The Real Romero

‘You lied to me?’

‘I wouldn’t exactly call it a lie …’ Naturally Lucas had expected surprise—incredulity, even—but at the end of the day a ski instructor had been swapped for a billionaire. He had taken it as a given that his newly discovered status would do its usual job and bring a smile of servile appreciation to her lips. It hadn’t.

‘Well, I would.’ Milly was struggling to contain her anger. How dared he? How dared he play her for a complete fool?

‘You made false assumptions,’ Lucas told her with barely concealed impatience. ‘I chose not to set you straight.’

She sprang to her feet and stormed over to the window, stared out for a little while, and then stormed back towards him, hands on her hips. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me who you were?’

Because I was enjoying the novelty of being with someone refreshingly honest … Because in a world where wariness and suspicion are bywords it was a holiday, not having to guard every syllable, watch every turn of phrase, accept instant adulation without being able to distinguish what was genuine and what was promoted by a healthy knowledge of how much I was worth …

‘When you’re as rich as I am, it pays to be careful.’

‘In other words, I could have been just another cheap, tacky gold-digger, after your money?’

‘If you want to put it like that …’

His dark eyes were cool, assessing, unflinching. She could have hit him.

But there was no denying that she still wanted to kiss him.

CATHY WILLIAMS can remember reading Mills and Boon^® as a teenager, and now that she’s writing them she remains an avid fan. For her, there is nothing like creating romantic stories and engaging plots, and each and every book is a new adventure. Cathy lives in London, and her three daughters, Charlotte, Olivia and Emma, have always been and continue to be the greatest inspiration in her life.

The Real Romero

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my fabulous and inspiring daughters.

Contents

Cover

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘AMELIA? IS THAT Amelia Mayfield?’

Milly pressed the mobile phone against her ear, already regretting that she had been stupid enough to pick up the call. How many more instructions could Sandra King give about this job?

She was going to be a chalet girl! Two weeks of cooking and looking after a family of four! Anyone would think that she was being primed to run the country. It wasn’t even as though she hadn’t done this before. She had, two years ago, for three months before she’d started the hotel job in London.

‘Yes.’ She sighed, allowing her eyes to drift over the pure, dazzling canvas of white snow all around her. It had been a fantastic trip, just the thing to clear her head and get her mind off her miserable situation. She had travelled in style and she had enjoyed every second of it. It was almost a shame that she was now in the back seat of the chauffeur-driven SUV with her destination only half an hour away.

‘You haven’t been picking up your phone!’ The voice down the other end was sharp and accusatory. Milly could picture the other woman clearly, sitting at her desk in Mayfair, her shiny blond hair scraped back with an Alice band, her long perfectly manicured nails tapping impatiently on her desk.

Sandra King had interviewed her not once but three times for this job. It was almost as though she had resented having to give the job to someone small and round with red hair when there were so many other, more suitable candidates in the mix: girls with cut-glass accents, braying laughs and shiny blond hair scraped back with Alice bands.

But, as she had made clear with unnecessarily cruel satisfaction, this particular family wanted someone plain and down to earth, because the last thing the señora wanted was a floozy who might decide to start flirting with her rich husband.

Milly, who had looked up the family she would be working for on Google after her first interview, had only just managed not to snort with disbelief because the husband in question was definitely not the sort of man any girl in her right mind would choose to flirt with. He was portly, semi-balding and the wrong side of fifty, but he was filthy rich, and she supposed that that was as compelling an attraction as being a rock star. Not that she was in the market for flirting with anyone, anyway.

‘Sorry, Sandra...’ She grinned because she knew that Sandra didn’t like being called by her first name. It was ‘Ms King’, or ‘Skipper’ to the chosen few. The other girls in the exclusive agency that dealt specifically with part-time positions to the rich and famous called her Skipper, one of those silly nicknames that Milly guessed had been concocted in whatever posh boarding school they had all attended.

