RAUL FASTENED HIS seat belt wondering what exactly he’d agreed to.
They’d met Pierre at the new centre, along with Vittore and Pablo, the project manager. Seve had also joined them, enthusing about all the renovation work being undertaken.
Charley had been in her element, eyes shining, her happiness as bright as the sun blazing in the sky.
The storm that had covered great swathes of Spain over the past few days had lifted. His spirits had turned with it.
‘It would be better if I drove,’ he said, watching as she adjusted the driver’s seat. He’d never been a passenger with his wife behind the wheel.
‘You’re not insured,’ Charley said blithely, switching the engine on.
‘It will take one minute to get me on the insurance.’
‘I’m driving.’ And with that, she put the minibus into reverse and they were on their way, ambling towards the town of Buñol.
Five of the children were strapped in the back with two of the other workers and another volunteer, all the children in a heightened state of excitement. From what Charley had said, they displayed the same level of enthusiasm towards trips to the local swimming baths and the supermarket.
The plan had been for him to drive Charley to the centre then head back to Barcelona, but then she’d turned those gorgeous green eyes on him and said, ‘Come with us.’
He still didn’t understand why he hadn’t just refused as he had when she’d first suggested it. Said No, I’ve far too much work to do to spend time watching a bunch of people throw tomatoes at each other.
Most likely it was curiosity, to see for himself the event regarded as the world’s biggest food fight.
It wasn’t, he assured himself, because being away from Charley was becoming a physical pain.
There was no doubt though that their relationship had shifted dramatically since her seduction in his office. The last of her reserve towards him had vanished.
When they made love now nothing was held back. She laughed easily and walked as if she had springs implanted in her shoes.
She was happy. Being with him made her happy.
Being with her was like being with the woman he’d first fallen in love with...
When they arrived at the tiny hotel that overlooked Plaza del Pueblo, where most of the action would be taking place, they were greeted by the manager who led them straight up to the small roof terrace. From what Raul could see, their spot was one of the only ones that allowed spectators to actually see what was unfolding.
And what a sight it was. Tens of thousands of men and women were crammed in the plaza and the surrounding narrow streets, haulage trucks filled with crate upon crate of ripe tomatoes placed strategically alongside water cannons. Many of the shop fronts and homes had been protected with huge plastic sheets. Scores of mostly young men were attempting to shimmy their way up a two-storey pole with what looked like a hock of ham at the top, but he guessed it must be greased for the men got no further than a couple of feet before sliding back down on top of each other, only to immediately try again.
Chairs had been laid out for them; the terrace was safe enough for the kids to jump up and down with the excitement of it all.
Never in his wildest dreams had Raul imagined he would take a day off work to watch a tomato fight, and he imagined the look on his father’s face if he were to learn what his son had done. The disapproval would be as clear as the juice of the ripe tomatoes.
‘Next year I’m going to try and spend the week here and join in with the whole festival,’ Charley said, shouting over the chants of ‘Olé, olé, olé, olé!’ bellowing from the crowd. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. Karin climbed onto her lap and she automatically put her arm around her waist to secure her. ‘I bet you’d love it too.’
Before he could respond, the roar of the water cannons signalled the start of the fight.
Carnage ensued, joyous, messy, glorious carnage.
Charley and the kids were in fits of laughter watching overripe tomatoes being thrown and squelched in all directions, the streets and the people that filled them soon a river of red juice.
He could hardly credit that he, Raul Cazorla, a man who enjoyed the finest of all the world had to offer, was enjoying something so...unrefined.
When he’d been growing up, his mother would have rather gone without her weekly pedicure than allow her children to attend something so messy and unbecoming. The Cazorlas had an image they protected fiercely; they were seen at the right places in the right clothes. The annual tomato fight at Buñol, preceded by a week-long festival, would most certainly have fallen onto the ‘unbecoming for a Cazorla’ list.
Something wet and squelchy slapped into his back. Turning his head, he saw that one of the children had thrown a tomato at him and was laughing so hard tears were falling down his face.
