time we sorted out an allowance for you.’
‘I don’t need one.’ If she needed money there was a petty-cash drawer in Javier’s home office filled with an ever-replenishing stack of euro notes that she helped herself to at his insistence, always leaving a note of how much she’d taken and what it was for. ‘It’s not as if I have any bills to pay.’
‘Everyone needs money to call their own. You shouldn’t have to feel that you need my permission to spend money.’
‘I don’t feel that,’ she protested.
His gaze was critical. ‘Carina, you’re my wife and carrying my child. Your clothes are tight on you.’
He’d noticed?
‘You will have an allowance,’ he said in the tone she’d learned not to bother arguing with. ‘While I’m away, I want you to go shopping and spoil yourself. If you have the time, arrange the nursery. Julio will have the names of decorators who can paint it out in whatever colour and style you want.’
‘I can do it however I want?’ she clarified.
His gaze was serious. ‘This is your home. You need to start treating it as such.’
Everything inside her swelled so big and so quickly it felt as if she could burst.
She had never dreamed Javier would say those words to her.
‘Which room shall we put the nursery in?’ she asked, trying not to beam her joy at this breakthrough with him.
‘There’s a pair of adjoining rooms on the east wing...’
‘The east wing? But that’ll be too far from us.’
‘The nanny will have the adjoining room.’
‘What nanny?’
‘The nanny you’re going to employ.’ He gave a smile that showed he thought he was being a good guy. A smile from Javier was such a rare occurrence that it momentarily startled her away from what he’d just said.
She remembered reading the clause in the old contract that had mentioned wraparound care for any child, presumably because he expected her to go back to work.
Sophie wouldn’t care if she never danced again. The thought of putting her pointe shoes on and performing made her feel all tight inside.
‘We’re not having a nanny,’ she told him flatly, her brief moment of joy gone.
‘Of course we are.’
‘We are not. I’m not letting someone else raise my child.’
‘A nanny would not raise it. A nanny would do the mundane chores.’
Now she was to use the tone that meant he could argue with her but she would not bend. ‘This is our child and I’m not palming it off on a stranger.’
His face darkened. ‘You are prepared to care for it 24/7?’
‘It’s called being a parent.’
‘What about work? How are you going to return to dance with a baby? Do you expect to pirouette with it strapped to your back?’
‘I’m not going back to the ballet.’
He stared at her as if she’d just announced an intention to fly a car to the moon. ‘Why on earth not?’
‘I don’t want to.’
Not want to? Javier had never heard such words from a ballerina’s mouth. His own mother had returned to the stage four months after giving birth to twins. To be a professional dancer meant a life of dedication and single-mindedness. His father had driven himself to alcoholic despair when the work had dried up, admittedly because of his drunken rages and violence against fellow dancers and choreographers. Javier didn’t know a single ballet dancer who had quit before the age of thirty-five, most usually only doing so reluctantly when their bodies failed them, all the injuries sustained through their careers finally taking their toll.
Sophie was twenty-four. She hadn’t even reached her peak.
‘But you’re a dancer.’
‘And now I’m going to be a mother.’
‘You can be both.’ He shook his head, trying to comprehend this woman he was beginning to suspect he would never understand. ‘Carina, you’re young. You’re in excellent health. There is no reason for you not to be able to continue to dance.’
‘I don’t want to,’ she repeated with an obstinacy he’d never seen before. ‘I’m done with dance. It’s not as if I was particularly good at it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I only got into ballet school because my parents paid the full fees.’
‘Did you not have to audition?’
‘Well...yes, but my parents still had to pay. I’m not saying I’m a bad dancer but I’m never going to be the best. I only got the job with your ballet company because Freya put a good word in for me.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘It isn’t rubbish...’
‘Compania de Ballet de Casillas does not employ second-rate dancers. I should know; it’s my company. You think anyone would dare go above my wishes for only the best to be employed?’
She gaped, a crease forming in her brow. Then she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and grimaced. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does. You’re a dancer. You’re an excellent dancer. It’s in your blood.’
‘It isn’t,’ she insisted. ‘I love the ballet but... I’d been thinking of quitting before I joined your company. I think I would have done if Freya hadn’t needed me here. She was having a hard time, really struggling with being so far from her mum—you know how ill she is—and I wanted to support her. Just be there when she needed a shoulder to cry on.’
‘You were already thinking of quitting?’
She nodded, a wistful look on her face. ‘I love the ballet, I really do, but dancing was never... My heart was never in it. It was not what I wanted to do in my life.’
‘What did you want to do?’
‘I wanted to be a vet.’
‘A vet?’
His wife, a professional ballerina, who’d dedicated her life to dance had never wanted to do it. She’d wanted to be a vet.
He could hardly wrap his brain around the notion.
He thought back to their wedding night and her comment that her parents would have lived in a shed if it had meant Sophie getting into ballet school. At the time he’d treated it like a throwaway comment but now it began
