by Kim Lawrence
Nell felt a surge of frustration and impatience and opened her mouth to tell him to pull himself together until she realised with horror that she was behaving as heartlessly as Luiz.
She forced herself to smile. ‘Why are you here alone, Felipe? Did you have a row? When did Lucy leave?’
‘She thinks you had a row and buried the girlfriend in the garden.’
Nell responded to the sardonic interruption with a gritted, ‘Will you be quiet? Or I’ll bury you in the garden.’
Luiz met her fulminating glare with a look of patently insincere innocence that drew a low growl from Nell’s throat. ‘You’re totally impossible.’
A wide grin of the painfully attractive variety spread across Luiz’s face as he inclined his dark head in acknowledgement as the tension between them perceptively thawed. ‘Thank you.’
Nell caught herself grinning back and instead compressed her lips into a thin line. ‘That was not a compliment,’ she said repressively.
Felipe, who had been visibly struggling to follow the quickfire interchange, shook his head. ‘I would never hurt Lucy.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t, Felipe.’
‘She left this morning some time…I think…’
Nell, unable to contain her impatience, cut across him. She just prayed that her niece had not got into more trouble. ‘You think—you don’t know?’
‘Not really. She left while I was asleep.’ He wiped a hand across his damp face and pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. ‘She left me a note and took the car. I was stuck—’
Luiz interrupted. ‘What about your phone?’ His glance slid to Nell and he added in a low-voiced aside, ‘There is reception here.’
‘It was in the car when Lucy left.’
‘She stranded you here?’ Nell exclaimed, appalled.
‘Your niece sounds like a very…resourceful young woman, querida.’
Nell cast him a look of seething dislike. ‘Do not call me that—I’m sure Lucy didn’t mean to strand you.’
Felipe looked shocked by the suggestion. ‘Oh, no, not Lucy.’ Nell lowered her eyes. Clearly his cousin had all the cynicism in the family. ‘She said in the note that she’ll always treasure our time together. This wasn’t just a holiday romance.’
Nell had some sympathy for Luiz’s grimace, but she hid it, and when he delivered the pithy advice to Felipe to get a grip on himself, before adding something in rapid Spanish that she was guessing from his cousin’s expression was not flattering or sympathetic, she narrowed her dove-grey eyes and flashed him a warning look.
‘You are not helping.’ She turned with a smile to the younger Santoro. ‘Did Lucy say where she was going? I’m sure she was very upset. She might need—’
‘You?’ Luiz inserted. He gave a laugh. ‘I don’t think so, querida. Accept it—your niece is a young woman who is well able to take care of herself.’ His dark gaze moved across the soft contours of her face. More so than her aunt, it seemed to him.
‘She’ll be at the airport by now.’
Nell dragged her attention from Luiz and turned back to his cousin. ‘Airport?’
Felipe nodded. ‘She put the flight details in the letter.’
‘What a romantic letter,’ Luiz drawled
Nell gritted her teeth. ‘So help me if you say one more word.’ She turned back to Felipe, who was looking startled to hear the cousin he was more than a little in awe of addressed this way.
‘Lucy said if she didn’t catch this flight she’d miss…’ he consulted the crumpled sheet of paper ‘…freshers’ week? If you’ll excuse me I’ll just…’ With a vague smile he vanished through the door, closing it carefully behind him.
Nell folded her arms across her chest, unwittingly pushing her breasts upwards to reveal the suggestion of a cleavage. It was not a suggestion that Luiz was unaware of.
‘So you are happy now? It would seem that your niece is not the hopeless romantic you thought, but a pragmatist.’
Nell, who was aware that Lucy did not emerge from this all that well, elevated her chin to a defensive angle. ‘I suppose you think she’s behaved badly.’
‘I have not thought about it. The truth is I have no particular interest in your niece—she was a means to an end.’ The end had not been intended to include a total breakdown in self-control or the most erotic, mind-blowing experience of his entire life.
Nell’s eyes dropped to the ring on her finger. God knew how but somewhere along the way—possibly when she had lain beneath him and begged him to take her—she had lost track of why Luiz was here. He was holding up his end of the bargain.
Of course, she had given a lot more than their contract demanded.
‘You’ll have your money, so you’re not bothered. I don’t suppose you even care that your cousin is heartbroken.’
The ease with which she believed the worst of him brought a steely glint to Luiz’s eyes. ‘Ah, yes, I have my money.’
The peculiar inflection in his voice made her ask again. ‘Don’t you?’
‘As for Felipe,’ he said, well aware that he had given Nell Frost little reason to think the best of him, ‘I’d like to think he has learned something from the experience but I doubt it.’
‘God, you are so callous!’ Nell exclaimed in disgust as her glance swerved towards the door the jilted young man had walked through.