‘The service has been a bit iffy ever since I left London...and I can’t talk for long because my phone’s almost out of charge.’ Not strictly true but she didn’t need yet another check list of the various things the special family ate and didn’t eat; or the favourite things the special little kids, aged four and six, insisted on doing before they went to bed. She didn’t need to be reminded of what she could and couldn’t wear, or say or couldn’t say.

Milly had never known people to be as fussy with just about everything. The family for whom she had worked two years previously had been jolly, outdoorsy and amenable.

But she wasn’t complaining. They might be fussy but the pay was fabulous and, more importantly, the job removed her from the vicinity of Robbie, Emily and heartbreak.

She had managed to push her ex-fiancé, her best friend and her broken engagement out of her head, but she could feel them staging another takeover, and she blinked rapidly, fighting back tears of self-pity. Time healed, she had been told repeatedly by her friends, who had never liked Robbie from the start and, now that she was no longer engaged, had felt free to let loose every single pejorative thing they had thought about him from day one.

On the one hand, their negative comments had been bolstering and supportive. On the other, they had shown up her utter lack of judgement.

‘In that case,’ the well-bred, disembodied voice informed her, ‘I’m afraid I have to inform you that the job has been cancelled.’

It took a few seconds for that to sink in. Milly had been busy being distracted by the unfortunate turn of events that had catapulted her life from sorted and happy to humiliated and up in the air.

‘Did you hear what I just said, Amelia?’

‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? Please tell me that this is a joke.’ But Sandra King was not the sort who had a sense of humour. Any joke, for her, would be foreign territory.

‘I never joke,’ the other woman said, on cue. ‘The Ramos family has pulled out at the last minute. I only took their phone call a few hours ago and, if you had picked up your phone instead of letting it ring, you would not have wasted your time travelling.’

‘Why? Why is it off?’ Visions of slinking back into the flat she had shared with Emily, risking bumping into her one-time best friend clearing her stuff before she took off to America with Robbie, were so horrifying that she felt giddy.

‘One of the kids has come down with chicken pox. Simple as that.’

‘But I’m only half an hour away from the lodge!’ Milly all but wailed.

They had left the exclusive village of Courchevel behind and the car was wending its way upwards, leaving the riff-raff of the lower slopes behind as it entered the rarefied air of the seriously rich. Hidden, private lodges with majestic views; helipads; heated indoor swimming pools; saunas and steam rooms by the bucket load...

There was an elaborate sigh from the end of the line. ‘Well, you’ll have to tell the driver to swing round and head back, I’m afraid. Naturally, you will be compensated for your time and trouble...’

‘Surely I can spend one night there? It’s getting dark and I’m exhausted. I have a key to the place. I can use it and make sure that I leave the lodge in pristine condition. I need to sleep, Sandra!’

She couldn’t get her head round the fact that the one thing that seemed to be working in her favour, the only thing that had worked in her favour for the past couple of horrific, nightmarish weeks, was now collapsing around her feet like a deck of cards, kicked down by one of the odious rich kids from the family who had bailed at the last minute. A wave of hopeless self-pity threatened to engulf her.

‘That would be highly irregular.’

‘So is the fact that my job here has been cancelled at the last minute, when I’m fifteen minutes away from the lodge—having spent the past eight hours travelling!’

She could see the lodge rearing up ahead of them and for a few seconds every depressing, negative thought flew from her head in sheer, wondrous appreciation of the magnificent structure ahead of her.

It dominated the skyscape, rising up against the blindingly white snow, master of all it surveyed. It was absolutely enormous, the largest and grandest ski lodge Milly had ever seen in her life. In fact, it was almost an understatement to classify it as a ‘lodge’. It was more like a mansion in the middle of its own private, snowy playground.

‘I suppose there’s little choice!’ Sandra snapped. ‘But for God’s sake, Amelia, pick up when you hear your phone! And make sure you don’t touch anything. No poking around. Just eat and sleep and make sure that when you leave the lodge no one knows you’ve been there.’

