by Kim Lawrence
He cut across her. ‘I was being serious.’
Her eyes fell from his. His intensity was unsettling; actually, he was unsettling.
She gave a strained little laugh. ‘I’m sure you’re not really interested…’
‘I asked, didn’t I?’
‘I work in a city casualty unit. I’m a nurse.’
‘A nurse?’
She tilted her head to one side and studied his face. ‘You sound surprised.’
‘I am,’ he admitted, though now he thought about it he could see her in the role. ‘The last time I was in a casualty department in England my nurse was a rugby player called Tomas. I’m feeling cheated.’
The glow in his eyes made her dizzy and excited.
‘So its not just last night—you spend your time saving lives.’
Maggie gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘It’s not normally so dramatic and there is no danger involved, except of course when a drunk decides to take a swing.’
Rafael tensed. ‘At you?’
Maggie who couldn’t stop staring at the muscles clenching and unclenching beside his mouth, nodded. ‘It has been known,’ she admitted, blinking as he loosed a stream of fluid, angry-sounding Spanish. ‘Don’t worry,’ she added, patting the clenched hand that lay nearest her and saying cheerily, ‘I can take care of myself and I have very quick reflexes.’
‘What sort of world are we living in when a nurse takes being assaulted for granted? Madre di Dio, your family allow this?’ he grated incredulously.
‘It’s not really a question of allowing, is it? I’m over eighteen…I’m over twenty-one, and I’ve never been assaulted. It happens, but not to me.’
‘But it could. Well, I,’ he announced autocratically, ‘would not permit it.’
‘Well, I’m glad I’m not your sister.’
‘So am I, but I have no sister.’
‘Your father and mother?’ she asked, wondering about this man whom she was alone with and realising he had told her nothing about himself. She had slept with a stranger and she had agreed to stay with him.
His shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘Both dead.’
The pragmatic statement did not invite sympathy but Maggie’s tender heart ached. ‘I can’t imagine what that would be like.’ A shadow crossed her face as she imagined a life that did not contain her family.
‘So you have a family…?’ Having pushed the Angelina question to the back of his mind, he did not enjoy the topic being front and centre where he could not ignore it.
She reached into her bag and pulled a family snapshot she always carried from her wallet. She held out her hand and offered it to him.
Maggie frowned as she watched an expression of astonishment wash over his dark face. He was looking at the snapshot as if it were an alien.
‘Is something wrong? You don’t have to—’ She began to withdraw her hand but he caught her wrist.
‘No, nothing’s wrong,’ he promised, taking the photo, not because he actually felt any interest but because he knew it would have injured her feelings if he had refused.
Feelings were entirely new territory for him and he saw no urgent need to explore this development.
‘I’m more used to being offered bills for designer shoes.’
Her brow furrowed in confusion at the comment. ‘Why? Do you have a business interest?’
He regarded her in much the same way she imagined he might had she just announced that she believed in Santa Claus.
‘No, I have girlfriends with expensive tastes who like me to pick up the tab.’ He did not begrudge the expense, he considered himself a generous lover.
The plural was not wasted on Maggie.
Good God, where is your pride, Maggie?
I’m sleeping with a man who, not only does not promise something as basic as exclusivity, he probably doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.
‘If you ever pay for my shoes I will feed them to you.’
He stared. ‘You don’t like shoes?’
‘You may not mind women who sleep with you for your money, but I mind being mistaken for one.’ She pinned him with a wrathful glare and yelled, ‘I’m sleeping with you for the sex! On a temporary basis, obviously.’
‘Obviously, and I promise not to offend you with shoes, though I would like to point out that I like to think it is not just my money they sleep with me for.’
Maggie’s eyes narrowed. She knew they didn’t and she hated them all with a vengeance. ‘You really do love yourself!’
His lashes lifted from his cheek and he levelled a direct look into her eyes. ‘Love is not something I encourage.’
