Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 18

CAROLINE was pacing the floor and becoming more agitated with each step that she took. She arrived at the window which led out onto the terrace, saw nothing of the beautiful view the elegant two-bedroom suite offered her of the famous Puerto Banus, and turned to pace back the way she had come, glancing impatiently at her watch as she did so.

Nine o’clock. Her father had said seven o’clock. He had promised seven o’clock. ‘Just going for a stroll before I need to change for dinner,’ he’d said. ‘To check out the old place and see if it’s changed much since we were here last.’

He loved Marbella. They’d used to spend most of their summers here once upon a time, so she’d understood his eagerness to reacquaint himself with the resort—but not his refusal to let her go with him.

‘Don’t be a pain, Caroline,’ he’d censured when she’d instantly started to get anxious. ‘I don’t need you to hold my hand. And I certainly don’t need a watchdog. Show a little faith, for goodness’ sake. Haven’t I promised to behave myself?’

So she’d showed a little faith—and now look at her, she mocked herself bitterly. For here she was, pacing the floor like a worried mother hen with every nerve-end she possessed singing out a warning of trouble!

He wouldn’t let her down—would he? She tried to reassure herself. He had been so firm, so needy for her to believe in him that he wouldn’t, surely, fall prey to his old weakness when he knew how important it was to them for him to remain strong?

Then where is he? A very cynical voice inside her head taunted. He’s been gone for hours. And you know what he can get up to when left to his own devices for too long.

‘Oh, hell,’ she muttered as the agitation suddenly reached whole new levels, and, in tight and angry surrender to it, she snatched up her little black velvet evening bag and headed for the suite’s outer door.

If she discovered that he had sneaked off to feed his damned habit then she would never forgive him! She vowed as she stabbed a hard finger at the lift call button then stood waiting impatiently for it to come. Things were bad enough already.

More than bad enough, she groaned inwardly. Or she wouldn’t even be here, her father knew that! He knew how much she hated this place now, hated the whole morass of painful emotions it evoked.

Seven years since their last visit, she recalled as the lift doors slid open. Seven years since they had been forced to leave beneath a dark cloud of pride-shrivelling humiliation and soul-destroying heartbreak, vowing never to return again.

Yet here they were, not only back in Marbella but staying in the same hotel. And once again she was having to go and hunt her father out in the very last place on this earth she ever wanted to step foot in!

The casino, she named it grimly as she walked into the lift. The wretched in-house casino, where she was all too aware of the damage her father could do in such a terrifyingly short space of time.

And how long had he been missing? she asked herself as she pressed for the ground floor.

Two hours at least.

Her fingers stood out white against her black evening bag while she waited for the lift doors to shut. In two miserable hours he could lose thousands. Give him a whole night and he would, quite happily, lose his shirt!

Like the last time.

A wave of sickness suddenly washed over her, sending her slumping weakly against the lift wall just as the doors began to close. A hand snaked out, compelling the doors to open again, and she found herself quickly straightening as a tall dark man of Spanish descent, dressed in an impeccably tailored black dinner suit and bow tie, stepped lithely into the cabin with her.

‘My apologies for delaying you,’ he murmured in smoothly modulated English, swinging round to offer her a smile. A smile that instantly arrested when his eyes actually focused on her.

‘That’s okay,’ she replied, and quickly dropped her gaze so as not to encourage any further contact.

The lift began to sink. Standing tensely by the console, Caroline was stingingly aware that he was still studying her, but pretended not to notice. It wasn’t a new experience for her to be looked at like this. She had the kind of natural blonde, curvaceously slender, long-legged figure that incited men to stare. And the stranger was good-looking; she had noticed that about him before she’d lowered her gaze.

But she was in no mood to be chatted up in a lift—if she was ever in the mood anywhere, she then added, bleakly aware that it had been a long time since she had let any man get close to her.

Not since Luiz, in fact, right here in Marbella.

Then. No. Abruptly she severed that memory before it had a chance to get a grip. She wasn’t going to think of Luiz. It was a promise she had made to herself before she came here. Luiz belonged in the distant past, along with every other bitter memory Marbella had the power to throw up at her. And this tall dark stranger looked too much like Luiz to stand the remotest chance with her.

