Kept by the Spanish Billionaire(23)

‘So he’s friendly towards you and, on the back of that, you decide that you’ll fall in love.’

Amy felt herself rush towards anger, then she considered what he had said, the starkly ridiculous thumbnail image he had presented, and sighed. ‘He caught me when I was vulnerable,’ she admitted. There was something solidly reassuring about the brute lying on the rug next to her. Sensitive he most certainly was not, but his unadorned honesty didn’t seem like such a bad thing just at the moment.

‘Vulnerable…from what?’

‘How are you when it comes to listening?’ Amy asked, resuming her horizontal position on the rug, so that they were both now staring towards the heavens, Amy with her eyes closed.

Rafael, with his line of perfectly groomed, perfectly controlled, high-powered ex-girlfriends, wondered what exactly listening entailed when asked by the woman lying next to him.

‘Inexperienced,’ he said deflatingly, although he was aware that he was being gifted a golden opportunity to find out what, if any, were her intentions towards his brother.#p#分页标题#e#

‘Really?’ Amy was distracted. He seemed to have that effect on her, she had noticed. One minute she would be going along just fine, and then the next minute he had managed to swing her off onto a tangent until she forgot what she had been talking about in the first place. ‘Is that because you don’t have many opportunities to…meet women?’ The thought seemed ludicrous now that she had voiced it. Women had stared at him wherever they went. She had noticed it. Sidelong, interested glances. She was pretty sure that the man could get a woman if he only emerged once a year from that house of his under cover of darkness. ‘No, forget I said that. You meet lots of women; you just don’t much care what’s going on in their heads.’

Rafael flushed darkly. ‘I meet lots of women who don’t see it as their duty to keep me advised of their every thought on a minute-by-minute basis,’ he corrected through gritted teeth.

‘Okay.’ Amy wondered what sort of women such a species would be.

‘But,’ Rafael said heavily, ‘we were talking about you. You said that you were…vulnerable.’

The word ‘vulnerable’ emerged from his mouth as though being aired for the very first time. It made Amy want to laugh.

‘I’d just broken up with my boyfriend of two years,’ she explained, frowning at the memory. ‘We’d met on the same catering course, would you believe?’ She smiled at the memory. ‘He was good fun. He wanted to be a TV chef, make a name for himself.’ Amy sighed. ‘Backroom catering wasn’t good enough for Freddie. He tried it for a while but he really felt that he was too big for just cooking behind the scenes. He could have carried on with his training, gone to work for a big cheese in the hotel business, climbed up the ladder like any other aspiring chef, but Freddie wanted it all and he wanted it sooner than yesterday.’

Rafael was intrigued in spite of himself.

‘At first, I just found it funny that he was so obsessed with wanting to make it big, but then we started arguing about it. I hated that. My sisters were very wary of him but I clung on until he dumped me.’

Rafael heard the catch in her voice and didn’t have to see her to know that her face would be clouding over. She had the sort of face that clouded over. ‘You were well rid of him.’

‘Well, yes, but still…he dumped me by text message! Said that he’d found someone else. Later I discovered that the someone else was twice his age and loaded! He lives in Italy now. He has a brand-new restaurant. Maybe I’ll drop in one day and give him the fright of his life.’

‘So…then you met James…’

‘At work. He made me laugh.’

And he was safe, Rafael worked out. Having a crush on the boss was like hankering behind the impossible, which was why it had only ever remained a crush. Had she decided to take it one step further now that she had seen with her own two eyes exactly how much money was wrapped up in him?

‘He makes a lot of people laugh.’ Rafael shrugged. ‘Did you think that you were special because of that?’

‘No, I did not!’ Amy flushed guiltily.

‘Because you would be a fool if you had.’

‘I really don’t need you preaching to me when you don’t know the first thing about me and probably not much about James either.’

Rafael reluctantly took a step back. He had a hell of a lot more to say on the subject of why she would be mad to even think about getting involved with his brother. James’s idea of the ideal woman was one who played hard and had no desire for commitment on any level. He mixed with the fast crowd, the people who enjoyed winter holidays yachting down the Grenadines and wild parties in country houses. He had only been living in London for a matter of a few years but in that short time he had accumulated more contacts than most people did in their entire lifetime. It was James’s gift, why he was so brilliant at what he did. But she was on the defensive and that was not where he wanted her.#p#分页标题#e#