Emergency Engagement

CHAPTER ONE

A ND ... brEATHE ... Y OU ’ RE here now, so just ... breathe.

Unlike the brash glass towers everywhere, the Moreno HQ was housed in an anonymous grey, five-storey, brutalist slab that felt threatening in its lack of pretentiousness. Inside, however, was an eye-watering marvel of pale marble, glass and concrete. Sammy, head down and walking at speed towards the reception area, cut a slight and unimposing figure: five-foot-three, close-cropped dark hair with skin as pale as milk and huge, cut-glass green eyes. Under one arm was her portfolio: five years of hopes, dreams and ambitions were contained within, not to mention blood, sweat and tears.

Most businesses in the heart of London would have been bustling with people. At least, that was what Sammy had vaguely assumed. Here, however, it was an oasis of deathly calm—very unnerving, to say the least. She wished that she’d made a stand and insisted on Rafael Moreno travelling to Yorkshire to see her, instead of her having to make her way to London, at great personal expense. He was the one who was in the process of ruining her life, after all.

Fat chance of that happening, though.

Phil, the assistant bank manager at the local building society, had been brilliant over the months and years with all her financial stuff. She had gone to school with him, and had been in his class right the way through, and he had suggested to Clifford that he could do her a favour and get her a meeting with Rafael. It was the way it worked in a small place where everyone knew everyone else.

So travelling to London? It was a small price to pay to see the Big Man, Sammy thought without an ounce of gratitude.

She padded her way to the ice-cold, smoothly polished concrete desk behind which two incredibly beautiful girls sat in front of a bank of wafer-thin laptops.

‘I have an appointment with Mr Moreno.’

‘Name, please?’

‘Samantha Payne.’ She waited while an impeccably groomed blonde took a rudely long time scrolling through her screen before nodding, without bothering to look at her at all.

‘You can go up—top floor. You’ll be met there. I’ve been advised to tell you that Mr Moreno works to a tight schedule. He can’t spare you more than half an hour.’

‘I’ll make sure to be grateful for small mercies,’ Sammy muttered under her breath, turning towards the small bank of discreet chrome lifts that blended seamlessly into the pale-grey walls.

Her heart was pounding as the lift purred its way up four floors. She could have taken the stairs—she would have welcomed the exercise as a little extra thinking time—but the business of asking where they were seemed more trouble than it was worth. Besides, there was such a thing as too much thinking time. Too much thinking time risked teetering into unhelpful panic.

Rafael Moreno: the self-made billionaire whose face seemed to be relentlessly plastered on the cover of every tabloid gossip magazine month after month, although he was so much more than just a sexy guy with an army of women swooning over him. He was also the golden boy who had made a fortune before he’d turned twenty-five—a tech genius who had refused to be limited to just tech and had moved some of his considerable fortune into other, equally profitable areas that included commercial developments, boutique hotels across the world and, most recently, his own wine label.

He was the guy who couldn’t be stopped when it came to climbing the ladder. In fact, Sammy reckoned that, when it came to Rafael Moreno, there were no more rungs left. He’d climbed all of them and was aiming for whatever there was beyond ladders.

Crazy, when she looked back and remembered the boy he used to be. She didn’t think Rafael Moreno did much looking back, though, but who knew?

Suddenly, the lift doors opened and, sure enough, there was another stunning woman waiting to escort her through to wherever Rafael had his office.

Here, at least, there was the quiet hum of vast sums of money being made. Sammy had no idea who occupied the other floors of the building but the men and women here, all decked out in snappy clothes, were serious and focused, and barely glanced in her direction as she walked by the open space with its clever glass partitions and luscious plants. How many screens did one person need, anyway? Everyone seemed to be facing an army of them on their chrome-and-glass desks. There were more computers here than people.

‘I should advise you that Mr Moreno...’

