‘Give it back to me, please,’ she commanded.
But he just offered her a lazy smile. ‘With that prim tone you could be my headmistress,’ he mocked.
‘How would you know?’ she hit back. ‘The way I remember you telling it, you rarely bothered to attend school.’
His soft laugh was appreciative, but his tone held something else entirely when he added, ‘Oh, I’ve known a few stiff-backed, cold-eyed females in my time.’
Which instantly reminded her of all the state institutes he had lived in during his childhood. And her inner eye was suddenly seeing a dark-haired, dark-eyed, lonely little Spanish boy who, even at the tender age of nine, had known exactly what it was like to rely only on himself for survival.
How many confidences had they exchanged during that long hot summer seven years ago? she wondered as a disturbing little ache took up residence in her stomach.
And how much of what he’d told her had been the truth? she then added cynically. And how much merely words calculated to earn her soft-hearted sympathy—while he quietly and calculatedly fleeced her father across a green baize table?
‘What’s the grimace for?’
Huskily intimate, disturbingly close. She blinked, glanced up, found he had shifted his stance slightly and now had a shoulder leaning against the crack between the two doors. It was such an obvious blocking tactic that Caroline was instantly on her guard.
‘My bag please, Luiz,’ she insisted, ignoring his question to hold out the hand from which her shoes now dangled from her own slender fingers.
He in turn ignored both the command and the outstretched hand. ‘Did you know that your eyes go grey when you’re angry?’ he murmured.
Messages began to sting through her blood. Sexual messages. ‘My bag,’ she repeated.
He sent her a spine-tingling smile. ‘And your mouth goes all prim and—’
‘Stop it,’ she snapped. ‘This is childish!’
‘Exciting…’ he argued.
She heaved out a breath that was supposed to relay irritation but only managed to sound fraught. And her outstretched fingers began to tremble, so she closed them into a fist and returned them to what they had been doing, which was keeping her towel in place.
‘I’m beginning to catch cold standing around here like this!’
And sure enough she started to shiver, though whether from cold or from something else entirely she refused to let herself consider. But, whatever the reason, it diverted Luiz away from his lazy teasing. And, with a swiftness that completely threw her, he straightened from the door to whip off his jacket then settle it around her wet shoulders.
The oddly gallant gesture sent her defences crumbling. Tears flooded into her eyes. ‘Don’t play him, Luiz,’ she pleaded huskily.
‘Here,’ he prompted, taking her dress and shoes from her fingers. ‘Feed your arms into the sleeves then get rid of that wet towel…’
It was a refusal to listen in anyone’s books. Despair wriggled through her while she obeyed him without thinking and pushed her arms into the sleeves of his jacket. The silk lining was warm against her cool damp skin, the scent of him suddenly swirling all around her.
‘I thought you were going to help me,’ she choked. ‘But all you’ve done is make matters worse!’
‘Madness only responds to the prospect of more madness,’ he answered quietly. ‘The only way to stop him tonight was by giving him a good reason to stop. So we play in an hour, away from the hotel, because I am not—’
His words were cut off mid-flow when Caroline reached up to press both hands to his shirt-front in pained appeal. ‘Please don’t do it! How can you want to do this to me all over again?’
But Luiz wasn’t listening. Instead he was staring down at the place where her hands lay spread across the fine white linen covering his breastbone. His own hands came up to cover hers, and suddenly she was made acutely aware of hot flesh, of the prickly evidence of very male body hair, of the hard pack of muscle and the solid thump of a living heart beating steadily beneath it all.
A heart she knew could rage out of control when he was in the throes of passion. A silk-fleshed body she could remember moving against her own. And that thick crisp mat of chest hair sweeping down like an arrow, aimed directly at his—
Her mouth ran dry. The sex was back. That burning, pulsing, nagging ache that was tugging her senses into life. His hands moved, leaving her hands so he could slide his fingers beneath his jacket, and the towel suddenly slid to the floor. Skin touched skin. Caroline arched on a gasping response.
