He glanced down at his drink, his muscles tightening as the memory of that phone call echoed in his head.
“Cabrera Shipping is losing money, Alejandro. Fix it.”A heavy sigh.“Or I’ll have to fix it for you.”
“I mentioned we’re behind on construction, yes?”
“Yes. Two ships?”
“Yes. By about a month on one and three on another. It may not seem like much, but four weeks behind means two to three trips down the drain. Millions upon millions of dollars in cargo going to other shippers.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. Unfortunate,” he added with a flippancy he didn’t feel. “But the loss has, understandably, made stakeholders and the board nervous. Convincing them to spend more money on renovating an aging ship when we just lost so much and saw clients move, at least temporarily, to other companies is not an easy feat.” He leaned into the plush cushions of his seat and closed his eyes as the enormity of the task before him weighed on his shoulders. “My father, the majority stakeholder, does not support the alternative use ofLa Reina. He holds considerable influence over the board. If they vote no on this proposal, Cabrera Shipping will no longer be mine.”
“That seems harsh.”
He shrugged, the casual gesture masking decades of pain. “He’s not a kind man. I see the loss in revenue as a temporary setback. He sees it as a catastrophic blow to our bottom line. Not that he was a fan of my idea aboutLa Reinato begin with. In his mind it’s further evidence that I have no head for business. I’m squandering company finances to create a playground for the rich.”
Sentiments his father had expressed multiple times over the last few weeks. Thankfully, the comments had been delivered over the phone so Javier couldn’t see the effect his lack of faith had on his middle son.
Ridiculous, really. Alejandro loathed his father. Had for over twenty years now. His opinion shouldn’t matter.
Silence. At last, he opened his eyes. Calandra stared out the window at the ground passing by, one hand resting lightly on her belly.
Despite the warmth of the afternoon, she wore her customary black. Slashes of black eyeliner reminded him of war paint instead of makeup.
Still, she’d softened since he’d last seen her. He’d first glimpsed it on the Eiffel Tower yesterday, but now he saw it in more vivid detail. Perhaps it was the gentle curve of her lips as her fingers traced back and forth over her stomach. Or maybe it was the occasional flashes of emotion he caught on her face, glimpses into the woman who’d seduced him with her intelligence and no-nonsense attitude.
“Why do you want to repurposeLa Reina?”
An innocent question he wanted to answer glibly. But she sounded like she truly wanted to know, a notion that made his chest swell with pride.
“La Reinawas the first ship I sailed on when I took over.” He could still taste the salt of the sea the first time the bow had carved through the waves of the Atlantic. His first bit of freedom from the confines of the persona he’d trapped himself in. “Helped out on the crew to understand how everything worked. She’s thirty years old, which is ancient in cargo ship years. But it’s hard to picture the old girl being sailed off to a graveyard and stripped down to nothing.”
“That’s an expensive endeavor for the sake of nostalgia.”
“Nostalgia’s part of it,” he conceded. “But I want Cabrera Shipping to go in a new direction. Our latest ships are being constructed to meet new environmental standards. I wantLa Reinato be a part of that trend, not contributing to waste but being reused.”
An unexpected wistfulness crossed Calandra’s face. “I wasn’t expecting that sort of viewpoint from someone so...”
“So what?”
Naked pain flashed in her eyes before she shut down, misty silver shifting to steel gray in a heartbeat. Her fingers clenched around the armrest for the briefest of moments before he saw her intentionally relax her body and recline back.
“Someone who views people as inconsequential, playthings to be discarded when they cease being interesting.”
The harsh remark hit him hard. He started to retort, to snap out a comment that both covered his pain and delivered a blow of his own, but stopped. Unlike his father, her words weren’t designed to hurt. They were coming from a different place, something rooted in Calandra’s past.
“Do you truly think that of me?”
She continued to stare, so intensely that he had to stop himself from shifting in his seat beneath her perusal.
“I don’t know what to think,” she finally said. The coldness slipped, and he got a glimpse of vulnerability in the crinkling of her eyes, the little V between her brows. “One minute I think I have you figured out and the next...”
She blinked and the vulnerability disappeared. “Tell me more about the event. What you want to accomplish, what you envision, what still needs to be done.”
So, he did. He talked for what felt like forever, though a glance at his watch revealed it had only been thirty minutes or so. No one, not even the board members who supportedLa Reina, had shown as much interest as Calandra did.
It was unsettling, the way she watched him so attentively. Like she could see everything about him. The women he’d dated the past year had been the exact opposite. They’d never looked past his money, the fancy cars or the glamorous vacations he whisked them off to on his private jet.