Milly grimaced as she was abruptly disconnected. She leaned forward, craning to get glimpses of the mansion as it drew closer and closer to her, until the SUV was turning left and climbing through private land to where it nestled in all its splendour.

‘Er...’ She cleared her throat and hoped that the driver, who had greeted her at Chambery airport in extremely broken English and had not said a word since, would get the gist of what she was going to say.

‘Oui, mademoiselle?’

Milly caught his eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes, well, there’s been a slight change of plan...’

‘What is that?’

She sighed with relief. At least she wouldn’t have to try and explain an impossible situation using her limited French, resisting the temptation to fill in the gaps by speaking loudly. She told him as succinctly as possible. He would have to stay overnight somewhere and return her to the airport the following day... Sorry, so sorry for the inconvenience, but he could phone...

She scrambled into her capacious rucksack and extracted her wallet and from that the agency card that she had not envisaged having to use for the next couple of weeks.

She wondered whether he might stay at the lodge, it was big enough to fit a hundred drivers, but that was something he would have to work out for himself. She suspected that she had already stretched Sandra’s limited supply of the milk of human kindness by asking if she could stay overnight in the place.

It was a dog-eat-dog world, she thought. As things stood, she was rock-bottom of the pack. She had been cheated on by her fiancé, a guy she had known since childhood and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she had been cheated on by her best friend and flatmate...

To top it off, she had been told that the reason he had become engaged to her in the first place was because his parents were fed up with his twenty-four-seven lifestyle of living it large and womanising. They had given him a deadline to find himself a decent girl and settle down or else he could forget about taking over the family business that had just opened a thriving branch in Philadelphia and was going places.

Banished from the family fortune and a ready-made job, he would have been faced, she assumed, with the terrifying prospect of actually buckling down and finding himself a job without Mummy and Daddy’s helping hand. And so he had plumped for the slightly less terrifying prospect of charming her into thinking that they really had a relationship, proposing marriage whilst playing the field with her much taller, much skinnier and much prettier flatmate.

His parents had approved of her. She had passed the litmus test with them. She was his passport to his inheritance. She was small, round and homely; when she thought of Robbie and the angular Emily, every insecurity she nursed about her looks rose to the surface at the speed of light.

The only thing worse than catching them in bed together would have been actually marrying the creep, only to discover once the ring was on her finger that he had zero interest in her.

She gazed mournfully at her finger where a giant diamond rock had nestled only a few weeks ago.

Her friends had all told her that it was a monumental mistake to have chucked it back at him, that she should have kept it and flogged it at the first available opportunity. After all, she deserved it, after what he had put her through.

And the money would have stood her in good stead, considering she had jacked in her hotel job so that she could play happy families with him in Philadelphia. It was galling to think that he had had the nerve to tell her that he hoped she understood and that she could count on him if she ever needed anything!

As things currently stood, she was out of a job, banished from her flat until Emily cleared out and with a shockingly small amount of money saved.

And she had no one to turn to. Her only living relative, her grandmother who lived in Scotland, would have sold her cottage had she known about her granddaughter’s state of near penury, but Milly had no intention of filling her in on that. It was bad enough that she had had to pick up the pieces when she had been told fifteen days ago that the fairy-tale wedding was off the cards.

As far as her grandmother was concerned, Milly was taking time off to work as a nanny for a family in Courchevel, where she would be able to do what she loved most, namely ski... She had glossed over the trauma of her breakup as just one of those things, nothing that a couple of weeks in the snow couldn’t cure.

Milly had painted a glowing picture of a cosy family, practically friends, who would be there for her on her road to recovery. It had helped her grandmother to stop fretting. Furthermore, she had embroidered the recovery theme by announcing that she had another job lined up as soon as she was back in London, far better than the one she had jettisoned.

As far as her grandmother was concerned, she was as right as rain, because the last thing Milly wanted to do was worry her.

