and an inconvenience. Hope that they would one day learn to love him had taken a long time to die. He’d come home from school full of excitement at the thought of seeing them again, only to find them ready to leave as he arrived. Or they would promise to come and not turn up at all.
One day his mother told him to his face that everything he touched turned to dust. She’d been a beauty before he was born, loved by his father and feted by the world, but now, thanks to her son, Xavier, she was nothing. He had destroyed her. And when his seven-year-old self had begged her not to say such things, clinging to her hand as she left the room, she had shaken him off with disgust, and then laughed in his face when he’d started crying. No wonder he’d steered clear of romantic entanglements. He’d seen where they led.
Doña Anna had stepped into the breach, raising him, and encouraging him to make the best of the island—to swim around it, and to sail around it—and he’d enjoyed his first love affair on the beach. But though his aunt had told him on numerous occasions that his mother’s words were just the emotional outpourings of a troubled woman, those ugly words still rang in his head. He wasn’t capable of love. He was a jinx, a misfortune. He destroyed love—
He turned as Margaret, his second in command, coughed discreetly to attract his attention. ‘You want these plans acted upon right away, Xavier?’
‘That’s right,’ he confirmed.
She knew he’d been remembering. Margaret had an uncanny knack of sensing when he was wrestling the demons from the past.
‘And you want that done before you attempt a satisfactory settlement with Rosie Clifton?’
‘Do you doubt I’ll reach a settlement with the girl?’
Everyone but Margaret laughed at his remark. Margaret had read the will, so she knew he had to produce an heir. Two years was no time at all, she’d told him with concern written all over her face. What was he supposed to do? Pluck one out of thin air? The thought of breeding with one of the women he customarily dated held no appeal at all.
‘I think this is a tricky situation of a type we haven’t encountered before,’ Margaret now commented thoughtfully.
Tricky was the understatement of the year.
‘If you mean Ms Clifton fires on emotion, while I work solely with the facts, then you’re probably right,’ he conceded. ‘But surely, that guarantees a satisfactory outcome for our side?’
Whether Margaret agreed or not, he would go ahead with his plans. Who was going to stand in his way? Not Rosie Clifton, that was for sure—
Rosie Clifton...
He couldn’t get her out of his head. Just her name was enough to set his senses raging. He suspected that beneath her composure Señorita Clifton could whip up quite a storm...
‘I’ve never known you to be so distracted at a meeting,’ Margaret commented discreetly.
He noticed everyone was leaving the room, while he had been thinking about Rosie Clifton. He was glad there was an air of excitement. His team was like a pack of greyhounds in the traps, eager to chase up every detail in his plan.
‘You’re right,’ he agreed, standing to hold Margaret’s chair. ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind.’
Women had always been ornaments in the past, to be enjoyed and briefly admired. He had never thought of them as potential mothers to any children he might have. He’d never thought of having children, or settling down. Life had kicked that notion out of him. His best plan was to make Rosie Clifton an offer for her half of the island that she couldn’t possibly refuse.
She might refuse.
There was that possibility, he conceded now he’d met her. The figure he had in mind was substantial, but would she take it? She was an idealist with her own plans for the island. She knew his reputation for taking wasteland and transforming it into a site of unparalleled luxury, but to Rosie every inch of that island held magic and potential—and not for a six-star hotel.
‘Xavier...’
‘Yes, Margaret?’ He would trust this woman with his life. She was the only woman he would trust with his fortune. Margaret was his fifty-four-year-old financial director, an accountant with a steel-trap mind who could run circles around every bean counter he knew. It was thanks to Margaret that he could take time away from the business. As a judge of people she had no equal. What would Margaret make of Señorita Clifton? he wondered.
‘I knew the meeting might run over,’ she said as he held the door for her, ‘and so I took the liberty of ordering the chopper to be fuelled and ready for you. You can leave at once.’
Margaret’s second talent was for reading his mind. His mood lifted, and he smiled at her decadent English vowels. Years of drilling in a strict UK boarding school accounted for the precision of her accent, Margaret had once told him. He didn’t care. He’d forgive her anything. She was the one woman in his life who had never disappointed him. Nodding briefly, he smiled his thanks and then they both went their separate ways.
* * *
It was late afternoon. Rosie was sitting on the beach, staring out to sea as she dabbled her feet in the water. She kept telling herself she knew Don Xavier wouldn’t come.
She should be relieved he wasn’t coming. She wasn’t relieved. Part of her wanted to get their business over with as fast as she could, while another, far less worthy part of her just wanted to see him again. Her best guess was that he couldn’t admit—not even to himself—that the island still meant something to him, and so he had decided to stay away. She got that. She had difficulty with emotions, having hidden hers for years. She would have been laughed at when she lived at the orphanage if she had given away even a hint of her romantic dreams, but that had never stopped her dreaming. In fact, sometimes, she thought she was overburdened with dreams, but they had never turned her into a block of ice like Don Xavier.
Almost six o’clock! The day was flying away. It was time to go back to the house. The glaring light of a sultry Spanish afternoon was fast burning out to burnished gold. The sunset promised to be spectacular, which was the only thing holding her on the beach. The sky was an intense, almost metallic blue, while the first signs of dusk were appearing on the horizon in random drifts of fluffy pink clouds. The sea was so smooth it looked like a skating rink, as if the waves, having exerted themselves all day, couldn’t be bothered to crash on the shore, so they were creeping up it instead. She scrunched her toes in the wet sand, loving the sensation as she allowed the rhythmical sound of the waves to flitter across her eardrums. Even that wasn’t soothing. Her irritation about the missing guest was stronger. Don Xavier seemed to find it easy to walk away from things and she’d been looking forward to another verbal sparring match with him. They had to get together if they were going to sort out the future of the island, and they should do that as soon as possible. They had a duty to the islanders.
She had wanted a chance to make him understand how much she cared for the island, and how lucky she felt to have been given the chance to live here. Helping the islanders was just her way of thanking them for their kindness towards her. Her dream was to share the island one day with other young people who’d had no advantages in life. She guessed that would have to wait, as her tiny pot of money would run out soon—
A sound distracted her. She couldn’t identify it at first. Then she realised it was the sound of rotor blades approaching fast. As she sprang to her feet a gleaming black craft appeared over the cliff
