Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘He isn’t here,’ he told her quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is there an alternative?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It is what we agreed,’ Luiz confirmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The doctor’s beeper began sounding then, cutting short any more discussion other than for him to step up and give Caroline’s cheek an affectionate peck before turning briskly away with, ‘See you both at the church, God willing!’

Then he was gone, scooting away as abruptly as he had arrived.

‘What did he mean, you need a food-taster?’ she asked in his uncle’s wake. ‘And what castle—what wedding?’

‘The wedding you should have been expecting,’ Luiz drawled. ‘The castle is the one I inherited along with my illustrious title. And the food-tasting quip was a joke—though not a very funny joke, I will admit,’ he conceded.

It hadn’t sounded like a joke to Caroline. In fact it had sounded like a bit of very serious advice! ‘I wish you would tell me what is really going on here,’ she bit out angrily.

‘Feuds and fortunes,’ Luiz replied laconically, and halted any further discussion by leading her out into a corridor that had too many other people walking about to allow for private conversation.

Vito Martinez was standing by the car waiting for them as they came outside. ‘Any messages?’ was Luiz’s instant enquiry as they approached him.

‘Nothing that can’t wait,’ the other man answered with a telling glance in Caroline’s direction.

It niggled her to catch that glance. Just as a lot of other things were now niggling her. ‘You two should think about joining the Secret Service,’ she snapped out tartly, and climbed into the back of the car without waiting for a response.

A few seconds went by before Luiz eventually joined her. Car doors slammed, the engine fired and behind his protective shield of glass Vito Martinez set them all into smooth motion.

‘Vito meant no offence,’ Luiz said quietly.

Caroline twisted her head to show him amethyst eyes turned smoky grey with anger. ‘Tell me, is that Vito the croupier, Vito the waiter, or Vito the chauffeur you are talking about?’ she asked sarcastically.

‘It is Vito my security chief and most trusted employee,’ he replied very levelly, but it was a silken warning to watch her tongue.

Caroline was feeling too fed up with the whole darn situation to watch her tongue. ‘Oh, I see, Mr Versatility, then,’ she mocked. ‘Does that mean he’s the one that pulls out the toenails of your enemies for you in between making sure that sick old men catch flights out of a country you don’t want them to be in?’

‘Vito did not chauffeur your father to the airport; he chauffeured you to the hospital, if you recall.’

‘Ah, he has assistants, then.’ She nodded understandingly.

The steady gaze hardened fractionally. ‘You, I think, are gunning for a fight.’

He was right; she was.

Luiz’s eyes narrowed. ‘Be very—very careful, querida,’ he warned.

‘Stop the car,’ she demanded.

Why she said it Caroline certainly didn’t know—but without hesitation Luiz leant forward and pressed a switch that sent the glass sliding downwards.

‘Stop the car, Vito,’ he commanded. The car came to a smooth halt.

Caroline was out on the side of the road before she’d had a chance to realise she was there. It was crazy. The whole situation was crazy! She didn’t know what she was doing here in Marbella! She didn’t know what she was doing letting Luiz Vazquez control her life! And she certainly didn’t know what she was doing standing here looking out over the Bay of Malaga beneath a burning hot summer sun—shivering like a block of ice!

She heard Luiz’s feet scrape on loose tarmac but didn’t turn around. She felt his closeness when he came to stand behind her but didn’t acknowledge he was there. Her eyes were hurting, and so was her head. And, lower down, that band of steel was encasing her chest again.

‘In the hours since we met, you’ve tricked me, blackmailed me, kidnapped me and seduced me,’ she told him in a tight little voice. ‘You’ve helped me put my father into hospital, then had him neatly spirited away. In short, you’ve layered shock after shock after shock on me, in some neatly worked out little sequence aimed, I think, to keep me constantly knocked off balance. And you know what, Luiz?’

‘What?’ he prompted.

‘I haven’t got a single shred of an idea as to why you’ve decided to do this to me!’

