Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 23

THE rest became a blur, a cold, dark, muddy blur, where Luiz leapt from her side to catch hold of her father just before he hit the ground. The croupier-cum-waiter leapt also, and between the two of them they managed to get his limp body onto one of the sofas, while Caroline just stood there, lost in the fog of one terrifying shock too many.

I did this, she was thinking over and over. I’ve just killed my own father. She couldn’t move a single muscle, while someone else—a perfect stranger to her, though she must have met him just now amongst the confusing melee—strode briskly over to the sofa and knelt down to examine her father.

The way Luiz immediately deferred to him was telling her something she was incapable of understanding just then. But she watched as if from behind a pane of glass as the man’s long fingers checked the pulse in her father’s neck before he began quickly untying his bow tie then releasing the top few buttons to his dress shirt.

‘Vito—my bag, from my car, if you please,’ he commanded.

The man who’d jumped to her father’s aid along with Luiz now quickly left the room, and an arm came carefully around Caroline’s trembling shoulders.

It was the lady in magenta. ‘Be calm,’ she murmured gruffly. ‘My husband is a doctor. He will know what to do.’

‘H-he suffers f-from angina.’ The information literally shivered from Caroline’s paralysed throat. ‘He sh-should have pills to take in h-his pocket. Daddy!’ she cried out, as at last she broke free of her paralysis and went to go to him.

But Luiz’s aunt held her back. ‘Let Fidel do his job, child,’ she advised. Then, with a calmness that belied everything happening around her, she relayed the information Caroline had just given her to her husband, the doctor.

Luiz’s head shot round, his dark eyes lashing over Caroline as if she had just revealed some devilish secret aimed specifically to wound him. She didn’t understand. Not the accusing look, or the blistering anger that came along with it. And he was as white as a sheet—as white as her father was frighteningly grey!

The slide of pills found, the doctor quickly read the prescription printed across them. By then his bag had arrived at his side and he was demanding Luiz’s attention, instructing him to take off her father’s jacket and roll up his shirtsleeve so he could place a blood pressure pad around his arm. While Luiz was doing that, the doctor was listening to her father’s heart.

It was all very efficient, very routine to him, probably. But to Caroline it was the worst—very worst thing she had ever experienced in her entire life. She’d done this, she was thinking guiltily. She had done this to him by not insisting on breaking Luiz’s deal to him in private and in her own less brutal way.

But she hadn’t cared. Not until she had seen his face just now. She had been angry with him, and bitter, and had actually wanted to shock him into seeing what he had finally brought her to!

But what she had brought him to by far outweighed what he’d done to her.

‘He is beginning to come round,’ Luiz’s aunt murmured.

The doctor was talking quietly to him and Luiz was still squatting beside them, his dark face honed into the hardest mask Caroline had ever seen it wear. And everyone else stood about, looking and feeling helpless, while right there in the middle of a beautiful cream carpet her father’s glass still lay on its side in a pool of golden liquid.

She saw one of her father’s hands move, going up to cover his eyes. He looked old and frail and pathetically vulnerable lying there, and as her heart cracked wide open she shook herself free from the comforting arm and went to him.

‘Daddy…’ she sobbed. She felt Luiz glance at her, then grimly straighten up to make room for her to take his place beside his uncle. Her hand went out, the fingers ice-cold and trembling as they closed around her father’s then gently pulled his hand away from his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered thickly.

‘It was a shock, that’s all,’ he answered weakly. ‘Didn’t expect it. Forgot to take my pill today. My fault. I’ll be all right again in a few minutes.’

The doctor was waiting with blood-pressure pad at the ready once the pill had been given a chance to take effect. Caroline flicked him an anxiously questioning look and he answered it with a small nod. Relief flooded the tears into her eyes.

Her father saw them and his grey face looked weary. ‘Don’t weep for me, Caroline,’ he sighed. ‘I have enough to contend with right now, without adding your tears.’

‘But it’s all my fault,’ she choked. ‘I should have warned you about Luiz and me. It was—’

‘Supposed to be a pleasant surprise for all of you,’ Luiz grimly put in, still aware of their audience, and protecting his damned deal from the risk of exposure even in the face of all of this, Caroline realised bitterly.