‘No,’ she groaned when she dared to let her eyes make contact with the burn now taking place at the back of his.
Luiz didn’t answer. It was too late anyway, because he’d closed the gap and was kissing her—kissing her like a lover—fiercely, deeply, and so very intimately that she was utterly shattered by how beautiful it was.
I’ve missed him, she thought, and felt the tears return. I’ve missed the power with which we affect each other, the passion we can generate with just a simple touch. Her fingers moved, drifting up his shirt and to his face, where they traced each contour with the fever of a blind woman Braille-reading her most treasured possession.
He responded with a sigh that shivered through both of them, and he brought her into even closer contact with him, close enough for her senses to fly when she felt the throbbing evidence of his pleasure.
And she knew it was crazy, but in these few brief sensual moments, she knew that Luiz belonged to her. She owned him. She possessed him. If she said, Die for me, Luiz, he would die.
But, more than that, as incredible as that might seem, she would also die for him.
‘Luiz…’ she breathed into his mouth.
The soft breathy sound had the most powerful effect on him. On a low growl, he literally submerged her in a hot and hungry flood of heat that completely consumed her will to fight.
If she’d ever had any, she derided herself. Luiz was her weakness, just as gambling was her father’s. Once you acquired an addiction it remained with you for life. Starve it for years and it would still erupt at the first tiny, tempting sip. And she was certainly sipping at her addiction, she admitted as she fell into the kiss with all the urgency of starvation, tasting him, touching him, needing him, wanting more!
His hands caressed her and she let them, his mouth devoured hers and she allowed it to. She could taste mint on his breath and on the moistness of his tongue, and feel the deep throb of his heart beneath her restless fingers.
Something gave between them. She hardly understood what it was until her breasts were swinging free and Luiz’s hands were taking possession. After that the whole thing became a banquet at its most ravenous. He deserted her mouth to go in search of other delights, and she tossed back her head and simply preened with pleasure while he licked and sucked and teased her breasts.
It felt perfectly natural to lift up one long silken leg and hook it around his lean waist for balance as she arched to offer him easier access. But the action brought her into even more intimate contact with the hard masculine core of him. And after that she became lost in a burning bright kaleidoscope filled with touch and feel and sound and scents that were so entrenched in her psyche because this man had been her first lover. The one who’d taught her to feel like this, to respond like this, to need like this!
Her only lover—though she hoped to goodness that Luiz couldn’t tell that was the case. Couldn’t tell that she was responding this wildly and this helplessly because he was the only man ever to make her feel like this.
And while it happened it didn’t seem to matter that he was also the man who’d completely shattered her once, betrayed her so badly that she had never been able to recover. Her father didn’t matter. The game didn’t matter. The knowledge that Luiz could only hurt her again didn’t matter.
In fact she was so lost in what he was doing to her that when the knock sounded on the pool room door she could barely comprehend what the soun
d meant. Until Luiz straightened abruptly, thrust her leg away, then clamped her weak and trembling frame to his own pulsing body before reaching out to open the door a crack.
At which point the shock waves of what they had been so close to actually doing, began ricocheting horribly through her system. Seven years with no contact, she was thinking dizzily, and they’d fallen on each other like a pair of hungry animals at the first opportunity they had been handed.
It was all so utterly, shamefully vulgar that she buried her burning face in Luiz’s throat and hoped to God that the person knocking on the door was not her father.
A man’s voice she had never heard before, but which had the same American drawl as Luiz, said, ‘It’s all arranged. You have half an hour.’
‘Okay,’ Luiz acknowledged gruffly, quickly shut the door again, then with a firmness that utterly shook her, he put her from him.
It took her a few moments to realise what was happening, but one glance at his coldly closed face and she knew that the passionately out-of-control man she had been kissing had suddenly turned back into her enemy.
‘What’s arranged?’ she asked tautly.
‘What do you think?’ he replied.
He meant his game with her father, she realised. Even after what had just erupted between them he was still going to play him.
