‘THAT’S going a bit far, but I do think you have … potential. And I really don’t think you want to get into the game of assigning guilt because if you did the subject of your father’s loose grasp of the most basic rules of business arise.’
Rafael’s scorn stung Libby. ‘My father is twice the man you will ever be!’
He appeared unperturbed by the charge. ‘Possibly,’ he conceded.
‘And it’s not Dad’s fault, a lot of businesses are suffering, it’s the economic downturn, he just needed time—’
‘To do what? Play another round of golf?’
Libby reacted angrily to the scorn in his voice. ‘My father blames himself for what has happened. He feels responsible for the people who are losing their jobs.’
‘He is right to blame himself,’ Rafael, who had studied the numbers, retorted.
Libby responded with protective anger. ‘If my father is such a loser why did your grandfather have faith in him?’
‘I am sure he had his reasons.’
The contempt etched into his face made her see red. ‘None that you’d understand,’ she flung back. ‘Your grandfather was a decent man. It’s a pity you didn’t inherit some of his integrity.’
During the short static silence that followed her outburst Libby watched the muscle in his lean cheek clenching. She could actually not take her eyes off it—or him.
His expression was like stone as he turned and began to walk over to the big antique desk that dominated the room.
Libby watched him warily, mystified as much about the suppressed emotions he was emanating as his actions. Her bewilderment deepened as he took a key from his pocket and, without a word, fitted it to a drawer in the desk.
His dark lashes lay across the sharp angle of his jutting cheekbones, effectively screening his expression from her curious gaze. Frustrated, Libby watched as he appeared to scan the top sheet of the sheaf of papers he extracted from the drawer. She started slightly as he turned on his heel and began to walk back across the room towards her with them in his hand.
There was a pronounced sneer of distaste stamped on his lean patrician features as Rafael dropped the papers in her lap. ‘This is my grandfather’s integrity,’ he drawled. ‘Go on, take a look,’ he urged. ‘I think you will find it educational.’
Libby stared at the papers. ‘I don’t understand.’ Her face lifted to his. ‘What are they?’
‘It is a contract between my grandfather and a development company.’
She gave a bewildered shrug. ‘What has that got to do with me?’
Rafael leaned across and, turning to the second typed page, he stabbed his forefinger on the relevant word. ‘Does that look familiar?’ he asked, lifting his hand away.
Pushing the damp curls from her face with one hand, she looked down at the passage he had pointed to. ‘Is all this mystery stuff really necessary?’ She picked up the papers and waved them at him. ‘Why can’t you just say what is so …?’
A word on a fluttering page caught her attention and Libby stopped mid-sentence, snatching the page in question free of the binder.
‘How … how is this possible? The house … What—’ she demanded in a quavering voice ‘—is this?’ She lifted her gaze, her eyes brushing his before dropping back to the paper.
‘It is an agreement drawn up between my grandfather and a development company signed, sealed and just awaiting the signatures. Unfortunately for Aldo he died before he had a chance to call in the loan he gave your father, which had always been his intention.’
Pale as paper, Libby shook her head in a negative motion of rejection. ‘No!’
The muscles along Rafael’s strong jaw tightened as he drew in a shuddering breath through flared nostrils. Her refusal to abandon her belief in his grandfather’s integrity and her readiness to assign the worst possible motives to him evoked a seething frustration.
Libby’s fingers trembled as she turned a page, and she gasped when she saw the figure that leapt out at her. ‘But it’s not worth that much—nowhere near,’ she protested as she breathed through a wave of nausea.
Rafael met her startled gaze and provided a simple explanation for the staggering amount on the page.
‘With planning permission for an out-of-town shopping complex a formality, it is worth that much … almost certainly more. My grandfather had an over-inflated opinion of his ability but any half-decent businessman would have got a better price.’
Libby, white-faced and shaking with the impact of these revelations, struggled to take on board this information. The home she had loved was to be turned into a shopping centre?
‘They want to knock down our house?’ If this was true, did Rafael plan to follow through with this diabolical scheme? ‘But this can’t be right. Your grandfather was helping Dad—he was his friend.’
‘My grandfather never put friendship ahead of profit in his life. When he offered your father a loan he knew that he would be unable to repay it and your father didn’t examine Aldo’s motives too deeply because he wanted an easy way out, and not one that required any sacrifice or work on his part. He is a lazy man who inherited a healthy business and ran it into the ground. He enjoyed seeing his name on the letterhead that appears to have been the limit of his enthusiasm.’
‘My father put his family ahead of his work.’ Unlike some of her friends’ fathers, her dad had always been there; he never worked late.
‘Your father put everything ahead of his work.’ Libby, shaking her head, lowered her gaze.
There was some sympathy in his eyes as he studied her downbent head. ‘You know what I’m saying is true.’
Libby compressed her lips and felt guilty as hell because he was right; she had recognised that there was a grain of truth in his accusations. ‘At least my dad wasn’t a crook!’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘And he’s not a callous bastard like you.’
‘Oh, my grandfather never did anything illegal.’ Aware that the charge of callousness had been aimed at him, Rafael did not attempt to deny the charge.
Her eyes shot wide. ‘And you think that makes it all right? How proud your grandfather must have been of you. A regular chip off the old block,’ she jeered.
Unprepared for his reaction to her words, Libby physically recoiled from the lick of white-hot rage she glimpsed in his compelling deep-set eyes. But more disturbing than this was the low, almost feral sound that was dragged from Rafael’s throat. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
‘I was nothing to him, and he was less than nothing to me.’ Nostrils flared, he snapped his fingers expressively.