‘Yes.’ Sammy pre-empted what was coming. ‘Is a very busy man who only has half an hour to spare for me. I was already warned by the girl downstairs. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on locking the door and keeping him prisoner until he hears what I have to say.’

This was met with stony silence that lasted until an imposing door was pushed open...and then, on the threshold of his office, nerves really kicked in. Yes, she’d seen his picture here and there in grainy print; and yes, she’d often glanced at reports of his meteoric progress in the financial jungle, where he took no prisoners; but was she ready to meet this guy? Maybe not...

She disapproved of him on every level. She’d disapproved of him fifteen years ago when he’d entered their small, comfortably cushioned world in the back of beyond like something from another planet, disrupting routines and flouting conventions. And she disapproved of him now because, from every report she’d ever seen, he’d become just what she’d expected—a guy who played by his own rules and didn’t give a damn about anybody else. A man who didn’t glance over his shoulder to see what havoc he might have left in his wake.

He had his back to her and was staring out of the window but then he turned round slowly, giving her plenty of time to realise that he was still as sinfully sexy as he had been as a sixteen-year-old—with his raven-black hair, dark, dark eyes with eyelashes any girl would kill for, his features chiselled to perfection.

The only difference was this was no boy. This was a man: tougher, harder, colder...the sharp contours of his face betraying experiences learned over the years in a ruthless climb to the top.

She’d wondered whether he would recognise her. Fifteen years was a long time; she’d been a kid of just twelve, invisible behind her shyness and early adolescence.

He didn’t have a clue who she was. She could see it in his cool, closed expression as he looked at her in silence for a few seconds.

‘Sit.’

Noticeably, he remained lounging by the window as she shuffled to the chair in front of his desk and rested her portfolio on the ground next to her.

‘You’re here about the hotel.’

Rafael strolled towards his desk, dark eyes pinned to the elfin girl in front of him whose face looked vaguely familiar, although he was damned if he could put his finger on it.

He knew what she was here about: some nonsense about the hotel he had bought. Of course, the deed was done; the hotel up in Yorkshire, along with the various outbuildings on either side of it, belonged to him. He had bought the lot and he had no intention of yielding to any bleeding-heart sob stories about slicing up his acquisition to share with anyone else.

But he had some experience of people from that part of the world. It was a closed community, suspicious of outsiders and happy to close ranks to make life difficult for them. He didn’t fancy a difficult life, so he’d agreed to this meeting—but it was going to be a waste of time for both of them.

He glanced at his watch and, when he looked back at her, her eyes were cool and scornful. They were green eyes, clear as glass, framed by thick, dark lashes and set against smooth, pale skin. Under the heavy jumper and thick, dark skirt, which he suspected had been worn in a token gesture to the fact that this was a meeting of sorts, she was slight. Her dark hair was very short, but it suited her, emphasising the delicacy of her heart-shaped face and the hugeness of those green eyes.

Right now, however, there was nothing fragile about either her posture or her expression.

‘I’m here about the outbuilding attached to the hotel, to be precise.’

‘This is hardly orthodox,’ Rafael drawled, moving to sit behind the desk so that she now felt in the position of someone being interviewed for a job she wasn’t going to get. ‘Cutting to the chase, I’ve bought the hotel, just as I’ve bought the places alongside it. As you’ll probably know, I have every intention of developing the lot into a niche boutique hotel, and taking those acres of tumbleweed and overgrown fields and doing something creative with them. A mower might prove to be a good start on that. I’ve cast an eye over your objections and it would seem that...’ he scrolled through his computer, then looked at her ‘...your plans were to buy one of the outbuildings for yourself?’

‘Correct.’

‘That’s unfortunate for you. You have my heartfelt sympathy but business, as you know, is business.’

‘This is more than just about business for me,’ Sammy said through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve spent years putting money aside so that I can accumulate a deposit to buy somewhere suitable for my venture. That outbuilding was my dream come true because I had also got someone in to look at converting the upstairs into a place for me to live.’

