The Last Illusion

The Last Illusion

Diana Hamilton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

CHARLEY paid the driver off at Plaza San Francisco. He had the grey eyes of a Berber in a face like a walnut, and they crinkled appreciatively as she added a generous amount of pesetas to the fare, thanking him in his own language.

At least her Spanish hadn’t emerged too rustily, though Olivia, who had prided herself on her pure Castilian, would no doubt still deride the distinctive Andaluz dialect she had picked up from her teacher, Andrés, who had tended the sumptuous gardens behind Sebastian’s town house here in Cadiz.

Despite the heat, a convulsive shudder rocked her too slender frame. She had no illusions. Olivia would spend as much time here as she had done before. Probably more. Facing her again, knowing what she knew, would be as hard, if not harder, than facing her husband.

Not that she had thought of Sebastian Machado as her husband since she had left him four years ago, she reminded herself as she picked up the small, soft-backed suitcase which had doubled as hand luggage on the flight from London to Jerez. She had cut him out of her life and, with a great deal of input from her aunt Freda, had made herself over, made a career of sorts for herself. And deciding, at last, to accept Gregory’s offer of marriage had been the final and decisive change, a change that had irretrievably cancelled out the trauma of the past.

The only thing left to do was to ask Sebastian to agree to a divorce.

And to buy back those shares. Greg had told her to insist on that, though to her way of thinking nothing was as important as her legal freedom, certainly not the extra money, useful though it would be.

Restlessly her tawny eyes ranged around the pretty square as she wondered whether to give in to the cowardly temptation to sit at a table beneath the shade of one of the dozens of orange trees and sip at an ice-cold jugo de naranja, but decided against, because she knew her churning stomach would instantly reject anything she tried to put into it—even something as innocuous and refreshing as orange juice.

Besides, she had already allowed herself the concession of stopping off at the square, using the five minutes or so it would take to find her way on foot to the home she had once shared—with equal measures of rapture and pain—with Sebastian. Time enough to quell the unlooked-for flutter of nerves that was, dismayingly, threatening to turn into a full-scale attack.

Striking off into the narrow, shadowed streets of the old quarter, she tightened her jaw, ignoring the trickle of perspiration between her shoulderblades. Here, deep in the maze of narrow white streets, glinting with miradores—the glazed balconies that offered protection from the Atlantic breezes—she felt drainingly homesick. She had forgotten how much she had learned to love this joyous, bustling white city, built on the tip of a headland, thrusting so confidently out into the sea.

There was so much she had believed forgotten, both the good and the bad thrust willy-nilly into the dark netherworld of her soul where they could no longer hurt her. And when she caught her first glimpse of the ornate iron gates that seemed to overpower the narrow street she almost turned tail and ran, beginning to wish she had followed Greg’s advice and done everything through her solicitor.

But she conquered the impulse as she had learned to conquer all her fears during the last four years. Beneath the sleekly styled ochre linen suit she had chosen to travel in, her slender body tautened with determination. It was just a house. Rather more splendid than most, but nevertheless just a house. Beyond the intricately fashioned gates lay a courtyard and beyond that the ancient, arcaded stone house, beyond that the gardens where the magnolia trees grew and within, somewhere among the dozens of sumptuous rooms, a place where she could quietly sit and collect herself until her husband returned from his arrogant office block in the commercial area beyond the ancient Moorish walls of the town.

And Teresa would bring her some tea.

Inconceivable that her old Spanish friend would have given up her jealously guarded position as Sebastian’s housekeeper. Four years ago Teresa had ruled the household with an iron fist in a very threadbare velvet glove, and that wouldn’t have changed.

Teresa had the tongue of a scold and the heart of a lion, but she had taken the almost painfully innocent girl Charley had been when she’d arrived here to her vast bosom. She had been nineteen years old when Sebastian had brought her here as his bride—with the experience and outlook of a child of ten, as Freda had tartly pointed out.

But that was no longer the case, she reminded herself as she pushed at the impressive iron gates. A year of marriage had all but broken her, but with Freda’s initial help she had put her life back together, wiped Sebastian and what he had done from her brain, and had emerged as a twenty-four-year-old woman who was nobody’s fool.

Sebastian meant nothing to her now. She couldn’t even be bothered to hate him for what he had done. So instead of feeling nervous she would concentrate on her achievement in travelling the road to complete self-recovery!

And when he returned this evening she would be waiting, would calmly state her business, and the moment she had obtained his agreement—and surely there would be no problem there—she would get herself back to the safe predictability of England and Greg and her work and quietly look forward to an autumn wedding.

Passing quickly through the scented courtyard, not giving the vibrant heat, the perfume of orange blossom and oleanders time to seduce her senses, she entered the huge dim hall, marble-paved and cool, the walls clad with dark, elaborately carved wood, the marble staircase a thing of almost ethereal beauty, soaring upwards like a pathway to heaven.