He saw the box of tomatoes, feet away from him, right at the moment Charley placed Karin on her seat and ran for it, grabbing a couple of tomatoes. Grinning widely, she squished them in her hands, then lobbed them at him.
He gazed down at what seconds before had been an immaculately pressed white silk shirt and was now dripping in juice and pips.
The others had got in on the act, except for Karin, who was clapping her hands, not knowing what was happening but reacting to the sounds of delight ringing out.
Charley dipped back into the box, her eyes sending out a clear challenge.
Raul never turned down a challenge.
* * *
Charley couldn’t remember ever having experienced such a magical day.
By the time the tomato fight had finished, they’d been as red as the people in the streets. The hotel manager had appeared with a hose to wash them all down. They’d returned to the centre wet and exhausted but happy.
‘You looked like you enjoyed yourself today,’ she said as they left the car park. It had surprised and delighted her how Raul had really got into the spirit of things on that little terrace, accepting the splatters of tomatoes from the children with good humour and retaliating with the gentlest of throws. His retaliation of her own throws at him had been markedly different; at one point he’d pinned her arms behind her back and encouraged the kids to use her as a target before squishing one right under her T-shirt. She was certain there were tomato pips stuck in the wiring of her bra.
He nodded musingly, bringing the car to a stop at a junction. ‘It was fun.’
‘Wasn’t it? Saying that, my arms are killing me after all that tomato throwing.’ She eyed him suggestively. ‘I think I need a good massage.’
His hand drifted over to her thigh and gently squeezed. ‘I’m sure I can think of a good masseur.’
‘I’m sure you can.’
With his hand resting on her thigh, she rested her head against the window and closed her eyes with a contented sigh. ‘Do you know how the ticket sales for the fundraiser are going?’ she asked.
Raul had got a team of his people to organise the fundraiser, for which they were charging obscenely rich people obscenely high ticket prices. Charley was fully involved in the practicalities but not with the ticket sales.
She heard the clicking of his tongue on the roof of his mouth. ‘I was waiting for the right moment to share this with you,’ he said in a chiding voice.
‘Oh, just tell me!’
‘We’ve sold out.’
‘No way!’ If the traffic hadn’t chosen that moment to start moving again, she would have thrown herself at him. ‘That’s amazing.’
‘I have a good team.’
She hugged her arms, doing the maths in her head. ‘Ticket sales alone will guarantee everyone’s salary is paid for the next two years.’
‘By the time the fundraiser is over, you’ll be able to guarantee salaries for the next decade.’ He laughed.
That made her sit up. ‘Wow. Just think, with those kinds of funds we’ll be able to afford more staff and start taking teenagers in. The builders are dividing the building into two separate parts so there can be adolescent quarters, but we never thought we’d be able to start taking them this soon.’
‘You can start paying yourself a salary too,’ he said lightly.
‘I don’t know about that.’ She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t sit right. I’ve got enough money left that, if I’m careful, should last me a long while yet.’
‘You have two hundred thousand euros, which you were prepared to give to the new centre, not loan. If you’d been successful in raising the rest of the money by other means, you would have been left penniless.’
‘How do you...? Oh, yes, you read my finance report.’ She’d listed on it how much of her own money she’d intended to contribute to the project, which had basically been everything in her account and her jewellery, all of which she’d sold with the exception of her wedding and engagement rings. As sentimental as she’d known it to be, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to part with them.
‘So you are intending to stay at the centre?’
‘What else can I do?’
‘You can start by drawing a salary. God knows, you work hard enough.’
‘Hardly. I just joke around and make the kids laugh.’ That was about all she was good for, she thought, her mood suddenly darkening.
‘You do a lot more than that.’
She shrugged.
‘Charlotte, if it wasn’t for you, the children wouldn’t have a new centre to look forward to and the staff would be job-hunting as we speak.’
‘If it wasn’t for you, you mean.’ While she had spent two months beating at doors to get the funding, putting an immediate freeze on personal spending other than on the bare necessities, selling anything of value, boiling her brain over design plans and finance reports, Raul had swept in and taken care of everything as easily as if he were taking a shower.
