by Abby Green
‘Something like that,’ Gypsy flung at him, hoping he’d stop coming towards her. But he didn’t.
‘There’s no reason we can’t be that, Gypsy…we have desire…’
Gypsy spluttered, shocked to feel a rush of something that felt disturbingly like hope. ‘That agreement you mentioned is your agreement. If you can recall, I didn’t have much say in it. And Rafael and Isobel have a lot more than desire. You don’t even like me!’
Rico stopped, a muscle in his jaw pulsing. ‘I think it’s safe to say that what I feel for you is undergoing something of a metamorphosis. And, to be perfectly honest, fifteen months is looking less and less palatable. I envisage a much longer union. It’s practical on every level…especially when I don’t see any sign of our desire waning…’
Feeling sheer panic at his cold words, and wanting to know what he’d meant by saying his feelings were changing, let alone the prospect that he’d want to lock her into some sort of loveless but passionate union, she blurted out, ‘Well, I can’t guarantee that my desire will last much longer. And I’m sure your ego won’t relish taking to bed a woman who doesn’t desire you any more. So perhaps you should think of that before you make any rash pronouncements.’
The words were stupid—inspired by panic and completely untrue, much to her own dismay. If anyone was going to lose their desire she had no doubt it would be Rico. She saw his expression change and knew she had to run—fast. She did turn, as if to flee, but Rico caught her easily with his arms around her waist. Gypsy struggled against the inevitable way her body was already responding and half kicked out fruitlessly as Rico carried her into his nearby study, shutting the door behind him.
Her back was against the door and Rico was crowding her, saying dangerously, ‘You were saying?’
Gypsy couldn’t open her mouth. As Rico spoke his fingers made quick work of opening the buttons of her shirt. His hips ground into hers, and with his hands he pushed apart the shirt, baring her lace-covered breasts to his gaze.
Her breasts heaved with the effort it took just to stay standing, and even though on some level Gypsy was aghast at her instant response she couldn’t help it. She could feel her nipples harden and push against the lace of her bra, and Rico saw it too, a feral smile curling his lips as he cupped her breasts and brushed his thumbpads over the straining peaks. Gypsy bit back a moan.
‘I don’t see any evidence of your desire waning. This does not happen to everyone…’ Rico’s voice was guttural. ‘It’s been instantaneous between us since we met. Do you think it’ll burn out when a two-year absence couldn’t dampen it?’
Gypsy fought through the waves of desire threatening to suck her under and said defiantly, ‘Nothing lasts for ever.’
With anger and desire crackling between them, Rico took Gypsy’s mouth in a bruising kiss. Her treacherous hands acted independently of her will and went to his tie to pull it off. Frantically she opened the buttons on his shirt, hearing some pop and fall to the ground. While her hands were on his belt he pushed down the lace cups of her bra, freeing her breasts to his mouth, where he sucked and nipped gently at the sensitised peaks.
Gypsy pushed down his trousers and freed his heavy erection. Rico flicked open her jeans and pushed them down, along with her panties.
‘Kick them off and put your legs around my waist.’
Gypsy nearly wept with frustration when her jeans got stuck, bending down to pull them off before reaching up again to cling onto Rico’s neck and shoulders as he took her legs and wrapped them around him. They hadn’t even moved from the door.
With one smooth and powerful thrust he embedded himself within her. Gypsy gasped out loud, clutching him tightly as he slowly withdrew and then thrust in again. He loosened her hold and set her back against the door, putting some space between them so that he could bend his head and take one rosy-tipped breast into his mouth as he thrust rhythmically.
When he took his mouth away from her breast Gypsy opened her eyes and looked at him. His cheeks were slashed with colour, his face stark with need and passion, his eyes nearly black. With a welling of emotion she acted completely instinctively and clasped his face in her hands, bringing his mouth to hers.
As they approached their shattering crescendo their mouths clung, and Rico swallowed her loud moan as she clenched around him more powerfully than he’d felt before. Then he let himself go, and spilled his life seed into her with such an intensity of feeling that when it was over he could only bury his head in her neck and try to remember which way was up.
