Paloma’s footsteps paused, and she said with guarded surprise, “Yes?”
“Is Javiero waiting for you in the corridor?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to speak with him. In private. In...um...here.”
Global warming ended and the modern ice age arrived in one glacial word. “Why?”
Shifting to open the door was awkward, given her full-term belly. Scarlett wrestled herself around it and watched Paloma’s gaze drop to her middle. Her eyes nearly fell out of her head.
“I need to speak to him,” Scarlett said as another contraction looped around her abdomen and squeezed a fresh gasp from her lungs.
Javiero Rodriguez was unfit to be in public, not physically and not mentally.
He’d showered, but he was unshaven and should have gone to his barber before leaving Madrid. He had blown off the nicety, which wasn’t like him. For most of his thirty-three years, he had passionately adhered to tradition and expectation. He’d had a family dynasty to restore, his mother’s reputation to repair and his own superiority to assert.
He had achieved all those things and more, becoming a dominant force in global financial markets and one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. He was known to be charming and intelligent, and an excellent dancer who dressed impeccably well.
Despite all that, a sense of satisfaction had always eluded him.
Javiero had come to accept this vague discontent as just life. Happily-ever-after was, as anyone with a brain in his head could deduce, a fairy tale. He had experienced the bleakness of financial anxiety and the bitterness of powerlessness. He’d had a father who belittled him and abused his trust, one who didn’t so much as offer a shovel to help him dig himself out of the hole he’d been shoved into. He had tasted grief when the grandfather he’d revered had passed away. All of that had taught him ennui was the best one could hope for.
World-weariness was a luxury he no longer enjoyed, however. Three weeks ago, he had nearly died. He had lost an eye and was left with scars that would be with him forever. He looked like and felt like a monster.
As he ran a frustrated hand through his hair, his fingertips reflexively lifted in repulsion from the tender line where his scalp had been sewn back on. He shouldn’t be inflicting his gruesome self on helpless receptionists and unsuspecting coffee-fetchers. It was a cruelty.
His mother needed reinforcement, though. She had stood by him when nearly everyone else was giving him a wide berth. His uncles and cousins, people he financially supported, were taking one look and keeping their children away. His ex-fiancée, whose idiotic idea of being interesting was to keep an exotic pet menagerie, had dropped him like a hot potato once she’d seen the damage.
Not that he was stung other than in his ego by her rejection. Their proposed marriage had been an effort to rescue his pride. He saw that now and it only made his foul, obdurate mood worse. What a pathetic fool he was.
Grim malevolence was his companion now. It had become as entrenched in him as the deep grooves carved into his face and body. It clouded around him like a cologne gone off. It had sunk into his bones with the insidiousness of a virus or a spell, making his joints stiff and his heart a lump of concrete.
Staring with one eye down at the streets of Athens, a city and country he had sworn never to set foot in again, he dreamed only of burning this whole place down.
Your family stands to inherit a significant portion of the estate, his father’s lawyer had said. All parties must be present at the reading of the will for dispersal to move forward.
Javiero didn’t want any of his father’s money. He didn’t want to be here in his father’s office tower and couldn’t stand the idea of listening to yet another version of his father’s idea of what was fair.
For his mother’s sake, and what she stood to gain, he had relented. She had been treated horribly by Nikolai Mylonas and deserved compensation. If Javiero’s presence could help her finally gain what should have rightfully been hers, so be it. Here he was.
He didn’t have it in him to muster pretty manners, though. His already thin patience was tested by the prospect of listening to his mother chase principles his father had never possessed. She would argue one more time that her son was Niko’s legitimate heir and Javiero was legally entitled to everything.
Then he would have to listen to his father’s onetime and always scheming mistress, Evelina, arguing that his half brother, Val, was two days older than Javiero, and therefore all the money should go to them.
Mine, mine, mine.
The sickening refrain continued despite the instrument being dead.
Javiero wished the damned jaguar had finished him off. He really did.
As for Scarlett...? His grim mood skipped in and out of its channel, sparking and grinding at the mere thought of her.
She had called once while Javiero was in hospital. Once. On behalf of his dying father. His mother had informed her that Javiero would survive, and that had been all Scarlett had needed to hear. Not another word, no card or flowers. Nothing.
Why did that bother him? Until the last time he’d seen her, she had always been a very businesslike and unflappable PA. Almost pathological in her devotion to his father. She would turn up in one of her pencil skirts, blond hair gathered at her nape, delicate features flawlessly accented with natural tones, and she would irritate the hell out of him with her one-track agenda.
Your father wants me to inform you that he’s aware you’re behind the hostile takeover in Germany. He is willing to give you control of his entire operation if you come back to Athens and run it.
No.
Or, Evelina has made a specific request for funds. Niko has granted it. This is your mother’s equivalent amount. If you would like to speak to him about—
No.
And then that final
