Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (24 page)

Caroline lay there, not sure if she should be jumping up and making a run for it while she had the chance, or whether she should just give in to everything and let him do whatever it was he had planned to come next.

She didn’t run, was too tired to run. And his
next
, was to reappear wearing nothing but a short black robe that exposed more of his tanned skin than it covered. He brought the clean scent of soap into the room with him—and a heightening of tension because he looked so damned sexually sure of himself, the way he obviously thought he could climb into this bed with her—and naked, by the looks of things!

‘I won’t sleep with you,’ she informed him flatly.

He was hanging his clothes away in the cupboard when she spoke, but he paused, glanced at her. ‘Sleep as in
sleep?
’ he asked. ‘Or sleep as in make love?’

‘Both,’ she replied. ‘And I don’t know how you’ve got the arrogance to think that I would.’

He didn’t answer that one straight away. Instead he went back to what he had been doing while Caroline followed
his every movement with a heart that was trying hard not to beat any faster.

It didn’t succeed very well—especially when he turned towards the bed and began to approach. And his face was wearing that hard, implacable look she didn’t like very much. Bending down, he braced himself with one hand on the pillow beside her head and one right by her curled-up knees. He looked very dark, very dangerous—and very, very serious.

‘Let’s just get a couple of things straight, Caroline,’ he suggested quietly and chillingly. ‘As far as I am concerned our deal still stands. If you decide not to go through with it, then you know the consequences. They haven’t changed because your father was taken ill,’ he pointed out. ‘But,’ he then added, ‘if you decide to keep your side of our bargain, then I will expect you to convince your father, and everyone else for that matter, that I am what you want more than anything else in your life. Understand?’

Yes, she thought dully, she understood. Her choices here were still non-existent. ‘If anything happens to him,’ she said thickly, ‘you know I’ll never forgive you, don’t you?’

He allowed himself a small grimace at that. ‘I think I had already worked that one out for myself,’ he replied dryly.

‘And if you try to touch me now, tonight, I shall probably be sick.’

This time it wasn’t a grimace but a weary sigh, and his dark head came closer—close enough for her to feel the warmth of his breath caress her face. ‘If I touched you now, Caroline, you would probably burst into tears—then cling to me as though your life depended on it,’ he taunted softly.

And to prove his point he brushed his mouth across her mouth. Sure enough, even as he straightened away, the tears were flooding into her eyes.

And she didn’t feel sick. She felt—vulnerable. Too vulnerable to say another word as Luiz reached out to flick a switch that plunged the room into darkness. A few seconds later there was a rustling of fabric before she felt the other side of the bed depress.

He didn’t attempt to reach for her, didn’t try to cross the invisible barrier that ran down the centre of the large bed. She fell asleep still struggling with a mix of emotions ranging from the bitterly resentful to the wretchedly disgusted with herself—because he was right, and she did want to cling to him.

She awoke during what was left of the night, though she wasn’t sure what it was that had woken her. But in those few drifting moments before she remembered just where she was, she was only aware that she was lying on her stomach, sprawled diagonally across the bed, feeling so sublimely at peace with herself that it came as a shock to realise that not only was it Luiz’s bed she was lying in, but that her cheek was pressed up against his satin-smooth shoulder and her arm was lying across his hair-roughened chest.

And, worse, he was awake. She knew he was because he was lying there on his back, letting his fingers stroke feather-light caresses along her resting arm. It wasn’t a sexual gesture; she knew that instinctively. More an absent stroking, as if he was lying there maybe staring into the darkness, lost deep in his own train of thought.

It was nice.

So nice in fact that she didn’t really want to end it. Though she didn’t know if she could simply go on lying here pretending to be asleep when she wasn’t, because already she could feel her pulse-rate picking up, feel the even tempo of her breathing alter.

It was a long time since she’d last felt the warm strength of a man lying beside her. Seven long lonely years, in fact.

And even then it had been
this
man. This same dark, sensually attractive man, with the same clean, slightly musky scent that was so intoxicatingly familiar.

It seemed ironic now, to find herself in this situation when it was Luiz who had spoiled her from wanting to go to bed with another man.

He released a small sigh. Caroline wished that she could do the same, only she knew it would give the game away. Then her defences would have to go back up, the tension would return, the need to keep on fighting him.

