and see if it’s changed much since we were here last.’
He loved Marbella. They’d used to spend most of their summers here once upon a time, so she’d understood his eagerness to reacquaint himself with the resort—but not his refusal to let her go with him.
‘Don’t be a pain, Caroline,’ he’d censured when she’d instantly started to get anxious. ‘I don’t need you to hold my hand. And I certainly don’t need a watchdog. Show a little faith, for goodness’ sake. Haven’t I promised to behave myself?’
So she’d showed a little faith—and now look at her, she mocked herself bitterly. For here she was, pacing the floor like a worried mother hen with every nerve-end she possessed singing out a warning of trouble!
He wouldn’t let her down—would he? She tried to reassure herself. He had been so firm, so needy for her to believe in him that he wouldn’t, surely, fall prey to his old weakness when he knew how important it was to them for him to remain strong?
Then where is he? A very cynical voice inside her head taunted. He’s been gone for hours. And you know what he can get up to when left to his own devices for too long.
‘Oh, hell,’ she muttered as the agitation suddenly reached whole new levels, and, in tight and angry surrender to it, she snatched up her little black velvet evening bag and headed for the suite’s outer door.
If she discovered that he had sneaked off to feed his damned habit then she would never forgive him! She vowed as she stabbed a hard finger at the lift call button then stood waiting impatiently for it to come. Things were bad enough already.
More than bad enough, she groaned inwardly. Or she wouldn’t even be here, her father knew that! He knew how much she hated this place now, hated the whole morass of painful emotions it evoked.
Seven years since their last visit, she recalled as the lift doors slid open. Seven years since they had been forced to leave beneath a dark cloud of pride-shrivelling humiliation and soul-destroying heartbreak, vowing never to return again.
Yet here they were, not only back in Marbella but staying in the same hotel. And once again she was having to go and hunt her father out in the very last place on this earth she ever wanted to step foot in!
The casino, she named it grimly as she walked into the lift. The wretched in-house casino, where she was all too aware of the damage her father could do in such a terrifyingly short space of time.
And how long had he been missing? she asked herself as she pressed for the ground floor.
Two hours at least.
Her fingers stood out white against her black evening bag while she waited for the lift doors to shut. In two miserable hours he could lose thousands. Give him a whole night and he would, quite happily, lose his shirt!
Like the last time.
A wave of sickness suddenly washed over her, sending her slumping weakly against the lift wall just as the doors began to close. A hand snaked out, compelling the doors to open again, and she found herself quickly straightening as a tall dark man of Spanish descent, dressed in an impeccably tailored black dinner suit and bow tie, stepped lithely into the cabin with her.
‘My apologies for delaying you,’ he murmured in smoothly modulated English, swinging round to offer her a smile. A smile that instantly arrested when his eyes actually focused on her.
‘That’s okay,’ she replied, and quickly dropped her gaze so as not to encourage any further contact.
The lift began to sink. Standing tensely by the console, Caroline was stingingly aware that he was still studying her, but pretended not to notice. It wasn’t a new experience for her to be looked at like this. She had the kind of natural blonde, curvaceously slender, long-legged figure that incited men to stare. And the stranger was good-looking; she had noticed that about him before she’d lowered her gaze.
But she was in no mood to be chatted up in a lift—if she was ever in the mood anywhere, she then added, bleakly aware that it had been a long time since she had let any man get close to her.
Not since Luiz, in fact, right here in Marbella.
Then. No. Abruptly she severed that memory before it had a chance to get a grip. She wasn’t going to think of Luiz. It was a promise she had made to herself before she came here. Luiz belonged in the distant past, along with every other bitter memory Marbella had the power to throw up at her. And this tall dark stranger looked too much like Luiz to stand the remotest chance with her.
So she was relieved when the lift stopped and she could escape his intense regard without him attempting to make conversation. Within seconds she had completely forgotten him, her mind back on the problem of finding her father as she paused at the head of a shallow set of steps which led down to the main foyer and began searching the busy area in front of her.
This was one of the more impressive hotels that stood in prime position on Marbella’s Puerto Banus. Years ago, the hotel had possessed a well-earned reputation for old-fashioned grandeur which had made it appeal to a certain kind of guest—a select kind that had once included both herself and her father.
But the hotel had only just been re-opened, after a huge refurbishment undertaken by its new owners, and although it still held pride of place as one of the most exclusive hotels in the resort, it now displayed its five-star deluxe ranking with more subtle elegance.
And the people were different, less rigidly correct and aware of their own status, though she didn’t doubt for a moment that if they were staying here then they must be able to afford the frankly extortionate rates.
It was a thought that brought home to her just how much she had changed in seven years. For seven years ago she too would not have so much as questioned the price of a two-bedroom suite in any hotel. She had been reared to expect the best, and if the best came with a big price-tag attached to it then that was life as she had known it.
These days she didn’t just question price-tags, she calculated how long she would have to work to make that kind of money.
In fact money was now an obsession with Caroline. Or at least the lack of it was, along with a constant need to keep on feeding that greedy monster her family home had become.
A frown touched her brow as she continued to search for the familiar sight of her father’s very distinctive tall and slender figure among the clutches of people gathered in the foyer. For two hundred years there had been Newburys in residence at Highbrook Manor. But the chances of there being Newburys there for very much longer depended almost entirely on what her father was doing at this precise moment.
And he certainly wasn’t in evidence here, she acknowledged as, with a grace that belied her inner tension, she set herself moving down the steps and across the foyer to see if he had left a message for her at the reception desk.
He hadn’t. Next she went off to check out the lounge bars in the faint hope that he might have met someone he’d used to know, got to talking and lost track of the time. Again she drew a blank, and her heart began to take on a slower, thicker beat because she knew that there was now only one place left for her to look for him.
Grimly she set her feet moving over to a flight of steps set in their own discreet alcove that led the way down to the hotel basement. Walking down those steps took a kind of courage no one would understand unless they had known her seven years ago. By the time
