Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (26 page)

‘Luiz, this isn’t—’ Funny, she had been going to say, but he reached for her, caught her wrists and used them to draw her body against him, then fed them around his neck.

Burning eyes became hidden beneath sweeping lashes as he lowered his gaze to where his fingers began to undo the tiny buttons down the front of her top.

It was all so intense, so very macho that she didn’t know whether she was feeling fiercely excited by it or just plain scared. But she didn’t attempt to get away from him—which was an answer, she supposed. And as his hands brushed the top aside, to reveal the flimsy thin silk bra beneath, her spine arched slightly in feline invitation for him to touch what he had uncovered. Yet when he did touch her he did it in a way that completely snagged her breath. Because it was not the sensually possessive caress
she had been expecting. His hands simply needed to touch her like this.

‘Why?’ she whispered. She just didn’t understand this man one iota. He could be so cold, so utterly ruthless with his demands. But this was different. This was—compulsion.

‘I need you,’ was all he said. Then his mouth was crushing hers apart, and nothing else seemed to matter after that. Their clothes disappeared in hurried succession, their flesh coming together in an intoxicating mix of hunger, heat and sweat.

The bed waited, and as they folded down onto its soft mattress the smell of fleshly starched linen came wafting cleanly round them. It was a smell that seemed to make it all perfect, somehow, though Caroline didn’t know why it should.

As time made deep and sensual inroads into the afternoon, without them being aware of it passing, they forget where they were supposed to be going—or maybe they chose to forget. It didn’t seem to matter. It was hot and it was steamy and it was a much more appealing journey, one that explored the senses to the exclusion of none, allowed no room for inhibition. It pretended that this was good and right and absolutely the only thing in the world either of them should be doing.

So they made love all afternoon, slept a little in an intimate tangle of limbs, before rousing to begin making love all over again.

‘Why, Luiz?’ she dared to ask him again, when they’d quietened. ‘Why are we here like this?’

‘You’re always asking me
why
,’ he complained, nuzzling his mouth against her throat.

‘Only because you keep hitting me with the unexpected,’ she told him.

‘Well, I thought the answer this time should be obvious,’

he said with a grimace. ‘You’re so beautiful you make me ache,’ he murmured deeply. ‘And so damn desirable that I can’t even control myself long enough to get us from one place to another without having to stop off in the middle of the journey to do—this…’

His mouth took hers in the kind of kiss that sent any further words spinning off into oblivion. But she knew that, no matter how good for her ego his answer had been, it wasn’t the real reason why they had ended up here in this bed, making love like this.

She had triggered something back at the lunch table when she had given away the fact that she’d missed him in her bed last night. She only wished she could understand what that something was, because then maybe she could begin to understand Luiz.

Eventually they reluctantly decided that they should be moving if they wanted to reach their destination before dark. Caroline went off to shower in the tiny bathroom they had discovered down the corridor. When she came back it was to find that the sun had left this side of the building and Luiz had opened the shutters and the windows to allow some warm but fresher air to filter into the room.

He was standing over a small breakfast-type table on which, she was surprised to find, rested a wooden tray with what looked like a plate of sandwiches and a tall jug full of iced water.

‘Mmm, the hotelier in action, I see,’ she remarked lightly.

He glanced round, grimaced a smile at her, then turned back to the two tall tumblers he was in the process of filling. ‘We didn’t really do lunch justice,’ he said. ‘And, knowing the Spanish habit of eating late in the evening, I thought we might as well have a snack before we leave.’

The ice chinked as it fell from jug to tumbler, and drew
her across the room. She hadn’t realised she was feeling so thirsty until she heard that irresistible sound.

‘Thank you,’ she said, accepting a glass from him.

‘The sandwiches are only cheese and ham, but help yourself,’ he invited—then turned to go and take his turn in the bathroom, leaving Caroline to gulp thirstily at the water as she took another interested look around her.

What had only been quite seductively mystical shadows in the room before had now taken on rather interesting shapes with the light streaming in. The pale green painted walls wore the patina of age, and the polished floor had thick hand-made rugs thrown upon it. The bed was one of those big old heavy things you had to hitch yourself up to sit upon, and the two bedside cabinets had a pair of matching table lamps on them that would probably fetch a tidy sum in today’s post-war collectors’ market.

Which was her professional head talking, she acknowledged with a wry smile as she chose a sandwich then sat down in one of the two leather club chairs that flanked the little table. For she liked the two lamps exactly where they were, so to start thinking of how much they would fetch at auction, only to be carried off elsewhere, was not where she wanted her mind to go right now.

In fact she liked the whole room in general, and was aware, when she thought that, why she did. This room would always stay in her memory as the place where she finally found peace with her own feelings for Luiz. She loved him, she wanted him, she needed to be with him, no matter how he’d used her in the past or was using her now, in the present.