The sigh escaped anyway, so she tried to use it as an excuse to slide away, as if in her sleep. Luiz moved at the same time, his fingers tangling with her fingers at the same moment that he rolled onto his side and towards her. She wasn’t quick enough to close her eyes, and it was like looking into a mirror and seeing her own sombre mood reflected back at her. Only his eyes were dark—as dark as the night still surrounding them.

He wanted her, she could see the need written there. And the mirror was in knowing that she wanted him. Too late to pretend. Too late to run and hide. He knew just as she knew. It was that simple, that final.

With the use of their tangled fingers he drew her up against him, and even as she felt the aroused heat of his body pushing gently against her his mouth was hungrily capturing hers.

And—oh, but it felt good, like finding something she had been mourning the loss of for too, too long. And perhaps because she didn’t fight him, didn’t even try to protest, he savoured the kiss, almost as if he was feeling the same way about it as she.

Or maybe it had more to do with the lateness of the hour, their slumberous state, the relaxed warmth with which they had come together, or even that all-encompassing darkness itself.

Whatever, this kiss was like no other kiss they had ever shared. It was slow and it was deep and it was unbelievably tender. And it went on and on and on, until she felt as if she were floating, lost to a beauty so profound that she had to reach up with her free hand and cup his cheek—just to check that he wasn’t a mere figment of her dreamy imagination.

Her fingers found lean, taut flesh that rasped lightly with a five o’clock shadow. She touched his cheekbone, his nose, the corner of his mouth where it covered her own mouth, heard his low groan as if her exploration moved him.

Gently rolling her onto her back, he came with her, untangled his fingers from hers and began to touch her face in the self-same way. But the kiss began to alter, subtly at first, then with a deepening of sensuality that quickened the senses.

Linking her hands around his nape, she held him, and his touch begin to drift on a gentle exploration of her throat, her shoulders, and finally the satin-smooth slopes of her waiting breasts. As he brushed a caress across tightly budding peaks she gasped her response into his mouth. One of his hands began to dip low over her ribcage, and as she arched in response to his so-light caress he reached up, caught hold of one of her own hands and fed it onto his body.

It was a command for her to match his movements. She remembered it from the last time they’d come together like this. Luiz had been her tutor in the art of arousing a lover. What he made her feel, he wanted to feel; what he did to her to make her go wild with pleasure, he expected her to do to him.

But that had been seven years ago, and seven years of abstinence had made her unsure of herself. Her fingers fluttered uncertainly against his hair-roughened breastbone,
found one small tight male nipple and began a tentative rolling of it between thumb and finger which had him groaning thickly. He wrenched his mouth from hers so he could string a line of heated kisses across her cheek and down her throat until he found and fixed on one of her own tightly drawn peaks.

She cried out. It was such a wildly exhilarating sensation. He muttered something she didn’t catch, ran his hand down her body, lifting eager nerve-ends to the surface of her skin as he did so, then caught hold of the hem of her nightdress and deftly slipped it up and over her head.

With the silk gone, his fingers began tracing the sensitive flesh along her inner thigh. Her mouth fixed on his shoulder; his returned to her breast. She could feel the heat of him, the burning, burgeoning power of him, pulsating against her hipbone.

His hand was beginning to trail ever further upwards, and she knew that if he touched her where he intended to go next then he would expect her to touch him the same way. But—

‘Luiz…’ she breathed, needing something—reassurance maybe, or even a reprieve. She wasn’t really sure.

‘Shh,’ he commanded, deep, dark, tense with arousal.

Did he think she was about to call a halt to it all? she wondered. But that was as far as it got—a question forming inside her head—before he literally sent her toppling over the edge as, with needle-point accuracy, he located the very life-force of her.

It threw her into a paroxysm of gasps and whimpers. No warning, no mercy. She hovered precariously on the very edge of orgasm, and as if he knew it Luiz uttered a soft curse, caught her mouth again with a hard, hot, urgent kiss that mimicked what he was doing to her. Then he was covering her body with his own and positioning himself so he could enter her with a sure, sleek thrust.

Delicate tissue unused to this kind of intrusion tensed on a moment’s protest at his potent demand. Then she sighed softly, slowly relaxed the tension out of her thighs so that she could draw him in deeper. He responded with a husky groan. After that it became a powerful example of intimacy at its most intense level. Mouth close to mouth, breast to breast, hip to taut hip, they began to move as a single entity. Her hands clutched at his silk taut back while his held her possessively beneath him. Her breath shivered from her parted lips to mingle sensually with his. And with her eyes captured by the burn in his everything else was temporarily forgotten. Past betrayals, present mistrusts—nothing else seemed to matter but what they were feeling.

