‘Wealthy people are often targets,’ Luiz gritted, spelling it out in clear syllables just in case she chose to miss the message. ‘My niece is extremely wealthy and will be even wealthier when she turns twenty-one. Now it appears that the dalliance I thought would peter out after a couple of months has turned into a marriage proposal.’
‘I still can’t believe that. You’ve got your facts wrong.’
‘Believe it! And what I’m seeing are a couple of fortune hunters who have lied about their circumstances to try and throw me off course.’
Aggie blanched and stared at him miserably. Those small white fibs had assumed the proportions of mountains. Her brain felt sluggish but already she could see why he would have arrived at the conclusion that he had.
Honest people didn’t lie.
‘Tell me…is your brother really a musician? Because I’ve looked him up online and, strangely enough, I can’t find him anywhere.’
‘Of course he’s a musician! He…he plays in a band.’
‘And I’m guessing this band hasn’t made it big yet…hence his lack of presence on the Internet.’
‘Okay! I give up! So we may have…have…’
‘Tampered with the truth? Stretched it? Twisted it to the point where it became unrecognisable?’
‘Maria said that you’re very black-and-white.’ Aggie stuck her chin up and met his frowning stare. Now, as had happened before, she marvelled that such sinful physical beauty, the sort of beauty that made people think of putting paint to canvas, could conceal such a cold, ruthless, brutally dispassionate streak.
‘Me? Black-and-white?’ Luiz was outraged at this preposterous assumption. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my entire life!’
‘She said that you form your opinions and you stick to them. You never look outside the box and allow yourself to be persuaded into another direction.’
‘That’s called strength of character!’
‘Well, that’s why we weren’t inclined to be one hundred percent truthful. Not that we lied…
‘We just didn’t reveal as much as we could have.’
‘Such as you live in a rented dump, your brother sings in pubs now and again and you are a teacher—or was that another one of those creative exaggerations?’
‘Of course I’m a teacher. I teach primary school. You can check up on me if you like!’
‘Well that’s now by the by. The fact is, I cannot allow any marriage to take place between my niece and your brother.’
‘So you’re going to do what, exactly?’ Aggie was genuinely bewildered. It was one thing to disapprove of someone else’s choices. It was quite another to force them into accepting what you chose to cram down their throat. Luiz, Maria’s mother, every single member of their super-wealthy family, for that matter, could rant, storm, wring their hands and deliver threatening lectures—but at the end of the day Maria was her own person and would make up her own mind.
She tactfully decided not to impart that point of view. He claimed that he wasn’t black-and-white but she had seen enough evidence of that to convince her that he was. He also had no knowledge whatsoever of how the other half lived. In fact, she doubted that he had ever even come into contact with people who weren’t exactly like him, until she and Mark had come along.
‘Look.’ She relented slightly as another point of view pushed its way through her self-righteous anger. ‘I can understand that you might harbour one or two reservations about my brother…’
‘Can you?’ Luiz asked with biting sarcasm.
Right now he was kicking himself for not having taken a harder look at the pair of them. He was usually as sharp as they came when other people and their motivations were involved. He had had to be. So how had they managed to slip through the net?
Her brother was disingenuous, engaging, apparently open. He looked like the kind of guy who could hold his own with anyone—tall, muscular, with the same shade of blonde hair as his sister but tied back in a ponytail; when he spoke, his voice was low and gentle.
And Agatha—so stunningly pretty that anyone could be forgiven for staring. But, alongside that, she had also been forthright and opinionated. Was that what had taken him in—the combination of two very different personalities? Had they cunningly worked off each other to throw him off-guard? Or had he just failed to take the situation seriously because he hadn’t thought the boy’s relationship with his niece would ever come to anything? Luisa was famously protective of Maria. Had he just assumed that her request for him to keep an eye out had been more of the same?
At any rate, they had now been caught out in a tangle of lies and that, to his mind, could mean only one thing.
The fact that he’d been a fool for whatever reason was something he would have to live with, but it stuck in his throat.
‘And I know how it must look…that we weren’t completely open with you. But you have to believe me when I tell you that you have nothing to fear.’
‘Point one—fear is an emotion that’s alien to me. Point two—I don’t have to believe anything you say, which brings me to your question.’
‘My question?’
‘You wondered what I intended to do about this mess.’
Aggie felt her hackles rise, as they invariably did on the occasions when she had met him, and she made a valiant effort to keep them in check.
‘So you intend to warn my brother off,’ she said on a sigh.
‘Oh, I intend to do much better than that,’ Luiz drawled, watching the faint colour in her cheeks and thinking that she was a damn good actress. ‘You look as though you could use some money, and I suspect your brother could as well. You have a landlord baying down your neck for unpaid rent.’
‘I paid!’ Aggie insisted vigorously. ‘It’s not my fault that there’s a postal strike!’
‘And whatever you earn as a teacher,’ Luiz continued, not bothering to give her protest house room, ‘It obviously isn’t enough to scrape by. Face it, if you can’t afford the rent for a dump like this, then it’s pretty obvious that neither of you has a penny to rub together. So my offer to get your brother off the scene and out of my niece’s life should put a big smile on your face. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it should make your Christmas.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Those big blue eyes, Luiz thought sourly. They had done a damn good job of throwing him off the scent.
‘I’m going to give you and your brother enough money to clear out of this place. You’ll each be able to afford to buy somewhere of your own, live the high life, if that’s what takes your fancy. And I suspect it probably is…’
‘You’re going to pay us off? To make us disappear?’
‘Name
