful thing to have had to live with,’ Tamsin said softly. ‘Not knowing …’
He shrugged. ‘It allowed me to believe that he was alive.’ His smile was brutal. ‘Unfortunately my mother didn’t share that view. She remarried quite quickly—the man she worked for as a housekeeper in Oxfordshire.’
‘Oh,’ Tamsin said, and it was more of a whispered sigh than a word. She hesitated, biting her lip. ‘But it can’t have been easy for her.’
Alejandro rubbed a hand across his forehead. Of course, he should have realised that Tamsin Calthorpe would see it from his mother’s side. They were two of a kind. Loyalty and faithfulness weren’t on the program. It was all about expedience.
‘Oh, I think it was,’ he said with brittle, flinty nonchalance. ‘I think it was very easy, in the end, to completely reinvent herself and behave as though the past had never happened. The only thing that was difficult was living with the reminder of where she’d come from. Which was where my long incarceration in the British public-school system began.’
While he was speaking she’d been playing absently with the stem of her wine glass, but suddenly she wasn’t doing that any more, and her hand was covering his. Her touch seemed to burn him, to sear flesh that already felt exposed and flayed raw.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a quiet voice.
He’d waited six years for that, and the irony of the circumstances in which he was finally hearing it took his breath away. What was she sorry about—his mother’s betrayal, or her own?
He moved his hand from beneath hers.
‘I doubt it,’ he said getting up and giving her a twisted smile. ‘Yet.’
Well, actually, he was wrong. She was sorry. Very sorry.
Sorry she’d agreed to come with him, sorry she’d ever set eyes on him, sorry she’d made the mistake of responding to him like he was a decent, well-adjusted human being. It wouldn’t happen again any time soon.
She was only trying to break down the awkwardness that seemed to exist perpetually between them. She was trying to be nice. She couldn’t help it if he was bitter, emotionally arrested and had major trust issues.
Tamsin sighed and looked out of the window into nothingness. Major and perfectly understandable trust issues, she thought miserably. His revelations had touched her deeply, and she’d seen his pain behind the hard, cynical façade. She understood why he had so fiercely maintained his Argentine identity during his time in England, even though it had infuriated the management of the England team and had ultimately cost him his place on it. But it was all he had left of his father, and of his old life. He had been trying to stop himself disappearing too.
Beyond the window the light was fading, and the sky was the same leaden grey as the Atlantic Ocean far beneath them. With infinite weariness, Tamsin looked down at the magazine on her knee and read the same paragraph for the hundredth time. ‘Next season’s key trend will be camouflage’, it said.
How appropriate, she thought, stifling a yawn with her hand.
‘You’re tired.’
She jumped as Alejandro’s voice broke the thick silence that had lain between them for ages now. ‘Get some sleep,’ he said coolly. ‘You know where the bedroom is.’
He had shown her when they had first boarded the jet, and she’d been utterly taken aback by such insane luxury. She’d like nothing more than to curl up now on the large bed—which was ridiculously out of proportion with the scaled-down proportions of the plane—and go to sleep, but Alejandro’s faintly scornful tone made it impossible to admit that.
Straightening her spine, she blinked rapidly. ‘I’m fine. It’s your bed, you have it.’
‘I have reading to catch up on. Business.’
His cold superiority made invisible hackles rise on the back of her neck. ‘Yep. Me too,’ she said briskly, picking up her laptop and flipping it open. ‘Lots to be getting on with.’ The sideways glance she shot him was filled with loathing, but her voice was deliberately sweet. ‘After all, the sooner I make a start on this, the sooner I can go home again, and I think we’d agree that would be best all round.’
At least there was one thing they could agree on, Alejandro thought sourly, leaning forward to lower the blind on the window and block out the reflection of her face in the glass. As the darkness had deepened outside her reflection had gradually come to life, like a Polaroid photograph developing, and he had found his eyes were constantly drawn to it, noticing the way she chewed her bottom lip when she was reading, and how her fingers stroked the hair behind her ears.
All of which was completely irrelevant to the company he was currently thinking of buying, he thought scathingly, returning his attention to the share report.
Business was a game like any other, Alejandro had discovered. You had to observe the tactics of your opponents, recognise their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. You had to know when to hold back, and when to surge forward and press your advantage home. And you had to be able to do it without emotion.
He was good at all that.
Unconsciously now he found himself turning towards Tamsin, and felt an instant dropping sensation in his chest. She was sitting perfectly straight, her legs tucked up to one side of her
