They left almost immediately after that. The black BMW was waiting in the car park. Luiz had driven himself to the hospital, Caroline discovered when, after seeing her into the front passenger seat, he climbed in behind the wheel.
His expression was closed, and he still didn’t speak as he set the car in motion. Outside it was dark and very quiet now, the hour one of those ungodly ones where even the owls Luiz likened himself to had retired.
‘I want to go back to the hotel,’ she said—and received no answer. Turning her head to look at him, she saw only that closed cast of a profile. ‘Luiz…’ she prompted.
He changed gear and turned the steering wheel to take them off the main road which would have taken them back into Puerto Banus. He had the long, brown, skilful fingers of an accomplished magician, she found herself thinking stupidly. And she knew she was only letting her mind notice his hands because she didn’t want to get into another heated row with him.
Yet she couldn’t let the subject go. ‘I don’t want to face all those people again,’ she told him.
He decided to answer that one. ‘They’ve gone home.’ His voice was quiet, flat, utterly devoid of any inflexion when he added, ‘The party, I think you would agree, is well and truly over.’
‘Did it ever get started?’ she shot at him tartly. If ‘party’ was the right word to cover whatever it was Luiz had been hoping to set up tonight. In truth, the man’s motives baffled her. His family baffled her. One moment they’d appeared hostile and resentful, the next too ecstatic to be real.
‘They don’t like you,’ she said continuing her thought pattern out loud.
‘They haven’t had time yet to make up their mind,’ he answered levelly.
Caroline frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I’ve only been an entity in their lives for a few months.’ In profile she caught the slight hint of a grimace. ‘Since my father died, in fact,’ he tagged on, ‘and it was revealed that he had left his estates, his money and his title to the bastard son they’d all preferred to pretend never existed.’
Sitting there beside him, Caroline took her time absorbing this information, because it helped explain so many other things about Luiz that had been a mystery to her until then.
‘Did you know about him?’ she questioned softly.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Always?’
‘More or less,’ he replied. Economical and to the point.
‘But he never acknowledged you until recently,’ she therefore concluded.
Luiz turned the car in through the gates of the villa and drove them beneath the arch into the courtyard. As the engine went silent neither tried to get out of the car. Caroline because she sensed there was more information coming, and Luiz because he was, she suspected, deciding how much he wanted to tell her.
‘He tried, once,’ he admitted. ‘Seven years ago, to be exact. But it—didn’t come to anything.’
Seven years ago. Seven. Caroline’s lungs suddenly ceased to work. ‘Why?’ she whispered.
Luiz turned to look at her, his closely guarded eyes flickering over her pale, tired, now wary face, and it was like being bathed in a shower of static. For, whatever he was thinking while he looked at her like that, she knew without a single doubt that his thoughts belonged seven years in his past and most definitely included her.
Then he flicked his eyes away. ‘He wasn’t what I wanted,’ he declared, and opened his door and climbed out of the car, leaving Caroline to sit there, making what she liked of that potentially earth-shattering statement.
Was he was talking about her? Was he talking about them? Was he talking about seven years ago, when he must have been here in Marbella to meet his father and had instead got himself involved with an English girl and her gambling father?
Her door came open. Luiz bent down to take hold of her arm to help urge her out. She arrived beside him in a fresh state of high tension, trembling, afraid to dare let herself draw the most logical conclusions from her own shock questions.
But Luiz couldn’t have meant that she had been what he had wanted seven years ago, she decided, or he would not have fleeced her father dry at the gambling tables the way he had done.
‘Come on,’ he murmured gruffly. ‘You’ve taken enough for one night.’
Yes, he was right; she had taken enough, she agreed as a throbbing took up residence behind her eyes. She didn’t want to think any more, didn’t want to do anything but crawl into the nearest bed and fall asleep.
The house was in darkness. Luiz touched a couple of wall switches as they entered and bathed the hallways in subdued light, then led the way to the bedroom.