He stared at the flat of her white stomach, exposed where her T-shirt had ridden up her midriff, and resisted the temptation to run a hand over it. ‘Not from where I’m sitting.’
She followed his gaze with a flush creeping over her cheeks, then tugged the T-shirt down over her navel. ‘Some ground rules. If I’m going to be your wife then no flirting.’
‘My wife?’ His heart jolted then set off at a thrum. ‘You are agreeing to marry me?’
The breath she took before inclining her head lasted an age. ‘Oui.’
He studied the beautiful face that was no longer looking at him. ‘What made you change your mind?’
The last time they had spoken Chloe had been vehement in her refusal. He’d known she would agree eventually but had been sure it would take a few more days for her to see reason.
‘I read the comments you spoke of.’ Her brow furrowed. When she continued, there was real anger in her voice. ‘They are vile. How people can even think such things...it is beyond anything I have ever seen. To post them on public forums like that...? Vile, vile, vile.’
‘Let me be sure I am understanding you correctly,’ he said slowly. ‘You are comfortable with my business and reputation suffering through your actions but take exception to mindless fools’ comments on the Internet?’
Chloe turned her head to stare into the hazel eyes that were studying her with an expression she did not understand.
‘Those comments are vile,’ she repeated fiercely. It was the only word she could think of that fitted. ‘You and Javier are not your parents. Your father’s crimes are not yours. You have suffered enough from what your father did, you shouldn’t have to suffer in this way too.’
Because in essence that was what the cruel, ignorant commentators were saying, that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree and that Yuri Abramova’s violence had been inherited by his sons and that they must have used their wealth and power to cover it up.
Oh, it made her rage. The more she had thought about it over the morning, the greater her anger had grown, reaching a boiling point when she had bumped into Jalen walking around with his beloved boom-box on his shoulder.
The simple, uncomplicated innocence she had seen on his young face had been the exact tonic she had needed while she waited for Luis to be done with his video conference.
‘You’d manipulated things so I would have been forced to marry you eventually but this made my mind up for me,’ she said into the silence that had broken out, reminding herself of his actions that were reprehensible and deserving of her fury. She might be having doubts on whether he had intentionally ripped her brother off but that did not excuse what he had done to her. ‘I don’t want to be stuck in limbo here for the rest of my life.’
‘Being forced to spend your life on these beautiful shores sounds like a real hardship.’
For some reason, the dryness of his tone tickled her funny bone. She covered her face with her hands so he couldn’t see the amusement he’d induced.
She didn’t want him to make her laugh. It hurt too much.
‘Are you crying?’
‘No, I’m holding back a scream.’ A scream to purge all the torment building itself back up in her stomach.
‘What was that? I can’t hear you.’
Moving her hands away, she was about to repeat what she’d said when she found he’d shifted to lean over her, his face hovering above hers.
‘Do you mind?’ she snapped, frightened at the heavy rhythm her heart had accelerated to in the space of a moment.
‘You want me to move?’
‘Yes.’
A gleam pulsed in his eyes. ‘Make me.’
Instead of closing her hand into a fist and aiming it at his nose as he deserved, Chloe placed it flat on his cheek.
An unwitting sigh escaped from her lips as she drank in the ruggedly handsome features she had dreamed about for so long. The texture of his skin was so different from her own, smooth but with the bristles of his stubble breaking through...had he not shaved? She had never seen him anything other than clean-shaven.
His face was close enough for her to catch the faint trace of coffee and the more potent scent of his cologne.
Luis was the cause of all this chaos rampaging through her. She hated him so much but the feelings she’d carried for him for all these years were still there, refusing to die, making her doubt herself and what she’d believed to be the truth.
Her lips tingled, yearning to feel his mouth on hers again, all her senses springing to life and waving surrender flags at her.
Just kiss him...
Closing her eyes tightly, Chloe gathered all her wits about her, wriggled out from under him and sat up.
Her lungs didn’t want to work properly and she had to force air into them.
She shifted to the side, needing physical distance, suddenly terrified of what would happen if she were to brush against him or touch him in any form again.
Fighting to clear her head of the fog clouding it, she blinked rapidly and said, ‘Do I have your word that your feud with Benjamin ends with our marriage?’
Things had gone far enough. For the sake of the three boys playing board games in her kitchen all those years ago, it was time to put an end to it.
‘Sí. Marry me and it ends.’
She exhaled a long breath. ‘D’accord. If I am going to do this then there will be some ground rules. Our marriage will last as short a time as is possible.’
‘Agreed.’
‘And it will not be consummated.’ Aware of her face going crimson again—Dieu, the heat she knew that was reflecting on her face was licking her everywhere—she scrambled to her feet.
A few inches of distance was not enough. Not when it came to Luis.
Two months of distance hadn’t been enough.
How was she going to get through this? How was she going to cope with living with him, even if it was only for a few months, and keep her craving for him contained?
