Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 24

MARK it, he’d said…

But twenty-four hours later it was Luiz who seemed to be marking what he’d said, Caroline noted, as the closer they got to Cordoba, the more uptight he became.

Sitting beside him, she stared at the forever-changing vista beyond the car window and wondered what it was that was eating into him today. He should be happy, she mused testily. After all, he’d got himself one very meek and obedient passenger here, who hadn’t put up a single protest against his arrogant take-over of her life—well, not since her performance out on the Marbella road yesterday, anyway.

But then she hadn’t been given the opportunity to protest about anything else, she reminded herself. Because as soon as he’d delivered her back to his villa Luiz had shot off again with his security chief, and she hadn’t set eyes on him until he’d come to collect her for this journey this morning.

And he had arrived dressed for travelling, in a lightweight black linen suit and white shirt, looking almost as uptight as he did right now!

‘Are you ready? Is that your case? Do you think we can go, then?’ Terse to the point of rudeness, he had barely given her chance to reply. And other than for a quick down and away glance at the dusky mauve skinny top and cream tailored skirt she had chosen to wear for the journey, not once had he allowed himself to make full eye contact with her.

Because he’d known that to do so would give her an invitation to start speaking her mind again. Something Luiz obviously didn’t want. Something Luiz obviously still didn’t want, since he’d maintained that barrier throughout the whole time they had been travelling.

Maybe he was afraid she was going to start demanding to know where he had spent last night, she mused with an acidity that stung in her blood. Because he certainly hadn’t spent it with her, in his own bed. And he might be refusing to look at her, but she had certainly looked at him enough to notice the signs of a man who hadn’t got much sleep!

She had, she recalled smugly. She’d slept like a baby and hadn’t even missed him until she’d woken up this morning to find the place beside her was still as smooth as it had been when she’d fallen asleep!

Liar, a tiny voice in her head said. You woke several times and worried because he wasn’t there. You missed him too! Which makes the lie all that more pathetic!

‘Damn,’ Luiz muttered, bringing the car to a sudden stop. ‘I think we just missed the turning…’

Slamming the car into reverse gear, he began driving them back the way they had just come, past a junction sporting a road sign indicating that a place called Los Aminos was off to the left.

He stopped the car again, uttered an irritated sigh and reached for the glove compartment to extract a road map, which he then spread out across the steering wheel and began to frown at.

Caroline frowned too. ‘Don’t you know where we’re going?’

‘No,’ he replied.

Blunt and gruff, it didn’t really encourage more questioning. But she was confused. It didn’t seem likely, knowing his gift of near photo-perfect memory, that he could have actually got them lost!

‘How often have you made this journey?’ she asked, condescension feathering her tone.

A long index finger was following the wavy red line that cut a path through from Marbella to Cordoba. A sudden vision of that same finger tracing circles around her navel sent an injection of heat directly to her thighs. It was shameful. She despised herself.

‘I haven’t,’ Luiz said.

It took a moment for her to take that answer in. Then she noticed that the finger had stopped at a road junction. This road junction, Caroline supposed, glancing up at the sign, then back at the map to see that indeed the finger was touching this precise point on the map.

‘You mean you haven’t done it from Marbella before?’ she finally decided.

The finger began moving again, mesmerising her when she knew she shouldn’t let it, as it traced a line off to the left that went skirting around Cordoba.

‘I meant I have not been there—period,’ he clarified, bringing the finger to a stop at a tiny dot on the map that bore the name Valle de los Angeles.

The remark came as such a surprise that it had her turning in her seat to stare at his grimly taut profile. ‘Why not?’ she demanded.

He didn’t answer. Instead he began neatly folding up the map again, and just let the silence fill with the same tension they had been travelling with before he’d lost his sense of direction.

‘Luiz?’ she prompted.

‘Because I knew I wouldn’t be welcome, okay?’ he launched at her tightly.

‘But it belongs to you!’ she exclaimed.

‘What does that have to do with being made welcome?’ Leaning across her, he put the map back into the glove compartment.