He didn’t reply—had she really expected him to? Caroline asked herself bitterly as she swung round to look directly at him. His lean hard face was giving nothing away—as usual. And as she stood there, letting the silence stretch between them in the hopes that it would force an explanation out of him, she found her mind scanning back to their seven-week romance seven years ago, looking for clues as to why he was treating her like this.

But the only thing she could come up with was the ugly scene they had had on the night she’d left Marbella for good. Luiz had been standing there, much as he was now, tall and tense, while she’d flung accusation after accusation at him.

‘How could you do it, Luiz?’ she could hear herself sobbing. ‘How could you take everything I had to offer you then leave my arms to go and win money from my father in the casino night after night?’

‘I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that it was your father who was trying to win money from me?’ he’d bitten back coldly.

His attempt to shift the blame to her father had only infuriated her more. ‘You’re the professional!’ she’d cried. ‘You told me yourself that you used to make a living from gambling—whereas my father is just a gullible fool!’

‘He’s an addict, Caroline,’ Luiz had hit back brutally. ‘A compulsive gambler who is therefore willing to play anyone so long as he plays!’

‘Well, he says he played you,’ she’d told him. ‘Are you telling me that he lied?’

‘No,’ he’d said heavily. ‘He didn’t lie.’

It had been the death of a beautiful love affair, she recalled as she came swimming back to the present. She had walked away. Luiz had let her go. And not a single day had gone by since when she hadn’t closed her eyes and seen his ice-cold expression as she’d left him standing there—and wished more than anything that things could have been different.

‘This has nothing to do with the past, but with the future.’

Luiz spoke so suddenly that she had to blink a couple of times before she could realise that he was actually answering the question she’d put to him before she’d gone floating off into memories.

‘I need a wife to secure the final part of my inheritance,’ he explained. ‘And, having come to terms with the fact that I have to have one, I have decided that I would prefer that wife to be you. Does that make you feel any better?’ he taunted lazily.

No, it didn’t. She went pale. ‘I’m just a convenient means to an end, then,’ she said, seeing just how conveniently vulnerable to persuasion she had been for him. He hadn’t even had to woo her, just make her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

‘As I am to you,’ he pointed out coldly. ‘Which seems pretty fair all the way round, don’t you think?’

She found herself stumped for an argument because, put like that, he was right! Luiz waited, though, ruthless devil, until he was sure she was not going to throw him yet another tantrum on some other quickly thought up charge.

Then, ‘Can we go now?’ he requested, oh, so sardonically. ‘Only I have a lot of things to do before we leave here in the morning.’

Leave…

He was doing it again! Knocking her off balance with yet another one of his little surprises! ‘Leave for where?’ she gasped out.

‘Cordoba,’ he replied, then turned on his heel and strode back to the car.

Caroline followed—did she really have any choice? she angrily mocked herself. ‘What’s in Cordoba?’ she demanded, the moment she was back inside the car.

‘A small valley in the mountains that goes by the name of Valle de los Angeles,’ he explained as the car began to accelerate. ‘And there in the valley stands the Castillo de los Angeles, which belongs to Luiz Angeles de Vazquez, Conde del Valle de los Angeles…’

And if she thought she’d plumbed the depths of cynicism in her own way a while back, then Luiz was now demonstrating what little she knew about cynicism at all.

‘There, el conde,’ he continued in the same nerve-wincing tone, ‘will wed his betrothed in the church of the Valle de los Angeles, as is tradition for all condes del Valle de los Angeles. Then he will carry his bride off to his impressive castillo—just in time to banish the resident wicked witch before he ravishes his new Condesa.’

‘Wicked witch?’ she quizzed, picking out the only part in the acutely sarcastic agenda that managed to completely baffle her.

‘Sı´.’ He nodded. ‘Don˜a Consuela Engracia de Vazquez—the present Condesa del Valle de los Angeles.’

‘The lady your uncle mentioned earlier,’ she remembered.

‘Sı´,’ he said again. ‘Tı´o Fidel is a very shrewd man,’ he allowed. ‘He is also the only member of my family that you can safely trust,’ he then added, more seriously. ‘It will be wise of you, querida, to mark that I said that…’