The information had been methodically researched and laid out, comprehensively covering all that would be required for him to make a decision on whether to go with her designs or not, and what it would cost him if he did. It was as thorough and as professional as her artistic vision was brilliant.
Numbly, he went on staring at Talia’s work, his thoughts in chaos.
* * *
‘Buenas tardes!’ Talia smiled cheerfully at another customer arriving at the busy café.
She was glad it was busy because it gave her no time for thoughts of Luke. Run off her feet, she could keep her misery at bay. Only in the long reaches of the night, attempting to sleep on the settee in the sitting room of the tiny flat above the café, her mother in the single bedroom, would it devour her in muffled, useless sobs.
What use was crying? But that didn’t stop her from doing it anyway.
Instead she must focus on her work: serving customers with drinks and relaying the dishes emerging from the kitchen, where Maria’s nephew Pepe was in charge, and keeping an eye on her mother, who sat at a small desk off to one side and, to Talia’s continuing astonishment, pored assiduously over the café’s accounts.
‘Darling, I’m good at accounts—you know I had to justify every penny I spent to your father!’
Talia did remember bleakly how her father had interrogated her own costings, brutally knocking off anything that he’d thought she’d overspent on, taking it out of the allowance he paid her instead of a salary.
But she shouldn’t let herself think of that, because that made her remember how enthusiastically she’d worked out the costings for the ruined Caribbean hotel. Anguish tore at her—and not just for the waste of her efforts. For a reason so much more unendurable.
But endure it she must—and so she hurried back out to the pavement tables to take orders there.
The café was in a side street of this busy tourist town, with nothing to remind her of the showy glitz of Marbella and Puerto Banus. Which was why the logo on the side of a delivery van turning into the road caught her eye. It was that of an upmarket courier company she remembered from the days when expensive items had used to be routinely delivered to the Marbella villa.
The driver was getting out, looking uncertainly at the modest café. ‘I am looking for Señorita Grantham,’ he said to her, his voice doubtful. In his hand he held a small package.
Talia stared, then walked slowly forward. She took the package and signed for it with a confused frown. Her heart started to beat heavily, and on impulse she tore at the packaging. Then, as the tell-tale contents were revealed, confirmed by the glittering river of fire as she lifted the hinged lid of the box, she gave a cry of revulsion.
Slamming the lid back down, she dashed to the driver, who was climbing back into his van. ‘Take it back!’ She thrust the package at him. ‘I don’t want it! Take it back!’
She whirled away, her heart slugging with a furious hammering. She bolted back inside the café, her face black with anger. Bleak with it.
That’s all he ever thought I was: a silly, spoiled princess who wanted rubies from him.
The pain of it pierced her like a blade in her heart—her stupid, stupid heart.
* * *
Luke was in his office in Lucerne, sunlight bathing the high peaks visible from the windows. But he did not see them. His entire attention was focussed on what was being said to him on his phone.
‘It was refused?’ he snapped. ‘And what the hell do you mean, the villa was empty? It can’t have been!’ He drew a sharp breath. ‘Then where—?’ He listened. ‘What? They were located where?’
He dropped the phone on to the huge mahogany desk, still staring, uncomprehending.
I told her she could stay another three months.
So why, when she had got exactly what she’d come begging for, would she have vacated the villa after all? His frown deepened, lines indenting around his mouth grimly. And why the hell had she ended up in some dump of a café in a cut-price tourist town, waiting on tables?
Why leave the villa? Why end up in a dump instead? And why, above all, refuse the damn rubies I sent her?
That bracelet was worth thousands. To refuse it when she had been reduced to waiting on tables... It didn’t make sense.
A space hollowed out inside him, as if a skewer had ground it from him.
But then, nothing about her made sense. Nothing at all.
Dimly, he became aware that his phone was ringing again, and he snatched it up. Only pre-screened calls came through on this line, so his PA must have cleared the caller. And when he answered it, he knew why. He listened with a gradual steeling of his body, his expression grim.
Then, as the call came to an end, he simply nodded. ‘Good,’ he said.