And hell, she reminded herself staunchly, her small face going stiff with the determination to block out the instinctive appeal this land, its architecture and its people had exerted on her in the past. It wouldn’t happen again. She had learned that appearances could often be deceptive, that people could lie, silver tongues saying things they didn’t mean.

Blinking, trying to get her eyes to readjust after the whiteness of the light outside, she absorbed the silence of the great house. Siesta time, so it wasn’t to be wondered at, and, rather than disturb Teresa, she would find herself somewhere to wait.

Putting her case down against one of the walls, she straightened, her ears picking up the faint rustle of fabric, a sibilant drag of indrawn breath, and her narrowed eyes fastened on a shimmer of white movement and she was fixed to the spot, because her feet seemed to have rooted themselves to the pale cold marble, and Sebastian said thickly, ‘So you return, at last.’

She hadn’t expected to see him so soon; it put her at a disadvantage. Thick dark lashes drifted down, briefly closing him out. The white cambric shirt made his olive-toned skin and his cropped midnight hair even darker, his narrow black trousers emphasising his long-legged leanness, the whippy strength of the hard, wide shoulders and non-existent hips. She had forgotten the impact he made.

She should have remembered, been more prepared.

Forcing her tawny eyes open, she stared at him with a cool and desperate defiance. Looks counted for nothing, she told herself. The rare combination of sultry, hooded black eyes and a wide, unashamedly sensual mouth with the harsh asceticism of bleakly carved cheekbones and jawline and the arrogant, aquiline cast of his nose had swept her giddily gullible head off her shoulders when they had first met five years ago.

But she saw more clearly now; he had the face of a fallen angel, the face of a man who could cold-bloodedly kill his own brother, who could pluck an innocent out of her own sheltered element, expose her to the dark pride and passion that was uniquely his own, use her, and betray her without blinking one of his own long, silky black lashes!

‘For about half an hour,’ she made herself answer, trying not to flinch as he stalked closer, like a black panther. ‘It shouldn’t take longer.’

‘I am honoured.’ His dark, intriguingly accented voice seemed to curl around her, and she shuddered. He smiled faintly. ‘You go to the expense and trouble to leave your nest in the middle of England—Stanton Bottom, such a curious name—to fly out to spend a mere half-hour in my company. An honour indeed.’

‘How did you know where I was?’ Shock and dismay had her blurting the words out without thinking, and she watched his sensual mouth go thin, heard a vein of ice creep into his voice.

‘If you imagine I would let you walk away from me and disappear, then you don’t know me. But then—’ the brooding black eyes hardened to glinting jet, ‘—past events adequately proved that you know more about the hidden side of the moon than you know about me. Isn’t that so, mi esposa?’ He spread one hand almost contemptuously, laying out the details of the last four years of her life as if they were beneath notice. ‘You spent six months with your aunt in Harrow. She put you through a crash course and made sure you caught up with your abandoned business studies. She then packed you off to that place with the curious name in your English Midlands, where you worked as an assistant to the manager of a hotel-conference-centre-leisure park. Is that not so?’

‘You spied on me!’ Charley felt what little colour she had drain out of her face. She had thought she was safe, that as far as he was concerned she had disappeared off the face of the earth.

She shifted restlessly from one foot to the other, her teeth biting into her soft lower lip. All that time—the six months of sheer hard grind that had earned her the qualifications she needed, the job Aunt Freda had found through her business and domestic agency, tucked away on the edge of the Staffordshire moorlands. She had felt safe there, had been able to come to terms with what Sebastian had done, had grown in confidence and independence. And all the time he had known exactly where she was, what she was doing. It didn’t bear thinking about. People must feel like this when they came home and found the house burgled and ransacked, their private possessions spewed around like so much tawdry, worthless debris.

‘I prefer to think of it as keeping a watch over my own,’ Sebastian stated, his aristocratically cut nostrils flaring with displeasure at her choice of words. The accusation of something as underhand as spying would not fit in with his exalted opinions of himself. He liked to think of himself as a man of honour—and woe betide anyone who had the temerity to impugn it—and didn’t allow himself to understand that he had long ago compromised what honour he might once have had.

And the fact that he had kept tabs on her meant that he must know about Gregory Wilson, how they had met and how often they had dated. So at least her request for a divorce wouldn’t come as a surprise, she thought, trying to feel tough.

But it was difficult to feel tough and in control of the situation when his lancing eyes informed her that he knew all there was to know about her and wasn’t impressed.

‘If we are to spend half an hour together, then I suggest we do it in comfort.’ The drawled sarcasm turned her stomach, fiery little spirals igniting inside her as he took her arm and led her through to a small sala tucked away at the rear of the house. Being close to him, touched by him, made every nerve end quiver, forcing her to remember how just one sultry glance from those impenetrable black eyes had once had the power to reduce her to a mass of desperate, wanton needs.