‘Here…’ Bending down, he picked up her dress where it had fallen to the floor at some unknown point. ‘Put this on; you’re dry enough. We have things to do and you can’t leave here looking like this.’
Looking like this… Through glazed eyes Caroline stared down at herself, saw the pulsing tightness of her distended nipples, her flushed skin, her long white thighs still trembling from the way he had made her feel. Even Luiz’s jacket was no longer where she’d thought it was.
He was shrugging it back onto his own broad shoulders with what was a callous disregard for her raw sensibilities as she stood there almost naked in front of him, feeling completely humiliated and cheap.
Instead of burning up with undiluted passion she was now icy cold with dismay. The nausea arrived, attacking her throat and forcing her to swallow thickly a couple of times before she dared let herself speak.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered.
‘Not as much as you would like to, I think,’ was his reply.
She was completely demolished by it, because it was such a dreadful truth. Slipping back into her dress took the concentrated effort of just about every brain cell that hadn’t been atomised. As she shimmied the black crêpe up her body, she noticed her bra lying on the tiled floor and wanted to crawl away in shame.
Luiz bent to scoop it up, stuffing the flimsy piece of silk into one of his pockets before turning her around to do up her zip. She moved like a rag doll, unable to think, unable to speak, and just stood there while he bent to feed her feet into her strappy black shoes.
He straightened again, then waited while her shaky fingers attempted to smooth some of the creases out of her dress. And the tension sizzling between them was dreadful. Not once did either attempt full eye contact. Not once did either of them attempt to speak again after that last telling comment of his.
When she eventually went still, in an indication that she had made the best of herself she could under the circumstances, Luiz opened the door, then stood back in a grim gesture for her to precede him back into the basement foyer.
The stranger she had encountered in the lift was standing talking to one of the dinner-suited bouncers. He glanced up as they appeared and was suddenly riveted. Caroline didn’t even notice him; she was too busy being repulsed by the feel of Luiz’s hand resting on her back as he escorted her to the stairwell.
She didn’t want him to touch her now. She didn’t want Luiz anywhere near her. Her chin was up, her head held high and her body erect—but her eyes were blind and inside she felt as if she were dying.
The moment they reached the upper main foyer, she stepped right away from him.
‘Where are you going?’
Already two blissful steps away, Caroline paused but didn’t turn. ‘If you want to ruin my father a second time then go ahead,’ she invited coldly. ‘I certainly can’t stop you—but I don’t have to watch you.’
After that, she began walking again.
‘But we haven’t finished.’ His hand came out to capture one of hers. And without another word he began trailing her across the foyer towards a door marked ‘Private’ that seemed to open magically as they approached it.
Frowning, because she just didn’t understand what was happening here, she found herself inside yet another foyer that had her high heels tapping on black and cream marble. Luiz led her across to another door, which he opened by hand this time, gestured her to precede himself inside, then quietly closed the door behind them.
It was an office, Caroline saw. A very elegant black and cream office.
‘What is this place?’ she asked warily.
Stepping past her, Luiz walked across the room towards the desk, then placed himself behind it. ‘My office,’ he answered, bending down to unlock and open a drawer.
‘You mean…’ Her eyes flickered around the room. ‘You mean, you actually work here?’
‘Work here. Live here…’ He placed a heavy leather-bound dossier on the desk in front of him. ‘This is my hotel, Caroline,’ he added levelly.
CHAPTER THREE
His hotel…? Caroline gave a small shake of her head. ‘But this is an Angel Hotel,’ she stated. ‘Part of the Angel Group!’ And the Angel Group was huge. Not just because of the string of deluxe hotels it owned throughout the world, but because it had other, much more powerful interests wrapped up in its multinational package.
Lifting his dark head, Luiz just looked at her. It was all it needed for the penny to drop. Angel as in Luiz Angeles de Vazquez, she was suddenly remembering. But it was the Angel in the Angel Group that was slowly filling Caroline with a new sense of dismay. Because it was also the group which had very recently acquired a bank in London that the Newbury family knew very well.
