There was a click, and then a strong, masculine voice spoke.
‘Portia.’ Just her name, that was all.
She felt the constricted passageway of her throat tighten. After all the chasing he had done, now he was going to make her do the running.
‘I’m—I’m at my flat. I… I…wondered whether you might be free for dinner tonight.’
She could feel the seconds pass, each one an eternity.
Then down the line came that same voice.
Her fingers clutched at the phone so tightly her nails were white. He gave her her answer.
‘I’m flying out tonight, Portia. But if you wish you could come over now.’
Her throat clo
sed completely.
‘Now?’
It scraped through her lips, scarcely audible.
‘I think so. Don’t you?’
The voice was controlled—very controlled—but she could hear emotion beneath it. It would be satisfaction, she knew. The satisfaction of a rich, spoilt, powerful man who had just achieved what he had wanted.
She put the phone down, feeling a wave of faintness going through her. Was she really going to go through with this? Give herself up to Diego Saez? Take a taxi to his hotel at this hour and…and… Go to bed with him. That was what he wanted. He was flying out tonight, and he wanted to make sure he’d had his before he went. After all, who knew when a busy international financier like him would be back in London again?
A shiver went through her. Would Diego Saez expect her to be waiting for him when he came back to London, whenever that was? Was she supposed to be his woman in London for the time being?
Stop it! She tore her mind away. What was the point of tormenting herself like this? Didn’t she have enough to feel anguished about? Tom was in danger of losing Salton—and the only lifeline being held out to him was Diego Saez’s.
And it came with a condition.
She was going to have to put aside all her principles about not indulging in a brief, physical affair with a man whose attitude to women, to sex was abhorrent to her.
A word came into her mind, ugly and vile.
Was she prostituting herself? To save Salton for her brother?
A bitter expression lit her eyes. What did it matter what you called it? She could not—could not—let Tom lose Salton just because she did not want an affair with Diego Saez. A man who with a single look could make her tremble…
A deep, abiding sense of inevitability swept through her. She had run all she could, denied him and defied him, scorned him and condemned him. But it had all been in vain.
Diego Saez would possess her, enjoy her, and dispose of her. What she had most feared, most fled from, would happen, after all.
She had no choice.
Slowly she walked into her bedroom and started to get changed. To adorn herself for Diego Saez.
Diego stood by the window of his penthouse suite and gazed out over the traffic on Park Lane and across to the dark mass of Hyde Park beyond. Through the soundproofed windows the roar of the traffic was silent, the endless procession of red tail-lights and white headlights streaming along the busy road.
His mind slipped away to another city.
Another time.
The stench. That was what he remembered most about San Cristo. The stench of poverty, destitution, despair. The stifling heat of the day and the chill of the nights as he lay, arms crossed over and hands tucked into his armpits, knees drawn up, sleeping in filthy doorways, with the perpetual gnaw of hunger in his belly.