Maggie blinked. The warning was unmistakeable. Then before she could respond to it he began to study the snapshot, saying, ‘Those are your brothers?’ The young men in the slightly out of focus snapshot were both blond and broad-shouldered and duplicates of their father. All three men towered over their sister, and the woman in the wheelchair.
She nodded, wishing she had remembered sooner that this was not the most flattering photo she had ever appeared in. ‘I still had my braces then.’
‘Which accounts for the lack of a smile? The woman in the wheelchair…your mother?’
‘Yes.’ Maggie did not want to go into details, but added, ‘But she’s not in the wheelchair any more—at least, not all the time.’
‘Your brothers are not much like you.’
Maggie grinned. Talking about her family made this abnormal situation seem less surreal. ‘You mean because they’re six feet four or because they’re blond?’ she suggested, raising a hand to her dark hair and grimacing as she realised it had come free of the ponytail and now hung loose in a tangled skein down her back.
‘Your colouring is very…Mediterranean?’ His glance moved across the glowing contours of her face. Her skin was flawless and had a peachy sheen that was almost opalescent. The idea of carrying her back to bed became more urgent than eating breakfast.
Maggie’s eyes fell evasively, her long lashes brushing the soft curve of her smooth high cheekbones, but not before Rafael had seen the emotion flicker across her face.
‘Actually, I wouldn’t look like Ben and Sam. I’m adopted.’
‘That must have been a shock…discovering you’re adopted.’ Rafael suggested, watching her push the gleaming strands of hair back from her heart-shaped face with both hands, looping it into a heavy bunch before letting it fall down her back.
She shook her head. ‘Not really. I didn’t discover—I always knew I was adopted. Mum and Dad always made me feel special because they picked me.’
‘But your brothers, they are…?’
‘Big surprises, with an emphasis on the big,’ she added with an affectionate grin. She felt some of the tension slip from her shoulders as a mental picture of her younger siblings formed in her head. ‘Mum and Dad thought they couldn’t have children so they were pretty shocked when Ben came along and then, a year later, Sam.’
‘So your real mother?’ he probed, wary of pushing too hard.
Her smile vanished. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she suggested.
Rafael gave a casual shrug and didn’t push.
‘I really envy you being bilingual…Spanish is such a marvellous language and you have an incredible home. I have never met anyone who lived in a castle before.’ She stopped, drew breath, and prayed for the floor to open and swallow her.
She had just taken inane babble to an entirely new level. On the plus side, at least she had run out of breath before she asked him about his heating bills!
No, actually there was no plus side.
‘We don’t have to talk at all.’
The invitation in his smoky, sinfully sexy voice would have been obvious no matter what language he chose to use. Maggie’s breath snagged in her throat. Her eyes fused with his and Maggie’s insides melted.
She reached for the coffee pot and refilled her cup. ‘This is great coffee,’ she enthused.
‘Or we could…?’ Rafael conceded
drily.
Maggie, who couldn’t stop staring at his long tapering fingers—she had never looked at a man’s hands and thought about them on her skin, but now she had she couldn’t stop—blurted with incurable honesty, ‘I feel very out of my depth.’ She levelled her candid gaze at his face and wondered how she had ever been mad enough to think a one-night stand with him was a good idea.
‘Once you learn to tread water, depth is not a problem.’
‘I can’t swim.’
‘But you are a very fast learner.’
She blushed and looked at him through her lashes. ‘You’re a passable teacher, but you’re also the sort of man I’d normally cross the road to avoid. You’re not my type at all. It’s crazy, but from the moment I saw you I…’
‘You what?’
Maggie shivered. He had a voice that was the auditory equivalent of having your skin stroked against the deep pile of rich velvet.
‘The moment I saw you I wondered…I wondered what sort of kisser you were.’ And you had to tell him that why, exactly?
Rafael didn’t move, didn’t blink, but she heard the breath leave his lungs in one audible hiss.
She carried on looking at him.
It was said and there was no way she could unsay it. Near-death experiences did not make you braver, they clearly made you more stupid!