‘And you are so inconsistent. We are speaking of the person you have spent the last twenty-four hours cursing and now—’ Luiz shook his head. It had always baffled him how women were drawn to needy men who needed mothering. ‘Now,’ he drawled, feeling a strong repugnance for the accompanying image that flashed into his head of his young cousin enjoying Nell’s embrace and maybe even returning it, ‘you wish to kiss him better.’
As if they were attached to a string Nell’s eyes were drawn to the sternly sensual outline of Luiz’s mouth. She swallowed and, losing her concentration, allowed her thoughts to drift to a place where his body was hot, heavy and hard on top of her. A place where his tongue made erotic, stabbing incursions into her mouth.
For long moments Nell forgot to breathe. And only remembered she needed to when the sexual fog that clouded her brain began to lift. Struggling frantically to draw air into her tight chest, she made the fatal mistake of allowing her eyes to connect again with Luiz’s.
His smoky stare was as dark as the feelings that broke free inside her when she looked at him and thought about touching him—the two were impossibly linked in her head.
Low in her pelvis things twisted hard, drawing a little gasp from her parted lips as she fought the enervating languor that nailed her to the spot. Heart thudding, she felt the heat rush to her cheeks—she might as well put up a sign, she thought in exasperated dismay: yours for the taking.
For a moment she thought he might be about to take up the invitation.
He took a step forward, then jerkily, without his normal fluid grace, stepped back and looked down at her with all trace of emotion wiped clean off his face. She might have believed the moment had all been a construct of her overheated imagination had it not been for the muscle that clenched and un-clenched like a time bomb in his cheek.
‘I do not go in for indiscriminate kissing.’
‘Imagine how privileged I feel.’
Nell ignored the nasty interjection. ‘Now I’ve seen Felipe I realise that he is—’
‘Pathetic?’
The suggestion drew her wrathful glare. ‘Did you have to speak to him that way?’
‘Yes,’ Luiz said bluntly. ‘I have no objection to Felipe suffering. I’m sure it is character-forming.’ In his opinion his cousin could do with some. He made allowances because he had a fiercely protective mother; however, there were limits. ‘But I would prefer he did so in silence.’
‘Because real men don’t cry?’ Nell shook her head and directed a look of contemptuous disbelief at him. ‘They should be strong and silent much like yourself, possibly. God, I pity your son if you ever have
one.’ With each successive accusation her temper rose and Luiz’s seemed to cool in a corresponding degree. By the time she flung a shrill, ‘You have the sensitivity of a brick!’ his face looked as though it were carved in stone.
Nell met his dark gaze and realised with a sudden flash of piercing insight that she wasn’t angry with him because he didn’t appear to care about his cousin, but because he didn’t care about her!
Her eyes widened, then as the implications of her discovery took hold her lashes swept downwards across the curve of her marble-pale cheeks.
God knew she had no right to expect anything from him.
She had no right to expect him to care—she didn’t care. Last night had not been about caring; it had been a moment of insanity. She had told herself, she had not stopped telling herself, that last night had been a one-off, but still in a secret unacknowledged corner of her heart she wanted more.
‘I have—’
Her lashes lifted as he began to speak and Luiz stopped dead—the wide, luminous dove-grey eyes that met his were shimmering with unshed tears. His anger fell away in a rush and tenderness that took him totally unawares rushed in to fill the vacuum.
Shock at the intensity of his feelings made Luiz’s voice harsh as he caught her arm and urged her into a chair. ‘Sit down before you fall down.’
Nell, struggling to summon some defiance in the face of his obvious irritation, shrugged off the hand that lay heavily on her shoulder.
‘Will you stop telling me what to do?’
His jaw tightened. ‘What’s wrong?’
Nell looked at him and thought, I want something from you…something more… She passed a hand across her face. She had no intention of voicing her thoughts—she had lost her mind, but not to that extent. She didn’t have a clue what the more she craved from him was, and even if she had been able to put a name to it she didn’t have the right to ask.
‘Nothing.’ The point was, even having her somewhat limited social life, she hadn’t been a virgin at twenty-plus from lack of opportunity, but from choice.
She just wasn’t equipped for the entire sex-without-emotional-involvement thing. She didn’t think she was straitlaced or prudish. A healthy sex drive was nothing to be ashamed of; she just didn’t have one—or so she had thought!
Nell’s glance slid of its own volition to the sensual outline of Luiz’s mouth. She swallowed and pressed her hand to her chest to contain the flutter that climbed into her throat as erotic images crowded into her head.
Clearly Luiz had what she lacked: an ability to separate his sexual needs from his emotional ones. He wasn’t going to be experiencing this awful, aching, empty feeling—it was good old-fashioned and utterly illogical guilt. She inhaled deeply, causing the bodice of her dress to chafe against her oversensitive breasts. It could be worse—she could have fallen for him!
The laugh that left her aching throat just stopped short of hysteria—just. No wonder he was looking at her as though she were a freak; in his world twenty-five-year-old virgins were probably about as freaky as it got.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she snapped.