‘And that’s a shame,’ Rafael said politely. ‘You might have something to say about Clifford selling the hotel to me, when he’d presumably already accepted an offer from you for the building attached to it, but...’ He shrugged—as if, “what do you expect me to do?”—and kept his eyes pinned to her face.

‘I have, as it happens! You offered him a stupid amount of money. His daughter is ill and that sort of money would mean that he’d be able to give her private medical treatment. He was in a no-win position.’

‘Hardly my fault.’

‘The hotel was doing fine, Mr Moreno! It was making sufficient money with the regulars, and in the summer months it was holding its own. It’s part of the community. It’s been there for over eighty years—and you want to bulldoze it!’

‘It’s decrepit and in need of some serious money spending on it. Plus, it’s heading in the wrong direction when it comes to making a profit. Trust me on this, Miss Payne. This is my business—I can spot something living on borrowed time from a mile away. There was no way Clifford was going to be able to keep on top of the repairs. He knew that. I did him a favour. If your little concern happened to fall by the wayside, then you need to step back and look at the bigger picture.’

‘The bigger picture being the usual situation of a large, faceless conglomerate consuming the small, family business? Clifford and I had agreed that the money he made from selling that side-building to me would have gone towards upgrading the hotel!’

‘I know how much he offered you the place for. It would have been a drop in the ocean when it comes to making a dent in the work needed to haul that decaying old place into the twenty-first century.’

Sammy swallowed and tried to control her temper which was threatening to break its leash and run haywire. She dropped her eyes and clasped her fingers on her lap.

‘Why did you come here?’ Rafael asked softly. ‘Was it to try and get me to change my mind—even though the machinery has already started rolling for completion on the new hotel within the next couple of weeks?’

‘I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for the past five years.’ She did her best not to sound self-pitying, because by the looks of it this wasn’t a guy who empathised with anyone’s plight. ‘Worked to get myself into a place where I could actually buy somewhere to open my patisserie and café. I’ve sorted out all the equipment and it hasn’t been cheap. I’ve done the maths and worked out how to make a living doing what I love and what I’m good at. Clifford felt awful about selling to you. I was the first person he told. He suggested...’

‘What did he suggest?’

‘He suggested that you sell the outbuilding to me. If you want to somehow modernise it to fit in with your plans for the hotel, then maybe we could work out a repayment plan. I know it’ll make money—with its location, and it being attached to the hotel, there’s footfall. I would be willing to pay the mortgage even if I couldn’t set up business immediately, even if I had to wait for work to be done...’

Rafael burst out laughing.

‘My apologies,’ he said, without a trace of apology in his voice. ‘But let me show you something.’

He fiddled on the keyboard and then swivelled the screen round so that she was looking at it, then he vaulted upright, his body long, lean and fluid, and swerved to stand behind her. He leant down, his hand resting on the arm of the leather chair in which she was sitting, and pointed to the screen.

Sammy’s vision blurred. She could make out something impressive and fancy, spinning round on the screen to afford a view from several angles, but it was hard to focus on anything because every nerve in her body was quivering at his sudden proximity.

‘So, you understand why that would be impossible?’

‘Sorry?’

Rafael stood up and then perched on the edge of his desk so that now she had nowhere to look but at him...and the the brown column of his neck where the white shirt was unbuttoned, cuffed to the elbows, the way the dark whorls of hair curled around the metal strap of his watch and the tight pull of his trousers over muscular thighs. Memories of her fourteen-year-old self gazing at him from the side-lines in those long summer months before he and his father had upped sticks and left now accosted her, making her thinking sluggish and woolly.