And feel it they did—together—together so perfectly that when her breathing grew shorter and her body more anxious he knew the exact moment she was about to leap, and drove them over the edge with a fierceness that was completely soul-shattering.

Afterwards, when it was eventually over and Luiz lay heavy on top of her with his face buried in her throat, there was even something perfectly shared in the way neither seemed able to move or speak. Nevertheless, Caroline was glad of the darkness to hide away in when Luiz did eventually find the strength to move. Rolling onto his side, he took her with him, holding her with arms that gave her no room to escape.

‘You’re mine now,’ he said, and that was all.

Caroline didn’t even bother to answer. For it didn’t take genius for her to work out that she had always been his, even during seven years of never setting eyes on him.

T
HE
next time she woke it was to find a voile-defused daylight eddying around her. She was alone, she realised, lying sprawled naked on her stomach once again, amongst a sea of tumbled white linen, with her arm thrown out in a way that told her exactly what it had been thrown across until that warm male body had slid stealthily out from beneath it.

Her heart performed a dramatic flip, the memory of the previous twenty-four hours enough to hold her still with her eyes closed tight while she tried to come to terms with knowing just how easy she had been for him.

It was scary. Because even as she coped with the inevitable clutches of shame that knowledge brought with it, she was also aware of a gentle pulsing deep inside that was warm and soft and infinitely sensual as delicate muscles searched for the silken force which had given them so much.

‘Luiz…’ she breathed, then wished she hadn’t, because even whispering his name was a sensual experience.

I
should hate him, she told herself.
I
want
to hate him for doing this to me again. No wonder it all felt so very scary.

A
light tap sounded on the bedroom door then, jolting her into a sitting position in the middle of the bed. She had just managed to scramble a white sheet around her nakedness when the door came open and a young woman appeared carrying a breakfast tray.

She was smiling shyly.
‘Buenos días, señorita,’
she murmured
politely. ‘Don Luiz instructed me to waken you in time to meet him at the hospital at noon.’

Noon. Hospital—her father! Oh, dear God, how could she have forgotten him as thoroughly as she had? She was about to leap from the bed in panic when the little maid added,
‘El
señor
also say to tell you that your
papá
is well, and will be discharged later on today.’

And as Caroline sat, needing long seconds to take this reassuring information in, the girl walked forward and put the tray down on a small table, then turned to enquire if there was anything else she wanted.

‘Er, no—thank you,’ she answered politely. But as the young maid walked back to the door, a sudden thought hit her. ‘Did
el sẽnor
leave the address of the hospital?’ she asked. ‘Only I forgot to make a note of it in the panic last night.’

‘He has placed Señor Martinez at your disposal,’ the maid explained. ‘He will know where he is to drive you.’

With that she was gone, leaving Caroline to wonder just who Señor Martinez was. The maid seemed to think that Caroline already knew.

She soon found out an hour later, when, dressed casually in soft doe-coloured trousers and a pale pink V-necked top, she stepped into the villa courtyard and found the croupier-cum-waiter and now chauffeur standing waiting for her by the black BMW.

‘Good morning, Miss Newbury,’ he greeted politely. Deep-voiced, smooth-toned, he had the same pleasant American drawl as Luiz.

Which made him—what, specifically? she wondered as she watched him move to open the rear door of the car for her. Luiz’s personal bodyguard? His jack-of-all-trades assistant? His friend?

The very suggestion of Luiz possessing a genuine, slap-on-the-back kind of friend made her smile as she sank into
squashy soft leather. He wasn’t the type. Luiz was a man who stood alone and softened his guard for no one. Even when he made love he did so with a silent intensity that protected the inner man.

She shivered, not liking it. Not liking what he had been able to expose in her while keeping himself hidden. So, he enjoyed making love with her, she acknowledged with a shrug. She would have to be a fool to have missed the power behind the passion with which he had taken her. But he’d done it in silence. And even his climax had been a disturbingly silent thing that had kept whatever he was experiencing locked deep inside him.

So Señor Martinez couldn’t be Luiz’s friend, she concluded, because to a man like Luiz a friend would be seen as a weakness.

