CHAPTER ONE
RAFAEL VIVES wasn’t sure whether to be amused, irritated, bored or downright enraged at the situation in which he now found himself. For a man whose raison d’être was his work, the mistress without rival, to be trapped in paradise for ten days on a babysitting mission was enough to make his teeth snap together in frustration. Even his twenty-four-hour accessory, his faithful laptop computer without which he would have been truly lost, could not make him forget that his stay at his mother’s house in the Hamptons had not been of his choosing.
Fortunately, at the time, he had been on his New York stint, so the physical inconvenience had been lessened considerably, but, close though his office was, he had been asked, rather told, by his mother that he was to ‘stay put and keep an eye on his brother’. He suspected that she knew him well enough to know that the minute he set foot into his office, that massive glass monster in Lower Manhattan, his mission to ‘keep an eye on James, you know what he can be like’ would be completely forgotten.
Her original plan had been for him to join in James’s house party, a commendable reward to select employees in London and New York by way of celebrating one year’s worth of substantial profit for the company.
Rafael didn’t know if he or James had been more averse to the idea.
From James’s point of view, one which he shared with candid horror, the idea of Rafael, as he put it, ‘glowering in the corners and frightening the employees’ made his blood run cold.
And, as far as Rafael was concerned, the thought of mingling with a truckload of people all day and all night, without any remission for good behaviour, was beyond the pale. In the running of the conglomerate, James was the blond-haired, blue-eyed face of advertising campaigns, and he, Rafael, the brains and horsepower that drove the company.
The symbiotic relationship worked and Eva, their mother, was forced to concede to their reluctantly agreed concession.
James would host the party at the house, a sprawling beach mansion poised on three acres of land and overlooking the spectacular beauty of prime Hamptons beach.
Rafael, from the peace and seclusion of a guest cottage in the grounds, would oversee things, ensuring that neither the music nor the fun and frolics got out of hand.
The last time James had hosted a party at the house, neighbours had complained and that was quite something considering how far away the nearest neighbour lived.
Of course, as Rafael had pointed out to his mother in an attempt to divert her from her insistence on his presence at the event, that had been two years ago and the party had been laid on for James’s personal friends, all in their early to mid twenties, rather than employees of the company, but his objections had been in vain. Eva Lee still shuddered at the memory of the fiasco and the inevitable all round apologies to her friends at the East Hampton Improvement Society.
So here he was now, one day into his Big Brother role and already itching to get back to the cut and thrust of what he knew and loved.
But at least, he conceded, the scenery was magnificent, forced as he was to contemplate it. It briefly, though only briefly, occurred to him that he didn’t visit the place often enough. The idyllic days of youth spent at the then family home had gradually tapered off to the occasional visits in between his university studies and thirst for foreign travel. And then his working life had begun in earnest, first operating independently at one of the biggest broking houses in the world and thereafter at the helm of the family company, following the untimely death of his stepfather, and James’s dad.
From there on in, time and the years had galloped away, leaving him now to ruminate as he stared at the stunningly beautiful and dipping sunset at the possibility that he would wake up one day only to find himself a middle-aged man married to a company.#p#分页标题#e#
Rafael frowned grimly and sipped the whisky and soda he had prepared for himself. Introspection was not a pastime he indulged. He had always been goal-oriented and had seldom questioned the unutterable direction of his plans.
He wasn’t about to start now.
On the drift of the breeze, he could hear the faraway sounds of forty-odd people having a good time.
It wasn’t too hard to picture the scene. James, naturally, would be in the thick of it. Pre-dinner drinks would be on the go and, of course, with an army of staff requisitioned to ease the strain of actually having to do very much of a practical nature, there would be no headaches over what to cook for everyone to eat or even when to top up the empty glass. The finest wine would be accompanied by the finest food and everything would be served by the most reliable and efficient of staff that money could buy.