The Last Illusion

But it was difficult to feel tough and in control of the situation when his lancing eyes informed her that he knew all there was to know about her and wasn’t impressed.

‘If we are to spend half an hour together, then I suggest we do it in comfort.’ The drawled sarcasm turned her stomach, fiery little spirals igniting inside her as he took her arm and led her through to a small sala tucked away at the rear of the house. Being close to him, touched by him, made every nerve end quiver, forcing her to remember how just one sultry glance from those impenetrable black eyes had once had the power to reduce her to a mass of desperate, wanton needs.

It was a memory she refused to entertain and she shook her head as if to clear it, obeyed the slight movement of his hand and sat on a damask-covered chair, her spine rigid. And all around her the cool green light that filtered through the louvres touched the graceful Spanish renaissance furnishings, giving the heavily carved or richly painted pieces an air of soft mystery that would be lost in the full glare of sunlight. This was the room she had made her own, often coming here to read or simply to try to relax, especially when Olivia—with all that false friendliness—had been in residence.

Had Sebastian remembered? Had he chosen this room from the almost countless others because he knew it would give her pain? He must know that it had been here that Olivia had finally shed her veneer of matiness and spat out the cruel, devastating truth.

Charley straightened her already rigid shoulders and wished he’d sit down, but couldn’t ask him to because to do so would reveal that his endless pacing, slow circling, was getting to her. She didn’t want him to know that he could affect her on any level. And the way he moved with the insolent grace born of a natural arrogance, touched a long-forgotten core of unwanted female responsiveness deep within her.

‘You have changed, Charlotte,’ he pronounced at last.

The deep timbre of his voice, that wickedly sensual accent, flicked her on the raw and made her snap without thinking of what she might be revealing. ‘I prefer Charley.’ Only her parents, and Sebastian, had used her full name. She had loved her parents and now they were dead. She had loved Sebastian and, as far as she was concerned, he might as well be dead, too. She didn’t want to be reminded.

‘I refuse to call you by a name that would be ugly for a male and unthinkable for a female, especially a female who has grown into something quite remarkably sophisticated.’

The level look beneath lowered brows was tinged with an amused derision, she noted fumingly, as he lowered himself gracefully on to a velvet-covered chaise. If he had thought of her at all during the past four years it would have been as the slightly plump, wide-eyed nineteen-year-old he had married. Her mouse-brown hair had hung limply halfway down her back, and the only make-up she had used had been a smear of pale pink lipstick.

But she had lost a lot of weight after she’d left him and had never regained it, and her hair had darkened to a glossy seal-brown and she now wore it cut fashionably short. Freda had been initially responsible for the change in her style of dressing. Her, ‘You can’t go through life looking like Alice in Wonderland, not if you want to land a responsible, reasonably paid job. I loved my sister dearly, but she had a blind spot when it came to your upbringing. She insisted on dressing you like the Sugar Plum Fairy since the day you were born, and you couldn’t have been more sheltered if you and your parents had lived out your lives as the sole inhabitants of a desert island,’ had hurt at the time.

However, it hadn’t taken too much soul-searching to acknowledge that Freda had been right. As the only child of parents who had feared that after fifteen years of marriage they would never have children, she had been too protected and sheltered.

Her education had been at a private, girls-only school, her friends carefully vetted, her out-of-school activities more suited to a Victorian miss than a girl of the twentieth century.

Her wish to take a business studies course and stay on in England when her parents retired to Spain had been granted only after endless and minute discussions. Only when her mother’s younger, unmarried sister, Freda, had stepped in and offered to have her stay at her flat in Harrow had her wish been granted.

And even during that year Freda hadn’t made more than a few half-hearted efforts to push her into the real world. While Charley’s parents had been alive Freda hadn’t felt able to interfere with the lifestyle of her quiet, studious and painfully innocent niece. Besides, she had been too engrossed in running her own successful agency to spare the effort needed to try to change someone who had been patently happy with the way she was.

But the way she had been then meant that she had been completely gullible, quite unable to see through a man like Sebastian Machado. A few kind words, a few careless caresses, had been enough to turn her silly, innocent head. No, he had needed to expend very little effort to ensure he got what he wanted: a woman who was stupid enough, besotted enough, to play the part he had allotted her in his devilish plans.

‘Yes, I have changed.’ She agreed, stony-voice, with his earlier statement and crossed her long, elegantly slender legs with a whisper of honey-toned silk, knowing that the fashionable short skirt of the suit she wore, her slender high heels, showed them off to advantage.