Her father seemed to understand and accept that. His tired eyes lifted to Luiz. ‘We need to talk,’ he murmured grimly.

‘Not tonight, though,’ the doctor decreed. ‘For tonight you will be staying as my personal guest in my private hospital.’

And even as he spoke the sound of a siren whined its way into the room, curdling Caroline’s blood and making her cling tightly to her father’s hand. But what really worried her was that her father didn’t attempt to put in a protest.

His eyes fluttered open. ‘Don’t look so stricken.’ He smiled at her wearily. ‘I plan to be a thorn in your side for a long time yet.’

‘Promise?’ she insisted with the kind of painful seriousness that had those who witnessed it lowering their eyes.

‘I promise,’ he ruefully complied. Then to Luiz, who was standing behind Caroline, ‘Not quite the response you were looking for, I think,’ he drawled.

‘No,’ Luiz quietly agreed.

‘Does she know yet?’

‘Know what?’ Caroline put in sharply.

But on a wince her father closed his eyes again, and all conversation came to a standstill as the doctor began pumping up the blood pressure pad wrapped around his arm.

Two medics entered the room then, and Luiz was gently drawing Caroline to her feet, to make way for them so they could do what they had to do unencumbered. But the moment the medics began to move her father onto their mobile stretcher she was back at his side. The rest of the people in the room had slithered off into the ether. She neither saw them nor wanted to see them.

The drive to the hospital was undertaken with the minimum of fuss. Caroline travelled with her father in the ambulance while Luiz followed behind in his car. After that everything became a worried blur again as they waited while her father was put through several examinations be fore Luiz’s uncle Fidel eventually came to pass on the reassuring news that it had not been a heart attack as such. ‘But his blood pressure has remained a little high,’ he added. ‘So I am going to keep him in here overnight, just to keep an eye on him.’

With a sinking sense of profound relief, Caroline leaned weakly against the wall behind her. But when Luiz attempted to touch her she shrugged him off abruptly. ‘I’m all right,’ she said.

‘You don’t damn well look it,’ he argued gruffly.

Ignoring him, she looked at his uncle. ‘Can I see him now?’ she asked.

‘For a few moments only,’ she was told. ‘He is sedated, so he will not know you are here.’

They did stay for only a few moments, for as the doctor had said he was asleep, but his colour was much better. Caroline stood by his bed gently stroking his hand for a few minutes while Luiz looked on in silence from his position at the bottom of the bed. Then, with the helplessness that came from knowing that she could do nothing more by remaining there, she allowed Luiz to take her away.

They didn’t speak as they walked through the hospital, but then they had barely exchanged a single word since the whole horror had begun in Luiz’s drawing room. They reached the exit doors to find Luiz’s uncle was waiting for them.

He glanced gravely from one face to the other—seeing too much maybe; Caroline wasn’t sure. ‘He is going to be fine,’ he assured her gently. ‘It really was only a small scare.’

‘Yes, I know…’ Nodding, Caroline fought yet another battle with tears, then impulsively stepped up to embrace Luiz’s uncle. ‘Thank you for being there,’ she whispered simply.

‘It was my pleasure,’ he replied, but his attention was fixed on her own drained pallor. ‘Take her home,’ he said to Luiz. ‘Make her go to bed, and don’t allow her to come back here until lunchtime at the earliest.’

They left almost immediately after that. The black BMW was waiting in the car park. Luiz had driven himself to the hospital, Caroline discovered when, after seeing her into the front passenger seat, he climbed in behind the wheel.

His expression was closed, and he still didn’t speak as he set the car in motion. Outside it was dark and very quiet now, the hour one of those ungodly ones where even the owls Luiz likened himself to had retired.

‘I want to go back to the hotel,’ she said—and received no answer. Turning her head to look at him, she saw only that closed cast of a profile. ‘Luiz…’ she prompted.

He changed gear and turned the steering wheel to take them off the main road which would have taken them back into Puerto Banus. He had the long, brown, skilful fingers of an accomplished magician, she found herself thinking stupidly. And she knew she was only letting her mind notice his hands because she didn’t want to get into another heated row with him.

