Page 62 of Surrender to the Ruthless Billionaire

‘Holà, Papá. It’s me…Laura.’

Cristina felt her stomach clench as her father’s eyes opened, for they hadn’t changed. They were still the same dark brown she remembered, and that only seemed to make her chest ache even more. His eyes might not have changed but everything else had—not just his appearance but in their relationship too.

‘Laura…’ His voice hadn’t changed either. It was still a distinctive rasp—the legacy of a life spent smoking, first cigarettes and then later cigars.

She watched as her half-sister smiled. ‘I’m here, Papá, and I’ve got someone here with me. Someone I know you want to see.’

Cristina’s pulse rippled as her father turned his head slowly towards her. But if she’d been expecting a tearful gasp of recognition she was to be disappointed.

Enrique stared at her blankly. ‘I don’t—’

‘It’s Cristina, Papá,’ Laura said quickly. ‘She’s come to see you.’

His eyes narrowed then, and Cristina waited for him to acknowledge her, but instead he turned back to Laura.

‘What does she want?’

Laura glanced over at her but Cristina said nothing.

It was clear from her sister’s stricken face that Enrique had not wanted to see her at all. Probably it had been Laura’s idea—a misguided desire to reunite her dying father with his estranged daughter—but they both knew without having to say it out loud that he had nothing to say to her.

If only that she could tell him that she didn’t want anything from him, and that he was as big a disappointment to her as she had obviously been to him. But the words stuck in her throat, and she was scared that if she pushed them out then the tears she was also holding back might burst free too.

She couldn’t see Luis’s face, but she felt his hand tighten around hers, could feel the hard breadth of his chest at her shoulder, and more than anything she wanted to turn and bury her head against it. But to do that would mean showing how hurt she was.

How hurt and humiliated.

Biting down on the howl of anguish filling her lungs, she turned and walked swiftly towards the door, just as a nurse pushed a trolley through it. Sidestepping it, she heard Luis curse and Laura call out her name, and then she was running through the corridors and down the stairs, out into the street and then into another street, and then another, tears streaming down her face.

Finally she could run no more and, whimpering, she crouched down in a doorway like a wounded animal and cried—just as she’d cried eleven years ago when she’d realised that her father wasn’t coming back and that he didn’t want or love her.

*

Striding into the living room of his family’s apartment on the exclusive Calle de Velázquez, Luis tugged off his jacket and punched Cristina’s number into his phone for perhaps the twentieth time. His mouth tightened as it went straight to voicemail again and he didn’t leave a message. There was no point. He’d already left a whole bunch of messages and she hadn’t responded to any of them.

Where was she? More importantly, was she okay?

Remembering the look of devastation on her face as she’d left her father’s room, he felt a rush of anger towards the man lying in the bed.

How could anyone be so cruel as to turn away from their own child?

His heart was pounding in time with his headache. It was nearly two hours since she’d fled from the hospital. In between calling her phone he’d tried to find her, stopping in bars and cafés, convinced that he would somehow catch sight of her just as he had that first night.

But he hadn’t and so, knowing that sooner or later she’d have to go back to the apartment, he’d decided to wait for her there.

Too impatient to wait for the lift, he’d taken the stairs three at a time, and as he’d walked in he’d half hoped she might have returned. But she wasn’t waiting for him in the living room, or the bedroom. Nor had Elena, the housekeeper, seen her. Everywhere was silent and empty.

It was a silence that reminded him painfully of his family home in the days and weeks following his brother’s death and, suddenly unable to bear the memories of that time, he reached for his jacket. He couldn’t just stand here doing nothing.

His heart jolted in his chest as somewhere in the building he heard a door close.

‘Cristina?’

He was halfway across the floor when she walked into the room.

‘Cariño. Thank goodness.’ Pulse racing, he pulled her against him, touching her hair with his lips, feeling her exhaustion.’

As his arms tightened around her Cristina leaned into his chest, the scent of his cologne and the warmth of his body enveloping her. It would be so easy just to stay there for ever in an eternal embrace…

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