‘I hate you, Luis,’ she whispered painfully.
‘I am so gutted by that, querida,’ he drawled in return. ‘Do you go or do you stay?’
She spun on him then, her beautiful face blanched of its warm golden colour, dark eyes shot through with a kind of agony that had him folding his arms across the sudden tightness trying to band his chest.
‘Stay for what?’ she cried out shrilly. ‘So that you can take more revenge for that precious ego that I bruised so badly once?’
‘Did you bruise it? I don’t remember.’
‘I battered it!’ she spat at him. ‘I crushed it in my fist and flung it to the ground! You want more of the same from me, querido? You want to feel the same rejection again?’
‘Reject me, then. Use the door,’ he invited. ‘You never know—if you spread your net wide enough you might catch another withered old man willing to buy his way into that sensational body of yours.’
She flew at him then. It did not surprise him. He’d been goading her towards it since she’d first walked through the door. The tied hair, the grim suit—as a disguise they were useless where he was concerned. With every flash of her eyes and every smart-mouthed comment he’d seen the real Cristina lurking there. Now she was out, and he was going to make sure that she stayed out.
He fielded her arrival without having to do very much other than catch her as she arrived at his chest, wrap his arms around her and lift her clean off the ground. Their faces came level—hers whitened by stark fury, his as un-giving as rock. She hit out at him with her fists. He laughed—once—harshly, then treated her angry mouth to a totally carnal flat-tongued lick.
All hell broke loose with that one action. She quivered from wetted lips to slender thighs. A whimper broke from her—a sobbing, cursing protest. He did it again, only this time he took the lick inwards and turned it into a full-blown deep and devouring assault. Her angry protest vibrated through both of them. As he levered himself away from the table and started walking her fingers clawed into his hair.
Did those fingers attempt to pull his mouth away from her mouth? Not this woman. She held him down, held him right there, where she was greedy for him. He knew her. He knew what made her explode sexually—and what made her his!
When he reached the door that would give them access to his private suite, he flattened her against it with his body, so he could use his hand to seek out the handle. As the door swung open, with the weight of their bodies as impetus, he had to use his hands against the heavy wood to cushion the moment when it hit the wall behind and they followed it. Her feet found solid ground again, but she didn’t let go of him. So they remained there, pressed against the door, kissing like hungry maniacs for long lost minutes. Time in which he managed to rid her of her jacket. The skirt was too big. He had only to release the zip for it to fall in a heavy whisper to the floor.
Did she let go then? Did she come to her senses? Did she even know this wasn’t six years ago? Not this hot, greedy, sexually hungry woman who pushed his jacket from his shoulders with impatient fingers and sent it dropping to the floor with her own clothes.
Her hair came next, pins flying as he loosened that glorious mass of twisting ebony and let it tumble over his fingers. She was working free the buttons on his waistcoat when he lifted her up again. She wrapped her legs tightly around his waist, took his bottom lip between her teeth and bit.
It hurt. She had meant it to. When he winced out a curse she did it again. When he attempted to pull his head back she imprisoned it in her hands, then she was the one to instigate the next mouth and tongue-devouring kiss.
She was wild for him. He loved it. Exhilaration ran through him as he made the move to the bedroom by pure instinct. She clung. He pulsed. She moved against him. His hands gripped her bottom and she felt like satin, warm, too slender, too delicate to be real. He dropped her on the bed, then came down with her, the heat of need pounding through his body and scoring streaks across his hard taut cheeks.
His mouth ached, his jaw, his warring tongue. He broke the kiss to look down at her and watched as she gasped and panted for air.
‘Are you staying or going?’ he demanded in a voice as cold as an English winter. The stark contrast between his physical self and his mental self was so acute that she stared at him for a full ten seconds before reality finally sank in.
‘You want your pound of flesh!’
‘I want more than that,’ he responded. ‘I want your thankless little soul gift-wrapped and handed to me with a rock-solid guarantee that this time it belongs to me!’
