Marriage Made In Blackmail

He added crushed ice to the concoction he’d put in the cocktail shaker. ‘Benjamin was sent a copy of the contract to read five hours before we all signed it. He didn’t read it.’

Javier had been the point man on the Tour Mont Blanc project and emailed the contract to Benjamin. Luis had been unaware of his twin’s failure to mention the change in the profit terms in that email. When they had gone to his apartment to sign it, the atmosphere had been heavy, the news of Benjamin’s mother overshadowing everything.

Luis had only discovered three months later, at Louise Guillem’s funeral of all days, that Benjamin still thought he would be receiving twenty per cent of the profit. It had been a passing comment during the wake, Benjamin nursing a bottle of Scotch and staring out of his chateau’s window saying he didn’t know how long he would have to keep the wolves from the door and ruefully adding that, if only the Tour Mont Blanc project could be speeded up and he had his twenty per cent profit now, all his money troubles would be over.

Luis had had many arguments with his brother through the years but that had been the closest they had ever come to physical blows. Javier had been immovable: Benjamin should have read the contract.

His twin was completely hard-nosed when it came to business. Luis was generally hard-hearted when it came to business too. They weren’t running a charity, they were in the business of making money and at the time their bank balance had been perilously close to zero.

But Benjamin had been their oldest friend and Luis had been very much aware that Benjamin’s frame of mind on the day of the signing had been anywhere but on the contract.

With Javier digging his heels in, Luis had decided that it would only cause bad feeling and acrimony if he told Benjamin the truth. It had been better for everyone that Luis wait for Tour Mont Blanc, a project that would take years, to be completed and for all the money to be in the bank before speaking to Benjamin man-to-man about it and forging a private agreement on the matter.

‘He didn’t read it because he was cut up about our mother. He trusted you. He had no idea the terms had been changed. He signed that contract in good faith.’ Chloe’s eyes were fixed on his, ringed with loathing. ‘He gave you the last of his cash savings. That investment meant he couldn’t afford to buy the chateau outright and he had to get a huge mortgage to pay for it so our mother could end her days there. He almost lost everything in the aftermath. You took his money then watched him struggle to stop himself from drowning.’

‘We were not in a position to help him. It gives me no pleasure to admit this but we were in as dire a financial situation as Benjamin was. We’d grown too big too soon and over-extended massively. The difference between us and Benjamin was that Benjamin saw no shame in admitting it. We did, and I am only sharing this with you so you understand that I’m not the treacherous bastard you think I am. At that time we were all trying to save ourselves from drowning. I’d always had it in the back of my mind that when the Tour Mont Blanc project was complete I would come to a private agreement with Benjamin and pay him the extra profit he felt he was due...’

‘You didn’t do that though, did you? The first he knew of it was when he saw the final accounts!’

‘I’d been overseeing a project in Brazil. Javier sent the accounts before I had the chance to talk to Benjamin about it. I flew back for Javier’s engagement party and your brother came in all guns blazing firing libellous accusations at us. Call it human nature, call it bull-headedness but when someone threatens me my instinct is to fight back. I admit, ugly words were exchanged that day—we were all on the defensive, all of us, your brother included. He would not discuss things reasonably...’

‘Why should he have?’ She stared at him like a beautiful, proudly defiant elfin princess, arms folded belligerently across her ample chest, as sexy a creature as could be imagined.

Luis still struggled to comprehend how he’d been oblivious to her beauty for all those months or how he could be standing there with the woman who had conspired against him and his twin and find his blood still pumping wildly for her. He didn’t know which need he wanted to satisfy the most: the need to avenge himself or the need to throw her onto the nearest soft furnishing and take that delectable body as his own.

Soon he would do both. He would screw her over in more ways than one.

‘Humans respond better to reason. Fight or flight, bonita. Benjamin made threats, we dug our heels in, then he hit us with the lawsuit and we had no choice but to defend ourselves. But I still had sympathy for his position. In truth it is something that hadn’t sat well with me for many years. I’d hoped to speak to him privately and come to an agreement once the litigation was over with and tempers had cooled and we could speak as rational men. Legally, I had nothing to prove. Javier and I had done nothing wrong and that’s been vindicated in a court of law.’

‘If you really believed that, why take the injunction out on him?’

‘Because there has been enough rubbish in the past two decades about my family. Do you have any idea how hard it is being Yuri Abramova and Clara Casillas’s sons?’ Luis downed his cocktail and grimaced at the bitter taste that perfectly matched his mood.

He tipped the glass he’d filled for Chloe down the bar’s sink and reached for a fresh cocktail shaker.

‘We are the sons of a famous wife killer,’ he continued as he set about making a more palatable cocktail, one that would hopefully wash away the bile lodged in his throat. ‘It is one of the most infamous murders in the past century. There have been documentaries made about it, books and endless newspaper articles. A Hollywood studio wanted to make a movie about it. Can you imagine that? They wanted to turn my mother’s death at the hands of my father into entertainment.’

