So Close and No Closer

Luis was his only constant. It had been the two of them, facing the world and everything it could throw at them, together, since they had shared the same womb.

Luis waited until they were out of anyone’s earshot before turning to him. ‘You knew we were ripping Benjamin off all those years ago, didn’t you?’

The rage that had simmered in Javier all evening blazed at the mention of his nemesis’s name.

Seven years ago the Casillas brothers had invited Benjamin to invest in a project they were undertaking in Paris, the creation of a skyscraper that became known as Tour Mont Blanc. They had only invited his investment because the seller of the land, to whom they had paid a significant deposit, suddenly told them they had until midnight to pay the balance or he would sell to another interested buyer. They didn’t have the cash. Benjamin did.

‘We didn’t rip him off,’ Javier reminded him icily. ‘He was the fool who signed the contract without reading it.’

‘And you should have warned him the terms had changed as you’d said you would. You didn’t forget, did you?’

Javier might be many things but a liar was not one of them.

Luis had been the one to invite Benjamin onto the project. His investment was worth twenty per cent of the land fee. In the rush of sealing the deal Luis had told Benjamin it meant twenty per cent of the profits. Their lawyer, who drew up the contract in record time, had been the one to point out that the Casillas brothers would be doing all the work and that Benjamin’s profit share should be only five per cent, a point Javier had agreed with.

The contract had been changed accordingly. Javier had emailed it to Benjamin expecting him to read the damn thing and negotiate if the new terms were not to his liking.

‘I knew it.’ Luis took a deep breath. ‘All these years and I’ve told myself that it had been an oversight on your part when I should have accepted the truth that you never forget. In thirty-five years you have never forgotten anything or failed to do something you promised.’

‘I never promised to email him.’ Javier never made promises he didn’t intend to keep. People could say what they liked about him—and frequently did, although never to his face—but he was a man of his word.

‘Not an actual promise,’ Luis conceded. ‘But look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t a deliberate act on your part.’

Luis had asked him to give Benjamin a heads-up about the changes in terms when Javier emailed the contract. At no point had Javier agreed to this request and Luis should be thankful for it. Benjamin’s failure to read the contract before signing it had made the Casillas brothers richer to the tune of two hundred and twenty-five million euros. Benjamin had still made an excellent profit—profit—of seventy-five million and all he’d had to do for that substantial sum was transfer some funds. That he’d had the nerve to sue them over it was beyond the pale. That Benjamin had refused to accept the court’s judgement when the judge had thrown the case out, and then stolen Javier’s fiancée from him, was despicable.

And the world thought he was the bad man in all this?

Blind, prejudiced fools, the lot of them. He knew what they all thought. The world looked at his face and saw his murderer father.

‘For what reason would it have been deliberate?’ he asked coldly.

‘That is for your conscience to decide. All I know for sure is that Benjamin was our friend. I have defended you and I have fought your corner—’

‘Our corner,’ Javier corrected, his limited patience right at the point of snapping.

Now his own twin was questioning his motives?

What happened to the loyalty that had always bound them together?

‘I assume this burst of conscience from you is connected to that damned woman.’

He’d had a sense of foreboding in the pit of his stomach since spotting Chloe Guillem, Benjamin’s sister, in the audience that night.

Chloe had betrayed them as greatly as her brother had; had aided and abetted his plot to steal Freya and was, unquestionably, the cause of all the tension that had hung between Javier and Luis since Luis’s return from the Caribbean.

A darkness rarely seen on his brother’s face suddenly appeared and before he had time to blink, Luis had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. ‘If you ever speak about Chloe in that way again then you and I are finished. Do you hear me? Finished.’

‘If you’re still defending her to me then I would say we’re already finished, brother.’ He spat the last word directly into Luis’s face.

Javier knew in his bones that something had happened between Luis and Chloe. Luis had always had a roving eye for the ladies but never had Javier had cause to suspect a shift in his brother’s loyalty from it.

If Luis wanted to be with that bitch after what she had done to him then Luis could get the hell out of his life. Loyalty counted for everything and if Luis had lost sight of that then he was no brother to him.

Eyeball to eyeball, they glowered at each other, the venom seeping between them thick enough to taste.

Then Luis released his hold and stepped back.

Javier stared at the man he had shared a womb with, had shared a bedroom with, had fought with, had protected, had been protected by, had grieved with; the other side of the coin that was the Casillas twins, and watched him take backwards strides until he turned his back on him.