He drove them through the gate to the hangar. The Cazorla helicopter sat ahead of them, gleaming in the early evening sun. ‘You did all the hard work. The renovations are being done according to your plans. Vittore has adapted them a little but it’s still your work. Take the credit for it. You’ve earned it.’
‘Twaddle. I didn’t do anything that anyone else couldn’t have done.’
He banged his fist on the steering wheel, making her jump.
‘When,’ he said tightly, ‘are you going to stop putting yourself down?’
‘I’m not putting myself down,’ she protested. ‘I’m just saying that anyone else in my position would have done the same.’
He pulled the car to a stop and gazed at her with an intensity that sent a not unpleasant shiver running up her spine.
‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t think many people in your position would have done the same.’
She swallowed, staring at him, trying to read what lay behind the intensity.
‘Sometimes, Señora Cazorla, I look at you and I remember exactly why I fell in love with you.’
A loud buzzing played in her ears. Her throat ran so dry no amount of swallowing could moisten it.
She cleared her suddenly arid throat. ‘Your pilot’s waiting for us.’
His gaze held a moment longer before he smiled and shook his head.
* * *
‘More wine?’
Charley blinked. She’d been a thousand miles away.
She breathed deeply and fixed a smile to her face. ‘Go on, then. We might as well order our food too.’ They’d been in the restaurant for an hour and still there was no sign of her dad. Neither was he answering his phone.
‘Are you sure?’
She gazed back at the menu open on her lap. She didn’t want to look at Raul or the sympathy radiating from him.
He was only an hour late. For her dad, that was nothing. As a kid she’d often spent whole days waiting for him to arrive.
‘Definitely. The minute we order is the minute he’ll arrive,’ she said brightly. ‘You wait, he’ll be here any second.’
‘Of course he will,’ Raul agreed with eyes that said he thought the total opposite.
She snatched up her glass and downed the last of the red liquid. Forget bouquets of blackcurrant and cinnamon and whatever else it was reputed to have, the only attribute she cared for was its anaesthetic quality.
She was an adult now, she reminded herself, and had long ago accepted her dad for who he was: a man who had certain reliability issues.
Yet waiting for him as an adult still made her feel like the little girl who would wait for hours for his car to pull into the car park, and the adolescent who would skive off school for fear of missing out on an unexpected visit from him.
He would be here.
They ordered their dishes and more drinks were brought over.
Her phone vibrated.
She knew what it would say before she opened it.
‘Has something come up?’ Raul asked carefully, while she read her dad’s brief message. He didn’t need to be psychic either.
She forced a cheerful smile to her face and nodded. ‘There’s something wrong with his car—it’s making strange noises. He doesn’t think it’s safe to continue the drive.’
She’d known she should have travelled to him and would have done if she hadn’t been spending the day at Poco Rio. When she was the one to make the effort there was less chance of some emergency cropping up at the last minute.
But...since her dad had moved to the Costa Dorado, he hadn’t made the effort to visit her once. The intention had been there though, she reminded herself. They’d made plenty of dates for him to come to her. She’d even bought him a car so he could get around and not be stuck in his beachside home.
She should have arranged to meet him in Barcelona, not here in Valencia. Barcelona was much closer to him.
‘That’s a shame,’ Raul said.
‘There’ll be another time.’
Another time for him to stand her up.
It had been bad enough worrying that Raul was going to be late for the meal too. He’d travelled to Brazil on Wednesday, only arriving back that afternoon. Two nights of fret and worry.
Sometimes, when she let her mind wander too far, she heard his words echo in her head. ‘Sometimes, Señora Cazorla, I look at you and I remember exactly why I fell in love with you.’
She’d laughed it off but under the bonhomie she’d turned into a wreck. His words had terrified her.
If he’d loved her so much then why had he given up on her so easily? Two years of silence had said it all.
He’d made her into the perfect Cazorla wife but as soon as she’d denied him what he wanted, a child, he’d given up on her.
Just as her father only wanted her when he needed money.
Charley was disposable.
Nothing similar had been mentioned in the subsequent weeks but those words had stayed with her.
