by Kim Lawrence
‘What distracted you?’
One corner of his mouth lifted, that crooked smile … it never failed to make her heart ache.
‘You know the answer to that, Megan. And for the record you still are. You’ll still be distracting me when I’m old enough to know better.’
The realisation did not appear to make him happy as, visibly leaking patience, he stalked with pantherlike grace to the other side of the room and slammed his hand against the wall before pressing his forehead to the cool tiles and breathing a heartfelt, ‘Give me strength!’
After a moment he lifted his head, exhaling as his attention immediately switched back to Megan. As he read the expression on her face the furrow between his dark brows deepened.
The mixture of heady exhilaration and grim determination that had carried him through the day faded as he registered the wariness in her eyes. The idea that Megan could ever be afraid of him pierced him like a blade.
‘I’m sorry … you …’
Megan didn’t know what was more shocking: hearing Emilio say sorry or seeing him at a loss for words.
The natural hauteur in his manner was pronounced as he revealed abruptly, ‘I am not accustomed to explaining myself.’
Her brows lifted. ‘Imagine my amazement and, let me guess, you don’t intend to start now.’
But it seemed he did intend to start.
‘I do not want to resurrect my marriage, and Rosanna did not divorce me because I had been unfaithful. She divorced me because she knew I had fallen in love.’
The colour slowly seeped from Megan’s face until even her lips were blenched white. The words, the last ones in the world she had imagined to hear coming from Emilio’s lips, hung in the air between them.
She looked at Emilio, who had not moved an inch since he had made his shocking declaration. His lean face was shadowed, his expression unreadable; Emilio’s dark lustrous stare remained trained on her pale face.
‘You fell in love?’ Why had this possibility never occurred to her?
His response echoed the sentiment. ‘Is that so difficult to believe? You think I am not capable of feeling such things?’
Megan gave an awkward shrug. ‘Of course not, no, I. just.’ Her voice dried.
‘It was not something I planned to happen. It was not actually something I believed possible. I felt in fact vastly superior to people who based their marriage on a temporary chemical imbalance, which in my mind equated to temporary insanity.’ His lips twisted into a self-derisive smile as he admitted his previous arrogance with a disbelieving slight shake of his dark glossy head. ‘I did not believe in something I could not see and taste and feel—then I did feel. I felt—’ He stopped and swallowed, his bleak gaze sliding from hers.
Watching this man who had always appeared to be in charge of, not just himself, but everything else, display his vulnerability evoked a swell of empathy in Megan that was physically painful. She felt his struggle to rein in his emotions as deeply as she would have felt a blade sliding into her own heart.
The shocking realisation that he had had his heart broken was deeply disturbing on many levels, not least because she felt envious of the woman with whom Emilio had had the affair that had ultimately resulted in his marriage break-up.
Which left the question—why weren’t they still together? Had the affair burnt itself out or was there another reason?
A reason that accounted for the haunted look in his dark eyes?
The nerve in his hollow cheek continued to clench and unclench. ‘My feelings were not relevant—’
Not relevant, she thought, but evidently strong. ‘Of course they were.’
‘I was not free to act on them, because by that time I had already entered into a marriage of convenience.’
Megan braced her shoulders against the cool tiles of the wall; the alternative was falling down in a heap.
‘Convenience? This is the twenty-first century. People don’t— And anyway you and Rosanna were—’ She stopped and lifted a shaky hand to her spinning head. ‘God, I need a drink.’
Without a word he held his hand out.
For a moment Megan stared at it. Emilio waited, his expression hardening as she shook her head in a negative motion from side to side. Fighting to retain his upbeat mood in the face of her rejection, he was about to let it fall when she reached out and snatched at it, her small finger curling tightly around his.
Emilio had switched on a couple of lamps. The big room was illuminated by their soft glow that cast shadows across his face, emphasising the sheer perfection of his strong sculpted features.
The champagne in the glass she nursed had not lost its fizz. Megan dragged her eyes from his face and directed her gaze instead at the golden bubbles as she drew her knees up to her chin and took a deep gulp.
‘Obviously it’s none of my business.’ She took a careful sip and looked at him over the rim of her glass. His response was a faint smile that told her nothing.
‘And obviously you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
He lifted a satirical brow and approached, bottle in hand.
‘But you did bring up the subject,’ she reminded him defensively.
‘I did, didn’t I?’ Not at all in the manner he had intended, but he’d been reacting to events rather than anticipating them all day, and reacting in a way that was totally uncharacteristic.
Megan held a hand over her glass as he tilted the bottle.
She realised his glass was untouched, but then she could recall Philip once commenting during their college days that he’d never seen Emilio tipsy, let alone drunk!
‘No, thank you.’ The moment the well-mannered refusal left her lips the farcical quality of the scene hit her.
She bit down on her trembling lip to hold in the bubbles of laughter that welled in her throat.
‘Care to share it?’
