‘Great. I’ll see you then.’
‘Sweet dreams,mi vida.’
Beth threw her phone across the hotel room floor and grabbed furiously at her hair.
The lying bastard! How dare he call her by that endearment?
Mi vida?My life? More like myexpendablelife.
Well, now it was Xavi who was expendable; Xavi who was going to learn how it felt to lose the most important thing in his life and for his life and dreams to be ripped apart.
By the time Beth was finished with Xavi de la Rosa, he would hate her every bit as much as she hated him.
It was hard to feel hate for someone when you walked into a villa and found them sitting around a dining room table looking all sexy in a dapper navy blue suit, pale blue shirt and thick checked silver tie, and with a large brown Spanish Water Dog on their lap, gazing at them adoringly whilst having the undersides of their ears rubbed.
Beth supposed it proved that dogs could be as stupid as humans. She’d once been as big a sucker for affection from Xavi as Diego. Still, it gave her perverse pleasure when Diego took one look at her from beneath the shaggy mane of curly hair on his head and jumped off Xavi’s lap to charge over and run around her like she was his personal maypole.
‘He likes you,’ Xavi observed.
‘He likes everyone.’
‘Yes, but hereallylikes you. He clearly has excellent taste.’
‘Clearly,’ she agreed, laughing lightly, biting back the comment that if Diego really did have excellent taste, he wouldn’t have given affection to Xavi. She would make sure to give the dog a stern warning of the danger of showing affection to Xavi when she was next alone with him.
To buy herself time to compose herself from all the memories that had started slamming into her before she’d even walked through the villa’s front door and the slamming of her heart at the first glimpse of Xavi, she crouched down to cuddle Diego, taking much-needed comfort from his soft warmth.
This was the home the mother she’d never known had grown up in, the villa Beth had first walked into as an unworldly eighteen-year-old hoping to forge a relationship with the grandfather she’d never known. The villa she’d met Xavi in. The villa they’d made love in every room of except her grandfather’s bedroom.
Even this dining room came prefilled with memories. Xavi had lifted her onto the sideboard dancing in her eye line, and taken her with such exquisiteness that she’d had to bite into his shoulder to stop her cries of ecstasy sounding through to the other rooms.
The room directly above this dining room was the bathroom she’d sobbed in when she’d miscarried their baby.
Still fussing over Diego, she forced herself to meet Xavi’s warm brown stare and willed her racing pulses to settle. ‘You know he’s going to have to live with us?’
His lips curved. She imagined he’d carried that smug, self-satisfied smile since she’d agreed to his proposal.
He thought he had his future mapped out to his exact specifications. Let him enjoy the delusion while it lasted.
‘I’d assumed as much.’
‘I hope your home’s not got too many valuables at low heights. Diego still behaves like a puppy at times.’
He stretched his long legs out and hooked his ankles together. ‘I will get my staff to Diego-proof it.’
‘Where do you live now? I assume you don’t live in the family home anymore?’ When she’d met him, he’d not long returned to Madrid after six years studying in England. Back then, it had thrilled her to think he’d lived only forty miles from her home in the heart of England.
There was the slightest hesitation. ‘In Salamanca.’
She only just managed to stop herself from visibly blanching.
Xavi had once taken her shopping in Madrid’s Salamanca district. The nineteenth-century neighbourhood oozed charm, glamour and beauty, and for Beth it had been love at first sight. So smitten had she been that when Xavi suggested buying a home for them there, she’d thrown her arms around his neck and kissed his face off.
‘Oh, right,’ she said as if she hadn’t just had another knife plunged into her heart, and tried desperately to think of something light-hearted to add to cover the coldness of her shock.
When they’d been together, Xavi had been making plans to buy a place of his own.Theirown. She was supposed to have moved into that place with him. In Salamanca. Moved into it and made a family of their own in it.
‘What about your sisters?’ she ended up plumping for. ‘The last time I spoke to Carlota, she was still living at home…when she’s not off on one of her archaeological digs, that is, but I haven’t spoken to Blanca in years.’