And if Luiz never came to love her back, at least she knew without a single doubt that he wanted her—passionately. She could live with that. She could
build
on that.

He arrived back in the room freshly showered and
dressed again, and her stomach gave a soft curling quiver in recognition of the way she was feeling about him now.

Picking up a sandwich, he took the other chair and folded his long frame into it. ‘Not quite a palace,’ he drawled, glancing round them.

‘Nice, though.’ She smiled. ‘I like little out-of-the way places like this.’

‘As opposed to five-star air conditioned luxury?’ he mocked.

She nodded, still smiling. ‘This place has soul,’ she explained. ‘It has secrets hidden in its darkest closets.’ Not to mention my own secret, she mused ruefully. ‘It has stories to tell of things long ago. These chairs, for instance,’ she said, reaching for her tumbler. ‘Who sat in them first? Who spilled their pot of ink on this wonderful table?’ she pondered, stroking a loving finger over the black stain. ‘Was it a woman? Was she writing a farewell note to her secret lover, so blinded by her own tears that she knocked the pot over? Or was it a man?’ she then suggested, her eyes darkening subtly as she wove stories in a way her father would have recognised, because she had always done it. But for Luiz this was new, and it held him riveted as he watched her softened face and listened to her dreamy voice. ‘Was he so engrossed in writing his one big novel that he spilled the ink in distraction?’

‘Both things could happen just as easily in a five-star hotel,’ Luiz pointed out dryly.

But Caroline shook her head. ‘If this table had had ink spilled on it in one of your hotels it would have been replaced with a nice new one before you had a chance to blink. No soul in that, Luiz,’ she told him sagely. ‘No soul at all.’

‘So you like all things old and preferably flawed.’ He smiled. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I like
some
things old and
sometimes
flawed,’ she
amended. ‘I also like new, so long as it tells a story. I like
interesting
,’ she decided that said it best.

‘Well, I think I can probably promise you
interesting
where we are going,’ he said.

And suddenly the cynicism was back. Impulsively Caroline reached for his hand across the table. ‘Don’t, Luiz,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t spoil it.’

He glanced down to where her hand covered his. His expression remained cast in stone for a while, then he released a small sigh, turning his hand to capture hers, and got to his feet, pulling her up with him.

His mouth was gentle on hers—seeming to be offering an apology. But when she made a move to deepen the kiss he withdrew, and his expression was still closed when he said, ‘We really have to be going.’

The afternoon of near perfect harmony, she realised, was over…

L
EAVING
Los Aminos behind, they began another twenty miles or so of driving before they would reach their destination. As the car ate up the miles so the scenery changed, from sprawling plains into rolling hills at first, then eventually into a more rugged terrain, where the hills took on the shape of forest-covered mountains.

The quality of the road they were travelling on changed also, narrowing to little more than a single car width as it wound them upwards on a steep climb that hugged a mountain face on one side and left sheer drops into deep ravines exposed on the other.

‘How much further?’ Caroline asked, beginning to feel as if they had been climbing for ever.

‘The next valley,’ Luiz replied. And his tension was back, in the clenched jawbone, the white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel.

He didn’t want to come here, she silently reiterated. He didn’t want to be this person who had to meet with people who were already programmed to hate and resent him.

And there was a hint of ill-omen in the way the air on the mountain suddenly turned colder, raising goosebumps on her arms she rubbed at with a small shiver.

Instantly Luiz touched a switch that changed the air conditioning from cold to warm. ‘You should have brought a sweater,’ he said.

‘If I’d known where we were coming, perhaps
I
might have thought of that myself,’ she smiled ruefully.

‘There’s a car rug on the back seat if you—’

‘I’m fine,’ she softly assured him, wishing she could say
the same about Luiz. But he was far from fine, she observed worriedly. For the higher they climbed the more tense he became.

‘You could always make the grand gesture and pass everything over to your half-brother then just walk away,’ she gently suggested.

His dark head shook. ‘That isn’t an option,’ he stated.

‘Because you feel he owes you for the years you had nothing while he had everything?’ she posed.

‘Because it just isn’t an option,’ he repeated in a tight voice that warned her that she was prodding what was really a very dangerous animal, the way he was feeling right now.

On a sigh, she took the hint, and fell silent. They were driving between the tall peaks of two mountains now, still hugging the side of one while the other stood guard in the distance. And really, Caroline observed, if they didn’t reach the valley soon then the only place left for them to go would be off the side of the mountain, because surely they couldn’t climb any higher?

Then—without warning—it finally happened. They rounded a deep bend, suddenly found themselves driving through a split in the mountain—and there it was.

The most beautiful place Caroline had ever seen in her entire life.

‘Oh, Luiz,’ she breathed, while he seemed to freeze for a couple of taut seconds, before bringing the car to a stop.

