‘She did not care for antique jewellery,’ he said shortly.
Nell’s eyes widened. ‘Oh!’ Her glance moved over the pink rose diamond surrounded by rubies—some reject! ‘Is this very old?’
‘It’s been in the family a long time. My grandmother’s twin sister Domenica was the last family member to wear it. Her fiancé was British.’
‘Really!’ It must be marvellous to have a family history that stretched back generations. ‘Did they move to England?’ she asked, wondering about the woman who had once worn this ring for real.
Luiz shook his head. ‘No, her fiancé was killed in World War Two and she remained single.’
Like you, Nell thought. She looked down at the ring, a wave of sadness lapping over her. ‘That’s so sad!’ she said gruffly.
‘Are you crying?’
He sounded astonished and no wonder—no doubt he thought it was ludicrous to be so affected by a tragedy that occurred so long ago. She sniffed and lifted her chin.
‘No, of course not!’ she denied stoutly.
‘You just have something in your eye.’
‘Funny man. I’m laughing on the inside,’ she promised him. ‘Why don’t you just keep your eyes on the road?’
Yes, why don’t you, Luiz? seconded the voice in his head.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUIZ drove on expecting the car to stop at any minute. In the periphery of his vision he was conscious of Nell’s head lolling forward like a rag doll every few minutes, the intervals between her snapping upright getting longer and longer.
‘Go to sleep if you’re tired.’
She scrubbed a hand across her gritty eyes and yawned. ‘I’m not tired.’
The blatant lie drew a heavy sigh from his lips, but before he could dispute her claim the engine faded and they glided to a standstill.
‘I wish I could say the same.’ Still, it could have been worse. He studied the area. The spot, sheltered from the road by a copse of the almond and oak trees that bordered the slopes, was not too exposed.
‘Why have we stopped?’ She passed a hand across her eyes and stifled a yawn. She felt stiff and uncomfortable. Her cheek, where it had been pressed into the window, probably looked as creased as her clothes—which were pretty creased.
Beside her Luiz looked as though he’d just stepped out of the shower, except of course his hair was dry and he had clothes on—clothes that looked freshly pressed—and he oozed an indecent amount of vitality for someone who had been driving on hair-raising roads.
She was scowling at the total unfairness of it all and when he turned his head she ignored his smile, lifting her brows in enquiry. ‘So why?’
‘I wanted to admire the view.’
Nell narrowed her eyes and looked daggers at him.
Luiz gave another smile, this time sardonic as he held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Why do you think we’ve stopped?’
‘If I knew I wouldn’t have asked…’ She stopped, a look of horror stealing across her face. ‘Are you trying to say we’ve broken down?’
‘We have.’
Luiz watched as she dropped her head into her hands and groaned. ‘Why do these things keep happening to me?’
‘Is that a rhetorical question?’
She lifted her head and glared at him with loathing. ‘This is not a good time to be funny. Just in case nobody has mentioned it, you’re not good at it.’ She took a deep breath and said to herself, ‘Don’t panic.’ She closed her eyes. Stay calm, she told herself. It was probably something simple and they’d be on their way in no time.
‘I’ll try.’
Nell didn’t deign to respond to this open provocation. ‘I suppose you know nothing about engines?’
‘I’m not an expert but I get by.’
‘Good. Then…’ she waved in the direction of the car bonnet ‘…shouldn’t you be looking for loose leads or broken fan belts or something?’ She had a vague recollection of a pair of tights being used with miraculous effect to repair a broken-down engine on a TV programme—she had no tights but clearly the situation was not hopeless.
‘There’s no point.’
This defeatist attitude earned him a disapproving frown.
‘I already know what’s wrong.’
Nell brightened. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ Silly question—he obviously got a sadistic kick from seeing her squirm. ‘Well, anyway, that’s marvellous!’ Her smile faded as she studied his face. ‘Not marvelous. It’s something major?’
‘Not major.’
‘Well, what?’ Nell wanted to shake the answer out of him.