‘Shall I call...er...the agency and see if you could stay overnight at the lodge...?’ Her better instincts grudgingly cranked into gear and she resigned herself to another awkward conversation with Sandra, who would probably spend a ridiculously long time telling her that being let down was all her fault because she should have just answered her phone, having confirmed that the driver would not, definitely not, be allowed to sully the mansion, no way.

But, no; Pierre, the driver, was a regular at one of the hotels in Courchevel, where one of his relatives worked, and he would be fine there.

Milly was tempted to ask whether being let down by the special family came with the job. Maybe he had a permanent room there for when he got messed around.

She didn’t. Instead, she allowed him to help her with her luggage, the luggage containing the clothes that would never be worn, and he only drove off when she had unlocked the imposing front door to let herself into the lodge.

It was blessedly warm and indescribably stunning, a testimony to the marvels of modern architecture and minimalism. The entire space was open-plan, with two sitting rooms cleverly split by a wall in which a high-tech, uber-modern fire caught the eye and held it. Beyond that, she could glimpse a vast kitchen, and beyond that yet more, although she was drawn to the floor-to-ceiling windows that captured the spectacular views of the valley.

She gazed out at the untouched, pristine snow, fast fading as night descended. It had been an excellent ski season so far—good accumulation of snow, which had collected on the roofs of the lodges lower down the mountain and lay there like banks and banks of smooth, marzipan icing.

Having no idea of the layout of the lodge, she decided to take her time exploring. She wasn’t going to be there long, so why not enjoy the adventure of discovery? Her flat was small and poky. More than four people in the sitting area constituted a traffic jam. Why not pretend that this place belonged to her?

She explored each room exhaustively, one at a time. She admired the sparse, expensive furnishings. She had never seen so much chrome, glass and leather under one roof in her life before. Much of the furniture was white, and she marvelled at a couple confident enough to let loose two small children in a space where there was so much potential for destruction.

The kitchen was a wonder to behold: black granite counters, a table fashioned from beaten metal and an array of gadgets that made her culinary fingers itch.

She decided that she was glad she no longer worked at the Rainbow Hotel. It boasted three stars, but everyone there reckoned palms must have been greased to get that rating because the rooms were basic, bordering on the criminally dull, the restaurant should have been updated half a century ago and the two bars were straight out of the seventies but without a cool, retro feel.

Not to mention the fact that she had never been allowed, not once in a year and a half, to do anything on her own, Chef Julian, whilst only dabbling in the actual cooking, had specialised in peering over her shoulder and picking fault with her cooking whenever he got the chance.

Here, she could have let her imagination go wild—within the constraints of the various faddy food groups they did and didn’t eat, of course. She trailed her hand over the gleaming, spotless counter and brushed a few of the marvellous gadgets, none of which bore the hallmarks of anyone ever having been near them. When she checked the fridge, it was to find that it was fully stocked, as were the cupboards. A horizontal metal wine rack groaned under the weight of bottles, all of which bore expensive, fancy labels.

Absorbed in her inspection of the kitchen, daydreaming about what it might feel like actually to have enough money to own a place like this as a second home, Milly was unaware of anyone approaching.

‘And you are...?’

The deep, cold voice coming from behind crashed through her pleasant, escapist fantasy with the unwelcome force of a sledgehammer and she spun round, heart pounding.

Her brain, which had been lagging behind, caught up to point out mockingly that there was a stranger in the house and she should be looking for something handy with which she could defend herself.

Because the man could be....dangerous...

Her mind went blank. She forgot that she should be scared—terrified, even. She was in a bloody great rolling mansion packed full of valuables and the owners weren’t there. The man standing in front of her, all six foot something of him, had probably broken in. She had probably disturbed him in the middle of ransacking the place, and everyone knew what happened to innocent people when they happened to interrupt a robbery.

But, God, had she ever seen someone so beautiful?

Raven-black hair, slightly longer than was conventionally permissible, framed a face that was, simply put, a thing of perfection: a wide, sensual mouth; chiselled features; eyes as dark and as fathomless as night. He was in jeans and a T-shirt and was barefoot.