Cristina looked into the hard, cold, face of this man she loved so much and had hurt so much, and wished there was a tiny molecule of hope for them.
But there wasn’t. ‘You will come to regret it,’ she told him honestly.
‘Are you staying?’
‘You will learn to hate me all over again.’
‘You are not here because I adore you, querida. You are here because I still want you.’
It should hurt to hear him say that, but it didn’t. How could it hurt when she did not deserve more than he was offering?
‘In your bed?’ She demanded confirmation.
‘Yes.’
‘As your obedient little sex slave?’
His green eyes began to gleam. ‘Most certainly that.’
A strange smile touched the corners of her hot pulsing mouth. ‘Gift-wrapped?’
‘Sim.’ He swapped languages so there could be no mistaking the answer.
‘You can have me like that without marrying me.’
‘I had you like that once before. Didn’t like it. So the marriage thing stays. It comes with the package.’
As the baby did? She wanted to weep all over him—but she didn’t.
‘The gift-wrapping?’ she asked.
‘The rock-solid guarantee of a marriage certificate—written in blood if need be. I will not compromise,’ he warned huskily.
Take it or leave it. Take this man when you know that you should not. Take everything he wants to dish out to you in the name of revenge when you know you will end up having to walk away.
Again.
Eventually.
‘So, are you staying?’
She made no answer, her beautiful eyes so painfully, hauntingly bleak that something too close to fear grabbed at the muscles in Anton’s chest. He did not want to be hooked by her again. He wanted Cristina firmly hooked by him.
‘Answer or leave,’ he ground out roughly.
She looped an arm around his neck and drew his mouth back down to hers.
Was it an answer?
He was going to take it as one. Choice was something ripped away from him the moment her tongue made a sliding caress over the top of his. She lifted a long silken leg to loop it around his hips in one of her old, uninhibitedly sensuous and possessive moves, and on a surrendering growl he let himself fall prey to the whole wild experience that was Cristina Marques, the enemy of his once bitten ten times shy heart.
Mouths open, hot and fused. Her fingers back at his waistcoat. She all but ripped it from his body, setting the tight satin muscles in his shoulders rippling as she tugged it down his arms. His tie came next—an impatient yank at the slender knot and silver silk slithered apart—and she was already opening the buttons on his shirt. Eager, needy, her fingers made familiar contact with the whorls of dark hair covering his thundering breastplate, curling, then scoring into his flesh to make him shudder with pleasure as he brought his own impatient fingers to the hem of the cotton T-shirt she wore.
They had to break the kiss so he could strip the T-shirt over her head. Separation brought with it a moment of sanity as he felt the thinness of the fabric. Well washed and well-worn, he saw, and made a mental note to buy her a new wardrobe as he tossed the scrap of cotton aside.
Then he saw them. Proud, unfettered, full and firm. Two golden globes tipped by long dark nipples standing up in bold and brazen demand. On a growl he pounced, sending her slender s
pine arching on a high-pitched quivering cry as he took possession in an open-mouthed, wet-tongued, hungry claim.
His shirt hung open. Her fingers crawled all over hard muscle and taut male flesh. When he sucked, she writhed beneath him, and he ground out a soft curse as electric sensation shot to his thighs. As if she knew, she located the fastener for his trousers and began an urgent attempt to strip him of those.
It was no use. He was forced to help because there was no way she was going to succeed while he still wore his socks and shoes. Sitting up with a growl of impatience, he reached down to remove the obstructing articles while her hands slid beneath his shirt and began a sensual exploration of his satin-smooth back.
His shoes hit the floor, followed by his socks, then he stood up to remove the trousers. She watched him, her eyes like burning rubies, coveting each new piece of hard male flesh he revealed.
No other woman had ever looked at him the way Cristina looked at him.