And strangely, the defiant little movement excited her, because there was a quiet assessment in the way he watched her, in the slide of those sultry eyes as they roamed down to the tips of her toes and back up again to her glinting eyes, and it told her his words hadn’t been empty, that he acknowledged the change and accepted it. And that worked to her advantage.

As long as he realised that she was no longer the adoring little doormat who had been willing to submit to the hurts and humiliations he and his mistress, Olivia, had subjected her to for the sake of the meaningless caresses and empty words he deigned to spare her, then they could discuss terms as equals.

That alone would be worth the expense of this trip, the arguments she’d had with Greg when she’d told him of her decision to face her unwanted husband in person. At last she was the redoubtable Sebastian Machado’s equal, and she had nothing whatever to fear!

Quickly, before his brooding presence made her change her mind on that score, she folded her hands tightly in her lap and told him crisply. ‘I want a divorce.’

‘Why?’ His expression didn’t alter by as much as a flicker of an eyelid. He brought his hands up, steepling his long, strong-boned fingers, the tips resting against the sweeping curve of his upper lip.

His cool question almost took her breath away, an insult in itself, and anger stirred, making her voice taut as she shot back, ‘Need you really ask? Our marriage ended four years ago. It’s high time we tidied up the loose ends.’

‘And you think a divorce would get rid of those loose ends, extinguish the past? Are you that naïve?’ His tone was still uninterested, the hooded eyes never leaving her face as he dropped in, ‘You could have asked me for a divorce at any time during the past four years, or at least made your intention to seek one plain to me and my solicitor. Why didn’t you, if our marriage had become so intolerable to you?’

That floored her. Charley felt her eyes go wide, staring into the dark and sultry depths of his as if she might find the answer there. During the past four years she had never tried to hide her married status, but she had never spoken of it to anyone except Freda and, much later, Greg. And even then she hadn’t told all the truth, merely explaining that she and Sebastian had had irreconcilable differences. Divorce hadn’t entered her head until Greg had proposed.

And she didn’t know why. But she wasn’t going to confess the sudden bewilderment his query had produced, because that might suggest she had clung on to the legality of their relationship because she couldn’t face the final severance.

She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them again they glinted with cold amber lights. She could never inflict on him the type of pain he had dished out to her, but she could have the satisfaction of pricking his overblown ego a little. And her voice was tart as she informed him, ‘You know why I left you. Do you imagine I wanted to remember you and what you had done?’ Carefully, she unfurled the fingers she hadn’t realised had been so tightly clenched and made herself rest her hands lightly on the slender carved wood arms of her chair. ‘I blocked you, and our marriage, out of my mind. I never gave it a second thought until I realised I needed my freedom to marry again.’

She thought she had earned herself a reaction in the sudden spasm of a muscle along his hard jaw, but couldn’t be sure. The tips of his fingers were still resting against his mouth, so she could have imagined it. She got to her feet, suddenly tired. She didn’t have time to play games. The sooner this interview was over the sooner she could book into the modest hotel where she had reserved a room for the night.

His eyes swept up, lazily following her movement, his attitude still sublimely relaxed. And she said, ‘As we haven’t lived together for so long, I can’t see how there can be any difficulties. Especially as ours was a civil wedding.’ Olivia had spelled out exactly why that had been, why Sebastian had chosen not to have a religious ceremony, and Charley tacked on tightly, ‘Greg and I would like to marry before the end of the year—in the autumn, preferably. Which gives us time, I would imagine, to get the divorce finalised.’

Suddenly, she needed to get out of here. It was as if the atmosphere of this house, the watchful presence of the man who had once meant more than life itself to her, was suffocating her, gathering her back into the web of deceit and cruelty, the binding strands interfaced with the wild magic of Andalucía, with the dark, irresistible charm of this devil in human guise that had almost broken her all that time ago.

She wouldn’t even mention the possibility of his buying back those shares. That could be done later, through solicitors. She couldn’t bring herself to spend one more moment with him. And she began to walk out of the room, making herself move slowly, because if she once gave in to the urgent desire to hurry she would find herself running until her lungs burst inside her.

‘No.’

The single word lowered the temperature in the room by a thousand degrees, and Charley’s feet felt as if they had been nailed to the floor as the blood in her veins turned to ice. But he couldn’t possibly mean what she thought he meant, she berated herself, then swung round quickly, defensively, because she could hear him moving, coming towards her.

