He pulled two china cups out of the cupboard, placing one in the slot of the machine. ‘I’m sorry I dismissed your plans the other day.’
Her heart jolted at this unexpected apology. She hadn’t thought the word sorry was in his vocabulary.
‘That’s okay,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I’m used to it.’
He looked at her curiously. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You used to cross-examine me about everything to do with my businesses. I always knew you didn’t take my plans or ideas seriously.’
‘I took them seriously enough to give you a lot of money to pay for them.’
She sighed. ‘But I always knew you were humouring me.’
Raul punched the button on the machine at the same moment a swell of anger cut through him. ‘I was not humouring you. I wanted you to succeed and I believed you could. But, Charlotte, you left school without any qualifications. All I did was give you the benefit of my knowledge and experience. It was when you chose to ignore my advice that your businesses floundered.’
It had been hard for him to watch her throw them all away, discarding them as if they were toys that had lost their sparkle after their first few uses. But he’d kept his patience, as hard as it had been. A part of him had admired her guts in dusting herself off and starting again.
It wasn’t until he’d lost that tolerance and witnessed her immediate horrified refusal to have a child that he’d realised her businesses had failed because she’d treated them like toys. They’d been something for her to play with so she could put off the moment she confessed to not wanting his child that bit longer, enabling her to milk him and their lifestyle for all it was worth.
He’d understood all this the night she’d left him and still he’d asked her to stay.
What sickened him more than anything was knowing he would have taken her back, right up until the divorce papers had landed on his doorstep.
He’d almost lost control of himself that day too, had taken his car for a drive, not knowing where he was going and somehow ending up in Valencia. Before he’d known it, he’d been at the street listed on the divorce papers.
The fog had lifted and he’d slammed on his brakes before he could seek her house out, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin.
He was certain the tyre marks at the entrance of her street had been made by him when he’d spun the Lotus round and screeched away.
Thinking about how she’d played him sent another spike of fury through him. He tempered it by the skin of his teeth.
‘It was hard for me,’ she said quietly, leaning against the wall by the door and folding her arms across her chest. ‘I was desperate to impress you.’
‘What for? You were my wife. I wouldn’t have married you if I wasn’t already impressed by you.’
‘You were impressed with my body,’ she answered with a hard laugh.
‘It was more than that and you know it,’ he cut in. ‘I admired your spirit.’ Something which, he had to admit now he thought of it, had disappeared during the latter years of their marriage.
How had he not noticed?
Seeing that spirit return now, that zinging feistiness, sent the most peculiar feeling of déjà vu tearing through him.
‘I wanted you to be impressed with my mind and my abilities,’ she said, a rueful twinge to her voice. ‘But it was so much harder than I thought it would be. Call me naïve but I wanted to do things my own way, to prove I could do it, but I put so much pressure on myself that I crumbled. It didn’t help that I didn’t speak the language.’
‘You’ve mastered it well enough since we separated.’ He’d employed a tutor to help her with Spanish but after a few months she’d put a stop to the lessons, saying they were too hard. Like driving a car, she’d mastered Spanish after she’d left him and without his help. ‘I suppose reading Marta’s books helped.’
‘Not much. It was working at Poco Rio that really did it. The kids hardly speak Spanish never mind English so I had to learn fast if I wanted them to understand me.’
Raul didn’t answer, his teeth clenching together as they always did whenever he thought of her surrounded by small children on a daily basis.
Charley loved children.
But not as much as she loved money...
Was that really true? All the evidence pointed to her leading a frugal existence without him. And she hadn’t asked for any money for herself...
She’d lapsed into silence, her head bowed. Then suddenly she lifted her chin and stared at him with enough force to keep his focus on her and not the coffee machine.
‘Marrying you was all wrong,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘You were the shining star turning the family business from silver into gold—everything you touched turned into gold. Everything I touched turned into rust. I couldn’t compete.’