If there was no money left, Eric would be the one to pay the ultimate price and Sophie refused to let that happen.

If Matias was interested in doing a deal with her father, a deal that might actually get him solvent once again, then how could it be in her interests to scupper that by letting him know just how awful James was? If her father had money then Eric would be safe.

‘That’s life.’ She shrugged, masking her expression. ‘There aren’t many men who would have found it easy to introduce an outside family to their current one.’ She took a deep breath and said, playing with the truth like modelling clay, ‘But he’s always been there for my mother... And now...er...for me...financially...’

Matias wondered whether they were talking about the same person. ‘So you would recommend him as someone I should have dealings with?’

Fingers crossed behind her back, Sophie thought of her brother, lost in his world in the home where she visited him at least once a week, her brother who would certainly find life very, very different without all that care provided, care that only money could buy. ‘Yes. Of course. Of course, I would.’ She forced a smile. ‘I’m sure he would love to have you contact him...’

CHAPTER THREE

MATIAS LOWERED HIS stunning dark eyes. So she either had no idea what kind of man her father was or she knew perfectly well enough and was tainted with the very same streak of greed, hence her enthusiasm for him to plough money into the man.

He wondered whether, over time and with her father’s finances going down the drain faster than water running down a plughole, she had found herself an accidental victim of his limited resources. She had just declared that her father had supported her and her mother and Matias had struggled to contain a roar of derisive laughter at that. But she could have been telling the truth. Perhaps the dilapidated car and the debt owed to the bank were the result of diminishing handouts. She might have been an illegitimate child but it was possible that Carney had privately doted on her, bearing in mind that his own marriage had failed to yield any issue. Advertising a child outside marriage might have been no big deal for many men, but a man like Carney would have been too conscious of his social standing to have been comfortable acknowledging her publicly.

For a moment and just a moment, he wondered whether he could notch up some extra retribution and publicly shame the man by exposing a hidden illegitimate child, but he almost immediately dismissed it because it was...somehow unsavoury. Especially, he thought, shielding the expression in his dark eyes, when the woman sitting in front of him emanated innocence in waves. There was such a thing as a plan backfiring and, were a picture of her to be printed in any halfway decent rag, a sympathetic public would surely take one look at that disingenuous, sensationally sincere face and cast him in the role of the bad guy. Besides, Carney’s close friends doubtless knew of the woman’s existence already.

‘I will certainly think about contacting your father,’ Matias intoned smoothly, watching her like a hawk. He became more and more convinced that she was playing him for a sap because she was suddenly finding it seemingly impossible to meet his eyes. ‘Now, you’ve looked at the menu. Tell me whether you think you’re up to handling it.’

Sophie breathed a sigh of relief at the change of subject. She hated the little white lie she had told, even though she was surely justified in telling it. Matias might be disgustingly rich and arrogant but he still didn’t deserve to be deceived into believing her father was an honourable guy. On the other hand, if the choice was between her brother’s future safety and well-being and Matias investing some money he wouldn’t ever miss, then her brother was going to win hands down every time.

But that didn’t mean that she’d liked telling Matias that fib.

She jumped onto the change of topic with alacrity. ‘Absolutely.’ She looked around her at the expensive gadgets, the speckled white counters, the vast cooking range. ‘And it helps that your kitchen is so well equipped. Did you plan on doing lots of entertaining here when you bought the house?’

‘Actually, I didn’t buy the house. I had it built for me.’ He went to the fridge, extracted a bottle of chilled white wine and poured her a glass. It seemed wildly extravagant to be consuming alcohol at this hour of the afternoon but she needed to steady her nerves, which were all over the place. ‘And I had no particular plans to use the space for entertaining. I simply happen to enjoy having a lot of open space around me.’

‘Lucky you,’ Sophie sighed. After two sips of wine, she was already feeling a little less strung out. ‘Julie and I would have a field day if we had this sort of kitchen. I’ve done the best with what I’ve got, but getting all the right equipment to fit into my kitchen has been a squeeze and if the business really takes off, then we’re definitely going to have to move to bigger premises.’

Matias wondered whether that was why she had encouraged him to contact her father and put some work his way. Was it because she would be the happy beneficiary of such an arrangement?

Suspicious by nature and always alert to the threat of someone trying it on, he found it very easy to assume the worst of her, in defiance of the disingenuous manner she had. Judge a book by its cover and you almost always ended up being taken for a ride.

Not only did he have the example of his father to go on, who had paid the ultimate price for judging a book by its cover, but he, Matias, had made one and only one catastrophic misjudgement in his heady youth. On the road to the vast riches that would later be his and caught up in the novel situation of being sought after by men far older than himself who wanted to tap his financial acumen, he had fallen for a girl who had seemed to be grounded in the sort of normality he had fast been leaving behind. Next to the savvy beauties who had begun forming a queue for him, she had seemed the epitome of innocence. She had turned down presents, encouraged him to sideline the sort of fancy venues that were opening up on his horizon and professed a burning desire to go to the movies and share a bag of popcorn. No boring Michelin restaurants for her!

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