Somehow she would find a way. She could not give in to it; the dangers were too great.
This was Luis she was going to marry. The only man she had ever had feelings for, the man she had fallen for when she had been only seventeen, the only man other than her brother she had thought she could trust. Even if he’d spoken the truth about not deliberately betraying Benjamin, she knew it had only been the headiness of newly discovered desire that had made her want to trust him before.
She could never trust this ruthless, pleasure-seeking hedonist, not with her body and especially not with her fragile heart.
She could feel his eyes burning into her as he clarified, ‘No sex?’
‘Our marriage will be short and strictly platonic.’ She strode away over the warm, fine sand, heading for the footpath that led back to the villas, needing to escape from him.
‘Still holding on to your virginity?’ he called after her.
She closed her eyes but didn’t break stride.
She would not give him the satisfaction of a response.
The hairs on the back of her neck lifted as he easily caught up with her.
‘Captain Brand’s bringing the yacht back in six days. We will marry then. In the meantime, I’ll get the pre-nuptial agreement drawn up.’
‘What pre-nuptial agreement? If you think I want your money you’re crazy.’
She didn’t want anything from him.
‘I am not interested in protecting my wealth, only my reputation and my future. You will sign a contract that forbids you from discussing our marriage.’
She stopped walking to stare at him in disbelief. ‘You’re going to put a gagging order on me?’
‘I will not have you sharing with the world that you only married me because you were forced to.’
‘Haven’t you learned your lesson about stifling free speech from m
y brother?’ she snapped, affronted. ‘That injunction you put on him worked out so well, didn’t it?’ she added over her shoulder as she set off again.
The only reason she was agreeing to marry him was to stop the cruel things being stuck all over the Internet about him, not to add fuel to the fire.
Those cruel comments had hurt as much as if they had been personally directed at her. More.
As she was about to step onto the bridge over the seawater moat, a strong hand snatched hold of her elbow and spun her around.
Where moments ago there had been a casual, almost lazily seductive look to his eyes, now there was a hardness. ‘The injunction against Benjamin was necessary. He was a loose cannon—’
‘Only because he felt you took advantage of him when our mother was dying.’ She grabbed hold of the outrage that filled her, negating the growing guilt at what her actions had helped lead to. ‘You can shout it as loudly as you like that you were going to give him that money but where’s the evidence to back it up? It’s been two months since the truth came out and all you have done is fight him in the courts. One phone call could have put an end to it.’
His hold on her elbow loosened but his angry face leant right into hers. ‘Your brother hit us with the lawsuit two days after our confrontation when I was still furious at his accusations. You speak of betrayal, well, what about your brother’s betrayal to friendship? He turned this into war, not us, and you were happy to join in with it. The only thing Javier and I are guilty of is protecting ourselves and if you would pull those damned blinkers from your eyes you would know it too, but you won’t because then you would have to accept responsibility for your actions and accept that it suits you to cast me as the monster in the scenario.’
‘In what possible way does it suit me to cast you as the monster?’ she demanded to know as the rest of his accusations dragged through her skin as if they were attached to barbs.
She had never been happy to join her brother’s side. She had been heartbroken for him...
But what if Benjamin had been wrong? What if his fury at the supposed betrayal had driven his actions to the point where reason was something no longer available to him?
‘Because you, bonita, are running scared and have been since you ran off like a frightened virgin at the end of our date. Your brother’s war with me was the excuse you needed.’
‘Excuse? Listen to yourself! Your ego is so big you should buy another island to contain it in.’
Her heart thundering and her skin feeling as if the barbs of his words were being pulled through it, Chloe marched away. There was a cramp in her stomach far sharper than the stitch she’d had on the beach.
‘Chloe!’ His deep voice called after her in a growl but she didn’t stop, upping her pace, trying her best to keep herself together through the burn of tears growing at the backs of her eyes and the cramp that had spread into her chest.
Hearing his assured footsteps closing in on her, she broke into a run, almost skidding over the swimming-pool moat bridge that led directly to her villa’s path.
That she was doing exactly what he’d just accused her of—running scared—was something she understood on a dim, hazy level of her psyche but enough to propel her faster, a desperation to escape the eyes that saw too much and the emotions brimming inside her.
She pulled the door open with Luis only a couple of strides behind her and slammed it shut.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IF LUIS HAD been one step quicker the door would have slammed in his face.
He turned the handle, had pushed it open an inch when she threw her weight against the other side.
‘Stay away from me,’ she screamed through the closed door.
‘Let me in or I will break it down,’ he said with a calmness he did not feel. Right then he felt anything but calm.
He knew he should walk away and wait for Chloe to regain her composure but reason be damned. He would not allow her to walk away. She had run enough from him.
‘I don’t want anything to do with you.’
‘Tough. Last chance, bonita. Open the door.’
His ultimatum was met with a choice of rude words.
