‘You make it sound like a burden,’ he said.
‘In many ways, it is.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Yet when I gave you the opportunity to liberate yourself from this state of self-imposed purdah, you turned and ran away.’
Her knuckles clenched. ‘It was very generous of you to offer to “liberate” me,’ she hissed. ‘But I’m not some charity case, eager for the big stud Martinez to show me where I’ve been going wrong all this time.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘And where have you been going wrong?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Please don’t push it, Luis.’
‘Why not? I think you should talk about it.’
And suddenly all the fight seemed to leave her. Her shoulders slumped as she sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and looked up at him. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything.’
‘That’s a big ask.’
‘I know it is.’
For almost a minute Carly didn’t speak, trying to convince herself that he had no right to demand to know these things. Until she reminded herself that she had started the ball rolling. She had told him or, at least, told him some of it. She must have realised that someone like Luis would demand to know the full story.
She hadn’t talked about it for years. Not since it had happened. She had taken it and buried it in a dark place somewhere deep inside her. She hardly ever thought about it now, only when she awoke from those occasional nightmares, the ones where she was clutching her throat and unable to breathe. Did that mean that on some subconscious level it still troubled her? And mightn’t it be good to get it off her chest to someone, even if that someone just happened to be her boss?
‘So why, Carly?’
His soft question slid in through all her defences, and suddenly she was back there. Back with those lights flashing and music pounding and that horrible dizzy feeling, which had ended with her bent double at the bottom of a frosty garden, being sick into one of the flower beds. In the bright, sunlit bedroom of the luxury Mediterranean villa, it seemed as if it had all happened to someone else. But it had happened to her.
‘I was at a party,’ she said tonelessly.
‘When?’
‘I was sixteen, but I probably looked older. I hadn’t been out of the house for weeks because of Dad, so I went with a schoolfriend to this big party on the edge of town. For once, I was wearing make-up and I’d borrowed some of my friend’s clothes and I felt excited. And there was this...this guy...’ She stumbled over her words, trying to present them in the fairest possible light. Because hadn’t she asked herself again and again if she’d somehow deserved what had happened to her? Wasn’t that what women always did in situations like this? ‘I’d had a couple of drinks—and so had he. He’d probably had a bit more than a couple, come to think of it.’
‘So he was drunk?’
‘A bit,’ she said. ‘But mostly he was just in love with someone else. Someone who didn’t want him.’
‘You’re not making any sense, Carly.’
‘Aren’t I?’ she said and she gave a hollow kind of laugh. ‘Okay, then, I’ll spell it out for you. I was supposed to be his substitute lover for that evening, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was the lucky person he’d picked to make him feel better about himself. To make him know that he was still desired. Surely you can guess what happened next?’
‘Oh, I can guess, but I’d rather be told.’ His mouth had grown hard. ‘You say you want to be a doctor. Well, you’ll make a much better doctor if you don’t cling onto the past and use it like some kind of security blanket.’
There was a pause which seemed to go on for an uncomfortably long time.
‘He started to kiss me,’ she said eventually, her voice a stilted whisper. ‘And then to touch me. At first I liked it. I liked the way it made me feel. But then....’
‘Then what, Carly?’
His words sounded distant. As if they were coming from somewhere far away.
‘He...’ She winced with pain and shame. She could almost feel those fingers probing her, digging into her dryness and telling her she should have been wet. Telling her that she was frigid and useless. The clamp of those teeth was sharp on her breasts and the sound of her knickers being ripped apart seemed deafening. She had attempted to scream, but he had blotted out the scream with the vodka-soaked slick of his mouth. ‘He...’ Her voice shuddered to a halt as, wordlessly, she shook her head.
‘Raped you?’
His appalled question broke the spell and Carly opened eyes she didn’t even realise had been closed. She shook her head again. ‘No. Not that.’
‘But he touched you...intimately?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aggressively?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘That’s a definition of rape in many of the statute books,’ he gritted out and there was a dark anger on his face she’d never seen before. ‘What stopped him?’
‘Someone came into the room to collect their coat and disturbed us.’
‘And then you called the police?’
She didn’t answer, not straight away, and in a way wasn’t this the bit she was most ashamed of? That she had succumbed to pressure and other people’s expectations and allowed them to take control of the situation.
‘No. I decided against it.’
‘You decided against it?’
‘That’s what I said.’
There was a split second of a pause. ‘Do you want to tell me why?’
Carly met his eyes and their dark light washed over her. Dark light was a contradiction in terms, wasn’t it? But that was what she was getting from him. And it was disarming. It was like a deep bath at the end of a long day. Like holding out your cold hands in front of a blazing fire.
‘What stopped you from reporting it?’ he said.
‘My mother did,’ she said baldly.
‘Your mother?’