So she was relieved when the lift stopped and she could escape his intense regard without him attempting to make conversation. Within seconds she had completely forgotten him, her mind back on the problem of finding her father as she paused at the head of a shallow set of steps which led down to the main foyer and began searching the busy area in front of her.

This was one of the more impressive hotels that stood in prime position on Marbella’s Puerto Banus. Years ago, the hotel had possessed a well-earned reputation for old-fashioned grandeur which had made it appeal to a certain kind of guest—a select kind that had once included both herself and her father.

But the hotel had only just been re-opened, after a huge refurbishment undertaken by its new owners, and although it still held pride of place as one of the most exclusive hotels in the resort, it now displayed its five-star deluxe ranking with more subtle elegance.

And the people were different, less rigidly correct and aware of their own status, though she didn’t doubt for a moment that if they were staying here then they must be able to afford the frankly extortionate rates.

It was a thought that brought home to her just how much she had changed in seven years. For seven years ago she too would not have so much as questioned the price of a two-bedroom suite in any hotel. She had been reared to expect the best, and if the best came with a big price-tag attached to it then that was life as she had known it.

These days she didn’t just question price-tags, she calculated how long she would have to work to make that kind of money.

In fact money was now an obsession with Caroline. Or at least the lack of it was, along with a constant need to keep on feeding that greedy monster her family home had become.

A frown touched her brow as she continued to search for the familiar sight of her father’s very distinctive tall and slender figure among the clutches of people gathered in the foyer. For two hundred years there had been Newburys in residence at Highbrook Manor. But the chances of there being Newburys there for very much longer depended almost entirely on what her father was doing at this precise moment.

And he certainly wasn’t in evidence here, she acknowledged as, with a grace that belied her inner tension, she set herself moving down the steps and across the foyer to see if he had left a message for her at the reception desk.

He hadn’t. Next she went off to check out the lounge bars in the faint hope that he might have met someone he’d used to know, got to talking and lost track of the time. Again she drew a blank, and her heart began to take on a slower, thicker beat because she knew that there was now only one place left for her to look for him.

Grimly she set her feet moving over to a flight of steps set in their own discreet alcove that led the way down to the hotel basement. Walking down those steps took a kind of courage no one would understand unless they had known her seven years ago. By the time she reached the bottom she was even trembling slightly. For very little had changed down here except maybe the decoration, she noticed with a sickly feeling of déjà vu. The basement area still possessed its own very stylish foyer, still had a sign pointing to the left directing the guests to the hotel’s fully equipped gymnasium, beauty therapy rooms and indoor swimming pool.

Still had a pair of doors to her right, which were as firmly closed as they always had been, as if to keep carefully hidden from innocent eyes what went on behind them.

But the sign hanging above the doors was not innocent. ‘Casino’ it announced in discreet gold lettering.

Her father’s favourite playground of old, she thought with a small shiver. A place where compulsive excitement went hand in hand with desperation and the flip of a card or the roll of a dice or the spin of a wheel had the potential to make or break you.

If he had given in to himself and gone in search of excitement, then she was sure she was going to find him on the other side of those wretched doors, she predicted as she took a reluctant step forward.

‘You will be disappointed,’ a smoothly accented voice drawled lazily.

Spinning round in surprise, Caroline found herself looking at the stranger who had shared the lift with her. Tall, dark, undeniably good-looking—her stomach muscles flipped on yet another sense of déjà vu. For he really did look uncannily like Luiz. The same age, the same build, the same rich Spanish colouring.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, thinking that even her first meeting with Luiz had been right here in this basement foyer, with her hovering uncertainly like this and him smiling at her like that…

‘The casino,’ he prompted with a nod of his dark head in the direction of the closed doors. ‘It does not open until ten o’clock. You are too early…’

Pure instinct made her check the time on her watch, to discover that it was only nine-fifteen. Sheer relief had her winging a warm smile at the stranger—because if the casino wasn’t even open, then her father could not be ensconced in there, wrecking what small chance they had of saving their home!

And now she felt guilty. Guilty for mistrusting him, guilty for being angry, guilty for thinking the worst of him when of course he wouldn’t do that to her!

