She could not forgive herself for it still being him, with all his treachery and lies, evoking so much inside her.
‘How much are you paying the crew to turn a blind eye? It must be a fortune. Not one of them is prepared to help me.’
‘I hope they refused politely.’
‘They are incredibly well trained and polite.’
‘Good.’ He smiled with satisfaction. ‘Marietta assured me they were the most loyal crew on the seas.’
For some reason the name Marietta only enraged her further.
She didn’t want to think about the negotiations that had taken place for Luis to take ownership of this floating prison in such super-quick time. It made her feel as if she had ants crawling all over her skin.
‘Now you are back we can have something to eat.’
Chloe breathed heavily, trying her hardest to keep some semblance of control when all she wanted to do was kick and punch him into reason. She had known there was a risk in crossing Luis but she had never dreamed he would go to these lengths.
She had no means of escape until they reached land.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Yes you are. How can you hope to escape if you’re faint with hunger?’
‘How can you be so blasé?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You have kidnapped me.’
‘Borrowed,’ he corrected as his phone suddenly rang. He stretched an arm out to pick it up.
His infuriating arrogance, already burrowing under her skin like a pulse, pushed her over the edge, all her fears and panic peaking.
She could contain it no more.
Chloe charged at him, snatched the phone from his hand before he could speak into it and threw it onto the floor as hard as she could. Only two humongous arms wrapping around her waist and yanking her backwards into a solid wall of man stopped her from stamping on it.
‘Let me go,’ she screamed, struggling against the vice-like hold she’d been put in, but it was like fighting against a solid strait-jacket.
His hold around her tightened and then she was lifted off her feet and placed unceremoniously onto a sofa. She hardly had time to catch a breath before her arms were pinioned above her head, her wrists secured together with one of his hands and Luis was on top of her, using the strength of his legs and his free hand to stop her from bucking and kicking out at him.
She opened her mouth to scream at him again, to demand he let go of her at once but nothing came out. Her tongue had become a stranger in her own mouth, unable to form the needed words.
Far from recoiling at being trapped in his hold, she felt the fight inside her morph into something equally ferocious but of a shockingly different flavour as his scent found its way into her bloodstream. Pulses flickered to life, electricity zinging over and through her.
His dark hazel eyes hovered only inches above her own, staring down at her with an intensity that made her chest expand and her abdomen contract.
‘Are you going to behave yourself now, bonita?’ he asked with a husky timbre she’d never heard before. A fresh pulse of heat ripped through her, filling her blood and her head with the fuzziest, dreamiest of sensations.
She could not tear her eyes away...
‘Make me.’ Her whispered words came unbidden from a voice that belonged to someone else.
Their gazes stayed locked until she found herself staring at the sensuous mouth she had so yearned to kiss.
And then that mouth fitted against her own and claimed her in a hard, ruthless kiss that sent her head and her senses spinning.
All her defences were stripped away from the first crush of his lips. Her mind emptied of everything except this moment, the heat that engulfed her... It filled her, from the tips of her toes all the way up, snaking into every crevice of her being.
With a greed she hadn’t known existed within her, she kissed him back, wrapping her arms around his neck and cradling his head with her hands, digging her fingers through his hair to his scalp.
She had dreamed of kissing Luis for close to eight years. On cold nights she had imagined him lying beside her and keeping her warm with that hulking, magnificent body.
She had never imagined it could be like this. Warm? Her body had become a furnace, desire running on liquid petroleum in her very core. The heat of his kisses fuelled it beyond anything fantasy could evoke. His dark, chocolatey taste, the thickness of his tongue playing against her own, the weight of his hands roaming down her sides... those fantasies had been dull compared to this giddy, urgent reality.
Scratching her nails down the nape of his strong neck, her fingers had slipped under the collar of his T-shirt when a door into the sky lounge opened.
In the breath of a moment reality reasserted itself.
Wrenching her mouth away, she turned her face from him and saw a pair of legs exiting the room as whoever had walked in on them left abruptly.
The ignobility of the situation they had been found in was starkly apparent.
She snatched her hands away from his skin and bucked against him. ‘Get off me.’
The sensuous lips pulled into a smile as Luis levered himself back up.
The moment he was upright, Chloe twisted herself off the sofa and fell in a graceless heap onto the floor.
She stared at him, wishing she could crawl away and hide for ever.
Chloe had been kissed before. She might be a virgin but she wasn’t completely innocent. She’d experimented like everyone else but nothing she had done—which admittedly wasn’t much—had been anything like this.
This was something else.
This kiss had come directly from heaven.
She had to remember it had been delivered by the devil himself.
‘You did that on purpose,’ she said in a breathless voice that made her wince. It was no consolation that Luis’s breathing was as ragged as her own.
He arched a dark brown eyebrow. ‘Kissed you?’
‘You knew someone was going to walk in,’ she hissed, grasping for excuses, anything to negate what she had just experienced. ‘You wanted us to be caught like that to discredit me.’