‘Oh, my God,’ she breathed, as full enlightenment finally began to dawn. ‘It’s you we have been summoned here to Marbella to see about our debts, isn’t it?’
He didn’t answer. But then he didn’t really need to when confirmation was already written on his lean dark face. And she could only stand and watch as every image she had ever built in her mind to form Luiz Vazquez slowly cracked, then shattered right there in front of her until she could no longer see Luiz the exciting lover. Or even Luiz the ruthless con-man who’d fleeced her father of tens of thousands of pounds.
‘What is it you want?’ she whispered frailly as the shattered pieces that had once been Luiz settled back into their new order of things. And now she was seeing Luiz the icecool operator, whom, it seemed, had only gone up and up in the world while she and her father had gone steadily down.
‘I want you to come and sit down,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got much time. And now that you understand just why you are here we may as well get down to business…’
Business. The word sent an icy chill chasing down her spine. As she walked across the room towards him on legs that were shaking badly Luiz sat himself down, opened the dossier, selected a piece of paper from it, then slid it towards her as she sank into the chair placed opposite him.
‘Tell me if you agree with what’s written on there,’ he invited.
Eyes flickering in an effort to get them to focus, heart slowed by the weight of what was unfolding in front of her now, Caroline pulled the piece of paper towards her, then picked it up in trembling fingers and forced herself to read.
Finely listed, tightly lined, it was a very precise inventory of every penny she already knew they owed—and a whole lot more that she actually hadn’t known about, but she couldn’t doubt their authenticity when the names of all her father’s favourite London haunts were inscribed next to them.
And the bottom figure was so utterly repellent that her
skin began to crawl. ‘Could I have some water, please?’ she breathed.
Without a single word, Luiz got up and walked over to a black-lacquered sideboard. He returned in seconds to place a frosted glass of iced water down in front of her, then just as silently returned to his chair while she picked up the water and sipped at it sparingly.
‘We can’t pay you, Luiz,’ she told him, once she’d found enough voice to speak. ‘N-not all of it anyway.’
‘I know that,’ he returned.
She swallowed thickly, and took a couple more sips of water before making herself go on. ‘If you refuse to play him at cards tonight, then the money he won in the casino plus some money I have of my own should clear a small part of this.’ But not all, she added with a silent bleakness. Not anywhere near all…
‘The planned card game and this are two separate issues,’ he informed her. ‘And I never—ever—mix business with pleasure, Caroline. Understand me?’
Understand? No she didn’t! ‘But we have the means to clear s-some of this, Luiz!’ she cried, tossing the wretched debt list back at him. ‘And you want to play card games just for the hell of it? Where is the business sense in that?’
Sitting back in his chair, Luiz didn’t even deign to watch as the piece of paper skidded across the table then floated down onto his lap. His face was inscrutable, his manner relaxed. ‘Where is your own block of money coming from?’ Smooth as silk, he kept the discussion fixed to his own agenda.
Her breath shuddered on an overwrought sigh. ‘None of your business,’ she muttered, then got up and paced tensely away from the desk.
‘It is if you borrowed from Peter to pay back Paul, so to speak,’ he pointed out. ‘Which would only make the bottom figure here worse, not better.’
‘I have money left over from my mother’s bequest,’ she told him reluctantly.
‘No you don’t.’
‘What—?’ Stung by his quiet certainty she spun to stare at him.
Instantly she felt under attack. It was his eyes, and the knowledge of truth she could see written in them.
‘Your mother’s money went on paying back debts years ago,’ he informed her. ‘After that you spent the next few years selling off the family heirlooms one by one, until there were very few left worth selling. Then came the quiet period when your father behaved himself for a couple of years—or so you believed. When it all started up again, you resorted to selling off small plots of land on the far edges of your family estate to wealthy businessmen who were looking for somewhere to build a country retreat. But the council eventually put a stop to that, quoting the rape of country heritage law or some such thing.
Exotic Affairs: The Mistress BrideThe Spanish HusbandThe Bellini Bride Page 21