Breathing heavily, his hands clenched into fists, his hardening heart thumping, Javier watched Luis collide with a petite blonde woman in his haste to get away from him.
In all their thirty-five years neither of them had ever turned their back on the other.
It would be the first and last time Luis walked away from him.
In the periphery of his vision he saw the woman his treacherous brother had bumped into come towards him but with his gaze on Luis’s retreating back, it was only when she stood a few feet from him that her features came into focus.
Javier stared at the face he had last seen two months before when he had shown her to the door of his house.
Big pale blue eyes stared back, apprehension shining out of them.
The rage inside him ratcheted up another notch. Any higher and there was real danger he would combust.
This was a face he had never wanted to see close-up again.
‘You should be at the after-show party,’ he snapped.
Sophie Johnson was part of Compania de Ballet de Casillas’s corps de ballet and had a contractual obligation to attend the after-show party.
Colour flamed the pretty heart-shaped face, a pained crease forming in her brow. ‘I quit the company two months ago.’
His heart thumped to hear that surprisingly sultry voice again.
Sophie had the sweet looks of an innocent but a voice that evoked thoughts of dark red satin sheets and dim lighting.
She had quit the company…?
He had hardly looked at the stage during the performance.
‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’
But he knew. The pressing weight in his already tightly crushed chest told him the answer. He did not want to listen to it.
Her throat moved.
He’d kissed that throat…
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Now is the worst time to speak to me.’ And she was the last person he wished to see or speak to. Not now, when he could feel the fabric of his life dissolving around him.
He stepped past her and nodded a dismissal. ‘Excuse me.’
He’d taken no more than two paces when she said, ‘It’s important.’
His heart began to thrum wildly, every nerve ending standing on edge. Memories of their brief interlude surfaced in a wave, memories he’d not allowed himself to think of since showing her out of his home.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he half turned to her and inhaled deeply.
‘No,’ he
told her harshly. ‘This is not a conversation we are going to have now. Go home.’
‘But—’
‘I said no.’
The vehemence in Javier’s gravelly tone made Sophie recoil.