Sudden enlightenment hit. ‘The one who might poison you,’ she murmured softly. ‘The resident wicked witch—your father’s widow?’

‘You bet,’ he replied, shifting the car into gear.

‘And she—resents you?’ She tried to put it kindly, but still Luiz released a scornful laugh.

‘Wouldn’t you resent the man who has usurped your own son’s position in the family?’

His father had another son? Luiz had a half-brother? While she sat there absorbing this latest piece of news, Luiz spun the steering wheel and set them moving into the left-hand fork in the road. A long and dusty winding road lay ahead of them. With a surge of power Luiz accelerated along it. Top-of-the-range plush as the car was, custom-built for quality performance with optimum comfort as it was, the BMW could do nothing about the kind of atmosphere its occupants created for themselves. It proceeded to throb with a hundred questions one of them wanted to ask, mingling with answers the other was clearly reluctant to provide.

In the end Caroline plumped for the most pressing question. ‘Why you instead of him?’ she queried.

‘Because I am the bastard and he is not?’ Luiz mockingly questioned the question.

Caroline flushed slightly at his blunt candour. Luiz might be possessive of his privacy now, but he had not been seven years ago. He had been very open then about his life as a fatherless child, living in a run-down tenement in the backstreets of New York with a mother who had struggled to make ends meet. She knew his mother had died when he was only nine years old and that Luiz had lived out the rest of his childhood in a state institution.

‘I was chosen because I possess a lot of individual wealth and the family itself is practically bankrupt.’

In other words, his father had named Luiz as his successor out of expediency rather than desire, she realised. It was no wonder Luiz sounded so bitter and cynical about the whole thing.

‘And your half-brother and his mother?’ she asked. ‘Where does it leave them in all of this?’

If it was at all possible, his expression turned even harder. ‘Out in the cold, as far as I am concerned. As they have kept me out in the cold for most of my life.’

No wonder he had left it so long without bothering to go and meet his inheritance face on, she grimly concluded. For Luiz was not a fool; he knew what he was going to find waiting for him. Which left begging just one more question she couldn’t leave unasked.

‘Our marriage?’ she prompted. ‘What has it to do with all of this?’

For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. His mouth was tight, his eyes shot through with a hard glitter as they followed the snaking line of the road ahead. Then, ‘Our marriage is the means by which I put them in the cold,’ he replied. ‘For by my father’s decree they may continue to live in the castle only until I marry.’

His ruthless streak was showing again. And Caroline was beginning to feel sorry for Luiz’s new-found family. She had a horrible feeling they had no idea what kind of man it was who was coming to meet them today, or they would have packed their bags and got out before he arrived.

‘Ever heard of the word forgiveness?’ she advanced huskily.

‘Forgiveness is usually only given to those that want it,’ he replied.

Slick and shrewd though his reply was, it still made her shiver. She fell silent after that. And they didn’t speak again throughout the miles they ate up until they entered the sleepy little village of Los Aminos.

‘We’ll stop here for some lunch,’ Luiz decided.

Caroline didn’t demur. She was beginning to feel stiff and thirsty, and a break for lunch was a preferable option to keeping on driving towards she knew not what.

Luiz found a little café with wooden tables set outside beneath a faded blue awning. Pulling into the kerb, he climbed out of the car, then stood stretching taut muscles while he waited for Caroline to join him. The inn wasn’t what you would call a fashionable place, but the basket of bread and bowl of crisp salad they were served were fresh and tasty.

She asked for a Coke, and Luiz did the same, then they sat sharing the lunch between them as if they did this kind of thing all the time. But the silence was still there, pulsing between them.

Reaching for another thick chunk of bread, she asked, ‘How much further?’ in an effort to break the deadlock.

‘Same again,’ Luiz answered briefly, while reaching for some more bread himself.

She huffed out a weary sigh that turned into a yawn. The day was hot and the air was humid, and she had lied about sleeping well last night, so now she was beginning to feel the dragging effects of hardly any sleep at all.

‘Tired?’ Luiz asked.

‘It’s the heat,’ she blamed. ‘And the travelling. Where did you sleep last night?’