‘We’ve run out of petrol.’
She flashed him an impatient look. ‘No, seriously.’
‘Seriously we have run out of petrol.’
The colour seeped from Nell’s cheeks as she stared at him transfixed in horror. The silence stretched. ‘Tell me this is a sick joke.’
‘No joke,’ he said, unbuckling his seat belt. Nell shivered as the evening air sent the temperature inside down several degrees.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded, her voice rising several quivering decibels as he calmly stepped out of the vehicle and stretched to straighten the kinks in his spine. ‘Ring someone.’
Luiz ducked his head back inside. ‘I’m going to stretch my legs, check out the lay of the land and attend to a call of nature. I suggest you do the same before it gets dark. There is no signal here, so no phone.’
Nell glanced nervously out of the window. She was by no means a town girl, but this landscape was bigger than anything she was used to and she didn’t even want to think about the remoteness. It was nature at a raw, primitive level that left her senses feeling bruised… With a shudder she turned away.
‘Dark?’ Her glance was claimed and held by Luiz Santoro’s mesmeric stare.
She flexed her shoulders as invisible fingers traced a path down her spine. The landscape wasn’t the only thing that was raw and primitive around here!
Nell was relieved when Luiz turned his head and lifted his narrowed eyes to the darkening sky. ‘I’d say we’ve got another hour of daylight.’
‘Someone might come along,’ Nell countered with determined optimism.
‘At this time of day?’ He arched a sardonic brow. Never a person who avoided reality even when it wasn’t pleasant, Luiz saw nothing admirable in Nell’s determined blind optimism. ‘When did you last see another car?’
Nell swallowed.
As Luiz scanned her face his irritated scowl faded. The air of desperation in her face was not contrived. As his hooded eyes slid to her mouth he was seized by a strong and dangerous desire to kiss that look away to leave in its place the dazed, hazy look of sexual surrender he had seen when he had kissed her earlier.
‘Cheer up,’ he said, seeing her moist parted lips in his head, hearing her voice begging him to do it again. ‘It could be worse.’ The lame platitude was a safer alternative, though it still left him with a gnawing ache that didn’t feel as if it was going away any time soon.
The sleeping arrangements were going to require some careful thought. Clearly if he didn’t want to complicate this already strained situation sharing the back seat was not an option, but it was a temptation.
‘Is that a joke? No,’ she contradicted flatly. ‘For the record it could not…not be worse. Nothing could be worse than being trapped in the back of beyond with…’ she paused, sucked in a breath and finished on a husky note of sheer loathing ‘…you!’
A smile played around his mobile mouth as he scanned her face and said with an air of disappointment, ‘I thought British fortitude came into play in the face of adversity?’
Nell extended her clenched fists in an effort to impress the urgency of the situation on him. ‘Lucy needs me!’ she yelled.
‘Relax.’ At that particular moment Lucy’s needs were not to be compared with the urgency of his own.
Nell heard his laconic advice and missed the heat in his hooded eyes and the fine lines of
tension bracketing his mouth. She gritted her teeth. If he said that once more she was going to hit him, though, she conceded, her glance slipping to the broad contours of his chest and shoulders, it would probably hurt her more than him. He was all hard muscle and bone.
‘I am relaxed!’ she snarled through grated teeth.
He gave an admiring whistle. ‘And you said that without a trace of irony.’
‘I will scream without a trace of irony too.’ The warning was only part black humour. She was really struggling to stay in control. She had a lump the size of a golf ball in her throat.
‘It’s a waste of time to stress about things over which you have no control.’
Nell threw up her hands and glared at him. ‘It’s easy for you to be philosophical when you don’t give a damn what happens to your cousin! You wouldn’t have lifted a finger to save him from making a mistake that could ruin the rest of his life.’ Her lips curled into a contemptuous smile as she observed him with disgust. ‘The only thing you care about is money!’ she accused wildly. ‘I pity you!’
