by Abby Green
CHAPTER TWO
‘MISS ANDERSON? MR Da Silva would like to see you in his office, if you could spare a few minutes?’
Lexie knew it wasn’t really a question. It was an order, and she chafed at the autocracy, already imagining his dark, forbidding expression. He’d been a complete stranger to her less than a couple of hours ago, known only by his reputation and name, yet now his saturnine image was branded like a searing tattoo on her brain. His taste...
Hiding her reaction, Lexie just shrugged her shoulders lightly and smiled. ‘Sure.’
She followed the smartly dressed young woman down a long hallway. She’d just arrived back at the castillo from the camera tests and was dressed in her own clothes again. Worn jeans and sneakers. A dusky pink long-sleeved cashmere top, which suddenly felt way too clingy.
The make-up artist had scrubbed her face clean and she’d left her hair down, so now she had no armour at all. She hated the impulse she had to check her reflection.
Lexie hadn’t had much time yet to look around the castillo as she’d been busy since they’d arrived, doing rehearsals and fittings. It was massive, and very gothic. The overall impression was dark and forbidding. Oppressive. Not unlike its owner. Lexie smiled to herself but it was tight.
A stern housekeeper had shown her to her room when she’d arrived: dressed in black, hair pulled back in a tight, unforgiving bun. She might have stepped straight out of an oil masterpiece depicting the Spanish Inquisition era.
Lexie’s bedroom was part of an opulent suite of rooms complete with an elaborate four-poster bed. Reds and golds. Antique furniture. A chaise longue. While it wasn’t her style, she had to admit that it was helping her get into character for the film. She was playing a courtesan from the nineteenth century, who was torn between leaving her profession for her illegitimate son and a villainous lover who didn’t want to let her go.
It was a dark, tragic tale, and the director was acclaimed. This film was very important to her—and not just for professional and economic reasons. One scene in particular had compelled Lexie to say yes, as she had known it would be her own personal catharsis to act it out. But she didn’t want to think of that now.
After a series of soulless but financially beneficial action movies, this was Lexie’s first chance to remind people that she could actually act. And hopefully move away from that hideous Luscious Lexie image the tabloids had branded her with. Not entirely unjustly, she hated to admit.
The young woman stopped outside a massive door and knocked. Lexie’s mind emptied. Her heart went thump and her throat felt dry.
She heard the deep and curt ‘Sí?’ And then the woman was opening the door. Lexie felt as if she was nine again, being hauled up in front of the head nun at her school for some transgression.
But then Cesar Da Silva was standing in the doorway, filling it. The woman melted away. He’d changed. Washed. Lexie could smell his scent—that distinctive woodsy smell. But without the earthy musk of earlier. It was no less heady, though.
Wearing a white shirt and dark trousers should have made him appear more urbane. It didn’t. The material of his shirt was fine enough to see the darkness of his skin underneath. He stood back and held out an arm, stretching his shirt across his chest. Lexie saw defined hard muscles. Heat flooded between her legs.
‘Come in.’
Lexie straightened her spine and walked past him into a massive office.
She was momentarily distracted by its sheer grandeur as he closed the door behind them. It was shaped like an oval, with a parquet floor, and it had an ante-room that looked like a library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books upon books.
Something very private and poignant gripped her inside.
‘Please, take a seat.’
Da Silva had moved behind his desk, hands resting lightly on top, but not disguising his obvious tension. The desk was huge, awe-inspiring. A very serious affair, holding all sorts of computers and machines and phones.
And yet less than two hours ago she and this man had mutually combusted and she had been oblivious to who he was.
Feeling uncharacteristically awkward, she started, ‘Look, Mr Da Silva—’
‘I think we’ve gone beyond that, don’t you?’ His face was mirthless and hard.
Lexie wondered for a crazy moment what he would look like if he smiled. Genuinely smiled.
She burned inwardly at that rogue little thought, and in rejection of his autocratic tone. ‘I...well, yes.’
Her big slouchy handbag was slung over her shoulder. She let it slip down now, and held it in front of her like a shield. Something was telling her this wouldn’t be a quick meeting.
A bright colour caught her eye then, and she glanced down to see a photo of herself on the ground. Frowning, she bent to pick it up. When she registered the image, her insides roiled. She’d been twenty-one. Completely naive. Cringing inside with embarrassment. Not that you’d know it from the picture. She’d been hiding behind a well-developed wall of confidence and nonchalance that hadn’t come easily.
She held the picture between thumb and forefinger and looked at Cesar across the desk. He was totally unrepentant. Something hard settled into her gut. The awareness she had of his sheer masculine physicality made her feel like a fool. And very vulnerable—which she did not welcome. It had been a long time since she’d allowed anyone to make her feel that way.
Then she saw the open file and all the other cuttings and clippings and pictures. She didn’t have to read the lurid headlines to know what the characters said even from here, upside down. Luscious Lexie.
She went icy. Her bag slipped to the floor unnoticed.
‘What is this?’
‘This,’ Cesar da Silva offered tautly, ‘is your life, I believe.’
