‘Well, that’s obvious. But how can I not? What will she think of me?’
‘That you’re my latest mistress. What else?’
Cruz saw a flash of hurt cross her face and hated how she made him feel subtly guilty about the situation between them. He had nothing to feel guilty about. She had asked him for money, he had laid down his terms, and she’d accepted. And now that she knew he was in direct competition with her his conscience was clear. Or should have been. Still, it picked at him that he might be making a decision he would later regret. His body said the opposite and he ran his eyes over her feminine, but demure outfit. All that wild hair caught back in a low ponytail just begging to be set free.
‘I don’t have anything for her,’ she said in a small voice.
Cruz forced himself to concentrate on a particularly dilapidated section of road before he had an accident. ‘I’ve got it covered.’
She fell blessedly silent after that as he navigated through the centre of town and he was just exhaling when she spoke again.
‘What did you get her?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your present. I would know what it was if I was really your mistress.’
‘You are my mistress,’ he reminded her. ‘For one night anyway.’
If possible even more colour drained from her face, and it irritated him to think that she saw sleeping with him as such a chore. By the time he was finished with her she would be screaming with pleasure and begging for more than one night.
‘Money,’ he said, pulling his thoughts out of his pants.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m giving her money.’
‘Oh.’
Her nose twitched as if she’d just smelt something foul.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ he snapped.
‘Nothing.’
Her tone implied everything.
‘Money makes the world go round, gatita,’ he grated.
‘Actually, I think the saying is that love makes the world go round.’
‘Love couldn’t make a tennis ball go round,’ he said, knowing from her tight expression that she didn’t approve or agree. Well, he didn’t give a damn. She hadn’t been given up as a child. ‘Look, my mother sold me to your grandfather when I was thirteen. I think I know what she likes.’
Aspen looked aghast. ‘I had heard that rumour but I never actually believed it.’
‘Believe it,’ he said, hating the note of bitterness that tinged his words.
‘I’m sure she didn’t want to send you away.’
Cruz didn’t say anything. She sighed and eventually said, ‘I know how you feel.’
‘How could you possibly know how I feel?’ he mocked. ‘You grew up on a hundred-acre property and went to a private school.’
‘I wasn’t born into that, Cruz. My father left my mother when I was three and she struggled for years to keep our heads above water while she was alive. What I was getting at was that my grandfather paid my father to stay away.’
Cruz frowned. He’d assumed her mother had lived off some sort of trust fund and her father had died. ‘Your father was a ski instructor, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Probably better that you didn’t have anything to do with him.’
‘Because of his profession?’
‘No, because he accepted being paid off. A parent should never give up a child, no matter what.’
‘I’m sorry that happened to you,’ she said quietly.
Cruz didn’t want her compassion. Especially not when he understood why his mother had done it. Hell, wasn’t that one of the reasons he worked so hard? So that if he did ever marry no wife of his would ever have to face the same decision?
He shrugged it off, as he always did. ‘I had a lot of opportunities from it. And worse things happen to kids than that.’
‘True, but when a child feels abandoned it’s—’
He cut off her sympathetic response. ‘You move on and you don’t look back.’
Aspen registered the pain in his voice, the deep hurt he must have felt. She experienced a strange desire to make him feel better—and then reminded herself that he was a wealthy man who was determined to steal her home away from her and was so arrogant he was lending her money to challenge him.
‘I’d like to stop for flowers,’ she said stiffly.
Cruz turned down a side street and cursed when the traffic came to a standstill along a busy ocean-facing boulevard, completely oblivious to the cosmopolitan coastline that sparkled in the sun.