A Virgin for Vasquez Read online

  A VOW OF REVENGE...

  When Sophie Griffin-Watt walked out of tycoon Javier Vasquez’s life, and down the aisle with another man, he swore to find a way to make her pay.

  A proposition from her past...

  With Sophie desperate for Javier’s help to save her family, his assistance comes with a price tag—the gorgeous body that was denied to him!

  An unimaginable outcome...

  Javier’s delicious game of retribution seemed the only way to get Sophie out of his system once and for all. But when he discovers Sophie’s exquisite innocence, he can no longer play by those rules...

  “I don’t care what you think!”

  How could Javier be so cool and composed when she was all over the place? Except, of course, she knew how. Because Sophie was just so much more affected by him than he was by her and she could see all her pride and self-respect disappearing down the drain if she didn’t get a grip on the situation right now.

  She cleared her throat and stared at him and through him. “I... We have to work alongside one another for a while...and...this was just an unfortunate blip. I would appreciate it if you never mention it again. We can both pretend that it never happened, because it will never happen again.”

  Javier lowered his eyes and tilted his head to one side as if seriously considering what she had just said.

  So many challenges in that single sentence. Did she really and truly believe that she could close the book now that page one had been turned?

  He’d tasted her and one small taste wasn’t going to do. Not for him and not for her. Whatever her backstory, they both needed to sate themselves in one another. And sooner or later it would happen...

  Cathy Williams can remember reading Harlequin books as a teenager, and now that she is 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 inspirations in her life.

  Books by Cathy Williams

  Harlequin Presents

  Seduced into Her Boss’s Service

  The Wedding Night Debt

  A Pawn in the Playboy’s Game

  At Her Boss’s Pleasure

  The Real Romero

  The Uncompromising Italian

  The Argentinian’s Demand

  Secrets of a Ruthless Tycoon

  Enthralled by Moretti

  His Temporary Mistress

  A Deal with Di Capua

  The Secret Casella Baby

  The Notorious Gabriel Diaz

  The Italian Titans

  Wearing the De Angelis Ring

  The Surprise De Angelis Baby

  One Night With Consequences

  Bound by the Billionaire’s Baby

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

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  CATHY WILLIAMS

  A Virgin for Vasquez

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  EXCERPT FROM SLEEPLESS IN MANHATTAN BY SARAH MORGAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  JAVIER VASQUEZ LOOKED around his office with unconcealed satisfaction.

  Back in London after seven years spent in New York and didn’t fate move in mysterious ways...?

  From his enviable vantage point behind the floor-to-ceiling panes of reinforced rock-solid glass, he gazed down to the busy city streets in miniature. Little taxis and little cars ferrying toy-sized people to whatever important or irrelevant destinations were calling them.

  And for him...?

  A slow, curling smile, utterly devoid of humour, curved his beautiful mouth.

  For him, the past had come calling and that, he knew, accounted for the soaring sense of satisfaction now filling him because, as far as offices went, this one, spectacular though it was, was no more or less spectacular than the offices he had left behind in Manhattan. There, too, he had looked down on busy streets, barely noticing the tide of people that daily flowed through those streets like a pulsing, breathing river.

  Increasingly, he had become cocooned in an ivory tower, the undisputed master of all he surveyed. He was thirty-three years old. You didn’t get to rule the concrete jungle by taking your eye off the ball. No; you kept focused, you eliminated obstacles and in that steady, onward and upward march, time passed by until now...

  He glanced at his watch.

  Twelve storeys down, in the vast, plush reception area, Oliver Griffin-Watt would already have been waiting for half an hour.

  Did Javier feel a twinge of guilt about that?

  Not a bit of it.

  He wanted to savour this moment because he felt as though it had been a long time coming.

  And yet, had he thought about events that had happened all those years ago? He’d left England for America and his life had become consumed in the business of making money, of putting to good use the education his parents had scrimped and saved to put him through, and in the process burying a fleeting past with a woman he needed to consign to the history books.

  The only child of devoted parents who had lived in a poor barrio in the outskirts of Madrid, Javier had spent his childhood with the driving motto drummed into him that to get out, he had to succeed and to succeed, he had to have an education. And he’d had to get out.

  His parents had worked hard, his father as a taxi driver, his mother as a cleaner, and the glass ceiling had always been low for them. They’d managed, but only just. No fancy holidays, no flat-screen tellies for the house, no chichi restaurants with fawning waiters. They’d made do with cheap and cheerful and every single penny had been put into savings for the time when they would send their precociously bright son to university in England. They had known all too well the temptations waiting for anyone stupid enough to go off the rails. They had friends whose sons had taken up with gangs, who had died from drug overdoses, who had lost the plot and ended up as dropouts kicked around on street corners.

  That was not going to be the fate of their son.