‘Clifford owned a hotel rooted in the past,’ Rafael said. He was talking slowly and gently, the voice of someone trying to explain the obvious to a halfwit. ‘The entire layout of the place left a lot to be desired. Some of the bedrooms actually shared a bathroom! Others had fireplaces that were so blocked, it’s a wonder they weren’t a registered fire hazard. It might have been languishing in its faded glory as a traditional timepiece, ticking along like an ancient grandfather clock, but that formula no longer works in this day and age. Those outbuildings? Falling apart at the seams. Destined for landfill, I’m afraid. The beautiful countryside in that part of the world demands something that people actually want to pay money to stay in, and that hotel and everything alongside it stopped fitting the bill fifty years ago.’

‘Clifford’s great-grandfather...’

‘Look, don’t get me wrong, I sympathise with you and I admire you for having the guts to come here and make your case. But the truth is, I’m doing you a favour. If you’d bought that outbuilding, you would have found yourself lumbered with a liability in five years’ time when the main hotel started to fall apart.’

Rafael swept aside any further pointless objections with a wave of his hand. ‘As a gesture of goodwill, I will reimburse you for any money you might have spent in the expectation of getting the place, although I’m assuming you will be able to make use of whatever equipment you may have bought wherever you end up?’

He paused, allowing an uncomfortable silence to gather between them before continuing with an elegant shrug, ‘I’ll admit that the prospect of a patisserie would have held considerable appeal, especially with the upstairs done up as a place of residence, but I have no intention of keeping that building. It would require too much work, given the state that it’s in, and besides, there’s no place for it, as you’ve seen for yourself from what I’ve just shown you. My team of architects lean more towards a minimalist look than shambolic clutter.’

He stood up, looked down at her for a few seconds and frowned.

‘Do I know you from somewhere?’

Sammy gazed back at him with a sinking heart.

‘So, there’s nothing I can do to persuade you to...?’

‘Completely reconfigure the design of the hotel so that I can incorporate your plans through sheer goodness of heart? No. I’m afraid not. And, like I said...’ his voice grew more gentle ‘...you’re better off finding somewhere that wouldn’t end up on the scrap heap anyway in a few years’ time. Surely there are other premises you could look at?’

‘My heart was set on Rafter’s Hotel. Like I said, it’s a really important part of the community, and it fitted the bill in so many ways. I’m sure whatever problems there were with the building’s age could have been handled.’ She raised her eyes to look him directly in the eye. ‘If you had no intention of doing anything about the situation, why did you bother seeing me in the first place?’

‘Good question, and deserving of an answer. Truth is, I like to do my due diligence when it comes to my hotels.’

‘Your due diligence?’

‘Make sure I’m not going to be treading on anyone’s toes. You’d be surprised how tedious it can be dealing with a cohort of people who decide to make a stand against something they don’t want.’

‘And the general consensus was...?’

‘That a renovation would do a lot to revive the community. My hotels come with a solid reputation and the year-round tourist influx would benefit a host of small businesses. Naturally, if Clifford had chosen not to sell, I would have shrugged and moved on, but I managed to make him see sense. I can assure you that I was extremely generous in my offer. He got a hell of a lot more from me than he would have from anyone else. Aside from that, I agreed to meet with you because, like I said, you deserved to be told first-hand why your deal went belly-up. I may be a businessman but I’m not without some sympathy for what you’re going through.’

‘You over-paid for the hotel?’

‘I’m a generous guy.’

‘I didn’t realise billionaires made their money by feeling sorry for people.’

‘I have a personal tie to that part of the world, if you really want to know.’

‘Royal Stanton Grammar.’

She knew the school he’d attended for the two years he’d been living in the village adjacent to the one in which the hotel was located. Their eyes met and he held her gaze as he rooted through his memories, trying to dredge up any recollection of her.

His dark eyes narrowed and she fidgeted.

‘So I do know you...’

‘You were in Stanton for two years,’ Sammy confirmed.

‘So I was. I don’t recall your name...’

‘It was a long time ago and you’ve turned into a billionaire since then. No surprise you haven’t got a clue who I am. Making billions must have taken quite a bit of your time.’