‘Under Spanish law a divorce is possible if the couple have been living apart for two years—provided, of course, that both are agreed.’ His black eyes mocked her. ‘Unless the desire for a divorce is mutual, then the statutory period of separation is five years.’

He smiled for the first time, but it didn’t touch his eyes. It was a mere baring of teeth that sent icy trickles of disbelief running down her spine.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Her voice emerged thickly and she had no control over the flood of dismay that sent hectic colour to stain her cheeks. She stepped back, her poise deserting her. He was crowding her, much too close, making her achingly aware of the scent of him, the warmth of him, the shockingly vibrant, power-packed, raw masculinity of him.

‘Never more so.’ His voice was an assured purr, and it made her stomach churn.

She was backed against the impenetrability of one of the walls, but he didn’t move closer. If he had done, their bodies would have been touching, but he didn’t need to make such an open statement of his physical domination, because already she felt weak and giddy, as if she were about to faint for the first time in her life.

There were tiny dancing lights in the brooding blackness of his eyes, and the graceful, upward lilt of one arched black brow reinforced his wicked amusement, the machiavellian satisfaction he derived from gaining the upper hand.

‘So, mi esposa, you have another full year to wait before you can even begin divorce proceedings.’

He placed his palms flat against the wall, on either side of her head, and she was trapped, and frightened, yet determined not to show it. And she told him fiercely, ‘Call yourself a man? You’re nothing but a spiteful little worm!’ and had the satisfaction of seeing him stiffen, his proud features frozen over as he dropped his hands and stepped back, his shoulders high and hard.

‘Explain yourself!’ He looked as if he would like to kill her where she stood, and she didn’t even care. She was beyond being frightened, even by a man who had committed the ultimate crime—slaughtering his own brother for financial gain!

She hurled at him defiantly, ‘What reason could you have for wanting to delay our divorce? You don’t want me. You never did! But you don’t want me to be happy with another man. That makes you spiteful!’

She sprang away from the wall, side-stepping him. Another year in an extinct marriage wouldn’t mean a thing to him. Olivia was content to wait for just as long as it took; she had openly said as much. The two of them had been lovers for ages, well before he had conned her into hurtling into marriage, and they would be lovers as long as they both drew breath, whether or not Olivia bore his name and wore his ring! And she told him witheringly, making for the door again, ‘Don’t think a year’s postponement of our marriage will make a scrap of difference to Greg and me. It won’t.’

She was sure of that, at least. Greg was a pragmatic soul. He could be patient. But her cheeks went very hot when he tossed at her, almost idly, ‘I am not in the least concerned about Gregory Wilson. He is no threat. He is, in fact, beneath notice.’

She glared at him hotly, her worst fears confirmed. She hadn’t mentioned Greg’s surname; his spies would have discovered that and reported back. So she’d been right when she’d half hysterically decided that he’d ferreted out every fact about her life, known precisely when she and Greg had met, how often they’d dated. It made her feel besmirched!

‘If you want to marry a middle-aged small-town accountant with a pot belly, an aversion to parting with his money and a fixation on his mother, then I can only mourn your lowered standards. I can’t prevent you, if such is your ultimate wish. But don’t ask me to make it too easy for you.’

‘Oooh!’ Charley couldn’t begin to express the disgust she felt. Her mind was reeling. How did he have the gall to accuse her of lowering her standards when he was the cruellest, most heartless, wickedest man she had ever had the misfortune to meet?

And Greg wasn’t middle-aged! He was thirty-seven, a mere three years older than Sebastian. And he did not have a pot belly—he was cuddly! And if he was careful with his money it wasn’t to be wondered at. His father had died before he’d left school, and his mother, with whom he’d continued to live until her death from a stroke almost a year ago, had had to scrimp and scrape to support him while he got his qualifications and even afterwards, while he struggled to get started up on his own. So it was little wonder he had been a devoted and grateful son, averse to throwing his hard-earned money around, because he had known what it was like to count every penny.

‘At least he doesn’t promise me the moon and stars wrapped up in gold ribbon,’ she managed at last, hating him, ‘then hand me something poisonous!’

‘And what does he promise you?’ His menacing body tensed, his mouth like a steel trap, his eyes boring into her head as he uttered, ‘No importa! It is of no consequence.’ The hard, white-clad shoulders lifted imperceptibly, then he swung on his heels and pressed the bell push near the door. ‘I have summoned Teresa. She will either show you to your room, or she will show you to the door. You have the choice.’