  If, as a teenager, Javier had ever resented the tight controls placed on him, he had said nothing.

  He had been able to see for himself, from a very young age, just what financial hardship entailed and how limiting it could be. He had seen how some of his wilder friends, who had made a career out of playing truant, had ended up in the gutter. By the time he had hit eighteen, he had made his plans and nothing was going to derail them: a year or two out, working to add to the money his parents had saved, then university, where he would succeed because he was bright—brighter than anyone he knew. Then a high-paying job. No starting at the ground level and making his way up slowly, but a job with a knockout financial package. Why not? He knew his assets and he had had no intention of selling himself short.

  He wasn’t just clever.

  Lots of people were clever. He was also sharp. Sharp in a streetwise sort of way. He possessed the astuteness of someone who knew how to make deals and how to spot where they could be made. He knew how to play rough and how to intimidate. Those were skills that were ingrained rather than learnt and, whilst they had no place in a civilised world, the world of big business wasn’t always civilised; it was handy having those priceless skills tucked up his sl eeve.

  He’d been destined to make it big and, from the age of ten, he had had no doubt that he would get there.

  He’d worked hard, had honed his ferocious intelligence to the point where no one could outsmart him and had sailed through university, resisting the temptation to leave without his Master’s. A Master’s in engineering opened a lot more doors than an ordinary degree and he wanted to have the full range of open doors to choose from.

  And that was when he had met Sophie Griffin-Watt. The only unexpected flaw in his carefully conceived life plan.

  She had been an undergraduate, in her first excitable year, and he had been on the last leg of his Master’s, already considering his options, wondering which one to take, which one would work best for him when he left university in a little under four months’ time.

  He hadn’t meant to go out at all but his two housemates, usually as focused as he was, had wanted to celebrate a birthday and he’d agreed to hit the local pub with them.

  He’d seen her the second he’d walked in. Young, impossibly pretty, laughing, head flung back with a drink in one hand. She’d been wearing a pair of faded jeans, a tiny cropped vest and a denim jacket that was as faded as the jeans.

  And he’d stared.

  He never stared. From the age of thirteen, he’d never had to chase any girl. His looks were something he’d always taken for granted. Girls stared. They chased. They flung themselves in his path and waited for him to notice them.

  The guys he’d shared his flat with had ribbed him about the ease with which he could snap his fingers and have any girl he wanted but, in actual fact, getting girls was not Javier’s driving ambition. They had their part to play. He was a red-blooded male with an extremely healthy libido—and, as such, he was more than happy to take what was always on offer—but his focus, the thing that drove him, had always been his remorseless ambition.

  Girls had always been secondary conquests.

  Everything seemed to change on the night he had walked into that bar.

  Yes, he’d stared, and he’d kept on staring, and she hadn’t glanced once at him, even though the gaggle of girls she was with had been giggling pointing at him and whispering.

  For the first time in his life, he had become the pursuer. He had made the first move.

  She was much younger than the women he usually dated. He was a man on the move, a man looking ahead to bigger things—he’d had no use for young, vulnerable girls with romantic dreams and fantasies about settling down. He’d gone out with a couple of girls in his years at university but, generally speaking, he had dated and slept with slightly older women—women who weren’t going to become clingy and start asking for the sort of commitment he wasn’t about to give them. Women who were experienced enough to understand his rules and abide by them.

  Sophie Griffin-Watt had been all the things he’d had no interest in and he’d fallen for her hook, line and sinker.

  Had part of that driving obsession for her been the fact that he’d actually had to try? That he’d had to play the old-fashioned courting game?

  That she’d made him wait and, in the end, had not slept with him?

  She’d kept him hanging on and he’d allowed it. He’d been happy to wait. The man who played by his own rules and waited for no one had been happy to wait because he’d seen a future for them together.

  He’d been a fool and he’d paid the price.

  But that was seven years ago and now...

  He strolled back to his chair, leant forward and buzzed his secretary to have Oliver Griffin-Watt shown up to his office.

  The wheel, he mused, relaxing back, had turned full circle. He’d never considered himself the sort of guy who would ever be interested in extracting revenge but the opportunity to even the scales had come knocking on his door and who was he to refuse it entry...?

  * * *

  ‘You did what?’

  Sophie looked at her twin brother with a mixture of clammy panic and absolute horror.

  She had to sit down. If she didn’t sit down, her wobbly legs would collapse under her. She could feel a headache coming on and she rubbed her temples in little circular movements with shaky fingers.

  Once upon a time, she’d been able to see all the signs of neglect in the huge family house, but over the past few years she’d become accustomed to the semi-decrepit sadness of the home in which she and her brother had spent their entire lives. She barely noticed the wear and tear now.

  ‘What else would you have suggested I do?’ There was complaint in his voice as he looked at his sister.

