Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Passionate Bargains: The Perfect Cazorla Wife / The Russian's Ultimatum / Once a Moretti Wife

She remembered once begging her mum to move so they could be closer to him, remembered the anxiety on her mother’s face at this impossibility. Her mum would do anything for her but to move the fifty miles would mean uprooting from the support network of her own loving and hardworking family.

Before they’d married, Raul had employed various people to ‘help’ Charley assimilate into Spanish high society. At the time it had felt as if she were starring in a rags-to-riches film and she’d been happy to embrace the elocution and deportment lessons, the drills on social niceties.

When she was growing up, meals at home had been spent beside her exhausted mum, with trays on their laps in front of the television, the pair of them happily arguing about whatever reality television programme they’d been into at that time. They’d hardly tasted the food. Their one proper meal of the week had come every Sunday when they would go to her grandparents’ for a roast dinner, everyone squashed around the small kitchen table with huge mugs of tea in front of them.

Raul’s world, with meals around a fully laid dining table with jugs of iced water, expensive wine, the savouring of food and the correct order of cutlery...it had been a different world. A fantastical dream come to life. Learning all these new things had been fun! At first.

It had taken a long time for her to realise that Raul had set out from the off to improve her so he could stand beside her without her being an embarrassment to the Cazorla name.

Their whole marriage had been about him moulding her into the sort of woman he believed she should be, the perfect wife he so desired.

She might have missed him terribly these past six hundred and thirty-six days but she had also been able to reclaim herself.

Leaving him had let her breathe again. She didn’t have to introduce herself to people as Charlotte any more. She could simply be who she’d always been: Charley, the name Raul had never once addressed her by.

Whatever happened over these next four months, she would not allow herself to lose sight of who she really was. Charley. Charlotte was merely the name on her birth certificate.

Inside the centre, she was greeted by Karin, a nine-year-old girl who’d been in a car crash as a baby. The crash had killed her father and left her with one functioning lung and severe brain damage. Yet, however locked in her own world Karin seemed, she always appeared to know when Charley was on the rota to work and would hang around the door of the day room until she arrived.

Charley scooped the skinny child up and planted a kiss on her cheek then gently set her back down and took her hand. Karin would be her shadow for the rest of the day, her easy affection something that warmed her heart.

A lump came to her throat as she looked at the dozen children in the day room, many locked in their own worlds, most of them here and alive against all the odds. This was what she was fighting for, these beautiful children. This was what she had to hold onto over the next four months.

For these children she would do anything. Even suffer living with her husband again.

CHAPTER FOUR (#u083b08e9-401d-5c39-87f4-1a2feaa9771b)

RAUL SAT IN his car scowling at his phone. It was almost five-thirty and Charley hadn’t yet come out. Nor was she answering his calls.

He looked at the building again, debating for the tenth time whether or not to go inside and get her. To his eyes the place looked like nothing but a load of concrete blocks slapped together. The only spot of colour was a faded sign above the door that read Poco Rio. Little River. The name would have amused him—for a start, the Turia had run nowhere near this part of Valencia even before the devastating floods of 1957, which had caused the authorities to divert it to skirt the city rather than run through it—but instead he shuddered. Who would want their child to spend their days in a place like this? Far from the sunny exterior most day care centres projected, this building, with its drab grounds...everything about it shouted ‘institution’.

His mind flickered to the care home his father had spent time in after his stroke while his mother had turned a wing of the family home into a facility able to manage his twenty-four-hour needs. That care home had been more akin to a hotel, a beautiful villa set in luscious grounds with first-class staff.

The care home could have been as opulent as the very first Cazorla hotel, built by Raul’s grandfather, Nestor Cazorla, in 1955, and Eduardo Cazorla would still have hated it, even if he couldn’t vocalise his thoughts or feelings. That hotel, built in Madrid, had been a shot in the eye to the Ritzes and Waldorfs of this world, a statement that anything they could do, the Cazorlas could do too.

Under Eduardo’s reign, the Cazorla Hotel Madrid fell from its lofty heights, as did the other thirty-eight hotels in the chain. Investment became a dirty word, Eduardo preferring to spend the dwindling profits on maintaining his lifestyle.

