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Her last partner, Jimmy, had been reassuringly average. Thin, with dark curly hair and passionate about teaching music. Creative enough to get her, yet down to earth enough to be safe.

No flash car, no persuasive charm, no showy gestures. Jimmy had ticked all the right boxes and she’d convinced herself that the outcome would surely be love and the sort of secure future she’d always envisaged for herself.

It had frightened her that he’d bored her. She should have loved the fact that he wasn’t a flash creep like the men her mother had always been drawn to. She hadn’t. In the end, no amount of common sense had been able to hide the fact that he didn’t excite her. She’d broken it off and gone for cover, scared at the thought that she might have had more in common with her mother than she wanted. She’d obviously needed more time to soak up the lessons she’d learnt about rich, good-looking guys and their empty, stupid promises.

‘Where does he go? Carlos? At Christmas?’

Hope blinked, reined in her wandering thoughts and focused on the man looking at her as he ate.

‘On holiday?’ he quizzed. ‘Abroad? With another batch of ten friends for whom he cooks a slap-up Christmas lunch?’

He scowled. In that moment, Hope saw the vulnerability beneath the impregnable, tough exterior.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t ask for details.’ She knew pretty much all the details, already. ‘What do you tend to do for Christmas?’

* * *

Javier paused.

He toyed with the food on his plate, unnerved by a pang of loss and pain at the distance between him and his brother.

‘Work never stops.’

He dug into the tapas but he knew that she was looking at him thoughtfully. He also knew that she was adept when it came to tactfully changing the conversation.

She didn’t give a hoot about him, couldn’t care less about what he thought or didn’t think, and was fine crashing through boundaries whenever she wanted. But there were times, like then, where she recognised that she was in front of a brick wall from which she had to walk away.

He was fast working out that she could be incredibly intuitive.

‘Work, work, work. Very bad for a person’s blood pressure,’ she murmured. ‘So, we leave here first thing? That was delicious. I think I’m going to hit the sack now. Thirty-six hours of being on the go is getting to me.’ She smiled and began standing up.

Javier watched in brooding silence as she took the dishes to the sink and then hesitated, not knowing what to do with them.

‘Leave them,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll make sure the agency I’m with sends someone to take care of everything as soon as we leave.’

‘When do you think that will be?’

‘I have some work to plough through first thing. I would say we’ll head off around lunchtime. Helicopter to the airport and then to St. Lucia.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait, Javier? Give Carlos a chance to get in touch with you? I’m certain we’re not going to have any more luck there than we had here. If you choose to ditch the whole thing, by the way, then you can just give me what you see fit…on the money front.’

‘It’s not as easy as that.’ Javier stood up and looked at her before he remembered the rest of the dishes on the table, which he carried over to the counter.

‘We can’t leave this dirty stuff overnight. Is there a dishwasher?’ Hope eyed the collection by the sink. In this pristine, picture-perfect kitchen, it looked as if someone had decided to detonate a small bomb.

‘You’re not here to tidy and clean,’ he said drily.

‘Tidying and cleaning is ingrained in me,’ Hope returned.

‘It’s late. Go to sleep.’ He glanced at the dishes and the containers for a couple of seconds. ‘I’ll handle this if you can’t live with the untidiness when you get up tomorrow morning.’

‘Are you sure you know what to do?’

‘That’s bordering on an insult.’ But he grinned and raised his eyebrows. He had moved to stand close to her, close enough for her to feel the heat emanating from his body.

They were in this big, sprawling empty villa on their own.

The night suddenly felt as though it was pressing against the windows, locking them together in intimate isolation.