It seemed unusual for a robber to take his shoes off to make off with the silver, but then it occurred to her that he had probably removed them so that he could sneak up on her unannounced.

‘I could ask you the same thing!’ She tried to keep the tenor of her voice calm and controlled—a woman in charge of the situation, someone who wasn’t going to be intimidated. ‘And don’t even think of taking a single step closer to me!’ Idiot that she was, she had left her mobile phone lying in her rucksack, which was currently reclining on the kitchen counter. It was infuriating, but how could she possibly have anticipated something like this?

In stark disobedience of her orders, the man took a couple of steps closer to her and she fell back, bumped into the counter and spun round to grab the nearest heavy thing to hand—which happened to be the kettle, a glass concoction that didn’t look as though it could stun a flea, never mind the muscled man who was now only a metre away from her and had folded his arms, cool as a cucumber.

‘Or else what? Don’t tell me you have plans for using that thing on me...?’

‘You’d better tell me what you’re doing here or else I’m going to...call the police. And I’m not kidding...’

This had not been the way Lucas had anticipated his evening going. In fact, he hadn’t actually banked on being here at all. He had lent the place to his mother’s annoying friends, only for them to cancel at the last minute, which was when he had decided to head there himself for a few days.

He would get away from his mother, who was becoming more strident in her demands for him to settle down and get married. She had suffered a minor stroke three months previously, had been pronounced fit and able, yet had decided that she had stared death in the face, had become acquainted with her own mortality—and now all she wanted was to hold a grandchild in her arms before she died. Was that asking too much of her only beloved son?

Frankly, Lucas thought that it was, but he had not been inclined to say so. Instead, he had wheeled out consultant after consultant, but no amount of reassurances from these top consultants could convince her that her fragile grasp on life wasn’t about to be snipped.

Add to that an annoying ex-girlfriend who refused to believe that she had been dumped, and a few days’ skiing had suddenly seemed like a brilliant idea.

Bracing conversations with his mother could be better faced after he had vented his frustrations in a few black runs.

Peace and quiet seemed to have nosedived, however, and he was not in the best of moods to be standing here, staring down a crazy woman brandishing his kettle and threatening to call the police.

A short, crazy woman, with red hair that was all over the place, and who thought he was looting the place. Hilarious.

‘You don’t really think you could take me on, do you?’ With lightning reflexes, he reached out and relieved her of her dangerous weapon, which he proceeded to set back down on its base. ‘Now, before I call the police and have you forcibly removed, you’re going to tell me what the hell you’re doing here.’

Deprived of the kettle, Milly stuck her chin out at a stubborn angle and stared at him defiantly. ‘You’re not scaring me, if that’s your intention.’

‘It’s never been my intention to scare a woman.’

The man oozed sex appeal through every pore. It was off-putting. How could she get her thoughts in order when he stood there, looking at her with those darker-than-night eyes that were insolent and intransigent at the same time? How was she supposed to think?

‘I’m actually employed here.’ Milly broke the silence. A thin film of perspiration had broken out over her body and, try as she might, she couldn’t seem to peel her eyes away from him.

He raised one enquiring eyebrow, and she glared at him, because she had every right to be here which he, almost certainly, did not.

What, she wondered, could possibly go wrong next? How could one person’s life get derailed in such a short space of time? She should have been here recovering, looking forward to an essential break from normality while she mentally gathered her forces and rallied her troops in preparation for returning to London. She should have been using the splendid kitchen to whip something up that was gluten-free for Mrs Ramos, meat-based for her husband and healthily braised for their children! Instead, she was having a staring match with someone who looked like Adonis but behaved like a caveman.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘Not that it’s any of your business! I’m the chalet girl the Ramos employed to work for them for the next two weeks. And they’ll be here any minute now...’

‘Ah...chalet girl... Now, why am I finding that hard to believe when I know for a fact that Alberto and Julia won’t be here because one of their children is ill?’ He strolled over to the fridge and helped himself to a bottle of mineral water, which he proceeded to drink while keeping his eye on her.