  ‘Anything but that, Ollie,’ Sophie whispered, stricken.

  ‘So you went out with the guy for ten minutes years ago! I admit it was a long shot, going to see him, but I figured we had nothing to lose. It felt like fate that he’s only been back in the country for a couple of months, I just happen to pick up someone’s newspaper on the tube and, lo and behold, who’s staring out at me from the financial pages...? It’s not even as though I’m in London all that much! Pure chance. And, hell, we need all the help we can get!’

  He gestured broadly to the four walls of the kitchen which, on a cold winter’s night, with the stove burning and the lights dimmed, could be mistaken for a cosy and functioning space but which, as was the case now, was shorn of any homely warmth in the glaring, bright light of a summer’s day.

  ‘I mean...’ His voice rose, morphing from complaint to indignation. ‘Look at this place, Soph! It needs so much work that there’s no way we can begin to cover the cost. It’s eating every penny we have and you heard what the estate agents have all said. It needs too much work and it’s in the wrong price bracket to be an easy sell. It’s been on the market for two and a half years! We’re never going to get rid of it, unless we can do a patch-up job, and we’re never going to do a patch-up job unless the company starts paying its way!’

  ‘And you thought that running to...to...’ She could barely let his name pass her lips.

  Javier Vasquez.

  Even after all these years the memory of him still clung to her, as pernicious as ivy, curling round and round in her head, refusing to go away.

  He had come into her life with the savage, mesmerising intensity of a force-nine gale and had blown all her neat, tidy assumptions about her future to smithereens.

  When she pictured him in her head, she saw him as he was then, more man than boy, a towering, lean, commanding figure who could render a room silent the minute he walked in.

  He had had presence.

  Even before she’d fallen under his spell, before she’d even spoken one word to him, she’d known that he was going to be dangerous. Her little clutch of well-bred, upper-middle-class friends had kept sneaking glances at him when he’d entered that pub all those years ago, giggling, tittering and trying hard to get his attention. After the first glance, she, on the other hand, had kept her eyes firmly averted. But she hadn’t been able to miss the banging of her heart against her ribcage or the way her skin had broken out in clammy, nervous perspiration.

  When he’d sauntered across to her, ignoring her friends, and had begun talking to her, she’d almost fainted.

  He’d been doing his Master’s in engineering and he was the cleverest guy she’d ever met in her life. He was so good-looking that he’d taken her breath away.

  He’d been also just the sort of boy her parents would have disapproved of. Exotic, foreign and most of all...unashamedly broke.

  His fantastic self-assurance—the hint of unleashed power that sat on his shoulders like an invisible cloak—had attracted and scared her at the same time. At eighteen, she had had limited experience of the opposite sex and, in his company, that limited experience had felt like no experience at all. Roger, whom she had left behind and who had been still clinging to her, even though she had broken off their very tepid relationship, had scarcely counted even though he had been only a couple of years younger than Javier.

  She’d felt like a gauche little girl next to him. A gauche little girl with one foot poised over an unknown abyss, ready to step out of the comfort zone that had been her privileged, sheltered life.

  Private school, skiing holidays, piano lessons and horse riding on Saturday mornings had not prepared her for anyone remotely like Javier Vasquez.

  He wasn’t going to be good for her but she had been as helpless as a kitten in the face of his lazy but targeted pursuit.

  ‘We could do something,’ he had murmured early on when he had cornered her in that pub, in the sort of seductive voice that had literally made her go weak at the knees. ‘I don’t have much money but trust me when I tell you that I can show you the best time of your life without a penny to my name...’

  She’d always mixed with people just like her: pampered girls and spoilt boys who had never had to think hard about how much having a good night out might cost. She’d drifted into seeing Roger, who’d been part of that set and whom she’d known for ever.

  Why? It was something she’d never questioned. Oliver had taken it all for granted but, looking back, she had always felt guilty at the ease with which she had always been encouraged to take what she wanted, whatever the cost.

  Her father had enjoyed showing off his beautiful twins and had showered them with presents from the very second they had been born.

  She was his princess, and if occasionally she’d felt uneasy at the way he’d dismissed people who were socially inferior to him, she had pushed aside the uneasy feeling because, whatever his faults, her father had adored her. She’d been a daddy’s girl.

  And she’d known, from the second Javier Vasquez had turned his sexy eyes to her, that she was playing with fire, that her father would have had a coronary had he only known...

  But play with fire she had.

  Falling deeper and deeper for him, resisting the driving desire to sleep with him because...

  Because she’d been a shameless romantic and because there had been a part of her that had wondered whether a man like Javier Vasquez would have ditched her as soon as he’d got her between the sheets.

  But he hadn’t forced her hand and that, in itself, had fuelled her feelings towards him, honed and fine-tuned them to the point where she had felt truly alive only when she’d been in his company.