‘Perhaps I could persuade you to share a glass of wine with me in the lounge bar, while we wait for the casino to open?’ the stranger invited.

Caroline flushed, realising that he had misinterpreted her sudden smile, and the pick-up she had carefully avoided in the lift was back on track with a vengeance. The kind of vengeance that made him flash her a megawatt smile.

By contrast she completely froze him. ‘Thank you, but I am here with someone,’ she informed him stiffly, and pointedly turned back to the stairs.

‘Your father, Sir Edward Newbury, perhaps?’ he suggested lightly, successfully bringing her departure to a halt.

‘You know my father?’ she questioned warily.

‘We have met,’ he smiled. But it was the way that he smiled that chilled Caroline’s blood. As if he knew something she didn’t and was deriding that knowledge.

Or deriding her father.

‘I have just seen him,’ he added. ‘He crossed the foyer towards the lifts only a few short minutes ago. He seemed—in a hurry…’ That lazily mocking smile appeared again, making her feel distinctly uneasy.

‘Thank you,’ she said politely. ‘For letting me know.’ And she turned away from him once again.

The feel of his fingers closing around her wrist came as a shock. ‘Don’t rush away,’ he murmured. ‘I would really like to get to know you better…’

His voice was quite pleasantly pitched—but his grip was an intrusion and alarm bells were beginning to sound in her head, because she had a horrible feeling that if she tried to break free his fingers would tighten—painfully.

She didn’t like this man, she decided. She didn’t like his smooth good-looks or his easy confidence or the lazy charm he was utilising—while using physical means to detain her.

She didn’t like his touch on her skin, or the itchy suspicion that he had been shadowing her movements since the lift, and had timed his approach to coincide with the fact that they were standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs well away from other people.

And she didn’t like the uneasy sensation of feeling vulnerable to someone stronger than herself and clearly so sure of himself that he dared detain her like this.

‘Please let go of me,’ she said.

His grip did tighten. Her pulse began to accelerate. ‘But if I let you go you will not learn how I became acquainted with your papa,’ he pointed out. ‘Or, perhaps more significantly, where I became acquainted with him…’

‘Where?’ she responded, aware that he was deliberately dangling the knowledge at her like a carrot on a stick.

‘Share a glass of wine with me,’ he urged. ‘And I will tell you.’

And it was such a juicy carrot, she noted, one that was trying to make her go one way while every single instinct she possessed was telling her to run in the other.

At which point anger took over, for if he believed she was open to this kind of coercion then he was severely mistaken! ‘I’m sure,’ she replied in her coldest voice, ‘that if my father thinks your meeting memorable enough he will tell me about it himself. Now, if you will excuse me?’ she concluded, and gave a hard enough tug at her captured wrist to free it, then walked stiffly up the steps without glancing back.

But her insides felt shaky, and the nerves running along her spine were tingling, because she half expected him to come chasing after her. It was an unpleasant sensation, one that stayed with her all the way up that flight of steps and across the busy foyer into one of the waiting lifts. In fact it was only when the doors had shut her in without him joining her there that she began to feel safe again.

And her wrist hurt. Glancing down at it, she wasn’t surprised to find the delicate white skin covering it was showing the beginnings of bruising. Who was he? she wondered. What was he to her father that made him believe it was okay to accost her like that?

It was a concern that took her into her suite and immediately across to her father’s bedroom door with the grim intention of finding out. But, having knocked sharply and then pushed open the door, she knew she was going to be unlucky, when it became immediately apparent that he had already been here and gone again.

And the way his clothes had been discarded on the floor told her he had changed in one heck of a hurry.

So as to avoid her? Oh, yes, Caroline conceded heavily. He was trying to avoid her—which could only mean one thing.

He had fallen off the rails again.

In a fit of angry frustration she bent down to snatch up the pair of trousers he had dropped on the floor and was about to toss them onto the bed when something dropped out of one of the pockets. It landed with a paper-like thud on the toe of her shoe. Bending to pick it up, she discovered that she was holding what appeared to be a set of receipts, and with her fingers actually tingling with dread, she slowly unfurled them.

