‘Not with me, there’s not,’ Ruy assured her stubbornly, forgetting in that instant that he was not in his own world of gilded exclusivity where nothing cost too much and nothing he desired was ever out of his reach.
Suzy wondered what it was about her that made men try to buy her. Percy had already done it, she reminded herself wretchedly. She could only think of the horrific sum her father had been told he owed after Percy had added on the interest charges that her poor father had misunderstood how to calculate. ‘Fifty thousand pounds,’ she said mockingly. ‘I’ll do it for—’
‘That’s a deal, then,’ Ruy declared with intense satisfaction, relieved that money was the lure he had assumed it would be because it made him more conscious of the barrier between them, a barrier he was determined to maintain.
Suzy’s brows rose at that response and she surveyed him in complete stupefaction. ‘You expect me to believe that you can pay me fifty thousand pounds to act as your model? Like you’re some Mr Rockefeller or something? Do I look like I still believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy?’ She gulped with a sudden helpless giggle of appreciation. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you for winding me up like that! I needed something to laugh about tonight and that offer was, not only tasteless, but also absolutely priceless!’
Ruy stared back at her in angry astonishment, never before having met anyone who failed to take him very seriously indeed. It was an instant when he surprised himself, learning that he was, in spite of all the many times he had assured himself he was not, a Valiente down to the backbone, proud of his blue-blooded heritage, his power and influence and arrogant as all get-out. He wouldn’t let himself notice how laughter transformed her face from pure Madonna perfection to girlish natural amusement, eyes lighting up like stars, pale slender throat extending, that full pink cupid’s bow mouth that tantalised him pouting in a delicious pillowy curve.
Percy stalked through the door, his mouth tightening when he saw his fiancée laughing behind the bar with Ruy leaning on it.
Unable to judge his mood as he stood in the shadows by the door, Suzy smiled at her fiancé and said, ‘I thought I wasn’t to see you tonight. I’m going over to do the flowers as soon as Dad comes back.’
‘I’ll see you there,’ Percy declared curtly and swung on his heel to leave again.
Suzy breathed in deep and slow to soothe herself, recognising that she was in an anxious, volatile mood because she couldn’t stop thinking about her wedding the next day and her nerves and regrets were really beginning to eat her alive. Making a sacrifice, even for someone that you loved as she loved her father, was much harder than she had thought it would be months earlier...
CHAPTER TWO
THE FLORIST, NOT PERCY, was waiting for Suzy when she crossed the road to walk into the picturesque little church. It was unusually cold for a spring evening and she shivered, wishing she had thought to put on a coat. The florist was in a hurry and had already positioned her arrangements by the time that Suzy arrived, leaving the bride to do nothing more than make her own few personal touches.
‘It looks wonderful,’ she told the older woman as she left, contriving a generous smile because it wasn’t the woman’s fault that Suzy was a less than happy bride-to-be. She hurried about tying small floral beribboned tokens to the ends of the pews. Her bridegroom had paid for everything and had spared no expense, although Suzy had not made a single extravagant choice for an event that she had feared taking place. Way back at the beginning, after his blackmailing start, though, Percy had been polite and reasonably pleasant but in recent months, as they got closer to the wedding, he had become terse and more difficult to deal with.
Sadly, however, her father’s debt would not be written off until she became Percy’s legally wedded wife. Could she honestly trust the older man to continue to respect the terms they had agreed, though? Right now, she was getting a little nervous about being alone with Percy behind closed doors, forced to tolerate his moods and hope for the best. Perhaps if she had been more sexually experienced she might have been less nervous of the older man, she reasoned uncertainly. Then she might have been more confident that she could accurately read his behaviour. But Suzy was a virgin, less from choice than from lack of opportunity, living in a small place where she met few single men.
Hearing a noise in the church porch, she grabbed her bag and went to switch off the lights, assuming it was Percy and wondering what on earth he wanted to see her about so late in the day. As she walked out into the dim porch, she was grabbed by both shoulders and flung back against the hard stone wall like a doll and a stifled shriek of fear erupted from her. She thought she was being attacked and then she saw Percy squaring up to her with a pugnacious face of fury.
‘What the heck?’ she began in disbelief.
Percy clamped a silencing hand to her mouth. ‘Standing there at the bar flirting with another man...making a fool of me, were you?’ he growled at her.
‘No, we weren’t flirting... I swear,’ she declared shakily, sincerely afraid of the way he was behaving and eager to placate him so that he would free her. ‘The silly man was still trying to persuade me to model for him—’
‘You’re lying, just like Barb did!’ he thundered down at her, unimpressed.
‘Who’s Barb?’ Suzy whispered, her spine and her head still stinging from that first rough meeting with the wall.
‘My first wife and I’m not having another one like her, running after all the men, making a mockery of me round the neighbourhood!’ he spat down at her, his eyes locked on her with what looked very like hatred to her frightened gaze.
‘Please let me go, Percy,’ Suzy whispered because, while Percy might not be a very tall man, he was built like an ox, square and stocky and strong. ‘This has got out of hand.’
‘Shut up...you don’t tell me what to do...ever!’ he launched down at her, slapping her across the face in a glancing blow that caused her head to strike the wall behind her again and extracted a gasp of pain from her pale lips. ‘Not so cheeky now, are you? I’ve been too soft with you.’
‘Let me go,’ Suzy urged between clenched teeth. ‘This is assault, Percy, and I won’t stand for it!’
And he laughed as though she had said the funniest thing he had ever heard.
‘What are you planning to do about it? Report me to the police when I can throw you and your dad out of this village any time I like? I own you just as I own all the businesses round here and don’t you forget it!’ Percy lifted his hands off her with an exaggerated flourish. ‘I’ve gone easy on you this time. Don’t let me see you flirting like that again!’
Suzy was so dizzy, she staggered as she slid back down the wall onto her own feet again. He was a frighteningly strong man because he had held her suspended all that time, but then she was a small and slender woman. As Percy slammed noisily into the car he had left parked across the street, she lifted her bag from where it had fallen and headed back home, praying her father would already be in bed. She massaged her aching head as she crept upstairs to her room. All of her ached from being thrown against the wall and her face was still stinging from that blow.