They stayed like that for a long moment, the air cooling their hot skin, still intimately joined, and Gypsy stroked Rico’s hair, not even aware of the tenderness of her gesture.
In that moment when Rico felt Gypsy’s hand in his hair, something fundamental within him changed for ever. He might have just impregnated her. And, if truth be told, he hoped he had. Reeling with that knowledge, he couldn’t deny it any more. He had to face up to the fact that his feelings for Gypsy had changed utterly.
Resolve gave him the strength to move, and he carefully let her down, holding her when her legs weren’t steady. He could feel the tremors still running through her body. He handed her her clothes, before picking up his own and putting them on. Never in his life had such intense urgency dictated his actions. He winced inwardly. ‘Are you all right?’
Gypsy looked up from where she’d just pulled her jeans up. She looked dazed. ‘I…think so.’
Rico frowned, fear tightening his insides. ‘Did I hurt you?’
Gypsy blushed and shook her head, her hair falling forward to hide her expression from him. ‘No…you didn’t hurt me.’
With that sense of resolve running through him and gathering force, Rico tipped up her chin. Her cheeks were flushed, lips swollen from his kisses, eyes huge. He had to curb the resurgence of desire. ‘If you think our desire is on the wane, or that this is something that happens more than once in a lifetime, then you’re a more cynical person than I thought you were.’
Gypsy looked at Rico, her heart pounding all over again. He was looking back at her with an indecipherable expression on his face.
‘But…you’re not a once-in-a-lifetime person.’
His mouth tightened. ‘You don’t know what I am, Gypsy, because since the morning after we met and you found out who I was you’ve had me sized up and boxed away.’
Gypsy felt little flutters enter her belly, along with a panicky feeling. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying, Rico.’
‘What I’m saying is that you have to open up to me, Gypsy. You need to trust me. I’m not letting you go, but I’m not going to put up with your blinkered view for ever. I am in your life and in Lola’s life for the foreseeable future. For that to work we need to agree on things like a nanny, and you need to be by my side when I need you.’
Inwardly shaking at his assertion that she needed to trust him and feeling extremely exposed to think that he’d made love to her just to make a point, Gypsy blurted out, ‘Just like I need to be available for a quickie when the mood takes you?’
Rico’s thumb moved back and forth over Gypsy’s skin. All he said was, ‘We both wanted what just happened. Don’t pretend you didn’t. And, just as I’ve never before picked up a woman in a club for a night of anonymous sex, I’ve also never felt that same urgency we felt just now. You have a unique effect on me, Gypsy Butler.’
Just then they heard Lola’s chatter. Agneta had obviously finished feeding her and was looking for them. Feeling very flushed and disheveled, Gypsy pushed past Rico to open the study door, and tried to pretend that everything was normal when the world felt anything but.
At the door she turned and said to Rico, while avoiding his eye, ‘I’m quite tired tonight. I’m going to go to bed early. Alone.’
Rico said with a mocking drawl, ‘Don’t worry, Gypsy. I won’t come to your bed this evening. I’ll be gone early in the morning, but be ready to come to me in Athens at four o’clock tomorrow.’
That night, sleepless in bed, aching for Rico despite her words, Gypsy lay and stared at the ceiling in the dark. She needed to think but her mind was disturbingly fuzzy. She’d got the distinct impression from Rico’s comments earlier that he saw some sort of future for them. But what, exactly? And was she brave enough to ask him?
She turned over on her side and looked out of the window to where the sea was just a black mass, with the small lights of boats flickering on and off. Rico was right. She’d prejudged him and misjudged him every step of the way.
He was nothing like her father in the business sense. And she now knew from his own personal history why he’d been so adamant that he wanted Lola. But still, that didn’t account for the way he’d so instinctively taken to fatherhood. He was nothing like her father in that regard either.
