‘In which case, if those are your sentiments, I will bid you goodnight.’
He turned on his heel and walked into the hotel. His pace was neither hurried nor slow.
He was gone.
Alone on the pavement in the chill spring night, Portia stood, face frozen, everything frozen.
Slowly, jerkily, she started to walk.
Diego Saez strode down the black and white squared hallway, away from the hotel lobby towards the bar. He walked in and up to the bar. The barman took one look at him and was there instantly.
‘Whisky.’
There was a nerve working in his cheek.
A single malt was soon in front of him and he lifted the glass and knocked it back in one.
An image burned in his head.
Not of Portia Lanchester.
Another woman.
Chic, immaculately dressed, with inky blue hair coiled like a snake at the back of her head. Her lips were very red.
Her eyes were black, as black as sin. Nothing like the cool, cutting grey of Portia Lanchester.
But the expression in them was the same.
Disdain. Revulsion. Horror.
He heard the voice in his head again.
‘You? The son of Carmita? It isn’t possible!’
A stream of Spanish had followed. Foul, insulting, vicious. Her heavily beringed hand, flashing with diamonds and emeralds, had flown up, pointing dramatically to the door.
‘Get out! Get out or I’ll have you thrown out!’
Above everything from that scene, everything he remembered in coruscating detail, it was that—the absolute disbelief in Mercedes de Carvello’s voice. She had been completely, totally unable to believe that the son of her maid had returned—through her own front door, walking into her drawing room—and told her that he now owned the estancia.
It had been the sweetest moment of his life.
And the most bitter.
For it had come too late for the two people for whom he had bought the estancia. His father—dead for fifteen years of a cancer caused by the carcinogenic agents knowingly used on the estancia’s banana plantations—and his mother, fatally knocked down on the estancia drive by Mercedes herself in her sports car, which she’d been driving at eighty miles an hour with a bottle of champagne inside her.
And that bitterness had made him stand there while Mercedes de Carvello, who had treated each and every one of the myriad staff who’d served her like the dirt she’d thought them, had tried to throw him from the house he had once never even been allowed to enter. But now, thanks to his own punishingly hard escape from the poverty he’d been born to, and thanks to the stupid, reckless extravagance of her dead husband Esteban de Carvello, he owned it—every last inch of it—and the vast estate that went with it.
His to do with as he liked. Whatever he liked.
A place Mercedes de Carvello no longer had any right to be.
Just as she had once told a twelve-year-old boy, his mown-down mother hardly cold in her grave, that he had no right to be there any more. She had thrown him off the estate, banning all the other workers from helping him. For he had dared, dared to call her a murderess to her face for killing his mother.
He had left, taking nothing with him—for he possessed nothing, she had told him—and had walked the long, weary miles, day after day, week after week, to the city, his feet bleeding, the flesh hanging from his bones, starving like so many other unwanted, surplus, valueless boys in his home country.
Taking with him nothing but the burning, punishing desire for justice.