Liar, a tiny voice in her head said. You woke several times and worried because he wasn’t there. You missed him too! Which makes the lie all that more pathetic!
‘Damn,’ Luiz muttered, bringing the car to a sudden stop. ‘I think we just missed the turning…’
Slamming the car into reverse gear, he began driving them back the way they had just come, past a junction sporting a road sign indicating that a place called Los Aminos was off to the left.
He stopped the car again, uttered an irritated sigh and reached for the glove compartment to extract a road map, which he then spread out across the steering wheel and began to frown at.
Caroline frowned too. ‘Don’t you know where we’re going?’
‘No,’ he replied.
Blunt and gruff, it didn’t really encourage more questioning. But she was confused. It didn’t seem likely, knowing his gift of near photo-perfect memory, that he could have actually got them lost!
‘How often have you made this journey?’ she asked, condescension feathering her tone.
A long index finger was following the wavy red line that cut a path through from Marbella to Cordoba. A sudden vision of that same finger tracing circles around her navel sent an injection of heat directly to her thighs. It was shameful. She despised herself.
‘I haven’t,’ Luiz said.
It took a moment for her to take that answer in. Then she noticed that the finger had stopped at a road junction. This road junction, Caroline supposed, glancing up at the sign, then back at the map to see that indeed the finger was touching this precise point on the map.
‘You mean you haven’t done it from Marbella before?’ she finally decided.
The finger began moving again, mesmerising her when she knew she shouldn’t let it, as it traced a line off to the left that went skirting around Cordoba.
‘I meant I have not been there—period,’ he clarified, bringing the finger to a stop at a tiny dot on the map that bore the name Valle de los Angeles.
The remark came as such a surprise that it had her turning in her seat to stare at his grimly taut profile. ‘Why not?’ she demanded.
He didn’t answer. Instead he began neatly folding up the map again, and just let the silence fill with the same tension they had been travelling with before he’d lost his sense of direction.
‘Luiz?’ she prompted.
‘Because I knew I wouldn’t be welcome, okay?’ he launched at her tightly.
‘But it belongs to you!’ she exclaimed.
‘What does that have to do with being made welcome?’ Leaning across her, he put the map back into the glove compartment.
Sudden enlightenment hit. ‘The one who might poison you,’ she murmured softly. ‘The resident wicked witch—your father’s widow?’
‘You bet,’ he replied, shifting the car into gear.
‘And she—resents you?’ She tried to put it kindly, but still Luiz released a scornful laugh.
‘Wouldn’t you resent the man who has usurped your own son’s position in the family?’
His father had another son? Luiz had a half-brother? While she sat there absorbing this latest piece of news, Luiz spun the steering wheel and set them moving into the left-hand fork in the road. A long and dusty winding road lay ahead of them. With a surge of power Luiz accelerated along it. Top-of-the-range plush as the car was, custom-built for quality performance with optimum comfort as it was, the BMW could do nothing about the kind of atmosphere its occupants created for themselves. It proceeded to throb with a hundred questions one of them wanted to ask, mingling with answers the other was clearly reluctant to provide.
In the end Caroline plumped for the most pressing question. ‘Why you instead of him?’ she queried.
‘Because I am the bastard and he is not?’ Luiz mockingly questioned the question.
Caroline flushed slightly at his blunt candour. Luiz might be possessive of his privacy now, but he had not been seven years ago. He had been very open then about his life as a fatherless child, living in a run-down tenement in the backstreets of New York with a mother who had struggled to make ends meet. She knew his mother had died when he was only nine years old and that Luiz had lived out the rest of his childhood in a state institution.
‘I was chosen because I possess a lot of individual wealth and the family itself is practically bankrupt.’
In other words, his father had named Luiz as his successor out of expediency rather than desire, she realised. It was no wonder Luiz sounded so bitter and cynical about the whole thing.
‘And your half-brother and his mother?’ she asked. ‘Where does it leave them in all of this?’
If it was at all possible, his expression turned even harder. ‘Out in the cold, as far as I am concerned. As they have kept me out in the cold for most of my life.’