‘She said it would be impossible to prove, that it would be his word against mine, and she had a point. He was insanely rich and well-connected, and could have hired the best defence lawyers. I was just an ordinary girl with a sick father and no money. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. My name would have been mud. It would have been just one more thing to add to the stack of dark things which were building up at home. And it wasn’t as if he actually raped me.’
‘But what about the person who came in to collect their coat? Couldn’t they have been called as your defence if they witnessed the attack?’
She gave a bitter laugh. ‘It was a friend of his,’ she said, ‘who described it as “horseplay”.’
For a moment he winced, as if her pain were his pain. ‘Cabrón,’ he bit out, his eyes darkening as he walked over to the bed and sat down beside her.
Carly tensed, but the arm he placed around her shoulder felt protective, not seductive. Although she guessed that in some way it was seductive. He seemed to represent safety and she’d never really had that before. She wanted to lean against him and drink it in, but she forced herself not to. She had learnt to stand on her own two feet and she didn’t need to lean on anyone, but, even if she did, it certainly shouldn’t be Luis, because he was the antithesis of safe. Luis was all about danger.
‘So that’s when you started sublimating your femininity,’ he said slowly.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, I think you do.’ He nodded, as if something was suddenly making sense to him. ‘That must have been when you started scraping your hair back into that damned ponytail, which means nobody ever gets to see it. Probably around the time when you stopped wearing clothes which might flatter you, or the make-up which most women your age wear. You must have thought that if you didn’t draw attention to yourself then you wouldn’t attract the wrong kind of attention. That by being invisible, people would look through you rather than at you, and it wouldn’t ever happen to you again.’
‘It’s not a sob story, Carly. It’s the truth. And I want to help you.’
‘Well, I don’t want your help,’ she said, pulling away from his grasp and staring out at the terrace, where a fat bee was disappearing into the scarlet trumpet of an hibiscus flower.
‘You might not want my help.’ His voice was quiet. ‘But you want me.’
Forcing her attention away from the pollen-brushed bee, she jerked her head round to look at him. Suddenly she realised that she was sitting on a bed next to him and she shouldn’t be. She shouldn’t be within six feet of him. And she definitely shouldn’t be staring into his eyes like that and losing herself in their dark luminosity. ‘No, I don’t,’ she whispered.
‘Then try saying it as if you mean it.’ His mouth flickered into a hard smile. ‘Except we both know you can’t.’
‘I can’t believe you’re saying this. Do you really think it’s...acceptable...’ her voice shook ‘...to start talking about desire, in the light of what I’ve just told you?’
‘Yes,’ he said fiercely. ‘Absolutely I do. What happened to you was bad, and the guy who took advantage of you was a piece of scum, but it happened a long time ago and you can’t let it write the script for the rest of your life. Sex isn’t wrong, Carly. It’s natural. It’s one of the greatest pleasures in life and you’re missing out on it. Don’t you see that?’
His fierce words were impossible to brush aside and suddenly Carly realised that she felt better for having told him. She felt lighter—cleaner. As if she’d scrubbed years of grime away from her skin and stepped out into the sunlight.
And Luis had been the catalyst for that.
She stared at him. ‘I’m wondering where we go from here,’ she said. ‘Do you think we can we go back to how it’s been before?’
‘Possibly.’ He took one of her hands in his and turned it over, studying her palm as if he was examining her lifeline, and when he looked up again there was a question in his eyes. ‘But I don’t want to. And neither do you. Not really.’
He had lifted his fingertips to her face and was tracing a feather-light path down over her cheek and Carly had to resist the urge to close her eyes, because it felt so right to have him touching her. She swallowed as his thumb moved across the cushion of her bottom lip and suddenly it began to tremble.
‘Luis,’ she said, but it came out in a way she didn’t recognise. As if she was making a protest without really meaning it.
And he smiled, as if he had just won a battle she hadn’t even realised they were having, before lowering his voice. ‘Tell me something, Carly. Are you saving your virginity for the man you will one day marry?’
His blunt question shook her out of her dreamy state and she blinked at him in surprise. ‘That’s a strange question to ask at a time like this.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s exactly the right question to ask because I need to know what’s important to you.’
She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t sure she could answer coherently when his thumb was rubbing her lip like that, but she didn’t want him to stop. ‘Then no. The answer is no. I wasn’t saving it for anyone. It’s not like money you put in the bank. It’s just that I’d never met anyone who—’
‘Makes you feel the way I do?’
His murmured assertion should have sounded unbearably arrogant, but it didn’t. Because that was the truth, too. She shook her head. ‘No.’
He leaned forward and replaced his thumb with his lips, brushing them over hers in a way which made her tremble even more.
‘I want to be your lover, Carly,’ he breathed. ‘I want to show you how to enjoy pleasure, for pleasure’s sake. You have helped heal me—so let me now heal you.’
‘S-sexual healing?’ she questioned unsteadily.
‘If you like.’
She drew her head away from his. ‘It’s...it’s a crazy idea.’