After that she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t even think a coherent thought for long, long seconds. Then, with a calmness that bore no resemblance to what was actually taking place inside her, she began to check with the methodical intent of one well-practised at doing it, every pocket in every item of clothing he had brought with him to Marbella.

Ten minutes later and she was standing there in the middle of her father’s room, staring into space like someone turned to stone. They had been here in Marbella for less than twenty-four hours and, going by the tally on the receipts, in that time her father had managed to gamble and lose the best part of one hundred thousand pounds…

Standing by the window of his hi-tech control room, Luiz Vazquez looked down on the casino floor of this, the latest acquisition in his growing string of deluxe hotels.

He could not be seen from down on the floor. The window allowed him to look out but did not let anyone look in. And behind him the really serious viewing was going on, via closed circuit television screens watched over by his eagle-eyed security staff. The window was merely a secondary source by which the casino floor as a whole could be observed.

Luiz preferred to check out the floor with his own eyes like this. It came from once being a serious gambler and trusting nothing he could not see for himself. Now things were different. Now he didn’t need to gamble to earn enough money to live. He had wealth and he had power and a kind of deeply satisfying sense of self-respect that had taken a whole lot of earning and yet…

A frown brought the two dark silk strips of his brows together across the bridge of his long nose. Possessing respect in oneself did not automatically win you the respect of others. A salutary lesson he had learned the hard way, and one he intended to rectify very soon.

It was, in fact, his next major project.

Vito Martinez, the hotel’s Head of Security, came to stand beside him. ‘She’s gone back to her room,’ he said. ‘He’s just arrived in the casino bar.’

‘Tense?’ Luiz asked.

‘Yeah,’ Vito replied, ‘humming with it. Ripe, I’d say,’ he added, the evidence of his on-the-street New York upbringing more pronounced in the dry-edged judgement.

A single nod in acknowledgement and Luiz Vazquez was turning away from the window, his expression, as always, a tightly closed book—not surprising for a man who’d used to play poker as lethally as he had.

‘Buzz me when he comes to the tables,’ was all he said. Then he was walking out of the control room, his long, lean level stride taking him across the elegant cream and black marbled floor of this tightly secured inner sanctum, then in through another door, which he closed behind him.

Silence suddenly prevailed.

Where the other room had been alive with a busy hum of activity, this room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop on the thick cream carpet covering its huge expanse. It was a luxuriously furnished room, plain but dramatic, with its modern black lacquered and leather furnishings enhanced by the simplicity of cream-painted walls.

Like the man himself, the room revealed nothing of his true personality. Except, maybe, for the black-framed picture hanging on the wall behind a large black-lacquered desk.

In its own way the picture was as dramatically plain as everything else in here—nothing more than the faint gold outline of a scorpion clinging to a white background with its lethal-looking tail curving upwards and over its scaly body in preparation to strike.

But it made the blood run cold just to look at it. For, although it was Luiz Vazquez’s chair that was situated directly beneath that lethal claw, it was not him the scorpion seemed to threaten—but whoever was unlucky enough to sit in the chair placed on the other side of the desk.

Its message was clear. Mess with me and I strike.

It was his mark—his logo. Or one of them, at least. But once upon a time the sign of the golden scorpion had used to adorn everything Luiz Vazquez was involved in. He had since learned to be much more subtle. And he just kept this one picture around him for personal reasons now—and as a warning to anyone who was unfortunate enough to find themselves summoned to these private rooms, that the cool-headed, soft-talking Luiz Vazquez still had a vicious sting in his tail.

But these days he was known better for his new logo. The one which gave his string of exclusive, internationally renowned hotels their name and had earned him quite a reputation for quality service and comfort during the last ten years.

For this was an Angel Hotel. Angel as in Luiz Angeles de Vazquez. Angel as in good, honest and true.

The sublime to the ridiculous. And an example of what good marketing could do because all of his hotels possessed in-house casinos which were the real draw. The luxury his admittedly well-heeled guests enjoyed while they played was just an added bonus.

The scorpion was probably a far more honest representation of what Luiz Vazquez really was.