And she could have bitten off her tongue the moment she caught the sudden gleam in his eyes. ‘Missed me, did you?’ he murmured silkily.

‘No,’ she denied. ‘I slept like a log.’ ‘Well, I missed you,’ he told her huskily.

Warily she glanced up, thinking he was just teasing—but he wasn’t. And the atmosphere between them suddenly took a violent change. He was looking at her as if he was seeing her sitting there naked.

She looked away again quickly—but not quickly enough to stop her insides from coiling tightly, and she could feel a sensual tingling between her thighs.

‘We could go somewhere,’ Luiz suggested.

Caroline almost choked on her bread. Was he saying what she thought he was saying? She picked up her Coke and gulped at it in an effort to disperse the bread.

‘You only have to say yes…’

Oh, for goodness’ sake! she thought. ‘No, Luiz!’ she whispered hoarsely. And made the mistake of looking into his eyes again.

They were on fire. He wanted her. And he wanted her now! ‘Stop it,’ she breathed, feeling her cheeks begin to glow, and sent trembling fingers on a wild foray of the salad bowl—only to meet his fingers halfway, because he was reaching for her.

It was like making contact with a high-voltage cable. Caroline snatched her hand away on a sharp gasp; Luiz did more than that—he released a low, short, explicit curse, then lurched angrily to his feet.

It a state of near shock, because she didn’t know what had happened between them, she watched him dig into his pocket for some money and toss it onto the table before reaching out to grab her hand.

And this time there was no snatching it back as if the contact was too electrifying to tolerate because Luiz wasn’t letting go. He turned and began striding off down the sun-drenched and dusty street, trailing her behind him like some recalcitrant child he was taking off to be smacked.

She wanted to protest—demand where he thought he was going, when the car was parked the other way! But the sheer ferocity etched into his lean face was enough to keep the words locked up tight in her throat.

Suddenly he stopped dead, tightened his grip on her hand and turned to walk her inside the foyer to what turned out to be a small hotel.

‘Luiz—no!’ she managed to gasp out at last, when the disturbing suspicion of what he was intending began to take horrifying shape in her head.

He completely ignored her. It was as if the devil was driving him. His face was taut, his jaw set, and she felt her cheeks suffuse with hot self-conscious colour as he grimly began negotiating the price of the hotel’s best suite—on an hourly basis.

It was awful, the most embarrassing situation she had ever experienced in her life! The concierge kept on sending her brief but knowing little glances, and she didn’t know where to put herself as Luiz placed a wad of notes on the desk, scrawled his signature in the register, then accepted the key the concierge was holding out to him before turning towards the stairs.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this!’ Caroline choked out as he began striding upwards, pulling her with him.

He didn’t even bother to answer, his expression so fierce that she began to quail inside her shoes as he led her along a narrow landing then unlocked a door and swung her inside.

The hotel was small and very simple; the room—darkened by closed shutters over the window—was nothing more than a bed, a table and a couple of chairs set on floorboards, and there was no air conditioning to help take away the suffocating heat. But by the time he had closed the door behind them she couldn’t have cared less what the room was like. She was out of breath, feeling a nerve-tingling excitement that didn’t go down well with how she knew she should be feeling in a situation like this!

‘What the hell has got into you?’ she demanded, managing to get her hand free at last.

Again he didn’t answer, but then he didn’t really need to, because she knew what had got into him. In fact it was written all over his hard-boned, muscle-locked face!

With a growing sense of awareness she stepped warily away from him, only to watch in a kind of wide-eyed fascination as he shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it aside, then began pulling his shirt off over his head.

The two items landed on a chair. His bronzed torso expanded, then relaxed, as if removing those garments had been a matter of life or death.

Fire and ice, she found herself likening, as she waited breathlessly to discover what was going to come next. The fire was in his passion, the ice the medium he used to keep the other suppressed. It was a dynamic combination, one that set some secret engine she hadn’t known she possessed humming throughout her entire system. She had never experienced anything like it. But it held her completely captivated as she watched the passion melt its way through the ice until all that was left was a blistering intent that began scorching her flesh.

‘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…