‘God, pretend I didn’t say that. I’m embarrassing myself…’ she admitted, not looking at him. ‘I’m embarrassing you.’
‘I am not easy to embarrass.’
Her eyes lifted. ‘I know,’ she conceded unable to take her eyes off his dark face. ‘Not that I’m suggesting that’s a bad thing. It wasn’t a criticism,’ she added hastily, thinking not many people looking at his face would find much to criticise.
Her embarrassed little laugh transmuted into a sharp intake of breath as he left the table and came round to join her.
Holding her eyes, he took her hand and drew her up to him. Placing a hand behind her head, he tilted her face up to him.
‘I too wondered when I saw you how you would taste. I wanted to find out right there in the street.’ And what man would not? How could any man with red blood in his veins resist the combination of warm sexuality, wide-eyed innocence and a body made for pleasure? ‘What would you have done if I had?’
‘Screamed, called for help…?’ she suggested, struggling to inject amusement into her voice and failing totally—her breath was coming in short choppy spurts that made it difficult to breath and impossible to raise her voice above a whisper.
‘And now?’ he asked, running his thumb across the cushiony pink surface of her lips.
She closed her eyes because looking at the flame burning deep in his—a trick of the light, probably—made her dizzy, and said, ‘Are you going to kiss me or torture me?’ She held her arms wide in a come and get me gesture and, eyes still tight shut, tilted her head back in invitation.
‘When you put it like that I see it would be an act of charity to put you out of your misery.’ The fever in his blood as he looked down at her made him shake—literally shake with need.
She tensed in anticipation of the plundering pressure of his lips; the light touch on the corner of her mouth took her by surprise.
Maggie’s eyes flickered open. They were still open, welded to the silver gleam in his, as he increased the pressure slightly as his tongue followed the curve of her mouth, leaving a damp trail.
The heat and frustration inside Maggie mounted as she noticed just how ragged her breathing was.
‘How was that for you?’
‘You know your way around a mouth. Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me yet,’ he breathed against her mouth.
So I would get a good score, hmm?
His wicked grin flashed as he took her face between his big hands.
‘That was not a kiss, that was merely the beginning…foreplay. I love the way you blush…I love your skin…’
‘There is only so much foreplay, Rafael, a girl can take.’
The touch of his warm lips as they claimed her sent a tide of heat through her body. Rafael’s arms slid around her body, pulling her close into him. Maggie’s arms curled around his neck as she raised herself up on tiptoe and leaned into the male hardness of his lean body, excited by the leashed hunger that made him shake.
The excitement spiralled at the first sensual stab of his tongue into the warm, moist recesses of her mouth. She moaned with need and kissed him back, her hands bunching into fists as she grabbed the fabric of his shirt.
‘I’m so sorry, darling, I had no idea.’
Maggie jumped away from him as if shot. Blinking as she struggled to clear the sexual fog in her brain, she stared. For some reason the star of a top American detective series was standing in the doorway.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN the flesh and without the benefit of lighting and make-up and minus the skin-hugging trademark leather trousers Camilla Davenport was even more beautiful than the wisecracking detective she played on the small screen.
Five ten in her bare feet, which she wasn’t—her heels had to be at least four inches—she was dressed in what was probably the latest fashion. It was hard to find fault.
And Maggie tried!
In real life the actress’s eyes were actually bluer, her lips even more incredibly pouty, and her breasts—was it even possible—more perky. And the people who said the camera put on ten pounds were obviously lying.
Was he sleeping with her?
Of course he was sleeping with her.
Maggie felt sick and stupid and plain. A plain, stupid woman throwing up—that would leave a great lasting impression, because obviously she was leaving. It would save him the bother of asking her to go.
‘Camilla, what are you doing here?’
Rafael dragged a not quite steady hand through his dark hair and turned a less than welcoming glare on his ex-lover.
‘And how did you get past Security?’