Lexie looked at Cesar and right at that moment despised him. She’d barely exchanged more than twenty sentences with the man, and he’d displayed not an ounce of charm, yet she’d blithely allowed him to be more intimate with her than any other man had ever been.
Her conscience mocked her. That wasn’t technically true, of course. But the other experience in her life hadn’t been consensually intimate. It had been a horrifically brutal parody of intimacy.
Lexie forced her mind away from that and raged inwardly at the injustice of his evident blind belief in the lies spread before him. She hated that a part of her wanted to curl up and cringe at how all this evidence was laid out so starkly across his desk. Ugly.
She forced her voice to be light, to hide the raging tumult. ‘And do you believe everything you read in the papers, Mr Da Silva?’
He gritted out, ‘Call me Cesar.’
Lexie smiled prettily, hiding her ire, ‘Well, when you ask so nicely...Cesar.’
‘I don’t care enough to give the time to believe or disbelieve. I couldn’t really care less about your tawdry sex life with married men.’
Lexie saw red. She literally saw a flash of red. She forced air into her lungs. Clenching her jaw so tight it hurt, she bit out, ‘Well, then, perhaps you’d be so kind as to let me know what you want to discuss so that I can get on with my tawdry life.’
* * *
Cesar had to force back the urge to smile for a second. She’d surprised him. Standing up to him so fiercely. Like a tiny virago. Or a pocket Venus.
It took an immense physical effort not to let his gaze drop and linger on the swell of her breasts under the clinging soft material of her top. Or to investigate just how snugly those worn jeans fitted her bottom.
When she’d walked in he’d taken in the slim, shapely legs. The very feminine swell of her hips. She was the perfect hourglass, all wrapped up in a petite, intoxicating package. Her hair was loose and wavy over her shoulders. Bright against the dark wood of his office. Against the darkness of the castillo. Something lanced him in
a place that was buried, deep and secret. He didn’t welcome it.
He didn’t like that he’d also noticed her beauty spot was gone. The artifice of make-up. It mocked him for believing himself to have been in some sort of a dream earlier. For thinking she was some sort of goddess siren straight out of a Greek myth.
But she was no less alluring now in modern clothes than she had been in a corset and petticoats. In fact, now that Cesar knew the flesh her clothes concealed, it was almost worse.
And he’d just been ruder to this woman than he’d ever been to another in his life.
He could actually be urbane. Charming. But as soon as he’d laid eyes on her again he’d felt animalistic. Feral. Even now his blood thundered, roared. For her. And she wasn’t even remotely his type.
He ran a hand through his hair impatiently. His conscience demanded of him that he say, ‘Look, maybe we can start again. Take a seat.’
Lexie oozed tension and quivering insult. And he couldn’t blame her. Even if her less than pristine life was spread all over his desk.
‘I’m fine standing, thank you. And where, might I ask, did you get your hands on what appears to be a veritable scrapbook of my finest moments?’
Her voice could have cut through steel it was so icy. Cesar almost winced.
‘Someone working on the film compiled information on the cast and crew.’ His eye caught another lurid shot of Lexie pouting over the bonnet of a car. His body tightened. He willed himself to cling on to some control. ‘It would appear that person was a little over-zealous with the back catalogue of your work.’
Lexie flushed, her cheeks filling with dark colour, and Cesar felt his conscience twinge again. As if he was in the wrong. When this woman was standing there with her chin tilted up, defiant in the face of her less than stellar reputation.
She came forward and Cesar’s gaze couldn’t help but drop to where her breasts swayed gently under her top. She stopped at the other side of the desk and put her hands on it and glared at him, her huge blue eyes sending out daggers of ice.
She plucked out the image of her on the car and held it up accusingly. ‘This is not a back catalogue of work. This is a naive young girl, trying to get on in a ruthless cut-throat business—a girl who didn’t have the confidence or economic security to say no to bullying agents and photographers.’
She spat out the words.
‘You might consider that the next time you find it so easy to judge someone you were only too happy to kiss without even knowing who she was.’
Before Cesar could respond to her spiky defence, not liking the rush of a very alien emotion within him, she’d gathered up all the cuttings and pictures, her CV and head-shots, and marched over to a nearby bin, dumping the lot.
She turned around, her hair shimmering as it moved over her shoulder. She crossed her arms. ‘Now, what was it you wanted to discuss?’
* * *
Lexie hated that her body was humming with awareness for this man. Who was blissfully immune to the angry emotions he was arousing.
What a judgmental, supercilious, arrogant, small-minded—
‘I owe you an apology,’ he said tightly.
Lexie blinked. The anger inside her suffered a body-blow. ‘Yes, you do.’
His mouth was a grim line. ‘I had no right to judge you on the basis of those pictures.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Lexie snapped, but then she flushed again when she thought of another similar shoot she’d done relatively recently—albeit for a much more up-market publication and with a world-famous photographer. But still, she couldn’t exactly claim the moral high ground either... ‘It’s fine,’ she dismissed airily, ‘let’s forget about it.’
He sighed heavily then, and opened up the laptop that was on the desk in front of him. ‘You should see this.’
Trepidation skittered over her skin. Warily Lexie walked around the desk until she could see the laptop, acutely conscious of her proximity to him. When she saw the images, though, her belly swooped alarmingly.