And, likewise, Señor Martinez didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a friend, she mused as she watched him settle his bulky size behind the wheel of the car. He had the cold face and tough body of a ruthless terminator—with a hint of the savage thrown in to add extra sinister impact.

All of which she was given the chance to consider only as long as it took him to set the car engine running then send up the partitioning piece of glass.

Shut out and shut in, she thought, and grimaced. Maybe they were brothers after all.

Her father’s room was on the second floor. Her feet trod spotless laminated wood flooring and she became aware of an increase of tension as the moment came closer when she was going to have to face her father with the truth—it was no use trying to pretend.

He knew too much—knew her, knew Luiz, and he knew himself. It was being that aware of all involved parties that had put him in here in the first place. What she didn’t want was to risk the same thing happening again once he’d heard the full story.

So, nervously she approached the room he had been allotted. The door was standing open; beyond it everything looked clean and neat. She saw Luiz first, standing gazing out of the window. With the sunlight streaming in around him he looked bigger and leaner and more intimidating than usual.

A force to be reckoned with, she likened with a small shudder. And had no concept whatsoever of how prophetic that thought was as she took a moment to brace herself, then stepped into the room proper.

He heard her and spun round, then went very still, watching her face as she glanced expectantly at the bed and began to frown when she found it empty. The room had its own bathroom. She looked next in its direction, saw the room inside was also empty, then finally—reluctantly—flicked her eyes towards Luiz.

‘Where is he?’ she asked, sounding afraid even to herself.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t had a relapse.’

Relief made her mouth tremble. ‘Then where is he?’ she repeated.

There was a lot to be said for having the sunlight behind him, she found herself thinking as she waited for an answer. At least with his face thrown into contrasting shadow she couldn’t tell what kind of expression he was wearing, didn’t have to guess what he was thinking as he stood there looking at her for the first time since they’d shared his bed.

‘Luiz?’ she prompted when she realised he still hadn’t answered her question.

‘He isn’t here,’ he told her quietly.

Isn’t here? Isn’t where? Her frown grew more puzzled. ‘You mean—he’s gone for more tests or something?’

The dark head shook and he took a couple of steps towards her. The moment he did it Caroline was having to
fight the need to start moving back. It was the loss of the sun to hide his expression and the sudden awareness of his physical presence that intimated her.

He was dressed in much the same way that she was, in casual trousers and a plain tee shirt. But it wasn’t clothes that made the man inside them. It wasn’t designer labels or that air of subtle wealth he carried with him that made her insides draw tightly inwards in sheer self-defence.

She was too vulnerable to him, she realised helplessly. Too easily diverted by things that held no place in this room.

‘He’s gone home,’ he told her. ‘To England,’ he added almost reluctantly.

‘Home? England?’ She repeated stupidly. ‘But he can’t do that!’ she cried. ‘He isn’t well enough to travel! I need to see him!’

Luiz took another couple of steps towards her as she spun round in a full circle so her dazed eyes could check the room out again, as if she expected him to miraculously appear and prove Luiz wrong.

But her father didn’t appear. And as she made herself look back at Luiz the sickly suspicion that this was just another part of his overall plan, to separate father from daughter, began to take a firm grip. ‘You’ve sent him away,’ she breathed.

‘He’s gone home to put his house in order,’ Luiz sombrely replied.

But she shook her head. ‘You made him go so we can’t get together and spoil your plans by coming up with an alternative solution to our problems.’

‘Is there an alternative?’

Gently put, smooth as silk, the question pierced her like the lethal prick from a scorpion’s tail. ‘Then why has he gone?’ she demanded, her heart beating so fast that she could hear it hammering inside her head.

‘Guilt,’ he told her bluntly. ‘He couldn’t face you, so he left before you could get here…’

Deserted her, he meant. Ran away, he meant. Left her here to face the rotten music alone, he meant!

It was too much. She couldn’t bear it. She turned to leave, but not quickly enough to hide from Luiz the flood of hurt tears that burst into being. His hand snaked out, caught her shoulder, stopping her from walking away.

‘Try to understand,’ he murmured huskily. ‘He saw himself last night for perhaps the first time. He saw the mess he had made of his life—the misery he had made of yours!’

‘So he ran,’ she mocked. ‘How brave of him!’

‘It was for the best, Caroline,’ Luiz insisted. ‘He wants to put his own house in order. Don’t condemn him for at least wanting to try before he can bring himself to face you again.’