Conscious that she had inadvertently hit a nerve, Libby knew the sensible thing would be to back off; instead she heard herself say belligerently, ‘It looks to me like you had no problem steeping into his shoes.’
‘I inherited nothing from my grandfather.’
Libby, who could not let this pass unchallenged, gave a snort and waved an accusing arm around the big room. ‘Nothing except all this.’ Her scornful gaze settled back on his lean face. ‘You’re such a hypocrite!’ she charged contemptuously. ‘A pathetic hypocrite!’
A look of utter astonishment crossed his features that on another occasion might have made her laugh.
‘What’s wrong?’ she taunted. ‘You can dish it out but you can’t take it?’
His eyes narrowed on her face. ‘Try me.’ He accompanied the invitation with a ‘bring it on’ gesture.
Libby, her eyes narrowed, obliged. ‘Where do you get off criticising my dad, looking down your nose at him for inheriting his money, when compared to the silver spoon you were born with—’
‘I was not born with a silver spoon.’
The harsh rebuttal drew a laugh from Libby. ‘No, solid gold.’
‘It happens to be true. My grandfather did not choose to acknowledge my existence until two years ago.’
Libby’s blue eyes flew wide. ‘Why—what did you do?’
‘I was born.’ He arched a sardonic brow and studied the face turned up to him. ‘Not so colourful a sin as you were anticipating, I suspect.’
Libby gave an uncomfortable shrug and felt foolish as she heard him add heavily, ‘But one that in my grandfather’s eyes was unforgivable.’
She struggled to banish the lingering image of a lonely, rejected little boy from her head—empathy was the last thing she wanted to feel for this man … Well, maybe not the last, but it was right up there with blind, indiscriminate lust.
‘So you were—’
When she broke off, colouring uncomfortably, Rafael, looking amused, finished the sentence for her. ‘A bastard, yes, I am. I was the result of an affair my mother had with a married man when she was seventeen.’ Rafael had never felt the desire to seek out the man who had rejected him. He had not even known the man’s name until he went through his mother’s pitiably meagre personal effects after her death and found his birth certificate.
‘And my grandfather threw her out, he washed his hands of her. When he contacted me two years ago he didn’t even know she was dead—that is how interested he was.’
The casually delivered information horrified Libby. ‘She was only seventeen, his own daughter, how could he do that?’ Her bewilderment was genuine.
Rafael shook his head and looked amused. ‘You have a very romanticised view of families.’
‘I think I’ve just been lucky,’ she admitted.
The softness in her voice was mirrored in the blue eyes looking at him. With a sense of profound shock Rafael identified the emotion swimming in the cerulean depths.
‘Relying on luck appears to be a family failing.’
Having successfully doused the glow of sympathy in her eyes with the sly insert, he gave an almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction. Pity from anyone, least of all a beautiful woman, was not something that Rafael could stomach, even as he acknowledged, allowing his gaze to move over the soft contours of her face, she was beautiful.
Libby’s chin lifted in reaction to his mockery. ‘I think roots are important and family loyalty, but I wouldn’t expect you to understand that,’ she charged, injecting her voice with scorn.
The hard lines of his bronzed features tightened as he suggested contemptuously, ‘Being a bastard makes me incapable of appreciating such things …?’
Libby’s gaze did not drop. ‘Don’t put words in my mouth. And for the record if I ever call you a bastard I won’t be referring to the circumstances of your birth!’
Her angry retort drew his restless glowing gaze to her lips. This time Libby did look away from the predatory gleam in his incredible eyes, her heart pounding so hard she didn’t see how he couldn’t hear it. She watched the knuckles of her clenched fingers blench white as she struggled to regain a semblance of composure.
It was mortifying to be forced to acknowledge she was sexually attracted to a man she hated and despised, but then maybe all women felt forbidden cravings when they looked at Rafael …?
She was sure a lot looked.
‘I have been called worse, but not recently.’
Libby’s gaze lifted and she was perplexed by the amusement etched in his dark features. Why did this man never react the way she expected?
‘And for the record I have inherited little that was not already mine. When my grandfather died I was already the majority holder in his company and poised to launch a takeover.’ His broad shoulders lifted as his sensual lips curved into a cynical smile. ‘His dying simply saved me the trouble.’
Libby’s wide gaze connected with his cold, implacable eyes and she gave a horrified shudder. ‘You deliberately set out to ruin your own grandfather.’
‘He would hardly have been penniless and destitute.’ ‘Just humiliated?’
Not appearing even slightly discomposed by the suggestion, Rafael ran a hand down the hard curve of his smooth shaven jaw.
‘Let us say that on this occasion financial gain was not my sole motivation.’
A man who showed such ruthlessness when it came to his own family was not, she realised with a sinking heart, going to show her own family any pity.
‘Did he ever apologise?’
‘That would have been hard considering that he never laid eyes on me.’ And you are telling her all this, Rafael, why exactly?
‘You never met him?’ ‘No.’
‘But you said he tried to contact you two years ago—’
Rafael swept a hand across his brow and clicked his tongue irritably. ‘He did, but not out of any desire to make up for the years of neglect. He suggested a financial merger.’ The offer had been laughable, hardly worth dignifying with a response.
But he had responded—through an intermediary. ‘I don’t know how anyone could do that.’
‘Sleep with a married man, princess?’
‘No,’ she snapped, annoyed at his interpretation. ‘Disown your own child. Did she and your father ever—?’ She stopped, embarrassed.
‘You wish to know if there was a happy ending, whether my parents were eventually happily united.’ He shook his head. ‘Outside the pages of fiction happy endings are rare,’ he observed cynically. ‘There was no happy ending. The man did not <