‘Oh.’ The annoying, arrogant man wasn’t a robber but, instead of rushing to reassure her, he had prolonged her discomfort by not deigning to tell her that he knew the family who owned the lodge. Were there any nice guys left in the world? ‘Well, if you think that I’m going to apologise for...for...’

‘Coming at me with the kettle?’

‘Then you’re mistaken. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you shouldn’t sneak around, and you should have told me that you knew the owners...’ A thought occurred to her. ‘I suppose they’ve let you down, as well?’

‘Come again?’

‘They let me down,’ Milly expanded glumly. Now that she was no longer in danger of imminent attack, her breathing had more or less returned to normal, but she still found that she had to put a little distance between her and Adonis, who was still standing by the fridge and yet managing to have a very weird effect on her nervous system.

His legs, she noted absently as she sat down on one of the high-tech leather-and-chrome chairs by the table, were long and muscular and he had good ankles. Not many men had good ankles but he had excellent ones—brown like the rest of him...with a sprinkling of dark hair...

She surfaced to find that he had said something and she frowned.

‘Not you, as well.’ She groaned, because from the tail end of his sentence she gathered he had been pointing out the obvious—which was how it was that she had managed to make the trip without being notified that the job had been cancelled. ‘I’ve had enough lecturing from Sandra about not picking up my phone; I don’t think I have the energy to sit through you telling me the same thing. Anyway, why are you here? Didn’t your agency let you know before you made a wasted trip here?’

Lucas had the dazed feeling of someone thrown into a washing machine and the spin cycle turned to full blast. She had raked her fingers through her wild red hair, which he now appreciated was thick and very long, practically down to her waist, a tumbling riot of curls and waves.

‘Agency?’ Never lost for words in any given situation, he now found himself speechless.

‘Sandra’s the girl at the agency that employed me. In London.’ She permitted herself to look at him fully and could feel hot colour racing up to her face. He was obviously foreign, beautifully and exotically foreign, but his English was perfect, with just a trace of an accent.

‘My job was to cook for the Ramos family and babysit their children.’ It suddenly occurred to her that he had called them by their Christian names. She had been under strict instructions to use their full titles and to remember that they weren’t her friends. It just went to show how different agencies operated; just her luck to have got stuck with snooty Sandra. ‘What were you employed to do? No, you don’t have to tell me.’

‘I don’t?’ Fascinating. Like someone from another planet. Wherever Lucas went, he generated adulation and subservience from women. They tripped over themselves to please him. They said what they imagined he wanted to hear. Born into wealth, he had known from a tender age what the meaning of power was and now, at the ripe young age of thirty-four, and with several fortunes behind him—some inherited, the rest made himself. He was accustomed to being treated like a man at the top of his game. A billionaire who could have whatever he pleased at the snap of his imperious fingers.

What did this woman think he did? He was curious to hear.

‘Ski instructor.’ Milly discovered that this strange turn of events was having a very beneficial effect on her levels of depression. Robbie, Emily and the horror story that had suddenly become her life had barely crossed her mind ever since Adonis had appeared on the scene.

‘Ski instructor.’ He was parroting everything she said. He couldn’t believe it.

‘You have the look of a ski instructor,’ Milly said thoughtfully.

‘Am I to take that as a compliment?’

‘You can if you want.’ She backtracked hastily just in case he got it into his head that she was somehow trying it on with him, which she wasn’t, because aside from anything else she was far too upset even to look at another man. ‘Isn’t it amazing how rich people live?’ She swiftly changed the topic and watched, warily, as he dumped the bottled water on the counter, making no effort even to look for the bin, and sauntered towards the kitchen table so that he could sit on one of the chairs, idly pulling another towards him with his foot and using it as a foot rest.

‘Amazing,’ Lucas agreed.

‘I mean, have you had a chance to look around this place? It’s like something from one of those house magazines! It’s hard to believe that anyone actually ever uses this lodge. Everything’s just so...shiny and expensive!’