‘I’m being served champagne by a man wearing silk boxer shorts who looks like—’ Her glance swept from his toes to his glossy head, taking in all the perfect bits in between, and she felt her imagination go into overdrive and provide her with a slide show of seriously distracting images.
‘Like?’ he prompted.
Megan shifted her position, arranging her skirt modestly across her knees as she struggled to ignore the shameful liquid heat that flamed between her legs.
‘Well, like you!’ she burst out, frustration making her voice unattractively shrill.
In other words, perfect!
‘Surreal does not even come close to describing all this. I feel like I’ve slipped into someone’s fantasy.’ She stared at his bronzed chest, watching the muscles glide beneath his satiny skin, and thought, Mine!
A glint appeared in his expressive eyes as he surveyed her flushed face. ‘I could take offence at being treated like a sex object.’
‘Which would be hypocritical considering the fact you enjoy flaunting your … your …’
‘Almost as much as you enjoy looking, querida,’ he taunted.
Megan, her cheeks burning, expelled a long shaky sigh as he vanished into the bedroom. A moment later he reappeared, zipping up a pair of faded jeans. His white shirt, which hung open, he made no attempt to fasten.
He held his hands wide. ‘Better?’ he asked, his gesture inviting her opinion as he approached, his intention clearly to take the seat beside her on the vast sofa.
Megan breathed through a wave of paralysing lustful longing and experienced a moment’s panic. ‘We’ll talk if you stay over there.’
‘What,’ he asked, looking torn between amusement and annoyance by her edict, ‘are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about no touching.’
‘No touching?’ he echoed.
She shook her head. ‘Touch me and I’m out of here.’ Touch me and I’m toast. ‘I know you think that all you have to do to close down any discussion is to kiss me, but—’
‘Presumably, considering your rather elaborate precautions, I’d b
e right.’
Megan’s amber eyes flew wide with indignation. ‘That wasn’t what I said—’
He arched a brow. ‘No?’
Realising that was exactly what she’d been saying, she closed her mouth, wishing she could think of a smart line that would wipe that unbearably smug expression off his face.
‘Naturally a man is always pleased to realise that he is actually irresistible.’
‘Just stay over there, Emilio, please,’ she begged, too weary to fight herself and him at the same time.
Their eyes held, for a moment she thought he was going to refuse, then he shrugged and turned, lowering his lean, rangy frame into a chair a few feet away.
He stretched his long legs out in front of him and, resting his chin on steepled fingers, arched an enquiring brow. ‘Better?’
She nodded, thinking it wasn’t better at all.
‘You know, Megan, you can build as many walls as you like, I will—’
‘Huff and puff and blow them down? ‘
He gave an appropriately wolfish grin. ‘And leave myself open to the insult I am all hot air? No, I would remove your walls brick by brick, Megan.’
He didn’t need to. With a cry she leapt up and flew across the room to him. She couldn’t recall why she had put him at a distance, why they needed to talk—so she could hear more about some other woman? Was she out of her mind? She pressed her body to his, wrapping her arms around his neck.
‘I don’t want you not to touch me. I can’t bear it,’ she confided in an agonised whisper. ‘Can I stay here tonight, with you?’
His slow smile was fierce and possessive, an emotion echoed in his kiss. ‘What made you think that you were ever going anywhere?’ he asked, sweeping her up into his arms.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MEGAN sat hunched forward, wrapped in a blanket of silent misery all the way to the airport. It seemed to take hours because, despite the hour, the early morning traffic was heavy and they got snarled up several times.
The taxi driver apologised in heavily accented broken English for the delays and reiterated his promise that he would get her to the airport on time to catch her flight.
Clearly misinterpreting the reason for his passenger’s tension, he reeled off a list of statistics he had clearly memorised for such occasions that demonstrated flying was the safest form of transport.
Normally Megan would have tried to respond to his friendly overtures using her basic Spanish. It only seemed good manners to her to attempt to use the language when you were in a country. This time she didn’t. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth she would start crying.
A hysterically weeping woman might not come under the heading of security threat, but she was not willing to take the gamble and risk being barred from the flight.
So she smiled and nodded instead and wondered again what Emilio would do when he woke up and found her gone.
Had he listened to his father’s message?
She closed her eyes, hearing again the diatribe recorded on the answer machine.
The first half had been in Spanish, but as she had returned from the kitchen, her glass of water in hand, the speaker had slid unconsciously into English, a language he was equally fluent in, at least when it came to curses, which had liberally peppered his comments.
She had tried hard not to hear, even going so far as to hum softly to herself as she hurried through the room to drown out the sound of the voice she had identified as belonging to Luis Rios.
Emilio’s father was clearly furious.
Then she had heard her father’s name and stopped.
‘Charles Armstrong was on to me half an hour ago. It turns out he gets the early edition of the damned British tabloids. Of course he was more than happy with the connection and shamelessly hinting at marriage plans—the man is deluded, but that is no reason to offend him. He can be useful to you and he does have influence in certain circles.