What madness had taken control of her?
She imagined that within minutes their passionate embrace would be known by the entire crew, including the captain, who had locked himself in the bridge when she’d been seeking help to escape. They would all conclude that they had been right to deny her help. They would never take her entreaties seriously.
‘I have many talents but mind control is not one of them.’
He could have fooled her. She would swear he’d just used a form of mind control. Something in his eyes, a magnetism, it had hypnotised her. It must have. Something that would explain the madness that had possessed her.
‘I kissed you because you asked it of me.’
‘I did not.’ Scrambling to her feet, she smoothed her T-shirt over her belly, trying desperately to look composed on the outside even if on the inside she had turned into a hormonal, blubbering mess.
‘What was “make me”, if not a challenge to kiss you?’ He spread his arms across the back of the sofa in a nonchalant fashion that made her fingers itch all over again to smack him.
‘It was not a challenge.’ She was painfully aware her cheeks must be the colour of tomatoes.
Her lips had tingled for him. They still did.
His gaze stayed unwaveringly on hers. ‘Bonita, your eyes begged for my kiss. You kissed me back. You ran your fingers through my hair. Faking virginal outrage does not change any of that.’
‘Shut up.’
‘You blush like a virgin too.’
‘I said, shut up.’ Storming to the bar, Chloe grabbed the first bottle that came to hand and poured a hefty measure into a glass.
She felt his eyes watching her every move.
‘Dios, you’re not, are y
ou?’
‘Not what?’ She took a large sip hoping whatever the potent liqueur was would numb her insides.
‘A virgin.’
The fiery liquid halfway down Chloe’s throat spluttered back out of her.
‘You are.’
The sudden fascination in his voice made her want to hurl the remnants of her glass at him. Instead she tipped them into her mouth and forced herself to swallow.
Oh, wow, it burned.
She coughed loudly and blinked back the tears produced by her burning throat, hating the amusement she found in his gaze.
‘Being a virgin is nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said when she had herself back under control. ‘And I would go easy with that—that’s Cuban rum. It’s very potent.’
Staring at him insolently, she poured herself another measure. Now the burn had abated she was left with a pleasant after-taste. ‘I’m not a virgin. I’ve slept with tons of men. Many more and I’ll be on the same number of conquests as you.’
Luis ignored her gibe. Her lie was written all over her flaming-red face and trembling hands.
His heart twisted.
It had never occurred to him that Chloe was a virgin. And why would it? She was twenty-five, an age when a person would have had a number of lovers in their life. This was the twenty-first century. Women were as entitled to take lovers as men were. He had never met a woman who hadn’t embraced the liberation that came with it.
Until now.
He thought of how her cheeks had always turned crimson when he saw her at the theatre, the look in her eyes when he had rubbed his nose against hers...
‘It explains a lot,’ he mused, shaking his head, incredulous at the turn of events since she had stormed back into the sky lounge.
Their kiss... It had exploded out of nowhere.
One moment he had been restraining her, the next their mouths were locked together, their hands burrowing hard enough to dig through flesh.
There had been no finesse. They had come together in a brief fusion of unleashed desire.
‘Because I refused a nightcap?’ She tossed the drink down her throat with a grimace. ‘That’s called having self-respect.’
‘If you’ve had a ton of lovers, why refuse to sleep with me? Your self-respect would already have been out of the window if that’s what you were hoping to preserve.’
‘Maybe I just didn’t fancy you enough to come back to your house? Maybe I didn’t want to be another conquest in a long line of many.’
‘If it’s the former then you lie—your body language is very expressive, bonita.’ Her blush was delicious.
She was delicious.
Her sweetness lingered on his tongue, the softness of her skin still alive on the pads of his fingers.
‘If the latter, why worry about being a conquest when you have such a long list of your own?’
She poured herself some more rum. ‘I do not have to explain myself.’
‘I’m merely curious as to why such a sensual woman would deny herself the pleasure that makes the world turn around.’
‘Pleasure—sex—counts for nothing. There are far more important things. Like loyalty,’ she added pointedly.
‘We are already agreed on the importance of loyalty but only someone with minimal experience would deny that sex is an important part of life, especially someone who has slept with tons of men.’ He hooked an ankle over his knee and enjoyed the fresh batch of colour flaming her cheeks.
Her presence alone invigorated him. He’d felt a lifting of his spirits when he’d first stepped into the sky lounge and surprised her with his presence. The hammers that had pounded at his head when she’d disappeared on her quest for escape had been driven out again with one look on her return.
Their kiss had pumped something else inside him, a buzzing in his veins.
He remembered their date; that buzz had been with him throughout it then too, an electric charge in his cells that had driven out the strains of his daily life and the weight that always seemed to be pressing on his shoulders.
‘If you have slept with the number of men you claim you have and can still state that sex is unimportant then that would suggest you have either been doing it wrong or have been picking the wrong partners.’