It was a memory she refused to entertain and she shook her head as if to clear it, obeyed the slight movement of his hand and sat on a damask-covered chair, her spine rigid. And all around her the cool green light that filtered through the louvres touched the graceful Spanish renaissance furnishings, giving the heavily carved or richly painted pieces an air of soft mystery that would be lost in the full glare of sunlight. This was the room she had made her own, often coming here to read or simply to try to relax, especially when Olivia—with all that false friendliness—had been in residence.

Had Sebastian remembered? Had he chosen this room from the almost countless others because he knew it would give her pain? He must know that it had been here that Olivia had finally shed her veneer of matiness and spat out the cruel, devastating truth.

Charley straightened her already rigid shoulders and wished he’d sit down, but couldn’t ask him to because to do so would reveal that his endless pacing, slow circling, was getting to her. She didn’t want him to know that he could affect her on any level. And the way he moved with the insolent grace born of a natural arrogance, touched a long-forgotten core of unwanted female responsiveness deep within her.

‘You have changed, Charlotte,’ he pronounced at last.

The deep timbre of his voice, that wickedly sensual accent, flicked her on the raw and made her snap without thinking of what she might be revealing. ‘I prefer Charley.’ Only her parents, and Sebastian, had used her full name. She had loved her parents and now they were dead. She had loved Sebastian and, as far as she was concerned, he might as well be dead, too. She didn’t want to be reminded.

‘I refuse to call you by a name that would be ugly for a male and unthinkable for a female, especially a female who has grown into something quite remarkably sophisticated.’

The level look beneath lowered brows was tinged with an amused derision, she noted fumingly, as he lowered himself gracefully on to a velvet-covered chaise. If he had thought of her at all during the past four years it would have been as the slightly plump, wide-eyed nineteen-year-old he had married. Her mouse-brown hair had hung limply halfway down her back, and the only make-up she had used had been a smear of pale pink lipstick.

But she had lost a lot of weight after she’d left him and had never regained it, and her hair had darkened to a glossy seal-brown and she now wore it cut fashionably short. Freda had been initially responsible for the change in her style of dressing. Her, ‘You can’t go through life looking like Alice in Wonderland, not if you want to land a responsible, reasonably paid job. I loved my sister dearly, but she had a blind spot when it came to your upbringing. She insisted on dressing you like the Sugar Plum Fairy since the day you were born, and you couldn’t have been more sheltered if you and your parents had lived out your lives as the sole inhabitants of a desert island,’ had hurt at the time.

However, it hadn’t taken too much soul-searching to acknowledge that Freda had been right. As the only child of parents who had feared that after fifteen years of marriage they would never have children, she had been too protected and sheltered.

Her education had been at a private, girls-only school, her friends carefully vetted, her out-of-school activities more suited to a Victorian miss than a girl of the twentieth century.

Her wish to take a business studies course and stay on in England when her parents retired to Spain had been granted only after endless and minute discussions. Only when her mother’s younger, unmarried sister, Freda, had stepped in and offered to have her stay at her flat in Harrow had her wish been granted.

And even during that year Freda hadn’t made more than a few half-hearted efforts to push her into the real world. While Charley’s parents had been alive Freda hadn’t felt able to interfere with the lifestyle of her quiet, studious and painfully innocent niece. Besides, she had been too engrossed in running her own successful agency to spare the effort needed to try to change someone who had been patently happy with the way she was.

But the way she had been then meant that she had been completely gullible, quite unable to see through a man like Sebastian Machado. A few kind words, a few careless caresses, had been enough to turn her silly, innocent head. No, he had needed to expend very little effort to ensure he got what he wanted: a woman who was stupid enough, besotted enough, to play the part he had allotted her in his devilish plans.

‘Yes, I have changed.’ She agreed, stony-voice, with his earlier statement and crossed her long, elegantly slender legs with a whisper of honey-toned silk, knowing that the fashionable short skirt of the suit she wore, her slender high heels, showed them off to advantage.

And strangely, the defiant little movement excited her, because there was a quiet assessment in the way he watched her, in the slide of those sultry eyes as they roamed down to the tips of her toes and back up again to her glinting eyes, and it told her his words hadn’t been empty, that he acknowledged the change and accepted it. And that worked to her advantage.

As long as he realised that she was no longer the adoring little doormat who had been willing to submit to the hurts and humiliations he and his mistress, Olivia, had subjected her to for the sake of the meaningless caresses and empty words he deigned to spare her, then they could discuss terms as equals.

That alone would be worth the expense of this trip, the arguments she’d had with Greg when she’d told him of her decision to face her unwanted husband in person. At last she was the redoubtable Sebastian Machado’s equal, and she had nothing whatever to fear!