Shamefully, she had to acknowledge that part of her reaction could have come from jealousy at seeing how unreservedly Rico had accepted Lola. She’d never received that from her own father. She could also see that a lot of his initial arrogance had most likely been due to shock, and perhaps a fear that she might try to run away again. He’d done everything he could to make sure they didn’t leave his side.
But more than all of that was the way she felt about him. She couldn’t help but remember the way he’d been that night they’d met for the first time. The magic that had infused the air as the dark and handsomely seductive stranger had put her at ease, made her laugh, and then made love to her with an intensity that had left her in pieces. Knowing Rico as she did now, she suspected that he’d indulged in a much lighter, less cynical version of himself that night. Perhaps because he had been unburdened by his anonymity, just as she had been.
If she was truly honest with herself, amidst all the turmoil of her pregnancy and finding out who Rico was, the one thing that had superceded everything else had been the hurt that he’d left her so coldly. And yet he’d admitted that he’d regretted it, that he’d tried to get in touch with her.
Gypsy’s heart squeezed. She didn’t think she could ever hope that Rico would look at her with the tenderness she’d seen between Rafael and Isobel, but right now her silly heart couldn’t help longing for it. She couldn’t fool herself into thinking that whatever rapprochement was between them would absolve her of her actions in his eyes.
The crows of doubt mocked her for even thinking that she might be falling for him. It had only been a few weeks since she’d met Rico again—how could she trust her feelings when her daughter’s future happiness was at risk? Who was to say that Rico wasn’t just seducing her to keep her and Lola in his complete control, only for him to lose interest and move on, having torn their lives apart?
The old fear was still strong, making her feel as if she should be suspicious of the way he was bonding with Lola. She hated it, but it squeezed like a vice around her heart; it was ingrained within her after years of living with a man who had bullied and controlled her because he’d resented her, the reminder of his weakness. A man who had thought nothing of letting her mother die because she was socially undesirable, and because she’d forced his hand so that he’d had to acknowledge his daughter.
Thoughts and memories roiled sickeningly in Gypsy’s head until she finally fell into a dreamless sleep.
Gypsy looked at herself in the mirror of the wardrobe in a luxurious suite at the brand-new hotel that was opening that evening. A car had met her from the helicopter at the airport and whisked her here to the hotel, where she’d been met by a veritable entourage.
Up in the suite there had been a wardrobe of different outfits, and once she’d picked one out the team had set to work. The hairdresser had even smiled and said to her, ‘I’m under the strictest instructions not to straighten your hair.’ Gypsy had just smiled back weakly, feeling a plummeting sensation in her belly—as if she were falling over an edge into a dark chasm of the unknown.
Now she was on her own again, and twisting and turning to see herself, feeling all at once ridiculous and disturbingly sexy. The dress was a dark gold colour, fitted and to the knee, with just one wide strap over one shoulder, leaving the other bare.
High-heeled gold sandals looked like the most delicate things she’d ever seen and her hair was down, with Grecian-style gold bands holding it back from her face. She wore simple gold hoop earrings.
It was only then that she noticed the tall, dark and looming shape lounging against the door behind her. She whirled around, feeling very exposed. Rico was stunning in a black suit, white shirt, black tie. He straightened up and strolled towards her, and she could see that he was holding a champagne bottle and two glasses. Immediately her stomach roiled at the sight, but she clamped down on it; surely now she could take the opportunity to get over that awful teenage trauma?
Rico stared at her as if he’d never seen her before, raking his eyes up and down her body, and then he said simply, ‘You look beautiful.’
Gypsy grimaced and wanted to squirm.
Rico smiled. ‘Say, Thank you, Rico.’
She looked at him and felt an alien lightness bubble up. She smiled too. ‘Thank you, Rico. You look lovely too.’
He poured champagne into two flutes and handed her one. Gypsy instinctively held her breath as she took a sip. It slid down her throat like an effervescent sunburst and she almost shouted with relief. She’d gone clammy for a moment, expecting to feel the old urge to be sick. But it hadn’t come. She took another sip, relishing it.
Rico touched his glass to hers and said, ‘You look like you’ve never tasted champagne before.’