‘Payne... Payne...’ he said softly, frowning. He sat back and stared out through the window before looking at her once again. ‘Did you plan on using your familiarity with me to your advantage?’

‘No. I hadn’t planned on telling you that I knew who you were at all.’

‘Samantha Payne.’ His eyes stayed fixed on her pale face and he tilted his head to one side and stared. Of course, he recognised her now, and was surprised he hadn’t sooner—but then he hadn’t been expecting someone from his past to show up in his present.

He’d been truthful when he’d told her he’d wanted to do the decent thing and explain the situation first-hand—while still, of course, making sure to impress on her that he was intransigent in his decision. Now, he felt a reluctant admiration for her tenacity in not backing down, even though she must have remembered that, well, even as a teenager, backing down had never been his thing.

‘I should go.’

Rafael didn’t say anything. He wasn’t about to embark on a voyage down memory lane. Yet, against his better judgement, he remembered those strange, unsettling days when he and his father had gone to the very village she had mentioned because his father had managed to land himself a two-year stint working on a building site eight miles away. It had been a basic job but anything had been better than staying put in the East End of London with his father buried in misery and depression because he’d found that his wife hadn’t just been unfaithful once, or twice, but too many times to count...

Theirs had been a volatile, disintegrating marriage to which his father had desperately clung even when the arguments had come on a daily basis—a marriage that should never have happened. It had been washed up in a series of confessions that Isabella Moreno hadn’t bothered to hide from her only son, sixteen years old and growing harder and tougher with each shouted, gloating, embittered revelation. Yes, he had loved his father, but he had also pitied him for not having the strength to walk away from what had been bad for him.

Accusations had been hurled and tears had been shed. If Rafael hadn’t grown up by then, he’d certainly grown up afterwards, when the dust had settled and his mother had left arm in arm with her new, rich lover and no forwarding address.

‘You’re a big boy now,’ had been her parting words to Rafael. ‘You don’t need me here any longer.’

‘Did I ever?’ he had returned, before leaving the house for a welcome dose of fresh air.

His father had lost the plot. At the time, Rafael had had no idea why. It wasn’t as though theirs had ever been a marriage made in heaven. To a child, it had been black and white: it was teenage lust that had propelled his parents into an unwanted pregnancy. Juan Miguel Moreno, aged just eighteen, had walked a very pregnant Isabella Gutierrez up the aisle, she too only just eighteen, only for her to give birth a fortnight later.

From memory, things hadn’t been bad to start with, but time had put paid to any notion of their marriage working. Rafael had grown up knowing just how frustrated his mother felt at being with a guy who adored her but was never going to make enough money to keep her satisfied.

She’d been the opposite of a domestic goddess. She’d worked shifts, although afterwards Rafael reckoned she’d been doing a whole lot more than working. She’d gone out without saying where to, and she’d left her husband to pick up the slack on the home front.

Why she hadn’t left sooner was a mystery—perhaps the habit of her marriage and the predictability of a husband she no longer loved but still relied upon had kept her rooted until someone rich had come along to rescue her. After she’d left, his father had taken to the bottle to cope. If the job offer many miles away in some nice, healthy countryside hadn’t come along, Lord only knew where things would have ended up. But they had gone to that little village with its little village school and...

‘Colin Payne.’ He looked at the elfin figure in front of him with her defiance and her angry green eyes and made the connection.

Before she could say anything, his intercom buzzed and his PA reminded him of the meeting he had at the Shard.

Without taking his eyes from her face, Rafael told his PA that he wouldn’t make it and, before she could recover from her astonishment, he surprised her further by telling her to cancel whatever remained on his calendar for the rest of the day.

‘I thought you could only spare me half an hour,’ Sammy said coolly.

‘Things change.’

‘Nothing’s changed. You can’t or won’t do anything to help me, and I get it. It was stupid of me to think otherwise.’

‘Colin Payne was your brother. Is your brother.’

