The Ultimate Persuasion: A Tempestuous Temptation / The Notorious Gabriel Diaz / The Truth Behind his Touch

‘Congratulations. You both provided a touchingly united front. I find that I barely know a single personal thing about either of you and it’s dawning on me that the few details you’ve imparted have probably been a tissue of lies—starting with where you live. It would have saved time and effort if I’d employed a detective to ferret out whatever background information was necessary.’

‘Maria thought that—’

‘Do me a favour. Keep my niece out of this. You live in a dump, which you rent from an unscrupulous landlord. You can barely afford the rent. Tell me, do either of you hold down jobs, or were those fabrications as well?’

‘I resent you barging into my house.’

‘Mr Cholmsey’s house—if you can call it a house.’

‘Fine! I still resent you barging in here and insulting me.’

‘Tough.’

‘In fact, I’m asking you to leave!’

At that, Luiz burst out laughing. ‘Do you really think that I’ve come all the way here so that I can leave the second the questioning gets a little too uncomfortable for you?’

‘Well, I don’t see the point of you hanging around. Mark and Maria aren’t here.’

‘I’ve come because, like I said, things have moved up a gear. It seems that there’s now talk of marriage. It’s not going to do.’

‘Talk of marriage?’ Aggie parroted incredulously. ‘There’s no talk of marriage.’

‘At least, none that your brother’s told you about. Maybe the touching united front isn’t quite as united as you’d like it to be.’

‘You…you are just the most awful human being I’ve ever met!’

‘I think you’ve made that glaringly clear on all the occasions that we’ve met,’ Luiz remarked coolly. ‘You’re entitled to your opinions.’

‘So you came here to…what? Warn my brother off? Warn Maria off? They might be young but they’re not under age.’

‘Maria comes from one of the richest families in Latin America.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Aggie looked at him in confusion. Yes, of course she had known that Maria was not the usual hand-to-mouth starving student working the tills on the weekend to help pay for her tuition fees. But one of the richest families in Latin America? No wonder she had not been in favour of either of them letting on that they were just normal people struggling to get by on a day-to-day basis!

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘When it comes to money, I lose my sense of humour.’ Luiz abruptly sat forward, elbows resting on his thighs, and looked at her unsmilingly. ‘I hadn’t planned on taking a hard line, but I’m beginning to do the maths and I don’t like the results I’m coming up with.’

Aggie tried and failed to meet his dark, intimidating stare. Why was it that whenever she was in this man’s company her usual unflappability was scattered to the four corners? She was reduced to feeling too tight in her skin, too defensive and too self-conscious. Which meant that she could barely think straight.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she muttered, staring at her linked fingers while her heart rate sped up and her mouth went dry.

‘Wealthy people are often targets,’ Luiz gritted, spelling it out in clear syllables just in case she chose to miss the message. ‘My niece is extremely wealthy and will be even wealthier when she turns twenty-one. Now it appears that the dalliance I thought would peter out after a couple of months has turned into a marriage proposal.’

‘I still can’t believe that. You’ve got your facts wrong.’

‘Believe it! And what I’m seeing are a couple of fortune hunters who have lied about their circumstances to try and throw me off course.’

Aggie blanched and stared at him miserably. Those small white fibs had assumed the proportions of mountains. Her brain felt sluggish but already she could see why he would have arrived at the conclusion that he had.

Honest people didn’t lie.

‘Tell me…is your brother really a musician? Because I’ve looked him up online and, strangely enough, I can’t find him anywhere.’

‘Of course he’s a musician! He…he plays in a band.’

‘And I’m guessing this band hasn’t made it big yet…hence his lack of presence on the Internet.’

‘Okay! I give up! So we may have…have…’

‘Tampered with the truth? Stretched it? Twisted it to the point where it became unrecognisable?’

‘Maria said that you’re very black-and-white.’ Aggie stuck her chin up and met his frowning stare. Now, as had happened before, she marvelled that such sinful physical beauty, the sort of beauty that made people think of putting paint to canvas, could conceal such a cold, ruthless, brutally dispassionate streak.

‘Me? Black-and-white?’ Luiz was outraged at this preposterous assumption. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my entire life!’

‘She said that you form your opinions and you stick to them. You never look outside the box and allow yourself to be persuaded into another direction.’

‘That’s called strength of character!’

‘Well, that’s why we weren’t inclined to be one hundred percent truthful. Not that we lied…

‘We just didn’t reveal as much as we could have.’

‘Such as you live in a rented dump, your brother sings in pubs now and again and you are a teacher—or was that another one of those creative exaggerations?’

‘Of course I’m a teacher. I teach primary school. You can check up on me if you like!’

‘Well that’s now by the by. The fact is, I cannot allow any marriage to take place between my niece and your brother.’

‘So you’re going to do what, exactly?’ Aggie was genuinely bewildered. It was one thing to disapprove of someone else’s choices. It was quite another to force them into accepting what you chose to cram down their throat. Luiz, Maria’s mother, every single member of their super-wealthy family, for that matter, could rant, storm, wring their hands and deliver threatening lectures—but at the end of the day Maria was her own person and would make up her own mind.

She tactfully decided not to impart that point of view. He claimed that he wasn’t black-and-white but she had seen enough evidence of that to convince her that he was. He also had no knowledge whatsoever of how the other half lived. In fact, she doubted that he had ever even come into contact with people who weren’t exactly like him, until she and Mark had come along.

‘Look.’ She relented slightly as another point of view pushed its way through her self-righteous anger. ‘I can understand that you might harbour one or two reservations about my brother…’

‘Can you?’ Luiz asked with biting sarcasm.

Right now he was kicking himself for not having taken a harder look at the pair of them. He was usually as sharp as they came when other people and their motivations were involved. He had had to be. So how had they managed to slip through the net?

Her brother was disingenuous, engaging, apparently open. He looked like the kind of guy who could hold his own with anyone—tall, muscular, with the same shade of blonde hair as his sister but tied back in a ponytail; when he spoke, his voice was low and gentle.

And Agatha—so stunningly pretty that anyone could be forgiven for staring. But, alongside that, she had also been forthright and opinionated. Was that what had taken him in—the combination of two very different personalities? Had they cunningly worked off each other to throw him off-guard? Or had he just failed to take the situation seriously because he hadn’t thought the boy’s relationship with his niece would ever come to anything? Luisa was famously protective of Maria. Had he just assumed that her request for him to keep an eye out had been more of the same?

At any rate, they had now been caught out in a tangle of lies and that, to his mind, could mean only one thing.

The fact that he’d been a fool for whatever reason was something he would have to live with, but it stuck in his throat.