He sighed heavily. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ And with that he used all his strength to barge the door open against the pressure Chloe exerted on the other side of it.
But he was by far the stronger of the two and in seconds he had it open.
She clearly had no intention of letting him in without a fight. As he stepped over the threshold, she hurled herself at him, pounding her fists against his chest, kicking him, her long raven hair whipping around her face as she threw curses at him.
He grabbed at her flailing arms and held her wrists tightly as she continued to struggle against him, clearly uncaring that her height and weight against his own made it a fight she could never win.
He managed to manoeuvre her so her back was to the wall and pulled her hands up and above her head and used the strength in his legs to pin her own and stop them kicking.
‘Is this how it’s going to be for the next few months?’ he demanded, staring hard at the beautiful face glaring at him as if condensed with all the poison in the world. ‘Is every cross word going to end with you running away or fighting me?’
Those gorgeous, voluptuous lips wobbled. The eyes firing loathing at him became stark, the fight dissolving out of her like a balloon struck with a pin.
‘I don’t know how to deal with it,’ she whispered tremulously. ‘It scares me.’
She no longer struggled against him.
His chest twisted to see the starkness of her fear. ‘What scares you, bonita?’
She inhaled deeply through her nose. Her throat moved, her eyes pulsed and darkened, her lips parted...
And then those soft lips brushed against his and he was no longer pinning her to the wall but pulling her into his arms. The hands that had been hitting at him wrapped around his neck as their bodies crushed together and their mouths parted.
Her taste hit his senses like a knocked-back shot of strong liqueur. It played on his tongue, the sweet nectar that was Chloe’s kisses, a flavour like no other.
Every cell in his body caught fire. The fever caught her too; there in the crush of her lips moving greedily against his own and the digging of her nails into his scalp and the hungry way her body pressed itself against him, an instantaneous combustion trapping them in a magnetic grip.
What was it with this woman that he responded to with such primal force? Chloe lit a fire inside him, fuelling it with kisses a man could use for sustenance. It was like nothing he had ever known before, as if all others before her had pitched him to a mere simmer.
Mouths clashing and devouring, Luis swept a hand up her back and under her cropped T-shirt, headily relishing the warm softness of her skin. Such beautiful, soft, feminine skin...
He found the ties of the bikini that contained the breasts he’d fantasised about for so long and pulled it undone. The bikini rose upwards as he traced his hand around her midriff and up to the newly released swell.
She gasped into his mouth as he cupped a breast far weightier than he’d imagined but soft like her lips and her skin. Her hands burrowed under the neck of his T-shirt and grabbed at the material.
The fire condensed into his loins. It burned, a pain like nothing he had felt before.
He’d never felt any of this before.
When he pressed his groin against her, his arousal ground against her abdomen, they moaned into each other’s mouths before she wrenched her lips from his and rubbed her mouth against his cheek and tugged even harder at his T-shirt.
Together they scrambled to pull each other’s T-shirts off and fling them to the floor, and then her arms were hooked back around his neck and her hot mouth devoured him all over again.
In a frenzy of kisses, Luis tugged the ties
of her bikini at the back of her neck and whipped it off fully, discarding it without thought.
A pulsing thrill ripped through him at the first press of her bare breasts against his bare chest.
He wanted to taste those breasts and all her other hidden places and burrow his face in their softness.
Everything about Chloe was soft. Everything. And so utterly, amazingly feminine, the yin to his yang, soft where he was hard, porcelain wrapped in silk.
She was a woman like no other. Feisty, stubborn, smart, funny, all contained in a body that could make a grown man weep.
And she was going to be his wife.
Chloe’s breaths were coming in pants. She could hear them, could feel herself make them but they seemed to be coming from somewhere else, from someone who was not herself.
She was not herself.
Her body had become something new, a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, coaxed into the sunlight by the only man she had ever desired or wanted. She had become a vessel of nerve-endings, and they were all straining to Luis, all her hate and rage, pain and sorrow, turned on their head in the time it took for a coin to flip from heads to tails.
She was beyond caring about yet another self-made vow being broken.
If this was what broken promises felt like then she would break a thousand of them.
For two months she had focused on her passionate hatred of him. But her passion for him was more than hate, it always had been, and to deny this part of her feelings for him was like denying herself air. If she were to walk—run—away right now she would forget how to breathe.
Even her skin felt alive. Tendrils curled around her and through her, sensation burning deep inside.
She gasped again when he squeezed her bottom roughly and ground himself more tightly to her, the weight and size of his excitement pressed so deliciously against her loins sending newer, deeper sensations racing through her.
As he held onto her thighs and lifted her up, she wrapped her legs around him and kissed him even more deeply as he carried her to the bed in three long strides.
She had to keep kissing him. She needed the heat of his mouth on hers and that dark masculine taste firing into her senses to drive out the fears that had held her in its grip for too long.
Marriage Made in Blackmail Page 8