Indebted To Moreno

‘That seemed to be a success,’ Nairo’s cool voice drawled as the last customer went out the door.

‘Success is an understatement.’

Her response came faintly. She had been so absorbed in the matter in hand that she hadn’t really been aware of the fact that he had been there all the time, a silent observer, sitting on the edge of the runway, his long black-clad frame standing out so starkly from the white and silver décor. She’d been fooling herself, of course, if she’d let herself think that he had gone. He had set this response in progress with his intervention for his own personal reasons, and now he was going to claim what he felt he was owed.

A chill breeze seemed to blow across Rose’s skin as he dropped down from his place on the runway and started towards her and she wished everyone hadn’t left her quite so alone.

‘Th-thank you for your help. I really appreciate it.’

His dark head nodded, bronze eyes hooded to hide any emotion he might feel.

‘There is a price for my assistance.’

Of course there was. This was Nairo Moreno she was dealing with now. A man who had somehow built himself up from the shabby, broken beginnings of their lives when they had first met and who now was this powerful, wealthy man. There had to be a price on anything he did. He was no longer Jett, the youth she had run out on so long ago.

‘A price?’

‘Oh, don’t look so panicked,’ he mocked as she turned uncertain eyes on him. ‘I’m not going to demand your body in return for my favours in some odd modern version of droit du seigneur.’

He paused just long enough for her skin to smart under the bite of his mockery.

‘There wouldn’t be much point, would there? After all, we’ve already been there, haven’t we, querida?’

The pointed reminder that they had once been lovers, that he had been the one to take her virginity all those years before, drained the strength from her muscles, making her grab at a nearby chair for support. An innocence that then she had relinquished happily and unhesitatingly, she had been so much under the sway of the heated hunger she had known for this man, blinded to anything but her need for him.

‘Been there, done that—didn’t bother to stay around to get the tee shirt,’ she flashed at him, then immediately regretted her too-aggressive tone.

He might have stepped in to save her business earlier this evening, but what he had decided so surprisingly to give her, he could take away in the blink of an eye. Just as so many new customers had followed his lead to want to use her services, they could easily follow him away from her again if he chose to reject her after all.

She must not forget that she was no longer dealing with the Jett of ten years before. This man was a very different sort of male. Tall and powerful, his broad frame had filled out and strengthened where Jett had had a whipcord leanness that had been defined even further by the fact that there was never quite enough to eat in the squat.

Added to that he was someone else entirely—a man of status, with power and money no object. He had a sister who was marrying into the aristocracy and an estate which, if the Internet reports were to be believed, was more than the equal of his prospective in-laws. How he had come by that she had no idea; she didn’t want to think about it too closely. She had bitter memories of the appalling ways he had planned on acquiring more money ten years before. But it all added up to someone who was light years away from the scrawny, long-haired Jett she had once believed herself in love with.

Thank heaven she was well over that particular nasty infection! But the scars the past had left on her soul reminded her that she would do best to play this particular game very carefully. Every instinct warned her that Nairo Moreno played to win and that he would prove a spectacular opponent if she was foolish enough to challenge him too far.

‘Querida...’ she echoed cynically. ‘How come you’re suddenly living in Spain and tossing about Spanish endearments?’

‘Not suddenly,’ Nairo corrected flatly. ‘I always did live in Spain—or, rather, my family home was in Andalusia. And so, naturally, I grew up speaking Spanish.’

‘You never used Spanish when we— In the squat.’

‘No.’ There was even less emotion in the response this time if it was possible. ‘I didn’t. But then I didn’t want anyone there to know who I was.’

Shockingly the fact that he included her in the ‘anyone’ he hadn’t wanted to know the truth about his background, combined with the fact that he had only ever used his native language to her in the brutally sarcastic way he had said querida just now, stung at her deep inside.

‘And obviously neither did you. So tell me, when did “Red Brown” become the much more exotically named Rose Cavalliero?’

The room suddenly felt chill, as if the heating had been turned off, as from a shadowy corner of her mind came the echo of her mother’s voice on the day she had been called to the hospital to find Joy recovering from a brutal beating that Fred Brown had given her.