‘Is this where you tell me that having sex with you will awaken me to all the things I’ve been missing out on?’ She rolled her eyes with a snort.
Laughter bubbled up his throat. Chloe had the face of an angel, the body of a siren and a melodious voice that sang to a man’s loins. It had only taken him so long to become fully aware of it because of all the years he’d seen her as a child.
He doubted there was a heterosexual man who’d met her and not felt a twinge of awareness for her.
Had she really, as he now strongly suspected, turned down every man who’d shown an interest in her?
And if so, why?
‘Close your eyes, bonita, and let your senses guide you. What do you taste? It is the chemistry between us seeping into the air we breathe.’
If he hadn’t suspected before that they had the potential to be incredible together, their brief, furious kiss had proven it.
She scowled as she poured herself more rum with a still-shaking hand. ‘The only thing I can taste is the hot air you keep spouting every time you open your mouth.’
His laughter came out as a roar.
No wonder he felt so invigorated to be with her. Chloe had a zest about her that he fed off. She’d always had it.
He remembered seeing a glimpse of the woman she’d become when they’d celebrated her seventeenth birthday at the chateau mere weeks before her mother had died. She’d been a gangly teenager still growing into her face, the beauty so evident today nothing but potential back then.
She was a full decade younger than the rest of them but her indefatigable spirit during those awful months her mother had been dying before their eyes had been inspiring.
Chloe had been the one to keep everyone’s spirits lifted. She had kept that smile on her face during the worst of times, never once letting her mother see the pain that had been hidden behind it, always turning the stone over to find the ruby underneath. She would speed from school to the hospital and later Benjamin’s newly bought chateau where Louise had ended her days, armed with cosmetics and other feminine products, doing her mother’s hair, massaging her feet, painting her nails, all the little tactile things that had shown her love. All of it conducted with a smile and that raucous laugh that had lifted everyone and pulled them all together in a web of joyous love.
Her hidden pain had only come out at the funeral.
The memory of her tears soaking into his shirt that day and the tremulous look in the baby-blue eyes staring at him now cut the laughter from Luis’s lips.
Whatever mistakes he had made, he had done his best by Chloe and her family. He had loved her mother and her brother. He had loved all of them. That she could believe him capable of using that awful time for his own financial gain sliced like a dagger through his chest.
Hindsight gave him much to regret but the past was the past. It was the future he had to think of and that future involved Chloe by his side as his wife.
Sentimentality had no part in it.
She held the glass of rum to her lips. ‘Does the possibility of me being a virgin not make you pause and think that what you’re doing is wrong on so many levels that Dante’s Inferno would have run out of space for you?’
‘You are thinking ahead to us sharing a bed?’ he asked, fresh sensation awakening in his loins as he brushed the last of the memories away.
‘Never. I despise you.’ She swallowed the rum in one hit.
‘No, bonita, you hate that you desire me.’
‘Don’t tell me what I feel,’ she snapped, pouring herself yet another glass. By Luis’s estimate she had drunk
over a third of the bottle in a very short time.
She downed it and fixed her eyes on him with a glare. ‘I will never be yours,’ she repeated, then gave a hiccup. Then another.
She reached for the bottle again.
‘Are you sure that’s wise?’
‘Stop telling me what to...’ another hiccup ‘...do.’ Her hand went to her mouth. When she next looked at him her face had lost much of its colour.
He leaned forward, preparing to get to his feet. ‘Feeling woozy?’
‘No.’ As if to prove her point she took two steps towards him but then stopped herself and grabbed hold of the bar.
‘I did suggest you eat something. All that rum on an empty stomach...’
She swallowed then took some long, deep breaths before raising her chin and studiously walking to the nearest seat. Seated, she gripped onto the arms of the sofa she had put herself into and flashed a grimace at him. ‘See? I’m fine.’
He raised a brow, torn between guilt at driving her to attacking the rum, admiration at her refusal to submit and amusement at the hangover he was certain was coming for her.
‘Ready for some food now? A bread roll or some toast to soak the alcohol?’
Her beautiful, stubborn mouth opened. He could see the refusal ready to be thrown at him. But then the mouth closed and she seemed to shrink a little into the chair.
When she met his eye there was a glimpse of vulnerability in her returning stare that made his heart twist and his chest tighten.
She gave a short jerky nod. ‘Just something light, please. I think I’m suffering from seasickness.’
Dios, she was amazing. Clearly inebriated as she had suddenly become, she still had the wit to try and turn it to her advantage.
‘You suffer from seasickness?’ he asked with faux sympathy.
She gave another nod. ‘You should put me on dry land...unless you want me to vomit all over your new toy?’
‘That is certainly something for me to consider,’ he said gravely.
‘I would consider it quickly if I were you or I won’t be...hic...responsible for the consequences.’
‘If it gets too bad I will get the ship’s doctor to give you something. He has a supply of anti-nausea injections and pills for such an eventuality. In the meantime, I’m sure some food will help.’
Marriage Made in Blackmail Page 5