Luiz went to sit beneath that scorpion now, sliding his perfectly contoured frame into a thickly padded swivel desk chair before reaching down to unlock and open one of the drawers in the desk.

His fingers, so long and lean and beautifully coordinated that they revealed even more about the man’s extraordinary powers of self-control in the way they did everything with such neat precision, took out the only item in the drawer and placed it on the desktop.

It was a leather-bound dossier, expensive but nothing particularly ominous about it. Yet he didn’t immediately open it. Instead he leant back in the chair and began swinging it lightly while one set of neatly filed fingernails tapped an absent tattoo against the desk. His expression revealed nothing, as usual. Whatever was going on in that shrewd, sharp mind of his was being kept hidden beneath the curling black lashes that usually shrouded his eyes.

Beautiful eyes. Eyes of a rich, dark fathomless brown colour that sat in the sleepy hollows of an arrestingly handsome face. A full Spaniard by birth, though raised in America, he undoubtedly had the warm golden skin of his Spanish forebears, the high cheekbones, the nose, the rocksolid, firmly chiselled jaw-line, and the shadowy outline of a beautifully moulded mouth.

But, for all of its good points, it was still the face of a cool operator. Of a man reputed to possess no heart—or, to be less fanciful, to possess the heart of an athlete, able to maintain the calm, steady pace necessary to keep the oxygen pumping into his clever brain no matter what pressure he put it under.

The fingers suddenly stopped tapping and moved, sliding over the desk and across smooth leather until they could curl and flick open the dossier cover to reveal a thick wad of documents stacked inside. With a supple dexterity that had been trained into his fingers years ago, he began sifting through the papers until he found the one he was looking for. Removing it from the stack, he set it neatly back down upon the top, then simply went still, his eyes glowing with a sudden burn as he sat there looking at a seven-by-nine colour photograph of—Caroline.

She was without doubt extraordinarily beautiful. No one with eyes would ever say she was not. Hair the colour of ripening wheat framed the most delicately perfect face even Luiz Vazquez, for all his thirty-five years of worldly experience, had ever set eyes upon. She had the flawless white skin of a pale English rose and eyes the colour of amethyst. Her small straight nose was classically drawn, like the finely defined curve of her delicate jaw-line. But it was her mouth that held Luiz’s attention. Soft, warm, pink and full—it was a mouth made to drive a man wild with pleasure.

And he should know, Luiz mused cynically. For he’d had plenty of experience of just what that mouth could do—and he meant to have some more very soon.

It was a prospect that had the burn in his eyes changing back to their normal inscrutable cool as he utilised yet another facet of his strong character. Patience. The man was blessed with unending patience when it came to goals he had set himself.

That next goal was Caroline. And he was so sure of success that in his mind Caroline already belonged to him. It was this kind of belief in himself which gave him the power to put her photograph aside and basically forget it was there while he set about reading through the rest of the papers in the bulky dossier.

They were mostly bills. Final demand notes, warnings of foreclosure on bank loans, property mortgages, and, most sinister of all, the long list of unpaid gambling debts—both the old and the very new. He read each one in turn, consigning every detail to his photographic memory before setting it aside and doing the same with the next one.

A light on the desk console suddenly began flashing. Reaching out, he stabbed at the console with a finger. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘She’s on her way down,’ Vito Martinez informed him. ‘He’s playing for big money.’

‘Right,’ was all Luiz replied, and another stab at the console brought silence back to the room again.

Turning his attention back to the papers in front of him, he picked them all up—including the photograph—deftly re-stacked the pile, then shut the dossier and locked it away in its drawer before getting smoothly to his feet. Then, with a deft tug which brought white shirt-cuffs into line with the edge of his creamy white dinner jacket, Luiz Vazquez rounded his desk and strode out of the room.

Back in the control room, Vito Martinez was still standing by the window. Luiz went to join him, saw Vito’s nod and followed its direction to one of the roulette tables.

Tall, lean, quite good-looking for his age, and, as always, impeccably presented, Sir Edward Newbury was playing big chips—and the expression on his face was a mere hair’s breadth away from fever-pitch.

Luiz recognised the look for exactly what it was—a man in the last throes of civility. Sir Edward was hooked—overdosing, in fact, and ready to sell his soul to the very devil.