Sammy shrugged.

‘He was in my form for the two years we were at school together,’ Rafael recalled.

‘I didn’t realise that you were ever at school. I thought school was just somewhere you visited now and again when it took your fancy.’

‘Good times, bad times,’ he murmured with a sudden grin. ‘I admit, I didn’t set a good example when it came to behaviour back in those days.’

‘Actually, that’s the understatement of the decade. But that was a long time ago and I haven’t come here to reminisce.’

‘I remember your brother and...now that I think about it... I remember you . You were very shy, always peeping from under that fringe of yours. Your hair was long back then—probably why I didn’t recognise you immediately. I have a keen eye for faces.’

‘Like I said, Mr Moreno, I didn’t come here to talk about the past.’

Rafael watched the rise of delicate colour in her cheeks, shaken out of his usual steely self-control and aware of her—not just as someone to whom he conceded he owed an explanation, but as someone who...belonged to memories he had put away in a box, hidden and never to be aired. He was surprised that he hadn’t remembered sooner because she did, in fact, have quite a distinctive face. Those eyes...

‘You must have been...what...thirteen, fourteen when I had called it a day with A Levels and was packing my bags to leave? You weren’t like the other girls, that’s for sure.’

‘You mean the other girls who kept begging for your attention?’

‘Adolescence can be a heady time for some.’

‘Not you, though. You ignored all of them. You missed the backstage tears.’

‘I was more fascinated by the older women back then.’

‘Good to know. Thank you for your time.’

She began to gather her things to leave, but Rafael stopped her by asking, ‘What’s your brother doing now? He wanted to go into medicine, if I remember.’

‘He’s a nurse now. He ended up having to repeat a year after you disappeared. He’d always been a model student until you came along.’

Rafael didn’t say anything. He remembered what life had been like back then, with his father a mess and him having to pick up the pieces. Rafael had had to make sure he got himself off to work and not back on the bottle because they’d needed the money to survive. He remembered himself as an angry, disillusioned, confused teenaged boy raging against the world, loving his fragile father but hating him at the same time.

There had been a lot of truancy back then but he’d been so bright that he’d never fallen behind. He hadn’t asked anyone to copy him, but some of the other boys in his class had followed his lead. He’d been too wrapped up in his own anger to give much of a damn about how skipping classes might affect them.

That said, he wasn’t in the business of apologising to anyone for anything. Besides, tough times made for tough people, and tough people did well in life. They knew how to handle its obstacles. He was a fine example of that.

‘I never encouraged anyone to follow me.’

‘But you never did anything to discourage them, either!’

‘I did my own thing. I wasn’t in the business of setting examples to anyone. At the time, there were more interesting things to do than listening to teachers who really didn’t know as much as me and, if there were kids who wanted to fall in with that, then who was I to start preaching to them?’

‘That’s incredibly arrogant!’

‘Maybe, or maybe I’m just being honest. I’m sorry if you feel that your brother went off the rails because of me, although it’s probably healthier to think that everyone is responsible for the decisions they make. It’s counter-productive to blame other people for their own poor choices. Send him my regards and, like I said, I would be happy to compensate you for any loss on whatever equipment you may have bought. I mean that. It took guts coming here and I admire you for that.’

She was already rising to her feet and heading to the door. He didn’t try to stop her. He wasn’t going to change his plans just because they happened to share a tenuous connection.

But he had to force himself not to follow her. Instead, he remained where he was, watching the angry sway of her slender hips as she stormed out of the door.

Lord only knew what his PA in the adjoining office made of the fuming slip of a thing who had just slammed a door behind her. Generally speaking, no one slammed doors behind them when they left his office, not even ex-girlfriends, which was a good thing; there had been enough angry exes to make the building rattle if they ever decided to join forces and slam doors.

