towards the house when you came racing out of the drive and crashed into my Maserati.’ The delicate bones of her face were taut with tension and his curiosity spiked a little more.
‘You had an appointment with my father?’
‘Not as such,’ Matias told her smoothly. ‘Art was going to...let’s just say...lay the groundwork for future trade...’ In other words, he had sent Art to do the preliminary work of letting Carney know that his time was drawing to a close. He, Matias, would step in only when the net was ready to be tightened.
‘Poor Art,’ Sophie sighed, and Matias looked at her with a frown.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I don’t think he would have got very far with James even if he’d managed to gain entry to the house.’
‘James? You call your father James?’
‘He prefers that to being called Dad.’ Sophie blushed. ‘I think he thinks that the word dad is a little ageing. Also...’
‘Also,’ Matias intuited, ‘you were an illegitimate child, weren’t you? I expect he was not in the sort of zone where he would have been comfortable playing happy families with you and your mother. Not with a legitimate wife on the scene.’
Sophie went redder. What to say and how much? He was being perfectly polite. He wasn’t to know the sort of man her father was and, more importantly, the reasons that had driven her mother to maintain contact with him, a legacy she had passed on to her daughter. Nor was she going to fill him in on her private business.
But the lengthening silence stretched her nerves to breaking point, and eventually she offered, reluctantly, ‘No. My mother was a youthful indiscretion and he didn’t like to be reminded of it.’
‘He got your mother pregnant and he refused to marry her...’ Matias encouraged.
Sophie stiffened because she could see the man in front of her was busy building a picture in his head, a picture that was spot on, but should she allow him to complete that picture?
The conversation she had had with her father just before she had blindly ended up crashing into Matias’s car had been a disturbing one. He was broke, he had told her.
‘And don’t stand there with your hand stretched out staring gormlessly at me!’ he had roared, pacing the magnificent but dated living room that was dark and claustrophobic and never failed to make Sophie shudder. ‘You can take some of the blame for that! Showing up here month in month out with bills to settle! Now, there’s nothing left. Do you understand me? Nothing!’
Cringing back against the stone mantelpiece, truly fearful that he would physically lash out at her, Sophie had said nothing. Instead, she had listened to him rant and rave and threaten and had finally left the house with far less than she had needed.
What if he was telling the truth? What if he was going broke? Where would that leave her...? And more importantly, where would that leave Eric?
As always, thinking of her brother made her heart constrict. For all her faults and her foolish misjudgements, her mother had been fiercely protective of her damaged son and had determined from early on that she wasn’t going to be fobbed off by a man who had been happy enough to sleep with her for four years before abandoning her as soon as the right woman had finally appeared on the scene. She had used the only tool in her armoury to get the money she had needed for Eric to be looked after in the very expensive home where his needs were catered for.
Blackmail.
How would those fancy people James mixed with like him if they knew that he refused to support his disabled son and the family he had carelessly conceived, thinking that they would all do him a favour and vanish when it suited him?
James had paid up and he had continued paying up because he valued the opinion of other people more than anything else in the world, not because he felt any affection for either the son he had never seen or the daughter he loathed because she was just an extension of the woman who, as far as he was concerned, had helped send him to the poorhouse.
If there was no money left, Eric would be the one to pay the ultimate price and Sophie refused to let that happen.
If Matias was interested in doing a deal with her father, a deal that might actually get him solvent once again, then how could it be in her interests to scupper that by letting him know just how awful James was? If her father had money then Eric would be safe.
‘That’s life.’ She shrugged, masking her expression. ‘There aren’t many men who would have found it easy to introduce an outside family to their current one.’ She took a deep breath and said, playing with the truth like modelling clay, ‘But he’s always been there for my mother... And now...er...for me...financially...’
Matias wondered whether they were talking about the same person. ‘So you would recommend him as someone I should have dealings with?’
Fingers crossed behind her back, Sophie thought of her brother, lost in his world in the home where she visited him at least once a week, her brother who would certainly find life very, very different without all that care provided, care that only money could buy. ‘Yes. Of course. Of course, I would.’ She forced a smile. ‘I’m sure he would love to have you contact him...’
MATIAS LOWERED HIS stunning dark eyes. So she either had no idea what kind of man her father was or she knew perfectly well enough and was tainted with the very same streak of greed, hence her enthusiasm for him to plough money into the man.
He wondered whether, over time and with her father’s finances going down the drain faster than water running down a plughole, she had found herself an accidental victim of his limited resources. She had just declared that her father had supported her and her mother and Matias had struggled to contain a roar of derisive laughter at that. But she could have been telling the truth. Perhaps the dilapidated car and the debt owed to the bank were the result of diminishing handouts. She might have been an illegitimate child but it was possible that Carney had privately doted on her, bearing in mind that his own marriage had failed to yield any issue. Advertising a child outside marriage might have been no big deal for many men, but a man like Carney would have been too conscious of his social standing to have been comfortable acknowledging her publicly.
For a moment and just a moment, he wondered whether he could notch up some extra retribution and publicly shame the man by exposing a hidden illegitimate child, but he almost immediately dismissed it because it was...somehow unsavoury. Especially, he thought, shielding the expression in his dark eyes, when the woman sitting in front of him emanated innocence in waves. There was such a thing as a plan backfiring and, were a picture of her to be printed in any halfway decent rag, a sympathetic public would surely take one look at that disingenuous, sensationally sincere face and cast him in the role of the bad guy. Besides, Carney’s close friends doubtless knew of the woman’s existence already.
‘I will certainly think about contacting your father,’ Matias intoned smoothly, watching her like a hawk. He became more and more convinced that she was playing him for a sap because she was suddenly finding it seemingly impossible to meet his eyes. ‘Now, you’ve looked at the menu. Tell me whether you think you’re up to handling it.’
Sophie breathed a sigh of relief
