Page 15 of An Inconvenient Marriage
The last word was said with so much acid I was sure it left a sour taste in his mouth.
“Was there something you needed?” He didn’t even bother looking up from his paper.
I shook my head and let out a barely audible, “No.”
Still feeling uncomfortable and disheartened, I rested back against the seat once more and willed the time to pass by. It didn’t. A seven-hour flight in Zach’s private plane felt like being trapped in purgatory for seven freaking years.
And when the plane finally landed, I was more than ready to make my escape. But first I needed to know where the heck we were. Sometime during the trip I’d fallen asleep and had missed the pilot’s announcement.
I grabbed my purse and trudged behind Zach toward the hatch. The first thing I noticed was the hot, humid air hitting my face. And the second was that we were on a private landing strip.
There wasn’t time to process the information because Zach hastily made his way toward a charcoal-colored SUV with blacked-out windows. By the time we reached it, his staff had already deposited our luggage in the back.
An older gentleman stepped around the front and greeted us both with a warm smile before handing Zach a key fob. The pair of them had a quick conversation in rapid Spanish that I honestly had no hope of understanding. They said their goodbyes with a quick handshake, then Zach motioned for me to get into the passenger side of the vehicle.
We pulled out of the airstrip a while later, and I tried as best I could to figure out where on earth we were.
On the plane, people had addressed Zach in English, but here, everyone spoke to him in Spanish.
From my research, I knew Zach was born and had spent half of his childhood in Catalonia before his mother had moved them to the States. Everything after that was a bit of a mystery.
I knew his mother had died when he was sixteen and that he had a younger brother. But no one knew who his brother was or what exactly Zach had been up to after his mother had died. He’d just vanished and then reappeared over a decade later as a self-made billionaire.
Numerous interviewers had asked, but his response was always the same: “The how doesn’t matter as much as the why.” And when he was questioned about the why, he simply gave a dazzling smile and changed the subject.
I’d wondered about that more than once. Naturally, Everlee'd had her own ideas. All of them centered around James Bond and none of them even remotely possible.
Maybe if I were lucky, I’d find out. Right after I figured out where we were.
Chewing the inside of my cheek, I twisted in my seat to face Zach. “Are we in Catalonia?”
“Close.”
I waited and waited, then quickly realized he wasn’t going to give me anything else. Letting out a sigh, I shifted my gaze back to the world outside my window. Everything went by in a blur of green and brown and hints of dark purple.
It was only when the SUV slowed down a little that I realized what I was staring at. “Is that a vineyard?”
Zach made a noise which prompted me to focus on him. I almost choked on air when I found him studying me in that intense way again. I wanted to tell him to focus on the road or even the sky, anywhere else but on me.
But the damn words wouldn’t come. Then he knocked out whatever air had been left in my lungs when he said. “Mine.”
“What?” This time I did choke on air.
He jerked his head toward the scenery beyond my window. “The vineyard, it’s mine.”
Right. He was talking about the vineyard. I didn’t know why my entire body tensed up the way it had or why those pesky butterfly wings teased my insides, I just knew this Spaniard beside me was doing a bang-up job at flipping my world upside down.
I didn’t understand why, though.
Because of that, I said nothing else and simply kept my gaze on the outside world. Another few minutes of silence passed. Just as it started to bother me, we turned onto a dirt road and finally came to a stop not long after that.
I was in awe.
And couldn’t wait to get outside and take my fill.Holy moly, this place is incredible. Shoving my door open, I jumped out of the car and stared. Everything around me, from the paving beneath my sandal-covered feet to the gorgeous building, was mesmerizing.
The house was clearly old but well maintained, and with its orange-hued bricks and red-tiled roof, it was something straight out of the 1800s. And If I remembered correctly, this specific style was referred to as Spanish Colonial architecture.
The more I took in the pops of color in the small garden in front of the wrought-iron gate and the tiny square windows giving light to the inside of the house, the more I wanted to go back in time to the very moment this house had been built.
