Special Deliveries: Her Nine-Month Secret: The Secret Casella Baby / The Secret Heir of Sunset Ranch / Proof of Their Sin

‘Oh.’ Holly was now fully invested in whatever Luiz had to say. In fact, she had completely forgotten her woeful projections of life without him in it. Whatever he had to say to her, she knew that the an unforgettable ex was one difficulty removed from the equation and that could only be a good thing. ‘What do you mean?’ She couldn’t resist extending her hand and running it gently along his arm. She could feel bunched muscle and it sent a pleasurable shiver through her.

‘You might not want to do that…’ Luiz’s jaw tensed and he vaulted upright. The effect of her soft hand on his arm was as dramatic as a white-hot branding iron. He put some distance between them, moving to sit on a chair.

‘Do what?’

‘Touch me. You touch me and I can’t help but touch you back.’

‘You have my permission.’ Holly thought that he might not want to promise her anything beyond today, but she still had a huge amount of power over him. Couldn’t she use that power to make small inroads into that tough fortress he insisted on building around himself to protect his emotions? Maybe it wasn’t the ‘all or nothing’ scenario she had painted. Life wasn’t black and white. It was always full of grey areas…

‘You wanted to talk. We’ll talk.’

‘We can talk and touch at the same time.’

Luiz stifled a groan. His fabled and formidable self-control, on which his empire was built and which had always stood him in good stead when it came to women, was missing in action. But wasn’t it always when it came to Holly? With her, he had never had to use it and lack of use had made it rusty. Her invitation to touch was almost more than he could bear.

‘Fifteen minutes ago you were going to chuck me out because I wasn’t going to propose,’ he said grittily. Holly smiled sheepishly at him and reddened.

‘I was emotional. I’ve been a little emotional recently. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because all my friends seem to be settling down. Maybe I feel like time is racing by. It all seemed to build up inside me. You were… um… telling me about Clarissa…’

Luiz cursed himself for being tempted to accept her explanation and run with it. The promise of the status quo being re-established dangled in front of him, as tantalising as a banquet to a starving man. No more talk of commitment. Back to him having her here, the one window in his life where there was no stress…

He savagely culled the alluring image before it could truly take hold and make him lose sight of the fact that this was not a situation destined to go away. Holly might be prepared to back away from the gauntlet she had foolishly laid down, but the gauntlet would still be there and it would only be a question of time before the inevitable happened. But, hell, she sat there on the couch with her fair hair spilling all over the place and her big blue eyes staring at him, her mouth half-open, as though on the brink of voicing a thought… He had to grit his teeth and push ahead.

‘Clarissa thought that I could be her ticket to the good life.’ He dragged his eyes away from the soft fullness of her lips which mirrored the exquisite abundance of her breasts. Just thinking about touching them again was enough to make him lose focus. On top of all the reasons why this relationship was a poor idea, he ruthlessly added ‘unacceptable loss of self-control’ to the list.

‘It’s understandable,’ Holly conceded reluctantly. ‘I guess that doesn’t make her much different from me…’

‘You’re not understanding.’ He stood up, raked his fingers through his hair and sat back down. Every nuance of expression and every slight movement of his body spoke tellingly of a level of awkward restlessness which was completely alien to the Luiz Gomez Holly knew and loved. While a part of her wanted to jump to her feet, hold him tight and apologise for ever mentioning anything, another part of her was already uneasily accepting that she had started something from which there was no retreat.

Luiz prowled the room before settling for a spot by the bay window and leaning against it.

The fading sun poured through the glass behind him and threw him into shadow. Now, she couldn’t see the expression on his face at all.

‘Clarissa saw me as a passport to the sort of lifestyle she could only dream of.’ He could tell from her silence that she was confused, didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘She wanted me for my money, Holly, and she would have done everything within her power to get what she wanted, including faking a pregnancy.’

‘I’m not following you. What money? What are you talking about?’ Holly felt as though she had stepped into a parallel universe, one in which everything looked the same, sounded the same, but was somehow completely different, altered and reconfigured into the unrecognisable. The Luiz talking to her in that flat, impersonal voice wasn’t her Luiz. She sensed that on a subconscious level and it made her pulses race with sudden, gripping apprehension.

‘Tell me who you think I am.’

‘You’re Luiz Gomez. You work as a salesman. Computers… Why would anyone think that you could be a passport to… to…? How much do salesmen get paid, for goodness’ sake?’

‘My name isn’t Luiz Gomez.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Holly could only stare. She half-stood up, mouth agape, wondering if she had heard correctly. ‘If you’re not Luiz Gomez, then who the heck are you?’