‘Oh, don’t blame them—nobody told the darlings I am yesterday’s news. Rafe, darling, you look absolutely scrummy…’ She advanced with a purposeful sexy sway and kissed him on the cheek, not from intention, but because he turned his head before she landed the kiss.
She gave a sigh and stroked a red-painted nail down his cheek. ‘As always,’ she said, adding with a pout, ‘you are a spoilsport.’
Rafael issued her a glare of seething impatience and her hand fell away.
‘Oh, all right, look, I can see my timing is absolutely lousy as usual—’ she flashed Maggie a friendly look apparently totally all right to find her lover with another woman ‘—but I was up here to check on the house. I’m thinking of putting in a new pool. I have a little villa just across the valley,’ she explained to Maggie. ‘Rafael makes a very friendly neighbour.’
‘I can imagine,’ Maggie said, trying hard not to, but Camilla’s attention and her fluttering eyelashes had already returned to Rafael.
‘So I thought I’d come and say sorry in person and I am truly…’
Rafael struggled to contain his impatience. ‘For what?’
She widened her eyes in amazement. ‘God, you don’t know! Wow, that’s…awkward.’ She lifted her brows and grimaced in Maggie’s direction. ‘He always reads the papers from cover to cover, doesn’t he? But not today. I guess he was busy.’
Maggie blushed and Camilla gave a husky laugh and said, ‘You’re different.’ Her attention swung back to Rafael. ‘All right, I’ll come clean. You remember that gorgeous weekend we spent on your yacht?’
‘I remember.’
Would anyone notice if she slipped out? Maggie wondered bitterly. Or on second thought she might make a scene, a big, noisy scene, and smash a few things because dignity was not, in her opinion, any substitute for broken crockery.
Different—presumably that translated as not glamorous.
Camilla took a folded newspaper from her bag and spread it on the table. Rafael, oblivious to Maggie’s violent pla
ns, did not even glance at it.
He can’t even take his eyes off the woman, Maggie thought miserably…and who can blame him?
‘That afternoon on the deck when we got…It turns out we weren’t alone. Tragic, I know, and so shocking—there’s absolutely no privacy these days. I think it must have been that speedboat that passed…’
‘Just as you took off your top.’
Maggie closed her eyes and thought, Just kill me now, let me die or, failing that, let me come up with a really good exit line!
‘Timing is everything.’
Rafael walked over to Maggie’s side. She tensed as she felt his fingers massage the tense muscles of her neck. ‘You all right?’
Maggie moved away and, unable to come up with an exit line of any variety, mumbled, ‘No, if you’ll excuse me…’
He moved to block her exit and declared autocratically, ‘No, I won’t. I want you to hear this.’
Tears of anger and humiliation formed in her eyes. Did he want to rub her nose in it for some reason, or was he genuinely unaware of how humiliating this was for her?
Maggie wasn’t sure which explanation was the worst.
‘So why are these photos appearing now, Cami, three months after the event?’
Cami and Rafe? She really wanted to throw up now. A choked sound escaped Maggie’s throat.
‘What’s wrong?’
That he could ask the question spoke volumes about his sheer titanic insensitivity.
‘I always knew there was something missing, now I know what it is…a pet name for you, darling.’
The corners of Rafael’s mouth twitched. ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something, honeybunch.’ He turned back to the other woman and folded his arms across his chest. The levity left his eyes as he snapped coldly, ‘Come clean, Cami.’
‘All right, I can see you’ve guessed—you always do. The studio are meeting this weekend and there have been rumours flying around that they are going to cancel the show. The viewing figures were low, but that was because they killed off my love interest…I always said—’
‘Cami!’
‘All right, all right. I arranged for the photo to be taken as an insurance policy, and it turned out I needed it, and,’ she added, clapping her hands and releasing a squeal of delight, ‘it has worked. The photos are all over the Internet, your name guarantees that, and the studio have been on the phone all morning. They are definitely going to commission a third series and give me a pay hike. Aren’t I brilliant?’