Ripe, as Vito had said.

Grimly unsurprised by what he was seeing, Luiz then shifted his attention away from Sir Edward Newbury as, with his usual faultless timing, he looked towards the casino entrance just as Caroline appeared.

And everything inside him went perfectly still.

Seven long years had gone by since he had last physically laid eyes on her—yet she had barely changed. The hair, the eyes, the wonderful skin, the gorgeous mouth with the vulnerable upper lip and cushion-soft lower one he knew tasted as delicious as it looked. Even the long and slender line of her figure, so perfectly outlined by the exquisite styling of her black dress, had not lost any of its youthful firmness—as his own body was in the process of informing him, growing hot around the loins in a way only this woman had ever managed to kindle.

‘His weakness’, he labelled the sensation. The Spanish bastard’s desire to possess the forbidden in this woman, who was an icon to class and breeding. Even her name was something special. Miss Caroline Aurora Celandine Newbury…Luiz tasted the name on his silent tongue. She had a family tree that read like a history book, a background education fashioned exclusively for the élite, and a stately home any king would envy.

These were the credentials that gave the Newburys the right to consider themselves noble, Luiz judged cynically. To be good enough to be accepted by them you had to be someone at least as special. Even now, he predicted, when metaphorically they were down on their knees and could not afford to be too choosy, quality of breeding would be the yardstick by which they would measure whether or not you were worthy of their notice.

Caroline looked very pale, he saw as he watched her anxiously scanning the casino in search of her wayward father. She also looked tense and severely uncomfortable with her surroundings. But then she never had liked places like this.

She caught sight of Sir Edward as the roulette wheel began to spin. Luiz watched her body stiffen, watched the strain etch itself onto her lovely face and her small white teeth come pressing down into that exquisitely shaped bottom lip as she made herself walk forwards. He felt his own teeth set hard behind the flat line of his lips as he watched her pause a couple of steps behind her father, then knot her fingers together across the flatness of her stomach as if she wasn’t quite sure just what to do next.

Really, what Caroline would have liked to do was get hold of her father by the scruff of his neck and drag him by it out of there. It was the breeding that stopped her; Luiz knew that. In the laws of polite society one did not make ugly scenes in public, no matter how bad the situation. Even when you knew that your finances were already in Queer Street and that what your father was doing was nothing short of criminal.

Black. Even. Sir Edward lost, as he had been doing steadily since they’d arrived here in Marbella late yesterday.

As the old man made a gesture of frustration, Caroline visibly wilted.

‘Daddy…’

Luiz could actually feel her wariness as she placed a hand on the sleeve of her father’s tux in an attempt to make him listen to reason.

No chance, Luiz judged. The man was half crazed with gambling fever. Once it hit there was no quick cure. Sir Edward could not give up now, even if he lost the very shirt from his back, and more.

It was the ‘more’ Luiz wanted.

After an initial start of surprise, then a guilty glance over his shoulder, Sir Edward Newbury turned petulant, and, with a tersely uttered sentence, shrugged off his daughter’s hand so he could place another stack of chips on the table. All Caroline could do was stand and watch as five thousand pounds sterling hovered in the balance between a ball landing on black or on red.

Black. Sir Edward lost again.

Again Caroline attempted to stop him. Again her pleas were petulantly thrust aside. Only this time Luiz found his hands clenching into tight fists at his sides when he caught the briefest glint of telling moisture touching lovely eyes. It was sheer hopelessness that sent them on a hunting scan of the crowded casino, as if searching for help where none would ever be found.

Then, without any warning, she suddenly glanced up at the control room, those incredible eyes homing directly in on him with such unerring accuracy that he caught his breath.

So did Vito. ‘Jeez,’ he breathed.

Luiz did not so much as move a single muscle. He knew she couldn’t see him; he knew the glass did not allow her to. Yet…

His skin began to prickle, a fine tremor of response rippling through his whole body on a moment’s complete loss of himself as he stared straight into those beautiful, bright tear-washed eyes. His throat had locked; his heart was straining against a sudden fierce tightening across his breastplate. Then her soft mouth gave a tremulous quiver in a wretched display of absolute despair—and his whole body was suddenly bathed in a fine layer of static electricity.