Raul clearly remembered the day when he’d sat down with his father to discuss the shocking decline of the family business. He’d graduated from university with a mile-long list of ideas for improvement. He’d mistakenly thought that gaining a first-class degree from MIT would finally garner his father’s respect. If not respect then at least something more than the distaste that seemed to be his father’s default emotion towards him.

His father had calmly sat at his desk and flipped through the pages and pages of analysis and reports Raul had completed, then, still calm, had walked to his office window, opened it, and thrown the pages out onto the street below.

Then he’d turned back to his son and said, ‘That’s what I think of your ideas.’

After twenty-two years of Raul’s being on the receiving end of his father’s relentless criticism, something inside him had snapped. He’d walked out of his father’s office without a word, returned to the family home, packed his bags, and left, using the small cash inheritance he’d received when Nestor died to rent an apartment and invest in a friend’s fledgling technology business. He’d recouped his investment in three months and immediately set out to invest in another.

He’d spent his entire life striving to be the perfect son his father wanted; now he was going to be the man he wanted to be. What he wanted above all else was to be nothing like his father.

As his business had grown, not once had his father asked any questions about it. Raul had no idea whether he had been pleased or disappointed that his only son had bailed on the family firm. When they had been together as a family no one had spoken of or alluded to it; not even his mother, who came from a wealthy, high-society family in her own right. So long as Raul had still played at being the dutiful son, kept the perfect Cazorla face intact, joined them at important family functions and kept the family name away from the scandal rags that had been good enough for her.

He was pulled out of his reminiscences when a dark blue minibus drove into the grounds and pulled up beside him. He paid little attention to it until he caught the figure getting out of the driver’s side.

While he was processing the image of Charley driving a minibus, she spotted him and, unsmiling, held up a hand and mouthed, ‘Five minutes.’

He shoved his door open. ‘We need to leave now. You’re late enough as it is.’

‘I did warn you,’ she replied with a nonchalant shrug. ‘I need to drop the keys back in and sign off. I won’t be long.’

She hurried off in her jeans-clad legs and disappeared through the double front door.

He could still hardly believe his wife was wearing jeans. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her in a pair before.

When he’d refused to take her back to her house in Valencia the night before, although promising to get her to work on time that morning, she hadn’t argued. He’d been quietly satisfied that she was adapting to his authority well, right until he’d discovered her missing. She’d returned a couple of hours later with a bag of shopping, saying, ‘You can hardly expect me to go to work wearing Chanel.’ Thus she had proceeded to take herself off to one of the spare rooms she’d appropriated for her own use, locked the door, and refused to come out until the morning.

He’d been sorely tempted to kick said door down but had refrained from losing his cool in any fashion. He’d left her alone, dining on marinated fillet of pork while she stayed hungry, stewing in her own righteousness.

Come Friday she would be in his bedroom with him. If she refused, she knew what the consequences would be. No more funds for her pet project.

When she reappeared exactly five minutes later, she got into the car and slammed the door.

‘You’re doing that deliberately, aren’t you?’ he said through gritted teeth.

‘Sorry.’

She didn’t sound in the least bit sorry.

Grinding his teeth some more, he reversed, turned round and drove out of the car park.

‘Why were you driving that thing anyway?’

‘I was taking some of the kids home.’

Now he recalled her mention of her car the day before. ‘When did you pass your driving test?’

‘A year ago.’

‘I always said there was nothing to be frightened of and that you were capable of driving over here.’ She’d learned to drive in England but had never taken a test. Despite all his cajoling and his offer to buy her any car she desired, she’d always flatly refused to get behind the wheel of a car in Spain.

It felt like a slap to know she’d waited until she was out of his life before trying for her licence.

‘You’re always right,’ Charley said shortly, thinking of all the times she’d heard the words ‘I told you’ from his lips, before quickly adding, ‘I needed to be able to drive for the job. We take it in turns to collect the kids and drop them back, at least for the ones whose parents don’t drive.’

Looking back, she couldn’t believe it had taken her so long to take her test. She’d been even more surprised when she’d passed first time. She’d been convinced she was going to fail.

When the examiner had told her she’d passed, her first impulse had been to call Raul and share the news with him. Finally she’d passed something—it had been a heady moment.

‘I assume you charge extra for the taxiing service?’ he said.

She shot him a look. ‘Of course we don’t.’