to reorient and when she did his words came rushing back at her in a poisonous flood that threatened to make her black out again. She squirmed away from him, eyes wide with horror and incomprehension.
‘What are you talking about? Don’t come near me! Who are you?’
‘I’m going to get you a glass of brandy. It’ll calm you down.’
‘I don’t want any brandy. I just want you to tell me what’s going on!’
‘I’m not a travelling salesman, selling computers and saving up to buy a house. My name isn’t Gomez, my name is Casella—Luiz Casella—and I’m worth more than most people can only dream about. Clarissa wanted the lifestyle I could give her. She faked a pregnancy to rope me into marriage, the plan being that she would suffer a “miscarriage” shortly after the wedding. I finally and completely opened my eyes to the level to which people will sink in an effort to secure financial security. I understood once and for all the concept of gold-diggers.
‘I made up my mind on the spot that, if the consequence of taking a chance on a relationship might result in another Clarissa moment, then no relationship with its promises of happy-ever-after would be worth it. And if I ever were to go for the long-term choice, then I would do so with a woman of independent means, someone to whom my money would be an irrelevance. It would be a marriage of mutual convenience. I have neither the time nor the inclination for emotional risk-taking.’
Holly heard what he was saying but was suffering from information overload. Her mind had stuck on the very first revelation that he wasn’t who he said he was.
‘But why? You lied. I don’t get it.’
Luiz could feel her withdrawal from him. He could detect that light in her eyes that spoke of suspicion and mistrust. She hadn’t yet reached the point of anger and bitterness, but those two emotions would come and he had to remind himself that life was a cruel place and being toughened up by unpleasant, unexpected situations was always, in retrospect, character building.
Right now, though… He flushed darkly and flung his arms out in an exotically foreign gesture.
‘Why would you lie to me? How could you do that? I helped you and you… you lied to me about who you were and I just don’t understand that! I don’t get it.’
‘Then you haven’t been listening.’
‘And you can stop treating me like an idiot, Luiz! Or are you lying about that as well? Is Luiz really your first name or will you come clean about that in a little while? Will you tell me that you’re actually called Richard, or—or Tom, or Fred? And that you’re not really from Brazil at all? You’re from East London and your father worked on a market stall!’
‘You’re upset. I understand.’
‘How can you tell me that you’ve spent the last year and a half lying to me and be so… so calm?’ She knew why. It was because she had fallen head over heels in love with a man whose core was a block of ice.
‘Would you like to listen to what I have to say or would you rather I leave?’
Faced with that stark choice, Holly bit back the onset of tears gathering pace and remained silent. She was numb all over. ‘I want to know why. I deserve to know.’
‘When I crashed my car…’
‘The car you couldn’t even be bothered to recover. You didn’t even go through the insurance company to see what money you could get back… I should have twigged that normal people don’t write off cars just like that. It wasn’t some old banger, was it?’
‘No. No matter. It was still disposable.’
Like a computer, suddenly rebooted and finally working to full capacity, Holly was adding up all the things that should have tallied and opened her eyes to a man who wasn’t just an ordinary Joe Bloggs. His casual way with money; the ease with which he accepted subservience as his due; his in-built self-assurance; his assumptions that he was always right…
‘When I crashed and you rescued me, I wasn’t in a particularly good place. I had just closed a deal in Durham and was on my way back to London. I came here and in a split second I made the decision that it would be an idea to take time out from being a Casella. Chances are you wouldn’t have heard of me anyway, but there was a chance that you might. The Durham deal was all over the newspapers. I never foresaw that we would still be in a relationship a year and a half later.’
‘But why wouldn’t you have wanted me to know your real name? Why would you think that it would have made a difference knowing who you were and… and…?’
‘Experience has taught me that people are rarely open and spontaneous when they know the extent of my wealth. They pander, they fawn, they even fake pregnancy… It’s just the way it is.’
Holly’s sluggish brain was reaching its inexorable conclusions and she was dismayed, hurt and horrified. The man she loved was rich. She didn’t know how rich, but if he could dismissively shrug off the loss of an expensive car without a backward glance, then very. Clarissa had hunted him down and tried to trap him because of his money. No doubt he was right when he told her that people adapted to please him.
But how could he ever have thought that she would be one of those people? Because he was suspicious. Whilst she had thrown herself into an open and honest relationship, there had been a part of him always holding back, always keeping her at arm’s length.
‘Did you think that I would be after your money if I had known that you were rich?’
‘I knew that the thought of not having to wonder whether you were was a very liberating experience.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘I’m not a man who takes chances,’ was the extent of his explanation, but it was enough for Holly to sag like a broken doll.
Luiz savagely told himself that this was just one very good reason why it paid to steer clear of emotional involvements. He had told her the truth. He didn’t now want hours of tearful post mortems, but neither could he make himself stand up and head for the door, and that paralysis enraged him.
‘So all this time…’ She looked at him wonderingly, still feeling as though she was in a nightmare, one from which she might awaken any time even though the still-thinking part of her had already accepted that this was no bad dream. ‘You’ve been using me like a plaything. A bit of light relief on the weekends. You come here, there are no demands made on you, you help out at the sanctuary and then you leave and return to your real life. Are there other women out there? In your real life?’
‘This is ridiculous.’ Luiz stood up and looked down at her vulnerable fair head. He cursed himself for having landed up in this situation but refused to ask himself if he would have walked away from it, had he had a crystal ball that first time he had met her. He shoved his hands in his pockets as the silence thickened around them, heavy with accusation.
‘Don’t bother to answer that,’ Holly muttered thickly. ‘I don’t think I want to know the answer.’
Luiz hesitated as pride warred with some other emotion he couldn’t quite identify but which he summed up as normal human decency. ‘Of course there were no other women,’ he imparted in a driven undertone.