Yet she couldn’t let the subject go. ‘I don’t want to face all those people again,’ she told him.

He decided to answer that one. ‘They’ve gone home.’ His voice was quiet, flat, utterly devoid of any inflexion when he added, ‘The party, I think you would agree, is well and truly over.’

‘Did it ever get started?’ she shot at him tartly. If ‘party’ was the right word to cover whatever it was Luiz had been hoping to set up tonight. In truth, the man’s motives baffled her. His family baffled her. One moment they’d appeared hostile and resentful, the next too ecstatic to be real.

‘They don’t like you,’ she said continuing her thought pattern out loud.

‘They haven’t had time yet to make up their mind,’ he answered levelly.

Caroline frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I’ve only been an entity in their lives for a few months.’ In profile she caught the slight hint of a grimace. ‘Since my father died, in fact,’ he tagged on, ‘and it was revealed that he had left his estates, his money and his title to the bastard son they’d all preferred to pretend never existed.’

Sitting there beside him, Caroline took her time absorbing this information, because it helped explain so many other things about Luiz that had been a mystery to her until then.

‘Did you know about him?’ she questioned softly.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Always?’

‘More or less,’ he replied. Economical and to the point.

‘But he never acknowledged you until recently,’ she therefore concluded.

Luiz turned the car in through the gates of the villa and drove them beneath the arch into the courtyard. As the engine went silent neither tried to get out of the car. Caroline because she sensed there was more information coming, and Luiz because he was, she suspected, deciding how much he wanted to tell her.

‘He tried, once,’ he admitted. ‘Seven years ago, to be exact. But it—didn’t come to anything.’

Seven years ago. Seven. Caroline’s lungs suddenly ceased to work. ‘Why?’ she whispered.

Luiz turned to look at her, his closely guarded eyes flickering over her pale, tired, now wary face, and it was like being bathed in a shower of static. For, whatever he was thinking while he looked at her like that, she knew without a single doubt that his thoughts belonged seven years in his past and most definitely included her.

Then he flicked his eyes away. ‘He wasn’t what I wanted,’ he declared, and opened his door and climbed out of the car, leaving Caroline to sit there, making what she liked of that potentially earth-shattering statement.

Was he was talking about her? Was he talking about them? Was he talking about seven years ago, when he must have been here in Marbella to meet his father and had instead got himself involved with an English girl and her gambling father?

Her door came open. Luiz bent down to take hold of her arm to help urge her out. She arrived beside him in a fresh state of high tension, trembling, afraid to dare let herself draw the most logical conclusions from her own shock questions.

But Luiz couldn’t have meant that she had been what he had wanted seven years ago, she decided, or he would not have fleeced her father dry at the gambling tables the way he had done.

‘Come on,’ he murmured gruffly. ‘You’ve taken enough for one night.’

Yes, he was right; she had taken enough, she agreed as a throbbing took up residence behind her eyes. She didn’t want to think any more, didn’t want to do anything but crawl into the nearest bed and fall asleep.

The house was in darkness. Luiz touched a couple of wall switches as they entered and bathed the hallways in subdued light, then led the way to the bedroom.

Once inside, she didn’t seem to have energy left to even undress herself. Luiz watched as she sank wearily down onto the edge of the bed and covered her aching eyes. After a few moments he moved across the room to begin opening cupboards, then she heard his footsteps crossing the cool marble floor towards her and something silky landed on her lap.

Drawing her hand away from her eyes, she saw her own smoke-grey silk nightdress. With a cool disregard for her utter bone-weariness, he pulled her to her feet and aimed her towards the bathroom. ‘Wash, change,’ he instructed.

She went on automatic pilot, and came back a few minutes later to find that Luiz was no longer there and that the bedcovers had been turned back ready for her to crawl between. She did so without hesitation. She was just sinking into a blissful oblivion when the door opened and he came back in.

The distinctive clink of ice against glass brought her gritty eyes open in time to watch him place a jug of iced water on the bedside table, along with a couple of glasses, then he strode off to shut himself away behind the bathroom door without uttering a single word.

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.