Then he’d gone off to Brazil, the land of beautiful women, leaving her alone for the first time since they’d got back together—got back together temporarily, she reminded herself—and found herself alone in his huge bed with a brain that refused to switch off.
They were only temporary, her brain had screamed. In less than a couple of months they would head their separate ways.
Oh, why had he said it? Why had he mentioned the L word?
He hadn’t said he loved her now. Just that he’d loved her then.
But he didn’t love you then. If he had he would never have tried to change you.
In defiance, she’d rolled over to the middle of the bed.
Come the morning and after a few hours of broken sleep, she’d been back on her own side with his pillow in her arms. She’d had to stop those same arms throwing themselves around him when he’d arrived at Poco Rio late that afternoon, as they were clearing up after a long day. She’d wanted to hug him even harder when he’d taken her briefly to the new centre so she could see how all the renovations were going.
‘Oh, stop pretending to be nice about it,’ she snapped now, suddenly and unbelievably on the brink of tears. ‘We both know my dad couldn’t give a stuff about me.’
To her horror, she only noticed her hands were shaking when Raul took one of them in his own.
‘Do you know my dad’s the only person not happy that we’re back together?’ she said, speaking the words before she could call them back. ‘He’ll want to meet up when he knows you’re out of the picture. Either then or if he runs out of money before our time’s up.’
He didn’t answer, his blue eyes holding hers, sympathy and not a little anger in them.
Raul had got the measure of her dad right from the start.
She jerked her hand out of his grasp, picked up her refilled glass and held it aloft. ‘Happy birthday to me, eh?’
‘Charlotte...’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she dismissed, putting her glass back down. ‘This isn’t the first of my birthdays he’s missed and I’m sure it won’t be the last.’
Twenty-six birthdays and her dad had only made two of them.
‘Charlotte,’ he repeated, speaking quietly, ‘this isn’t your fault.’
She attempted a smile, now really scared that she would cry. ‘I know.’
At least, it wasn’t her fault she’d been born a woman. She’d always known that if she’d been born with male genitals her father would have wanted to spend more time with her, just as he did with her half-brothers. Deep down she’d always known it, just never acknowledged the painful truth.
She was a mere woman. Disposable.
A waitress arrived at their table with their first course.
Charley stabbed a piece of chorizo with her fork. Before she could pop it in her mouth, more unbidden words spilled out. ‘I’ve never mattered to him. I look back on my childhood and all I can clearly remember is the waiting. I used to get so excited when I knew he was coming over. Half the time he’d be late—at the very least an hour—the other half he wouldn’t turn up at all. When he did bother, he’d always have a great big present for me that cost the earth, then tell my mum he didn’t have the money to buy me a new pair of school shoes.’
She took a breath and another sip of wine, wondering why she was rehashing a tale Raul was already familiar with. But there was one story she’d never shared...
‘I have never spent a single Christmas with him,’ she said, keeping her eyes on her glass of wine, ‘and I only got invited to celebrate one of his birthdays—his fortieth. I was about nine, I think, and Mum and I went together. I remember being really excited about meeting my two half-brothers. Dad had told me all about them. I knew he lived close to them and saw them a lot.’
Now she dared look at Raul. ‘They didn’t know who I was.’
‘I suppose that’s understandable, seeing as they’d never met you.’
‘No—I mean they didn’t know of me. My dad had never told them they had a sister.’
Raul tried to keep his features composed, not to let Charley see the anger her words were provoking in him.
He had little doubt that if her father should walk into the restaurant at that moment he would connect his fist to his face with all the force in his possession. How that man had the nerve to call himself a father...
How Charley had managed to grow up into the warm, compassionate woman she was today stumped him too.
‘Can we go home?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got a headache.’
She did look pale.
He called for the bill and discreetly told the waitress to cancel the cake waiting in the kitchen that was to have been brought out when their meal had finished. Getting to his feet, he felt in his pocket for the square box. He would give Charley her present when they got home, after a relaxing massage and a bottle of champagne. He would spoil her rotten and make this a birthday to remember for all the right reasons.
But first he had to get them home.