Marriage Made In Blackmail

Luis Casillas’s deep, playful voice echoed into her ear. ‘Good evening, Chloe. I hope you are safe wherever you are and have not been kidnapped by a gang of marauding youths. You might wish you had been though because I will find you. And when I do...’ Here, he chuckled malevolently. ‘You will wish you had never crossed me. Sleep well, bonita.’

It was the emphasis on his final word rather than the implied threat that lifted the hairs on her arms.

Bonita.

The first time he had called her that she had thought she would never stop smiling.

Now she was overcome with the urge to cry.

He was not worth her tears, the two-faced, treacherous, conniving, evil bastard.

Thank goodness she’d had the sense to resist his offer of a nightcap...

Chloe downed the rest of her champagne and grimaced.

It hadn’t been sense that had stopped her accepting his offer or his goodnight kiss. It had been fear.

Her date with Luis had given her a sense of joy she hadn’t felt since her early childhood where she had spent innocent, happy days climbing trees and running around with friends, cocooned with love, blissfully unaware life could be anything other than wonderful. Luis was tied up in those memories.

Once upon a time she had been smitten with him.

She’d wanted to be sure his feelings for her were genuine and that he wasn’t looking at her only as a potential conquest. As hard as it was, she’d wanted to trust him. She’d wanted his respect.

At the end of their date when his nose had rubbed against hers and every ounce of her being had strained on an invisible leash to escape her brain and kiss him, she had almost given in. She’d spent their entire date imagining him naked, something she’d blamed on the erotic dream she’d had of him the night before but which she’d known, deep down, was her own hidden sexuality breaking free for this man who’d stolen into her teenage heart and now demanded to be heard.

What had she been thinking?

Luis had no respect.

He had made a mockery of her brother’s trust in him and by extension made a mockery of her and her dead mother. He was as bad, no, worse, than her pathetic father.

She knew his brother was equally culpable for ripping her brother off but Javier hadn’t been the one to embrace her tightly at her mother’s funeral and promise that one day the pain would get better. That had been Luis. Witty, sexy, fun-loving Luis, the only man who had ever captured her feminine attention. The only man in her twenty-five years she had ever dreamed of.

Whatever Benjamin had planned for him could not come soon enough.

The board on the wall with the constantly updated list of all departures and arrivals showed her own flight was now boarding.

Hurrying to her feet, Chloe made her way to the departure gate.

Now she knew what Luis Casillas was capable of she had to take his threat to hunt her down seriously.

Only when she looked out of the window of her first-class seat on the flight paid for by her brother and watched Madrid shrink from view did her lungs loosen enough to breathe easily.

Luis thought he’d be able to find her? Well, good luck to him. She would be the needle to his haystack.

* * *

The Grand Bahaman suburb of Lucaya was, Chloe could not stop thinking, a paradise. Her brother had set her up in a villa in an exclusive complex where all her needs and whims were taken care of and all she had to worry about was keeping her sun lotion topped up.

She had spent her first six days there doing nothing but lazing by the swimming pool and refreshing her social media feeds, her worries slowly evaporating under the blazing sun. As far as boltholes went, this was the best. It had exclusivity but also, should Luis carry out his threat to hunt her down, the comfort of safety in numbers.

She doubted he was sparing her a moment of his thoughts. The fallout in Madrid and the rest of Europe was growing in intensity. Chloe read all the news and gossip torn between glee and heartbreak.

It should never have come to this. Luis and Javier should have done the right thing and paid her brother the money they owed him, all two hundred and twenty-five million euros of it.

Seven years ago, on the day Chloe and her brother were told their mother’s cancer was terminal, Luis had called Benjamin for his help, dressing it up as an investment opportunity.

The Casillas brothers had paid a large deposit on some prime real-estate in Paris that they intended to build a skyscraper on that would eclipse all others. The owner of the land had suddenly demanded they pay the balance immediately or he would sell to another interested party. He’d given them until midnight. The Casillas brothers did not have the money. Benjamin did.

He gave them the cash, which amounted to twenty per cent of the total asking price. It was an eye-watering sum.