‘Greedy,’ he muttered as she reached out to touch him, brushing feather light worshipping fingers along his full length. He throbbed and swelled and hardened so fast it was almost an agony. He had to fight with uncoordinated fingers to release cufflinks so he could remove his shirt.
Stripped naked he was beautiful. ‘Bonito,’ Cristina murmured.
Still beautiful…always beautiful. Her Luis, she thought helplessly as she drifted her eyes over his tall dark stance, with its arrogant masculine pride in his own prowess.
He came down beside her, stretching out along her slender length, then sliding an arm beneath her shoulders and lifting her towards him. He held her like that, with her hair rippling behind her and her passionate mouth parted, ready for the hungry onslaught of his.
Eyes like glowing emeralds looked deep into her eyes. He didn’t speak. She didn’t want him to. If he did they would fight, and all she wanted to do was make love. Would he know, afterwards, that he had been her only lover ever? Could men tell these things?
He moved then, claiming her mouth with a hot, deep, probing assault that pressed her back against the pillows so he could cover her with his warm naked weight. After that it was a voyage of rediscovery, hot and intense and achingly poignant. Neither bothered to look for restraint.
And six years was a long time to starve a fever. It was hungry and it wanted feeding. They fed it. Oh, yes, they fed it. The rest of the world might have come to an end and they would not have noticed or cared.
Neither heard the quiet footsteps making their way across the living room. Neither recalled that they’d left the doors to the conference room and bedroom hanging wide open. Kinsella Lane
stood in the bedroom doorway. She had been there for a long time, watching like a voyeur and listening to everything they said, with the cold blue eyes of hate.
She wanted Anton. She had always wanted him, from the moment she’d first seen him when she was only a very junior secretary at the Scott-Lee Bank, much too low in the ranks for him to notice her. She’d worked long and hard to gain entry into his select circle. She’d made a careful study of all the different women who’d floated in and out of his life. He liked blondes. She’d become a blonde. He liked them slender and neat, supremely elegant and sophisticated. She’d learnt how to achieve that elegance and sophistication. She’d honed and pruned and sculpted herself to meet the specifics of his sexual criteria. And he had begun to notice her. She’d seen the warmth grow in his eyes when he looked at her—felt the telling sting of his attraction towards her begin to catch light.
When he’d brought her along on this trip to Rio she’d thought it was because he was ready to deepen their relationship. His rejection of her in the lift the other day had hurt. But then two other employees had been present, so she’d understood and learnt yet another lesson—get your timing right. Or so she’d thought.
Now look at him, locked in the arms of the complete opposite from everything he had ever been attracted to. She was dark, she was small; she wore ugly clothes. Her hair was a mass of wild black twists and her breasts were too big. And there was no sophistication in the way she kissed him or touched him or taunted him or even spoke to him. Yet he was mad for her!
It was there in the way he shuddered when she caressed him. No finesse. No smooth, slick seduction. Just animal hunger and hard, hot sexual feast. Even the way he was covering her now and reaching round to wrap her legs around him showed an animal with no grace.
His lean golden flanks rippled as he made that first lunging thrust into her body. Her cry of pleasure echoed round the room.
Turning away in disgust, Kinsella left as silently as she had entered, stepping over discarded clothes and touching nothing, not even bothering to close those doors.
As soon as she gained the privacy of her office she opened the safe and took out the file Anton had placed there that morning, after his private meeting with a man called Sanchiz. Ten minutes later and she was replacing the folder in the safe, then picking up the telephone and dialling London.
‘ Scott-Lee?’ she said. ‘I think you should know that your son is intending to marry a Brazilian woman. A young widow—Cristina Ordoniz.’
There was a long silence, then a faint, slightly tremulous question. ‘Ordoniz, you say? Are you sure of that name?’
‘Yes,’ Kinsella confirmed.
‘And young, you said? How young?’
‘About my own age, Scott-Lee,’ Kinsella answered. ‘I understand that her husband was an old man when she married him for his fortune. Not quite the person you’d want as a wife for your son, I would think.’