‘I pity me too for having to contend with your sanctimonious ranting.’
‘Lucy is—’
Luiz, who was heartily sick of hearing the name, cut across her. ‘I’m sure Lucy is safely tucked up in bed.’
‘With your cousin—great!’ she snorted. ‘That’s a very comforting thought.
‘Then don’t think about it,’ he advised brutally, almost visibly becoming bored with the conversation.
Deep in denial, Nell shook her head firmly from side to side. ‘I’m not budging from this car until you take me to Lucy. I insist you take me to her.’
‘I’m flattered by your faith in my ability but making the internal combustion engine run on fresh air is beyond my capabilities.’
‘How can we be out of petrol? Didn’t you check? Or do you normally delegate tedious tasks like that to some flunky? My God!’ she exclaimed, shaking her head as she looked him up and down in disgust. ‘You’re obviously totally clueless.’
An expression of stunned shock on his face, Luiz stared at her in silence that was broken a moment later by the sound of his husky laughter. Some of the tension drained away with the sound.
‘I have been called many things before but never that,’ he admitted, his mobile lips twitching into a wry smile as he added, ‘Not to my face at least.’
Nell regarded him with unfriendly eyes. ‘I’m so glad to have amused you,’ she said frigidly. There was laid-back and then there was obtuse, and in her opinion someone who could find anything to laugh at in this situation definitely fell into the latter category.
‘You are right. I should have checked we had a full tank, but by the time I noticed it was empty we were past the point of no return.’
Nell struggled to maintain her frigid expression. The man had apologised and it wasn’t as if he had planned for this to happen. She was also uneasily aware that her own reaction to their dilemma had been slightly excessive. He couldn’t be any happier about this than she was.
‘Oh, well,’ she began flashing a half-smile without looking directly at him. ‘I suppose even you are not—’ She stopped, a frown forming between her brows as her gaze focused on his lean features. ‘By the time you realised…?’ Her half-smile guttered. ‘You mean you’ve known for miles that we were going to be stranded?’
‘You make it sound as though I had some grand plan.’
‘You said nothing!’ Nell was outraged at being kept in the dark. God, the man had been totally condescending from the moment they had met, he was calculating and controlling, and the worst part was she’d been allowing him to manipulate her!
Her eyes narrowed—well, no more!
‘Hindsight is a great thing, of course. If I’d known I could have been enjoying your hysterical response for the past five miles…’
He flashed a smile of world-class insincerity, but before Nell had an opportunity to respond to his sarcasm he withdrew his head and strolled away into the tall trees. A moment later the dark, sinister shadows in the dense greenery had swallowed him up.
‘I’m not getting out of this car!’ she yelled defiantly out of the window before adding a plaintive, ‘You can’t leave me here like this!’
But he could and he had.
Nell, her face set in lines of mutiny, sat there, her back stiff with outrage. This was a nightmare. It couldn’t be happening.
She lasted ten minutes before, unable to withstand her inner restlessness, she decided that she might as well take a look around. Force of habit made her remove the keys he had left in the ignition, lock the car and drop them in her shoulder bag before she left the car and traced the path she had seen him take along the edge of a stream and into the copse of tall trees. She had gone a few feet when the ground began to slope steeply.
The incline was hard to negotiate and after a couple of graceless trips she kept her eyes trained on the ground. She didn’t see Luiz until she was literally feet away.
‘So you decided to join me.’
‘I…’ She stopped. Luiz was kneeling on the leaf-covered ground fanning a smouldering pile of what looked like leaves and twigs. ‘What are you doing?’ The tables were turned. For once she was looking down on him. She decided to enjoy the moment of physical superiority while it lasted.
It didn’t last. It didn’t even start as she studied his face turned half in profile to her and without warning she started to tremble—nothing that showed on the outside but inwardly at her core.
It reminded her of the feeling she’d experienced once when she’d been caught in the middle of a flat open field during an electric storm and had stood helpless to prevent it as the lightning had struck the ground almost at her feet.
