Page 4 of Emergency Engagement

‘I should go.’

Rafael didn’t say anything. He wasn’t about to embark on a voyage down memory lane. Yet, against his better judgement, he remembered those strange, unsettling days when he and his father had gone to the very village she had mentioned because his father had managed to land himself a two-year stint working on a building site eight miles away. It had been a basic job but anything had been better than staying put in the East End of London with his father buried in misery and depression because he’d found that his wife hadn’t just been unfaithful once, or twice, but too many times to count...

Theirs had been a volatile, disintegrating marriage to which his father had desperately clung even when the arguments had come on a daily basis—a marriage that should never have happened. It had been washed up in a series of confessions that Isabella Moreno hadn’t bothered to hide from her only son, sixteen years old and growing harder and tougher with each shouted, gloating, embittered revelation. Yes, he had loved his father, but he had also pitied him for not having the strength to walk away from what had been bad for him.

Accusations had been hurled and tears had been shed. If Rafael hadn’t grown up by then, he’d certainly grown up afterwards, when the dust had settled and his mother had left arm in arm with her new, rich lover and no forwarding address.

‘You’re a big boy now,’ had been her parting words to Rafael. ‘You don’t need me here any longer.’

‘Did I ever?’ he had returned, before leaving the house for a welcome dose of fresh air.

His father had lost the plot. At the time, Rafael had had no idea why. It wasn’t as though theirs had ever been a marriage made in heaven. To a child, it had been black and white: it was teenage lust that had propelled his parents into an unwanted pregnancy. Juan Miguel Moreno, aged just eighteen, had walked a very pregnant Isabella Gutierrez up the aisle, she too only just eighteen, only for her to give birth a fortnight later.

From memory, things hadn’t been bad to start with, but time had put paid to any notion of their marriage working. Rafael had grown up knowing just how frustrated his mother felt at being with a guy who adored her but was never going to make enough money to keep her satisfied.

She’d been the opposite of a domestic goddess. She’d worked shifts, although afterwards Rafael reckoned she’d been doing a whole lot more than working. She’d gone out without saying where to, and she’d left her husband to pick up the slack on the home front.

Why she hadn’t left sooner was a mystery—perhaps the habit of her marriage and the predictability of a husband she no longer loved but still relied upon had kept her rooted until someone rich had come along to rescue her. After she’d left, his father had taken to the bottle to cope. If the job offer many miles away in some nice, healthy countryside hadn’t come along, Lord only knew where things would have ended up. But they had gone to that little village with its little village school and...

‘Colin Payne.’ He looked at the elfin figure in front of him with her defiance and her angry green eyes and made the connection.

Before she could say anything, his intercom buzzed and his PA reminded him of the meeting he had at the Shard.

Without taking his eyes from her face, Rafael told his PA that he wouldn’t make it and, before she could recover from herastonishment, he surprised her further by telling her to cancel whatever remained on his calendar for the rest of the day.

‘I thought you could only spare me half an hour,’ Sammy said coolly.

‘Things change.’

‘Nothing’s changed. You can’t or won’t do anything to help me, and I get it. It was stupid of me to think otherwise.’

‘Colin Payne was your brother.Isyour brother.’

Sammy shrugged.

‘He was in my form for the two years we were at school together,’ Rafael recalled.

‘I didn’t realise that you were everatschool. I thought school was just somewhere you visited now and again when it took your fancy.’

‘Good times, bad times,’ he murmured with a sudden grin. ‘I admit, I didn’t set a good example when it came to behaviour back in those days.’

‘Actually, that’s the understatement of the decade. But that was a long time ago and I haven’t come here to reminisce.’

‘I remember your brother and...now that I think about it... I rememberyou. You were very shy, always peeping from under that fringe of yours. Your hair was long back then—probably why I didn’t recognise you immediately. I have a keen eye for faces.’

‘Like I said, Mr Moreno, I didn’t come here to talk about the past.’

Rafael watched the rise of delicate colour in her cheeks, shaken out of his usual steely self-control and aware of her—not just as someone to whom he conceded he owed an explanation, but as someone who...belonged to memories he had put away in a box, hidden and never to be aired. He was surprised that he hadn’t remembered sooner because she did, in fact, have quite a distinctive face. Those eyes...

‘You must have been...what...thirteen, fourteen when I had called it a day with A Levels and was packing my bags to leave? You weren’t like the other girls, that’s for sure.’

‘You mean the other girls who kept begging for your attention?’

‘Adolescence can be a heady time for some.’

‘Not you, though. You ignored all of them. You missed the backstage tears.’

‘I was more fascinated by the older women back then.’

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