Chloe tried her hardest not to allow sympathy to creep through her but it was hard. Luis’s past was something that never failed to make her heart twist and tears burn her eyes. She blinked them back now as she imagined the vulnerable thirteen-year-old he would have been.

She had been only three when Luis’s mother had been murdered, far too young to have any memories of it.

But she had been there.

Clara had been performing in London on the night of her murder in a production of Romeo & Juliet. Yuri, a ballet dancer who had defected from the old USSR in the seventies and whose career had gone into freefall, had watched the performance convinced his wife was having a real-life affair with Romeo. When the performance had ended, Yuri had locked Clara in her dressing room, preventing dancers and backstage staff from entering when the screams and shouts had first rung out.

By the time they’d smashed the door open, Clara was dead, Yuri’s hands still around her throat.

Luis and Javier had been in the hotel across the road from the theatre babysitting Chloe with Benjamin.

Chloe and Benjamin’s mother, Louise, who had loved the twins fiercely, had been the one to break the terrible news to them.

He poured the fresh cocktail into two clean glasses. ‘Imagine what it has been like for us growing up with that as our marker. We are hugely successful and rich beyond our wildest dreams but still people look at us and their first thought is our parents. You see it in their eyes, curiosity and fear.’

He pushed one of the glasses towards her and put the other to his lips. He took a sip and pulled a musing face. ‘Not too bad. Better than the last one but I think I’ll stick to construction and property developing.’ He took another sip. ‘As I was saying. My parents. A legacy we have tried hard to escape from while still honouring our mother.’

‘Is that why you took her surname?’ The question came before she could hold it back. It was something she’d been intensely curious about for years.

‘We took it because neither of us could endure living with our father’s name. We have worked hard to disassociate ourselves from that man and to make our mother’s name synonymous with the beauty of her dance and not the horror of her death, but now everything has been dredged up again and you are partly responsible. Our lives are back under the media’s lens and again we find the world wondering how much of our father’s murderous blood lives in our veins.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘We took out the injunction to stop this very thing from happening because we knew Benjamin was an explosive primed to detonate. We are close to signing a deal to build a new shopping complex in Canada. Our partner in this venture has stopped returning our calls.’

‘Then he’s a smart man who knows he will be ripped off.’

The flash of anger that rippled from Luis’s eyes was enough to make her quail.

‘We did not rip him off and if anyone says otherwise we will sue the clothes off their back.’

‘You ripped my brother off,’ she said defiantly. ‘Feel free to sue me. I would love my day in court.’

‘I have a much better way of dealing with you, bonita, but as for your brother, I will not say this again—we did not rip him off. I was going to get the gala out of the way and then call him but, instead, Benjamin stole Freya and tried to blackmail us. All my sympathy left me then. As far as I’m concerned, your brother can go to hell. The press speculation his actions have wrought are untenable. My assistant found comments on a newspaper website querying whether Freya ran off with Benjamin because she feared she would end up like my mother.’

Chloe winced. She had many issues with Luis and Javier but they could no more help their parentage than she could help hers. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘I’m glad you think so because you are going to help put things right. If you hadn’t called with your tale of terror I would have been at the gala before Benjamin stepped foot inside it. None of this would have happened.’

‘He believed you owed him two hundred and twenty-five million euros,’ she spat, her fleeting compassion overridden by anger. ‘Did you expect him to roll over and accept that? Did you expect me to? I was there with him at the hospital when you made that call begging for his help and his money.’

She’d been there, at the first turn of the wheel of the whole mess.

Chloe had been sitting on a bench in the hospital garden with her big brother, both of them dazed; her crying, he ashen, both struggling to comprehend the mother they loved so much was going to die. That was when Benjamin had received the call from Luis asking for his financial help.

‘If you felt Javier had been cheated would you sit there meekly and allow it to go unchallenged when there was something practical you could do to help?’

‘Probably not.’ He shrugged. ‘But would I have conspired to kidnap a woman and hold her to ransom...? No, I would not have gone that far if the first throw of the dice had not already been rolled.’

‘I did not conspire to kidnap Freya! I helped whisk her away from a potential marriage made in hell and...’

‘Is that how you justify it to yourself? I must remember to dress my actions up in a similar fashion when I tell you that you won’t be returning to port until you have married me.’

CHAPTER THREE (#ub13f7c78-3983-5e82-ba0a-fbdbc8f07f54)

FOR A MOMENT there was an intense buzzing in Chloe’s ears. She shook her head to clear it, being careful not to take her eyes from Luis, who was now leaning forward with his elbows on the bar.

‘What are you talking about?’

His eyes were intense on hers. ‘I’ve not kidnapped you, I’ve borrowed you. Would that be how it’s said? Is that how I can justify it?’

‘No, what was that rubbish about marrying me?’

‘That? That’s the next stage. If you want to go home you have to marry me first. But let us not call it blackmail. By your logic it will be...an incentive? How does that sound?’