‘Why?’
Why?
A million reasons flooded into her head. Sex wasn’t supposed to be something you just did, was it, like some cold-blooded experiment carried out in laboratory conditions? Sex was supposed to be about passion. A lot of people thought it was only about love.
She looked into the hard gleam of his eyes and suddenly she understood what that journalist had meant when she’d written that article. His face was rugged and beautiful, yes, but his eyes really did look empty. As if you could jump into their black depths and never reach the bottom. And surely only a fool would choose to be intimate with a known heartbreaker like Luis Martinez.
Yet the detached, scientific side of her personality was impressed by his honesty. He wasn’t spinning her lies by making promises he couldn’t fulfil. He was offering to teach her the art of sex.
She imagined turning him down. Of going back to being the woman she’d been before. Carly the invisible. Carly the scared. But she hadn’t felt invisible when he’d kissed her. Or scared. She had felt three-dimensional and desired—properly desired—for the first time in her life. Hadn’t it come as a huge relief to discover that the creep at the party hadn’t destroyed those kind of feelings for ever? That deep down she was still a functioning woman, with a woman’s needs.
And didn’t she want that? Wasn’t it time for her to truly leave the past behind?
‘So how would it work?’ she questioned casually, but maybe her nonchalant tone didn’t fool him because she saw him smile in response. ‘If I were to agree.’
‘I hadn’t actually given much thought to that,’ he said. ‘I thought that might have been a little...presumptuous.’
‘I suppose it might.’ But Carly didn’t care about presumptuous; she just wanted him to begin. She wanted him to kiss her again and make her feel the way she’d done before. She wanted his hands on her breasts and in her hair. She wanted to know what would happen if that low ache deep inside her was allowed to keep building and building...
Letting her eyelashes flicker to a close, she elevated her chin, silently inviting him to kiss her. But his soft laugh made her eyes snap open.
‘Oh, no,’ he said softly. ‘This is not how I intend for your seduction to happen, querida. It will not be here, or now. It will not be fast and furious with us grappling on your bed like a couple of greedy teenagers. It will be a slow and considered feast. A banquet guaranteed to satisfy all the senses, rather than something devoured without tasting properly. I want you to be sure that this is what you really want.’ His lips curved into a slow smile. ‘And when you do, there will be no holds barred.’
She wanted to contradict him. To listen to the small part of her brain which was questioning her own sanity. But the heat in her blood had other ideas and so she shrugged, as if it were no big deal. ‘So...’
‘So.’ He stood up very quickly, as if he didn’t quite trust himself to sit chastely beside her on the bed any more. ‘You will meet me on the upper terrace at eight o’clock. I will instruct the chef to prepare something cold and dismiss the staff for the rest of the night. We will not be disturbed.’
A shiver of anticipation whispered over her skin.
‘I should like you to wear a skirt or a dress and to leave your legs bare,’ he continued. ‘Oh, and make sure your hair is down. I don’t want to see you with that damned ponytail.’
‘Anything else?’ she questioned, her sarcasm hiding the sudden hurt she felt.
‘Yes. And this is probably the most important provision of all.’ He looked down at her, his shadow suddenly enveloping her like a dark cloak. ‘I need you to promise that you won’t fall in love with me. I can do sex—very good sex, as it happens—but I don’t do love. Do you understand, Carly? Because I mean it. And if you think this is going to end in we
dding bells and clouds of confetti, then you’re mistaken.’
Carly was in no doubt that he meant it. She could tell from the implacable note in his voice and the steely glint of his eyes. And while his arrogance was shocking, once again she couldn’t help admiring his honesty. Luis would never spin her any impossible dreams, would he?
‘There’s no need to worry about that,’ she said. ‘Believe me, I have no desire to waft up the aisle in a cloud of tulle and then listen to a load of boring speeches. I’m going to be a doctor, not a housewife, and I’m certainly not in any danger of falling in love with you, Luis. I know you too well.’
He smiled. ‘That’s what I like about you, Carly. I like your clear-headed way of thinking.’
But as Carly looked into the hard glitter of his eyes she suddenly found herself wondering if she had taken on more than she could handle.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CARLY BECAME PROGRESSIVELY more nervous as she got ready for dinner that night. Her mouth had grown dry and her hands were trembling and she thought seriously about abandoning the whole idea and telling Luis it had all been a horrible misunderstanding. Could she really go through with losing her virginity to a man like him, who had laid out his exacting guidelines from the start? She thought about what he’d said about her appearance, about what she should and shouldn’t wear for her seduction. He had been positively brutal in his assessment of her physical appearance, hadn’t he?
Yet he’d said nothing which wasn’t true. Dull anonymity had been her aim and it seemed she had achieved exactly that. But while fading into the background had worked brilliantly when she’d been his housekeeper, he had told her quite emphatically that it was inappropriate for her new role...
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