‘What were you thinking of? You kiss the girl in an airport terminal packed with people with mobile phones, of course you end up on the front page. I’ve no doubt at all it will be all over the Internet. I can only hope there is nothing more incriminating out there.
‘My son and a girl who is the daughter of some cleaner. Por Dios, what were you thinking of? If you’re going to get involved with one of the Armstrong girls, did you have to make it the bastard? The other at least has some sort of pedigree. What have I told you? Bad blood will out! Well, I insist that it ends now. If not I will have no compunction in disinheriting you.’
The diatribe had continued, but by that point Megan had heard enough. She had dragged on her clothes, pausing only to take one last look at Emilio’s sleeping face before she had left the building and hailed a cab.
Would he be angry or secretly relieved when he found she was gone and read her note?
She had her answer to the depressing question a lot sooner than she anticipated.
Having paid off the driver, she was walking towards the terminal building when a shadow fell across her. She automatically turned her head, just in time to see a tall figure clad in a black biker leather jacket remove his helmet.
‘We cannot carry on meeting like this, querida.’
The sound of his soft accented drawl hit Megan with the impact of a thunderclap. Shock held her immobile. Totally paralysed, she gazed up blankly at the tall, rampantly male figure exuding masculinity from every pore and thought, He can’t be here.
Logically he could not be here; she had left him sleeping. Was she hallucinating, or had she lost her mind?
Dragging a hand across his tousled dark hair, Emilio bared his teeth in a smile that left his dark eyes angry and cold as he stepped directly into her path, removing his designer shades as he did so, to pin her with a stare with the same penetrating quality as surgical steel.
People were staring, not because he was doing anything, just because he was Emilio—he was really here.
‘You … here … I don’t … How?’ Megan stammered, barely able to hear her own voice above the pounding of her overstressed heart. ‘Note … My note, it …’ Frustrated by her inability to form a sentence, she stopped trying and lapsed into miserable silence.
Emilio arched a brow and took her arm, sliding the bag she carried from her shoulder. ‘I always said if I ever found a woman who travels light I would not let her go.’
Her gaze made a slow journey up the long, lean length of him. She released a fractured sighing gasp. He looked like a walking advert for mean, lean and dangerous—a leather-clad fallen angel.
‘You have a motorbike?’
‘It allows me more flexibility than a car does.’
Megan lifted a hand to her spinning head. ‘I feel—not good.’
As he subjected her face to a searching, unsympathetic scrutiny Emilio felt his anger fall away and protective instincts rush in to fill the vacuum. She looked so incredibly fragile, the ribbons of soft colour along her cheekbones only accentuating her ghostly pallor, it physically hurt him to see her distress.
‘You’re not going to faint.’
Her outrage stirred in response to this typically heartless statement. ‘Serve you right if I dropped dead at your feet.’
‘That’s more like it,’ he approved, taking her elbow.
Megan, still in shock, responded to the pressure without thinking.
There was a time lag before she realised they were walking in the wrong direction. She directed a worried gaze up at his stern profile.
‘My flight, it’s …?’
Emilio carried on walking.
‘Emilio.’ She stopped dead. Short of dragging her, which she did not put past him, he would have to listen to her now.
He flashed an impatient look down at her before continuing to scan the rows of parked cars in the distance.
Watching him, Megan was conscious of details she had previously missed, like the pallor of his normally vibranttoned olive skin and the lines of tension bracketing his mouth.
Better to worry about herself. If anyone was capable of looking after himself, it was Emilio.
‘The car should be here,’ he announced after consulting the metal-banded watch on his wrist.
She avoided the obvious question. ‘Look, Emilio, I don’t know how or why you’re here but I left a note. I should be at check-in and—’
‘I know you left a note.’ A muscle clenched along his jaw. ‘You have delightful manners, and excellent handwriting, but neither are the reason I spent the last twenty-four hours in bed with you.’
The earthy disclosure sent a slam of desire through Megan’s body. Lowering her eyes in the vain hope of disguising her reaction, she heard him say, ‘I fully intended to spend the next twenty-four in much the same manner.’
This time there was absolutely no question of hiding her reaction.
She moaned a weak, ‘Oh, God, Emilio!’ And lifted her passion-glazed golden gaze to his. ‘You can’t say things like that to me.’
‘Why?’ He angled a satiric brow and smiled down into her face. ‘It’s true. Are you trying to tell me you don’t want to go to bed with me? ‘
Megan flushed to the roots of her hair and cast an agonised look over her shoulder. Emilio had made no attempt to lower his voice and they were now attracting a great deal of attention.
‘Will you lower your voice?’ she hissed. ‘People can hear you.’ And some enterprising person might snap a photo again.
Anger flashed across his face. ‘Pity you cannot.’ He might not have said the words, but he had told her in every other way possible that he loved her.
He had stripped his soul bare, broken the ingrained habit of a lifetime and lowered his defences to let her in, making himself vulnerable in the process.
She had frustrated his plans to make a formal declaration—a formality as far as he was concerned—by falling asleep in his arms after their last exhausting session of wild lovemaking.