‘In that case, let him swing for his own wretched debts!’ she responded in swift and bitter retaliation. ‘Find someone else to marry you, Luiz!’ she flashed. ‘Because I am now taking myself out of it!’

With an angry shrug she tried to free her imprisoned shoulder. All that happened was that the hand turned into a grip of steel.

‘I am still
paying
for him to put his house in order,’ Luiz inserted with deadly precision.

Caroline sucked in some air, held onto it for as long as she could, then let it go again with such violence that it escaped as a sob. ‘So am I, it seems,’ she whispered then.

‘It is what we agreed,’ Luiz confirmed.

And in her mind’s eye she had an image of her father, running away like a frightened rabbit while Luiz stood viewing his departure from his lofty position in his eagle’s nest, happy to let one tasty meal go because he still had another set cleanly in his sights.

Then she shuddered, and stopped thinking right there, because she just didn’t want to know how she was going to describe herself. But still the apt description of a lamb being led meekly to the slaughter managed to fill her head.

And if cynicism could be measured in fathoms, then Caroline knew she was now plunging the very depths as she made herself turn to face him.

‘Do you ever lose, Luiz?’ she asked him.

His grim mouth flexed on a twist of a smile. ‘Very rarely,’ he answered honestly.

She nodded, and left it at that. After all, what was there left to say? She was here because Luiz wanted her here. Her father had gone because Luiz had wanted him gone.

‘So what happens now?’ she asked eventually, knowing the question told him that she was right back on track—just as Luiz wanted.

‘Now?’ he said curiously, his dark eyes fixed on her beautiful but cold amethyst eyes set in an equally beautiful but coldly composed face. And the twist to his mouth became more pronounced. ‘This is what we do, right here and now,’ he drawled—and with only that outwardly innocent warning he caught her by the chin, pulled her face up towards him then kissed her—hard.

She just hadn’t expected it, so the rush of heat that attacked her nerve-ends had taken tight hold of her before she managed to find the will to pull away. Luiz let her go, but only because he was willing to do so, she was sure of that.

And still smiling that twisted smile, even though he had just used that wretched mouth to kiss her utterly senseless, he tapped one of her burning cheeks with a taunting finger. ‘Now that’s warmed you up nicely,’ he noted smoothly.

She wanted to hit him. He knew she wanted to hit him. Standing there toe to toe, breast-tips to muscle-padded
chest, he held her furious eyes with devilishly mocking ones and just dared her to do it!

It was a skin-blistering few moments. Neither moved, neither spoke, neither seemed even to breathe. Tension gnawed and antagonism pulsed—along with a slice of something else that further infuriated her.

Sex was its name. Hot sex, tight sex. Sex that plucked at the angry senses until they sang like an out-of-tune violin. And suddenly she could feel the fine lining of her body begin to ripple in an agonising parody of what happened when he was buried inside her. It wasn’t fair. Her senses had no right to betray her like this! It wasn’t fair that her breasts were stinging, their tender tips tightening into hard, tight, eager nubs against his wretched breastbone.

‘Marriage to you is going to be one hell of an adventure,’ he murmured—and effectively brought her tumbling back down to earth with a resounding bump.

She should have shattered. She would have preferred to shatter rather than have to continue to stand here knowing that he knew exactly—and in detail—what she had been feeling.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered, and spun her back to him with the intention of stalking stiffly away. But her exit was ruined by the sudden appearance of the doctor, Luiz’s uncle Fidel.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking much as Caroline must have looked when she’d first walked in the room. ‘Your father has left already?’ he asked.

‘There was a spare seat on a flight to London he didn’t want to miss,’ Luiz informed him. ‘He has business that needs his immediate attention if he wants to be back here in time for our wedding next week.’

Next week? Caroline tensed. Long fingers came to clasp
her shoulders in a physical warning for her to watch what she said.

‘I pray you will both survive till then,’ his uncle said sagely. ‘If you are to eat at the castle, Luiz, then make sure you take a food-taster with you. For if Consuela could have her wish it would be to see you six feet under the soil rather than have to watch you take what is left of her life away.’

Caroline didn’t understand a single word of what was being said. Except that she and Luiz were, it seemed, to be married in a week!

‘Don’t worry about your father, child,’ Fidel said smilingly, obviously reading her expression as one of anxiety for her father. ‘He was fighting fit when I saw him this morning. And he will not forget to take his medication again after experiencing the shock he had last night.’