His title made him think he could do anything and have anything. Or anyone.
‘If I had asked would you have accepted?’ he said evenly.
She shook her head.
‘Exactly. Just think of it as being cruel to be kind.’
Emily gave a bark of harsh laughter. ‘The cruelty I can believe. Kindness? Not so much.’
‘When was the last time you ate properly?
Emily thought back to the bowl of cut-price breakfast cereal she’d had in her room before leaving for work earlier. The milk had been off, so she hadn’t felt like eating much. The rent she paid for her room in Mr Lukacs’s house was supposed to include use of the kitchen, but she found that whenever she ventured in there he would appear, finding some excuse to squeeze past her in the narrow space, or just watching her with his damp, beady eyes. She preferred to avoid it.
‘Why do you care? It’s got nothing to do with you.’
Despair made her uncharacteristically ungracious. Despair and the uncomfortable feeling that, having been hit by the express train, she had now been hauled aboard and was speeding away into unknown and dangerous territory.
‘You’re right, it’s not. Not in itself, and believe me I have plenty of other things to worry about. But given that your father looks like a dead man walking because he has no idea where you are, and I discover you living like…like…’ Lost for words, he gave a small exhalation of frustration. ‘It’s become my business whether I like it or not. So I’m going to feed you, and you’re going to tell me exactly what’s going on.’
Something in his tone silenced the retort that had sprung to her lips. There was an edge there, a tension that she hadn’t noticed in him before. The Luis Cordoba she knew was laughing, insouciant, urbane—a playboy whose most serious decisions in life involved which party invitations to accept, and which women to seduce when he got there.
This man was different. Harder. Colder. And possibly even more dangerous than before.
The car had picked up speed now. The street lights stained the soft, early summer dusk a lurid shade of orange, and threw neon bars of light into the car as they sped along. They were heading out of the city, she realised with curious numbness. When he had said dinner she had imagined some exclusive West End restaurant, but the traffic was thinning as they left London behind them.
The events of the exhausting day seemed to pile up in the centre of Emily’s mind, blocking her ability to think properly. Instead she sat motionless between the dark-suited men, keeping herself very upright, her eyes fixed straight ahead of her.
A dead man walking.
The phrase echoed in her head. She longed to ask Luis what he meant, what Oscar had said, but couldn’t bring herself to do it in the presence of Tomás and the faceless driver. The damned newspaper still lay on the seat between them, its salacious headline seeming to emit some high-frequency signal into her brain, which made it impossible to quite ignore it. Her chest felt like there was an iron band across it as she thought of Zoe, and Olivia and Bella—what were they doing now, in the aftermath of the latest shocking news? And her father…
Suddenly she felt very tired, and knew that it wasn’t just from the events of the day. It was from the past two months of fighting to keep her head above water since she’d left home—of battling loneliness, the grimness of her surroundings, the shock of struggling to make ends meet for the first time in her life. It was from before that too—from the sheer, grinding misery of missing her mother, mourning her death and her father’s betrayal.
She tipped her head back against the cushioning leather and closed her eyes. In the darkness behind their lids she was even more aware of Luis beside her. He was lounging nonchalantly, but she could sense the restlessness that lurked beneath his outward show of calm, the strength and steely determination that infused his whole being.
And as her head drooped onto his shoulder and the soapy sweet scent of hawthorn drifted in on the warm May evening she forgot to be afraid of him.
She felt simply…safe.
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