Anton’s mother made no response to that. And there was another one of those silences before she said, ‘I will be catching the next flight to Rio. Thank you for helping me with this, Miss Lane
…’
He’d forgotten what it was like to have her breathe his name all over him. Forgotten too much, Anton realised as she blew six years of other women to absolute Hades and rolled him up, tied him up and packaged him with a label—Belonging to Cristina Marques.
Did he care? The hell he cared, he thought as he made that first driving thrust inside her, then stopped, watching in dark eyed fascination as she tensed, then cried out in an echoing response to their first time together, when she’d given him her virginity without bothering to warn him that it was there.
‘Long time, querida?’ he questioned huskily.
‘Sim,’ came the gasping reply.
Her fingernails were scoring deep grooves into his shoulders, and the slender arch of her body was an instinctive attempt to fight off his invasion. For a short, frowning second he thought of withdrawing, but she opened her eyes and looked directly into his.
Her mouth shook, but she said, ‘Don’t you dare, Luis.’
He smiled then, amused by how well she too was remembering that first time, when he had tried to withdraw only to have her stop him. And, like that first time, he reached up to brush her hair from her face, then lowered his mouth to gently soothe her with soft kisses while he waited for the tension to ease.
Familiarity should breed contempt, but not in this case. Familiarity was everything when she lifted up her hands to cup his face, then began whispering soft words of love against his lips. In one way he did not want to hear them spoken; in another way he lapped them up with true macho arrogance as she told him everything she was feeling, everything she wanted to feel, and eventually, as the tension eased from her body, everything she demanded he give.
And he gave it all. He gave everything. They matched. They’d always matched—in hunger, in passion, in what they wanted and demanded and made sure they received. They kissed, they touched, they rolled, they built it. It was hot and it was fevered. Each surging thrust overpowered the previous one; each coiled-spring meeting of their bodies drove them closer to the edge. He kissed her mouth, her breasts, her fingers when they came back to his face. When he felt the first ripples of her growing climax he lost it completely and quickened the pace. She came as she’d always com
e—wildly, noisily, gasping and shuddering and tugging him with her over the edge.
Afterwards they lay in a heap of tangled limbs and sweat-slicked skin and shuddering senses. He could feel the thunder of her heartbeat and the quiver of her lips against his throat.
‘Well, that was worth the six-year wait,’ he murmured eventually.
‘Don’t talk,’ she said, and he grimaced.
Maybe she was right. Talking was bound to spoil everything. Rolling onto his back, he took her with him so she lay along his length with their bodies still joined and no desire on either side to separate.
Her hair was stuck to his face and he reached up to brush it away, then gently rearranged her into a more comfortable position, with her cheek in the damp, cushioning crook of his shoulder and her boneless legs resting along the sides of his.
He was sated, he realised, then thought, Strange, that. Because the feeling had nothing to do with the sex but with this—having Cristina lying on top of him like a warm, sleek, sleepy cat.
Reaching for one of her hands, he lifted it to his mouth and began idly tasting each slender finger while he attempted to work out why he was feeling like this.
Cristina, on the other hand, was trying to work out how she’d break it to him that marriage was out of the question, no matter what slant he wanted to put on what they had just done.
Why did he need a wife, anyway?
Or a baby?
The thought of the latter addition made her start to tense up. He instantly soothed her with the featherlight brush of his fingers down the length of her spine.
Luis was always like this after making love, she remembered. Wide awake, but relaxed, content to keep her this close. Any minute now he would start to instigate a second loving. She knew it because she could feel him inside her, still a bold, probing force, even though he was not quite fully erect. And this time it would be slow, more deeply intense and sensually exploring.
Did she let it happen? Did she give in and steal just one more escape from reality before she told him that his deal was not going to happen?
‘You told me you still love me,’ he remarked idly.
The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride - The Ramirez Brides 02 Page 7