Rafael enjoyed a colourful love life. He enjoyed women and, when he was dating, he was one hundred percent attentive and faithful. He just wasn’t into staying the course. He didn’t have the appetite for the disillusioning business of marriage and the pointless hope that fuelled it. He was always honest about that—some might say to a fault—but still, many an angry ex who had expected the unattainable would have slammed doors had they not feared his disapproval.

This woman, though... She hadn’t thought twice. He rose to his feet, suddenly edgy. When he glanced down, it was to find that she had forgotten the folder she had brought with her and dumped on the ground by the chair.

It was too late to chase her down the road waving a folder...not his style anyway. He would have a look to see if a contact number was anywhere inside, or at the very least her email address. He would get his PA to do the honours and return it.

He settled into his leather chair, kept all calls on hold and flipped open the portfolio she had managed to forget in her furious haste.

Halfway to Harrogate on the train, Sammy belatedly remembered the damned portfolio. It had taken her days to meticulously prepare her business plan, but no way was she going to turn around and go back for it. Nor was she going to phone and ask for it to be sent.

Frankly, after the reception she’d been given, it was probably winging its way to the dump by now. She hadn’t given it a passing thought because she’d been so worked up when she’d stormed out of his office, slamming the door behind her, aware of his glamorous PA half-rising to her feet in shock as she’d swept by. All those uninterested people who hadn’t noticed when she’d arrived had sat up and taken stock when she’d left—which had almost made her smile, except the last thing she’d been in the mood to do had been to crack a smile at anything.

Of course, it was the mention of her brother that had been her undoing. She had been shocked that he’d recognised her and then to remember Colin...and, to top it off, to remember her as the shy thing peeping at him while all the bolder girls had flaunted themselves in the smallest outfits they could get away with.

She stared through the window at scenery flashing past.

Rafael and Colin had been in the same form. Who could ever have predicted that Colin, always so quiet and studious, would have become a dedicated member of Rafael’s fan club? He’d gone off the rails, in true Rafael Moreno style and had dumped the school books for skipping class, as if he’d been making up for all that lost time when he’d been so diligent. Then, Rafael had disappeared in a puff of smoke, and her brother had discovered how woefully behind he had fallen. He’d failed four of the eight exams he’d taken. Rafael Moreno might have been capable of attending one class and still getting straight As, but no one else had been, including her brother. Everything had been delayed a year and her mother, fragile after the divorce, had become a bag of nerves all over again.

Sammy simmered and fumed and wondered what the hell happened now. She would have to start looking into things in the coming week. She rented somewhere at the moment, but she’d blithely given in her notice because she’d anticipated the fun of living above her café and doing the place up, somewhere that would be all hers. The thought of getting back in the rental market yet again made her feel sick. Her mum lived ten miles away in the nearest town. Should she migrate there for a while?

Sammy knew that she should feel angry and betrayed, because she had set her hopes high, had had it all just within her grasp... But how on earth could she be angry with Clifford when concerns for his ill daughter had driven his decision?

It was quite a lot to think about and yet, with all those pressing worries on her mind, she found herself drifting off to sleep, thinking of something else of a very different nature.

Or rather, someone else.

Rafael, with his darkly forbidding good looks and eyes that seemed to bore straight into her. He’d looked at her and she’d felt herself go hot and cold and then hot all over again. All she could hope was that he hadn’t noticed.

He’d made her relive a youthful infatuation and she hated that. She might not have openly flung herself into his path like some of the other girls but, as twelve had turned to fourteen, she had done her fair share of daydreaming. She’d been no different from everyone else. Like them, she had never met anyone as fascinating or as good-looking as Rafael Moreno.

She’d been smart enough not to show it, but it seemed that he’d noticed her looking from the side-lines anyway: a thin, boyish, self-conscious adolescent without any of the generous assets all the other girls had seemed to have.

Memories floated in and out as she fell asleep, and they didn’t have the decency to leave her alone even then; when the train pulled into the station, she woke to realise that she’d been dreaming of the damned man.