Quickly, before his brooding presence made her change her mind on that score, she folded her hands tightly in her lap and told him crisply. ‘I want a divorce.’

‘Why?’ His expression didn’t alter by as much as a flicker of an eyelid. He brought his hands up, steepling his long, strong-boned fingers, the tips resting against the sweeping curve of his upper lip.

His cool question almost took her breath away, an insult in itself, and anger stirred, making her voice taut as she shot back, ‘Need you really ask? Our marriage ended four years ago. It’s high time we tidied up the loose ends.’

‘And you think a divorce would get rid of those loose ends, extinguish the past? Are you that naïve?’ His tone was still uninterested, the hooded eyes never leaving her face as he dropped in, ‘You could have asked me for a divorce at any time during the past four years, or at least made your intention to seek one plain to me and my solicitor. Why didn’t you, if our marriage had become so intolerable to you?’

That floored her. Charley felt her eyes go wide, staring into the dark and sultry depths of his as if she might find the answer there. During the past four years she had never tried to hide her married status, but she had never spoken of it to anyone except Freda and, much later, Greg. And even then she hadn’t told all the truth, merely explaining that she and Sebastian had had irreconcilable differences. Divorce hadn’t entered her head until Greg had proposed.

And she didn’t know why. But she wasn’t going to confess the sudden bewilderment his query had produced, because that might suggest she had clung on to the legality of their relationship because she couldn’t face the final severance.

She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them again they glinted with cold amber lights. She could never inflict on him the type of pain he had dished out to her, but she could have the satisfaction of pricking his overblown ego a little. And her voice was tart as she informed him, ‘You know why I left you. Do you imagine I wanted to remember you and what you had done?’ Carefully, she unfurled the fingers she hadn’t realised had been so tightly clenched and made herself rest her hands lightly on the slender carved wood arms of her chair. ‘I blocked you, and our marriage, out of my mind. I never gave it a second thought until I realised I needed my freedom to marry again.’

She thought she had earned herself a reaction in the sudden spasm of a muscle along his hard jaw, but couldn’t be sure. The tips of his fingers were still resting against his mouth, so she could have imagined it. She got to her feet, suddenly tired. She didn’t have time to play games. The sooner this interview was over the sooner she could book into the modest hotel where she had reserved a room for the night.

His eyes swept up, lazily following her movement, his attitude still sublimely relaxed. And she said, ‘As we haven’t lived together for so long, I can’t see how there can be any difficulties. Especially as ours was a civil wedding.’ Olivia had spelled out exactly why that had been, why Sebastian had chosen not to have a religious ceremony, and Charley tacked on tightly, ‘Greg and I would like to marry before the end of the year—in the autumn, preferably. Which gives us time, I would imagine, to get the divorce finalised.’

Suddenly, she needed to get out of here. It was as if the atmosphere of this house, the watchful presence of the man who had once meant more than life itself to her, was suffocating her, gathering her back into the web of deceit and cruelty, the binding strands interfaced with the wild magic of Andalucía, with the dark, irresistible charm of this devil in human guise that had almost broken her all that time ago.

She wouldn’t even mention the possibility of his buying back those shares. That could be done later, through solicitors. She couldn’t bring herself to spend one more moment with him. And she began to walk out of the room, making herself move slowly, because if she once gave in to the urgent desire to hurry she would find herself running until her lungs burst inside her.

‘No.’

The single word lowered the temperature in the room by a thousand degrees, and Charley’s feet felt as if they had been nailed to the floor as the blood in her veins turned to ice. But he couldn’t possibly mean what she thought he meant, she berated herself, then swung round quickly, defensively, because she could hear him moving, coming towards her.

‘Under Spanish law a divorce is possible if the couple have been living apart for two years—provided, of course, that both are agreed.’ His black eyes mocked her. ‘Unless the desire for a divorce is mutual, then the statutory period of separation is five years.’

He smiled for the first time, but it didn’t touch his eyes. It was a mere baring of teeth that sent icy trickles of disbelief running down her spine.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Her voice emerged thickly and she had no control over the flood of dismay that sent hectic colour to stain her cheeks. She stepped back, her poise deserting her. He was crowding her, much too close, making her achingly aware of the scent of him, the warmth of him, the shockingly vibrant, power-packed, raw masculinity of him.

‘Never more so.’ His voice was an assured purr, and it made her stomach churn.

She was backed against the impenetrability of one of the walls, but he didn’t move closer. If he had done, their bodies would have been touching, but he didn’t need to make such an open statement of his physical domination, because already she felt weak and giddy, as if she were about to faint for the first time in her life.

There were tiny dancing lights in the brooding blackness of his eyes, and the graceful, upward lilt of one arched black brow reinforced his wicked amusement, the machiavellian satisfaction he derived from gaining the upper hand.

‘So, mi esposa, you have another full year to wait before you can even begin divorce proceedings.’