The shadows across his face highlighted the purity and strength of his carved features, but it wasn’t the aesthetic quality of his male beauty that affected her, but the more raw, earthy aspect that was an integral part of this man.
‘I’m building a fire. It will get cold later.’
Nell plucked fretfully at the neck of her shirt. She could have done with some of that cool right now—her overheated skin prickled with heat even though she was shaking with cold.
‘What are you—a Boy Scout?’ The image that formed in her mind was more of a grown-up version and it wasn’t much of a stretch to see him all hunter gatherer, in commando-style camouflage, maybe a hunting knife in his belt.
Her imagination, Nell decided, giving her head a firm shake to clear the image, needed some serious attention! Women had fought for years for equality and what was she doing with her freedom? In sisterly solidarity she was fantasising about a caveman!
Her glance slid of its own volition to the spot where a button midway down his shirt had parted to reveal a glimpse of the sort of chest that no Boy Scout could boast. Not unless the modern Boy Scout was endowed with a precocious degree of muscular development and a sprinkling of dark body hair.
Heart thudding hard, Nell dragged her eyes clear and in the process collided with the dark gleam of Luiz’s glittering heavy-lidded stare.
Emotion welled in her throat as the air between them seemed to thicken. Nell’s stomach muscles, already quivering frantically, clenched viciously. She exhaled hard twice and swallowed as she struggled to escape the sexual thrall that made her limbs heavy and her brain unco-operative.
Continuing to balance lightly on his heels, he prodded the smouldering flames with a stick, igniting a flame. ‘I never was a Scout, nor actually,’ he conceded, ‘much of a team player.’
‘Some people might consider that a weakness.’ Nell gave her spiky observation even though she didn’t imagine for one second that he cared a jot for the opinion of others. His brand of self-sufficiency bordered on arrogance… Actually, she corrected mentally, there was no bordered about it—he was the most arrogant man she had ever met.
He brushed a hand along his jaw that was already showing a visible shadow of dark stubble. ‘It was,’ he admitted, flashing
a grin, ‘something that was touched upon in several of my school reports. That and my problem with authority figures.’
‘So your schooldays were not the best of your life.’
‘Thank you for your concern, querida, but I have for the most part overcome my childhood traumas.’
‘I wasn’t concerned,’ she countered, studiously ignoring the mental image in her head of the lonely, misunderstood little boy with the rebellious streak. ‘I reserve my sympathy for your teachers, if you were half as annoying then as you are now.’
His low rumbling chuckle was uncomfortably sexy.
‘It is true that the English public school system and I were not a marriage made in heaven.’
Her eyes widening, Nell put out a hand to steady herself as she leaned against a nearby boulder closer to the fire. ‘You went to school in England?’
‘It’s a family tradition.’
‘So your cousin went there too.’
Luiz shook his head. ‘No, my uncle is in the diplomatic service. He was based in the States for many years. Felipe was educated there.’ He turned away from her to throw another log on the fire and sparks flew into the air. As a billow of woody smoke blew into her eyes Nell coughed.
‘What do you expect standing downwind? Come over here.’
The scent that made his nostrils flare was more subtle than smoke—the light warm female flowery scent of her body. Somehow his olfactory senses isolated it from the more pungent scents of acrid smoke, warm soil, wet leaves and green growing things.
Luiz’s lashes brushed his razor-sharp cheekbones, highlighted by a dull flush as his glittering obsidian gaze slid over the pale oval of her delicately featured face and downwards over her slim body and smooth, slender limbs. She made him think of a bright fragile flower blooming in a dark corner.
Did her skin feel as soft and silky as it looked?
Why was he looking? Why was he wanting—Dios, but want was a weak, watery term for what he was feeling—to do more than look?
Relax, Luiz, he urged himself, clenching his jaw as he forced air into his lungs through flared nostrils. It was not exactly one of life’s mysteries. This was lust, nothing more complex than a chemical reaction—a strong reaction.
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