It was her, and him, locked in a clinch that looked positively X-rated. Both his hands were under her skirt, pulling it up, baring her legs. Her breasts seemed about to explode from her corset, crushed against his chest. Their mouths were locked together in a passionate kiss, their eyes closed. Lexie’s hands gripped his shirt so tightly that her knuckles were white. And just like that it all came back in a rush: the desperation, the craving, the aching. The need.
Lexie could feel heat from behind her. She swallowed. There could be no mistaking that whatever had happened between them had consumed them both. It was not a comfort.
‘Where is this?’ she asked hoarsely, unable to stop looking away from the image with some kind of sick fascination.
‘It’s on a well-known internet gossip website. It’s only a matter of time before it hits the papers.’
Lexie backed away from the laptop as if it might explode...retreating around the desk, feeling marginally safer once something solid was between them.
Cesar’s eyes were glittering. His disdain was palpable. He might have just apologised, and surprised her by doing so, but there was no mistaking his disapproval of the entire situation.
Stung, Lexie said defensively, ‘There were two of us there.’
He was grim. ‘I’m aware of that, believe me.’
‘So...’ She swallowed painfully, thinking of the inevitable re-igniting of press interest and the weariness and fear of exposure that would provoke. ‘What now?’
Cesar looked at her for a long moment and crossed his arms. ‘We contain it.’
Lexie frowned. ‘What do you mean...contain it?’
‘We don’t give it air to breathe. You’re here in the castillo for the next four weeks. There should be no reason why it won’t die a death if they have nothing to work with.’
Something icy touched Lexie’s spine. ‘What are you talking about exactly?’
A muscle pulsed in Cesar’s jaw. ‘What I’m talking about is that you don’t leave this estate.’
Fire doused the ice. Lexie pointed at herself. ‘I don’t leave the estate? What about you?’
Cesar shrugged minutely, arrogant. ‘Well, of course I will have to leave. I have business to attend to.’
Lexie emitted a laugh that sounded far too close to panic for her liking. ‘After a passionate embrace is plastered all over the world’s press, you appear in public with me nowhere to be seen...do you know how that’ll look?’ She answered herself before he could. ‘It’ll look as if you’re rejecting me and the press will be all over it like a rash.’
Cesar’s jaw pulsed again. Clearly he was not used to having anyone question his motives. ‘You will be protected in here from the press.’
‘Oh, really?’ asked Lexie. ‘That paparazzo managed to get in, and I assume even a reclusive fossil like you has heard of camera phones?’
She was so angry right then at Cesar’s preposterous plan that she barely noticed that he’d moved around the desk, or that his eyes flashed dangerously at her childish insult.
‘What’s to stop some enterprising crew member from snapping pictures of poor jilted Lexie on the set of her new film...?’ Lexie was on a roll now, pacing back and forth. ‘The press will love documenting your exploits while I’m the rejected fool, locked in the castle.’
Lexie stopped and rounded on Cesar, who was at the other side of the desk now and far too close and tall and dark. She took a step back.
She shook her head. ‘No way. I’m not going to be incarcerated in this grim fortress just to make life easier for you. I’d planned to visit Lisbon, Salamanca...Madrid!’ That last came out with more than a little desperation.
Lexie had dark memories of being all but locked up once before, and it wasn’t going to happen again in her lifetime—not even on an estate as p
alatial as this one.
Cesar looked at Lexie and was momentarily distracted by her sheer vibrancy and beauty. Her cheeks were pink with indignation, her eyes huge and glittering. Her chest was heaving. As she’d paced back and forth energy had crackled around her like electricity.
Her words hit him then: I’m not going to be incarcerated in this grim fortress... He felt like cracking a bleak smile. He knew only too well what that was like. And he could sympathise with her rejection of the idea.
He rested back against his desk and crossed his arms, because right now they itched to reach out and grab her and pull her into him. So close to her like this he could smell her scent, all but feel those provocative curves pressed against him.
His body tightened, blood rushed south. He cursed silently.
‘So...what would be your suggestion, then?’
Lexie blinked. Cesar marvelled that her every thought was mirrored on that expressive face and in those huge eyes. He’d never seen anything like it. He was used to women putting on a front, trying hard to be mysterious.
She bit her lip and that was even worse. He wanted to bite that lip.
She looked at him. ‘We go public.’
Cesar’s eyes snapped up from her mouth to her eyes. His crossed arms dropped. ‘We go what?’
‘We go public,’ she repeated.
‘As in...?’
Her eyes flashed brilliant blue, like fire. ‘As in we are seen together. As in we go out in public. As in we let people think that we are having an affair.’
Cesar tensed for the inevitable rush of rejection at that proposition. He didn’t do high publicity—especially not with women like Lexie, whose second home was among the tabloids. Whose life was laid out in a series of lurid pictures amid salacious headlines.
But it didn’t come. The rejection. What did come was an intense spiking of anticipation in his already hot blood. His brain clicked and whirred at the thought of this audacious plan. The news of his half-brothers would be hitting the newsstands possibly as soon as tomorrow...