Tour Mont Blanc, as the skyscraper became known, took seven years to complete. Two months ago, Benjamin had received his copy of the final accounts. That was when he realised he’d been duped. The contract he’d signed, which he’d believed stated his profit share to be twenty per cent as had been verbally agreed between him and the Casillas brothers, had, unbeknown to him, been altered before he signed. He was entitled to only five per cent of the profit.

His oldest, closest friends had ripped him off. They’d taken advantage of him at his lowest point. They’d abused his trust.

When they’d refused to accept any wrongdoing Benjamin had taken them to court. Not only had he lost but the brothers had rubbed salt in the wound by hitting him with an injunction that forbade him from speaking out about any aspect of it.

Chloe would never have believed Luis could be so cold. Javier, absolutely, the man was colder than an ice sculpture, but Luis had always been warm.

Now the press was alive with speculation. Benjamin whisking Javier’s prima ballerina fiancée away from the Casillas brothers’ gala and marrying her days later had the rumour mill circling like an amphetamine-fed hamster on a wheel. An intrepid American journalist had discovered the existence of the injunction and now that injunction was backfiring. So far only the injunction itself was known about but a frenzy of speculation had broken out about the cause of it, none of it casting the Casillas brothers in a favourable light.

Let them be the ones to deal with it, Chloe thought defiantly, shoving her beach bag over her shoulder and slipping on her sparkly flip-flops. She was safe here in the Bahamas and her brother was safely cocooned with Freya in his chateau.

Leaving the tranquillity of the complex for only the third time since her arrival a week ago, she spent an enjoyable fifteen minutes strolling in the early-morning sun to Port Lucaya, very much looking forward to a day of island hopping on the complex owner’s yacht.

The invitation had been hand delivered by the manager the evening before, the man explaining it was an excursion the owner provided for favoured guests whenever she visited. A guest had been taken ill so the invitation was Chloe’s if she wanted it. Thinking she couldn’t come to much harm if it was a woman hosting the event—she’d read too many horror stories about young women and rich men on yachts to have been comfortable with it being run by a rich male stranger—she had been delighted to accept. She couldn’t spend a fortnight in the Bahamas hiding away.

Chloe liked to keep busy. She liked to be with people. Being alone with only her thoughts for company meant too much time to think. Better to let the past stay where it was by always looking forward and keeping her mind busy and her life full.

She found the port easily, the pristine yachts lined up in the small bay an excellent giveaway. Opposite it was the Port Lucaya Marketplace she’d heard so much about and which she had promised herself a visit to. Looking at the quaint colourful tourist trap bustling with life and exotic scents brought a big smile to her face. She would go there tomorrow.

Turning her attention back to the yachts, Chloe scanned them carefully, looking for the one named Marietta. Her excitement rose when she finally located it. At least four decks high, the Marietta was the biggest and most luxurious-looking of the lot. Not quite cruise-ship size, it looked big enough to accommodate dozens of guests with room to spare.

But where was everyone? The metal walkway for passengers to board had been lowered but she saw and heard none of the sounds and sights you would expect of a large party going off on an all-inclusive day trip.

As she hesitated over whether to step onto the walkway, a figure wearing what she assumed was captain attire appeared on deck.

‘Good morning,’ he said, approaching her with a welcoming smile. ‘Miss Guillem?’

She nodded.

‘I am Captain Andrew Brand. Let me show you in. I’ll give you the mandatory safety talk as we go.’

Chloe joined him on the gleaming yacht with a grin that only got wider as he showed off the magnificent vessel, pointing out the bar, swimming pool and hot tub on the next deck up, then taking her inside.

This yacht had everything, she thought in awe as she tried her hardest to pay attention to what she was being shown and told.

After showing her the Finnish sauna that had a window looking straight out to sea, he took her to the top deck to what was appropriately named ‘the sky lounge’ and left her with a young woman with tightly curled hair who made her a cocktail of coconut blended with mango and rum and served it in the coconut shell with a straw. This stretched Chloe’s smile so wide her mouth must have reached her ears. She enjoyed it so much she readily accepted a second, then took a seat on one of the plentiful cappuccino-coloured leather seats encircling the lounge.