‘Sit down, Holly!’ He barely had time to make it across the room and catch her before she hit the ground.

Holly came to quickly, but it took her a few seconds to reorient and when she did his words came rushing back at her in a poisonous flood that threatened to make her black out again. She squirmed away from him, eyes wide with horror and incomprehension.

‘What are you talking about? Don’t come near me! Who are you?’

‘I’m going to get you a glass of brandy. It’ll calm you down.’

‘I don’t want any brandy. I just want you to tell me what’s going on!’

‘I’m not a travelling salesman, selling computers and saving up to buy a house. My name isn’t Gomez, my name is Casella—Luiz Casella—and I’m worth more than most people can only dream about. Clarissa wanted the lifestyle I could give her. She faked a pregnancy to rope me into marriage, the plan being that she would suffer a “miscarriage” shortly after the wedding. I finally and completely opened my eyes to the level to which people will sink in an effort to secure financial security. I understood once and for all the concept of gold-diggers.

‘I made up my mind on the spot that, if the consequence of taking a chance on a relationship might result in another Clarissa moment, then no relationship with its promises of happy-ever-after would be worth it. And if I ever were to go for the long-term choice, then I would do so with a woman of independent means, someone to whom my money would be an irrelevance. It would be a marriage of mutual convenience. I have neither the time nor the inclination for emotional risk-taking.’

Holly heard what he was saying but was suffering from information overload. Her mind had stuck on the very first revelation that he wasn’t who he said he was.

‘But why? You lied. I don’t get it.’

Luiz could feel her withdrawal from him. He could detect that light in her eyes that spoke of suspicion and mistrust. She hadn’t yet reached the point of anger and bitterness, but those two emotions would come and he had to remind himself that life was a cruel place and being toughened up by unpleasant, unexpected situations was always, in retrospect, character building.

Right now, though… He flushed darkly and flung his arms out in an exotically foreign gesture.

‘Why would you lie to me? How could you do that? I helped you and you… you lied to me about who you were and I just don’t understand that! I don’t get it.’

‘Then you haven’t been listening.’

‘And you can stop treating me like an idiot, Luiz! Or are you lying about that as well? Is Luiz really your first name or will you come clean about that in a little while? Will you tell me that you’re actually called Richard, or—or Tom, or Fred? And that you’re not really from Brazil at all? You’re from East London and your father worked on a market stall!’

‘You’re upset. I understand.’

‘How can you tell me that you’ve spent the last year and a half lying to me and be so… so calm?’ She knew why. It was because she had fallen head over heels in love with a man whose core was a block of ice.

‘Would you like to listen to what I have to say or would you rather I leave?’

Faced with that stark choice, Holly bit back the onset of tears gathering pace and remained silent. She was numb all over. ‘I want to know why. I deserve to know.’

‘When I crashed my car…’

‘The car you couldn’t even be bothered to recover. You didn’t even go through the insurance company to see what money you could get back… I should have twigged that normal people don’t write off cars just like that. It wasn’t some old banger, was it?’

‘No. No matter. It was still disposable.’

Like a computer, suddenly rebooted and finally working to full capacity, Holly was adding up all the things that should have tallied and opened her eyes to a man who wasn’t just an ordinary Joe Bloggs. His casual way with money; the ease with which he accepted subservience as his due; his in-built self-assurance; his assumptions that he was always right…

‘When I crashed and you rescued me, I wasn’t in a particularly good place. I had just closed a deal in Durham and was on my way back to London. I came here and in a split second I made the decision that it would be an idea to take time out from being a Casella. Chances are you wouldn’t have heard of me anyway, but there was a chance that you might. The Durham deal was all over the newspapers. I never foresaw that we would still be in a relationship a year and a half later.’

‘But why wouldn’t you have wanted me to know your real name? Why would you think that it would have made a difference knowing who you were and… and…?’

‘Experience has taught me that people are rarely open and spontaneous when they know the extent of my wealth. They pander, they fawn, they even fake pregnancy… It’s just the way it is.’

Holly’s sluggish brain was reaching its inexorable conclusions and she was dismayed, hurt and horrified. The man she loved was rich. She didn’t know how rich, but if he could dismissively shrug off the loss of an expensive car without a backward glance, then very. Clarissa had hunted him down and tried to trap him because of his money. No doubt he was right when he told her that people adapted to please him.

But how could he ever have thought that she would be one of those people? Because he was suspicious. Whilst she had thrown herself into an open and honest relationship, there had been a part of him always holding back, always keeping her at arm’s length.