After that they both sat there and just stared in breathless awe at what had opened up in front of them.

The Valle de los Angeles… It could not possibly be anything else, Caroline decided. And they’d caught it at probably one of its most perfect moments, with the late sun pouring fire down its lush green slopes to brush everything on the wide valley bottom with a touch of sheer magic.

Directly below them blushing white-painted buildings stood clustered around a tiny church sitting in the centre of the village square. From there, and running parallel with the valley, snaked a gentle stream with a narrow dirt road running beside it through line upon line of what looked like fruit trees planted in uniform rows.

And there, standing out like the place from which all fairytales were conceived, stood a white-walled, red-roofed castle, complete with battlements and cylindrical towers, and even a drawbridge beneath which the stream ran while the dirt road stopped in front of it.

‘This is perfection,’ Caroline whispered.

Luiz stiffened sharply, as if the sound of her voice had woken him from a daze. But he said not a word—not a single word. He just put the car into gear and set them moving again—with a whole new level of tension sizzling around him that kept Caroline’s tongue still.

Going down into the valley was not as hair-raising as it had been climbing up to it. Instead of teeth-tingling sheer drops on one side they were zigzagging down through a series of carefully cultivated terraces that spread out on either side of them. It was all so lush and green and obviously fertile that it was no surprise to find herself recognising just about every fruit-bearing shrub and plant imaginable growing here.

The road eventually brought them out in the valley bottom, just behind the village. Driving through the village itself was another experience entirely. People were out, strolling or just chatting to their neighbours, while dogs barked around the feet of playing children. It was like entering another world. Nothing about the place seemed quite real. Not the dark-eyed, dark-haired simply dressed people or their immaculate white homes with their brightly coloured painted doors and shutters.

And the sense of unreality deepened when everyone went still and stared as they drove by.

Oh, my, Caroline thought, they know who we are! Or at least, she amended that, they know who Luiz is. And she felt the hairs on the back of her neck began to tingle as she watched them stare curiously in through the sun-tinted car windows at Luiz’s stern dark profile.

‘Do I start referring to you as
el conde
now?’ she asked in a shaky attempt to lighten the tension.

‘Try the Vazquez bastard,’ Luiz gritted.

And that was the point when she began to lose her patience with him, because while Luiz was busy seeing himself as the Vazquez bastard, he was blinding himself to what these people were seeing when they looked at him.

They were seeing the lean, dark, arrogant profile of one of their own. They were seeing their own black silk hair and olive-tinted skin and dark brown eyes that stated, quite plainly, Here is one of us. Their expressions were not deriding or hostile, or even vaguely contemptuous, they were simply curious.

If anything, it was the glances
she
received that brought other forces to the fore. For what was she to these people? She was a pale-skinned, blonde-haired utter stranger, with eyes the colour of amethysts. Nothing even remotely familiar about the way she looked to them.

When the road opened up into the village square, with the sweet little church in its centre, the people all jumped to attention—except for one young man, who ran across the square then into the church. Mere seconds later, a priest in his simple black robes appeared in the opening. Very tall, very thin, and with a shock of white hair framing his lined face, he watched them pass by with a solemn shrewdness that made Caroline’s insides tingle.

‘Is this the church where we are expected to marry?’ she asked in a choked little voice.

‘Yes,’ Luiz replied.

‘Then don’t you think we should have stopped and at least passed the time of day with the priest?’ It was censure and anxiety rolled into one question, because she didn’t want to offend these people, and she was sure that once Luiz had got over whatever it was that was slowly killing him he wouldn’t want to think that he had offended anyone either.

Luiz shook his head. Not once did he let his eyes divert from the way ahead as he grimly kept them moving across the square and through the next gauntlet of curious spectators.

He didn’t even relax when they left the village and began to pass between the neatly tended fruit groves. Orange groves, lemon groves, peach and apricot groves. ‘How can a place like this be bankrupt?’ she questioned on a fresh bout of awe. It was all so rich in everything that life could offer.

‘Through the extravagances of its previous owners,’ Luiz informed her cynically.

He had to mean his own father. ‘Nobody
owns
something like this,’ Caroline objected. ‘They are merely guardians, whose responsibility it is to take care of it all during their term of office. And if they can’t see what an honour and a privilege that has to be, then they deserve to lose custody.’

‘Spoken like a true lady to the manor born,’ Luiz derided. ‘Maybe I should just cut my unworthy losses and sign it all over to you.’

‘And you can mock me all you like,
el conde
,’ she sniped right back, ‘But if you can’t grasp the concept of what I am saying then maybe you should do just that.’

‘Lecture over?’ Luiz clipped.

‘Yes,’ she sighed, wondering wearily why she bothered to take him on like this. The man was impervious to anything
anyone said that didn’t suit his own view of things! ‘I’ve finished.’

‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘Because I think we’ve arrived, and I am beginning to feel like hell…’

As surprise admissions went, that one really managed to strike at the heart of her. She turned in her seat, saw how pale he had gone, saw how clenched his face muscles were and automatically looked where he was looking—and felt everything inside her shudder to a resounding halt.

For while they had been sniping at each other they had come to the end of the fruit groves and driven over the drawbridge, beneath a wide archway cut into the whitewashed wall that surrounded what she supposed must be the castle’s private enclave.

She had never, ever seen anything quite like it. From up on the mountain it had all looked pretty stunning, but from down here, on the valley bottom and this close up, the castle was nothing short of enchanting, with its whitewashed walls blushing in the dying sunlight.

It was all so outstandingly—dramatically—beautiful. Even the formally laid out gardens they were now passing through took the breath away. The driveway opened up into a wide cobbled courtyard with a statue of Neptune spouting water into a circular pool, guarding the huge arched entrance into the castle itself.

Luiz stopped the car. Without a word they climbed out, then just stood gazing around.

‘It’s a folly,’ Caroline murmured softly.

‘Hmm?’ Luiz’s dark head swung round to frown a blank look at her.

‘The castle,’ she explained. ‘It’s not what it appears to be.’

‘What makes you say that?’ He seemed to have a struggle to get his voice to work, but once he had spoken some of that awful strain eased from his face.

‘Look around you,’ she invited. ‘There is absolutely no reason for anyone to build a fortified castle down here in the valley. The mountains themselves are the only protection needed down here. If you’d wanted to protect what was yours, you would have built up there, where we came in through the pass in the mountain. This…’ she gave a nod of her head towards the castle ‘… was built to satisfy someone’s eccentric ego. A folly,’ she repeated, looking frontward again. ‘But a beautiful folly…’

And if his family were guilty of bankrupting themselves due to their personal extravagances, she added silently, then at least it had not been at the expense of their exquisite home.

Luiz’s home now, she extended, looking across the top of the car at this man who was such a complicated mix of so many different cultures that it was no wonder he kept most of his real self hidden—he probably didn’t know who he actually was himself!

‘We’re being watched,’ Luiz murmured.

‘Mmm,’ Caroline replied. ‘I know.’ She had felt the eyes piercing her flesh from behind leaded glass windows from the moment they climbed out of the car. ‘So, what do you want to do now?’ she asked. ‘Bang on the door and claim ownership? Or do we take the more civilised approach and wait until we are invited in?’

But even as she put the two lightly mocking suggestions to him the great door behind Neptune was drawing open. Her heart skipped a beat. On the other side of the car she heard Luiz’s feet scrape against gravel. Without thinking twice about it, she walked around the car and went to stand beside him.

As she did so a man appeared in the doorway, small, thin and quite old, his expressionless face giving no hint as to whether they were to be made welcome or simply
grudgingly allowed to enter the castle’s hallowed inner sanctum.

‘It looks like it’s showtime,’ Caroline said softly.

‘Looks like it,’ Luiz agreed, and although he reached out to catch hold of her hand, as if he needed to feel her presence for moral support, she was relieved to see that the implacable Luiz Vazquez was back in place again and the other, tense and uncomfortable one had been firmly shut away.

Together they walked around the fountain and up to the door. With a slight bow of his dark head, the man murmured, ‘Welcome
señor
—
señorita
,’ with absolutely no inflexion in his voice whatsoever. ‘If you would kindly come this way?’

The man stepped to one side in an invitation for them to precede him inside, and as the door closed quietly behind them they found themselves standing in a vast hallway built of oak and stone, with an eight-foot-wide solid stone stairway as its main feature. The rough plastered walls were painted in a soft peach colour, adding warmth to what could quite easily appear coldly inhospitable.

Caroline felt her tummy muscles begin to flutter. Beside her, Luiz’s fingers tightened their grip on hers. He was used to big reception halls. He was used to standing in beautiful surroundings. But this was different. This was his past meeting head-on with his present. Even she, who had always known the place where her roots were planted, was acutely aware of how significant this moment must be for him.

Yet his voice was smooth and as calm as still water when he turned to speak to the old man. ‘And you are?’ he enquired, sounding every inch the noble Conde. Considering what she knew he was feeling inside, Caroline was proud of him.

‘Pedro, sir. I am the butler here,’ the old man replied—

and there was respect in his tone. He for one wasn’t condemning Luiz for being the Vazquez bastard. ‘Please,’ he invited. ‘If you will follow me…’

He began leading them across a polished stone floor past two suits of armour that were guarding the stairs. There were artefacts scattered about this hall that made Caroline’s head whirl as it went into professional mode.

Maybe Luiz knew it. ‘Enough
soul
here for you?’ he questioned lazily.