That mouth. That small, lush, sensual mouth—‘He won,’ Vito murmured quietly beside him.

From the corner of his eye Luiz caught Sir Edward Newbury’s response as he punched the air with a triumphant fist. But his attention remained fixed on Caroline, who was just standing there watching, with a dullness that said winning was as bad as losing to her.

Abruptly he turned away. ‘I’m going down,’ he told Vito. ‘Make sure everything is ready for when we leave here.’

And neither his voice nor his body language gave away any hint of the burst of blistering emotion he had just been put through before he strode away.

‘Yes!’ On a soft burst of exultation, Sir Edward Newbury turned and scooped his daughter into his arms. ‘Two wins on the trot! We’ve hit a winning streak, my darling! A couple more like this and we’ll be flying high!’

But he was already high. The wild glint burning in his eyes was frightening. ‘Please, Daddy,’ Caroline pleaded. ‘Stop now while you’re ahead. This is—’

Madness, she had been going to say, but he brusquely cut her off. ‘Don’t be a killjoy, Caro. This is our lucky night, can’t you see that?’ Letting her go, he twisted back to the table as the croupier was about to slide his winnings over to him. ‘Let them ride,’ he instructed, and Caroline had to look on helplessly as every penny he had won was instantly waged on one feckless spin of a roulette wheel.

A crowd had started to gather around the table, their excited murmurs dying to a hush as the wheel began to spin. Caroline stopped breathing, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her paper-dry mouth as she watched that small ivory ball perform its tantalising dance with fate.

Inside she was angry—furious, even. But she had been reared never to make scenes in public. And the fact that he knew it was a weapon her father was more than happy to use against her. It was the nature of his weakness to rely on her good behaviour while he behaved appallingly.

So much for sincere promises, she derided as she watched through glazed eyes as the wheel began to slow. So much for weeks and months and years of careful vigilance, when she’d learned that trusting anything he said was a way to look disaster in the face.

She was tired of it, wearied with fighting the fight at the expense of everything else in her life. And she had a horrible feeling that this time she was not going to be able to forgive him for doing this to her yet again.

But for now all she could do was look on, feeling helpless, locked inside her own worst nightmare in the one place in this world her nightmares could be guaranteed free reign. This place, this hotel—this wretched casino. All she needed now was for Luiz Vazquez to materialise in front of her and the nightmare would be complete.

Like lightning striking twice. She shuddered.

Someone came to stand directly behind her, she felt their warm breath caressing her nape, though she only registered it vaguely. Her attention was fixed on that tormenting little ball and the rhythmic clacking noise it made as it jumped from compartment to compartment in a playful mix of ivory, red and black.

And the tension, the pulsing sense of building expectancy that was the real draw, the actual smell of madness, permeated all around her like a poisonous drug no one could resist.

‘Yes!’ Her father’s victorious hiss hit her eardrums like the jarring clash of a hundred cymbals as he doubled his reckless stake—just like that.

The gathered crowd began enjoying his good fortune with him, but Caroline wilted like a dying flower. Her heart was floundering somewhere down deep inside her. She felt sick, she felt dizzy—must have actually swayed a little, because an arm snaked around her waist to support her. And it was a mark as to just how weak she was feeling that she let that arm gently ease her back against the hard-packed body standing behind her.

This was it, she was thinking dully. There would be no stopping him now. He wouldn’t be happy until he had lost everything he had already won—and more. She didn’t so much as consider him winning, because winning was not the real desire that drove people like him to play. It was, quite simply, the compulsion to play no matter what the final outcome. Winning meant your luck was in, so you played until your luck ran out, then played until it came back again.

A fine shudder rippled through her, making her suddenly aware that she was leaning against some total stranger. With an abrupt tensing of her spine, she managed to put a little distance between them before turning within that circling arm to murmur a coldly polite,‘Thank you, but I’m—’

Words froze, the air sealed inside lungs that suddenly ceased to function as she stood there, staring into a pair of all too familiar devil-black eyes that trapped her inside a world of complete denial.

‘Hello, Caroline,’ Luiz greeted smoothly.