Gypsy caught his eyes. ‘Not for a long time.’
He arched a brow and asked, ‘Secrets of a hell-raising youth?’
Gypsy hid the dart of pain and said, ‘Hardly.’
A delicious coil of tension settled in her belly as she took Rico in; he was so tall and broad. His face all planes and shadows and hollows.
On an impulse, she blurted out, ‘What happened to your nose?’
Rico stiffened. She could see his hand tighten on his glass, but then he said, ‘My stepfather, the day I left Buenos Aires…He left me with a token of his affection, and a constant reminder that your own flesh and blood is your only real family.’
Gypsy remembered Isobel telling her how Rico had nearly had to be hospitalised.
‘Was he responsible for the scars on your back too?’ She’d noticed the faint silvery lines criss-crossing his back one morning when Rico had got up to go back to his own room, and she’d felt them while making love, but she hadn’t had the nerve to ask about them. Until now.
Rico’s mouth was a thin line. ‘Yes, more of my stepfather’s legacy for not being his biological son. It’s hard to get out of the way of a belt when you’re small…’
Sheer horror tightened her gut, and she had a sudden stark understanding of how important it was for him to be there for Lola.
Gypsy went close and reached up her hand to touch his jaw. Her voice was husky. ‘If I’d been there I would have stepped in the way, so he’d hit me instead.’
She looked up at him. A part of her couldn’t believe what she’d just said, and another part felt fiercely that she’d meant every word. Even now anger bubbled low to think of anyone beating Rico, or hurting him.
Realisation hit her like a thunderbolt. God, she’d fallen for him. There was no luxury of falling about it. She was already deeply and profoundly in love with this man.
To her relief, before Rico might see something of her realisation and her reaction, he took the champagne and put it down before taking her hand.
His voice sounded rough, and impacted upon her somewhere very raw. ‘We should go downstairs. The grand opening will be any minute now, and I have a speech to make.’
Feeling as though the earth had shifted on its axis, Gypsy followed Rico out, her hand tightly clasped in his. All the way down in the lift she looked resolutely at the floor, terrified that if she looked into his eyes he’d know immediately.
Rico stared at the elevator door
on the way down, Gypsy’s hand in his. He was still reeling from her simple assertion that if she’d been there she would have taken the blows for him. He knew she’d been sincere because she’d looked shocked once the words were out—as if she couldn’t believe she’d said them.
The only other person who knew the extent of what Rico had been through at the hands of his stepfather was Rafael, because he’d suffered too—albeit not to the same extent—and many times Rico had felt that Rafael wanted to say something similar. That if he could have borne the brunt of that man’s anger he would have. But he’d never articulated it the way Gypsy just had, with such sweet simplicity.
Taking a deep breath just before the doors opened, Rico gripped Gypsy’s hand more tightly momentarily, and she squeezed him back in silent communication. His chest expanded, the door opened, and they stepped out and into the melee.
Rico had made his speech and was now back at Gypsy’s side, holding her hand again. A guilty part of her revelled in this newly proprietorial touch and she grimaced inwardly. She could never have imagined this—wanting to be claimed so publicly by him.
They barely needed to circulate, as a constant stream of people came to him. The only time he crossed the room it was to another couple, and Rico slapped the man on his back playfully. He introduced the handsome man and his very pregnant wife to Gypsy. ‘I’d like you to meet some newlywed friends of mine—Leo Parnassus and his wife Angel.’
The wife smiled shyly, one hand on her large bump. Gypsy asked how far along she was, and they started to chat about pregnancy and birth. She could feel Rico tense by her side, and when the couple had moved on he turned to her and said, ‘I don’t know anything about your pregnancy, or the birth…’
Guilt rose up, so much more poignant now, and immediately fearing some kind of reprisal Gypsy took her hand from his. ‘I’m sorry…I didn’t think…’ she started.
But Rico took her hand again and shook his head. ‘No, it’s not about that. I’m not angry about that…not any more. But I’d like you to tell me some time, OK?’