Luiz, who only ever dated women who smiled at him and told him he was wonderful, found himself for some bizarre reason not disliking her cranky manner—it was probably the novelty value.
She had more prickles than a porcupine. A slightly unfocused expression drifted into his dark eyes—she had not felt prickly in his arms. She had felt soft and supple, responding to his touch without reservation—she had given without expecting anything in return, given without reservation. A need to feel her softness again right now and here of all places, Rosa’s place, swept through him until every cell in his body ached with it and he felt shame at his weakness.
‘Like what?’
‘You try and be aggravating,’ she accused.
He didn’t deny it and carried on looking.
‘What?’ she said, feeling totally unnerved by his scrutiny—actually, not totally. That came when he answered her.
‘The sex, it was good.’ His narrowed gaze slid to her mouth, he swallowed and admitted in a throaty purr, ‘Better than good.’ He added something in Spanish that sounded throaty and sexy and probably indecent so she was glad she didn’t understand him.
‘I’ve not an awful lot to compare it with, but it was not something I will forget in a hurry.’
‘I have a lot to compare it with—’
‘Please spare me the details, I have a sensitive stomach,’ she begged, not joking.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, watching her tug at the ring on her finger.
‘What does it look like? I’m trying to get this damned thing off—’
‘I will not forget it either.’
Nell’s head came up with a jerk. Cheeks tinged with pink, she regarded him warily.
‘I suppose you’re wondering why I slept with you? I’ve been thinking about it.’
‘So have I.’
His deep voice made her stomach flip, but Nell determinedly ignored it and she pushed aside the erotic images of intertwined sweaty limbs that his husky comment had triggered. She opened her mouth to say sorry and stopped herself—why should she apologise? He ought to take at least fifty per cent of the blame.
‘No!’ She held up her hand, shook her head and, just to get her point over, said it again. ‘No!’
‘You introduced the subject,’ he said mildly.
Nell raised her narrowed eyes to his. ‘If I had set out to seduce you I would say sorry. If I deliberately misled you in some way I would say sorry, but I didn’t do either and I’m not going to apologise,’ she added fiercely, ‘for a moment of utter madness.’ She started to rise, found her legs were shaky and sat back down again.
‘You regret what happened?’ Regret—what was to regret? He silently answered his own question—oh, if you didn’t count losing your virginity to a man you barely knew on the floor in the middle of a damn wood…no soft music, no gentle seduction, just a raw, unpolished explosion of hunger. Shame was a sour taste in his mouth.
She had tasted sweet.
At the time the significance of her little gasps of shock had not hit him; they had not made him hold back and make allowances for her inexperience; they had only aroused him more.
The one time in his life he had lost control in the bedroom, and it hadn’t been the bedroom and she had been… His mouth curled into a grimace of bitter self-reproach. Dios, it was a wonder, he told himself, that Nell had not run screaming for the hills.
But she had not.
She had responded to him with a sweetly wild, unrestrained passion that had been equal to his own, as if the same fire that had heated his blood and wiped all sane thought from his brain had also pumped through her veins.
His eyes darkened and he was helpless to control the response of his body as he savoured the sweet memory of her deliciously wild, abandoned responses to his lovemaking.
A woman could lose herself in his eyes, she thought, mesmerised by the glow in his fixed black stare. She took a breath and pulled her eyes clear.
‘When they reach a scary point in their lives some people bury themselves in their work to avoid dealing with it,’ she continued, her voice gaining confidence as she spoke—this was a subject she had given some thought to on the journey, thought, not rationalisation.
‘Me—’ Nell pressed a hand to her chest and gave him a lopsided grin, hoping she was coming across as someone who had dealt with this and come out the other side able to be objective, able to see the funny side.
What funny side?
‘I jumped on a plane for what turned out to be no good reason, then I jumped into bed with you—well, not bed, but you know what I mean. I was…actually I’m not sure what the psychological term is for what I did, or if there is one—’
‘Oh, I feel sure there is one.’
Nell acknowledged the slick, sardonic interruption with a frown.
‘Lucy didn’t need saving.’ Pity the sa
me can’t be said of me! She arched a brow and tilted her head up to him and found he was still watching her.
Nell swallowed as her stomach went into a slow-motion big-dipper dive.
‘You told me that all along. How does it feel to be right?’ She carried on talking because he wasn’t saying anything and Nell felt an irrational need to fill the silence and avoid his smouldering stare.
The trouble with silence was you started thinking, and there were any number of things she didn’t want to think about.
‘I suppose you think it’s funny?’
She struggled to put a name to his expression but it wasn’t amusement.
‘You’re allowed to say I told you so,’ she added. ‘I bet you’re just gagging to.’
‘You want to know what I am… “gagging” to do, querida?’
‘No!’ Cheeks burning, she lifted her hands and held them to her ears.
His laughter took the edge off the high-voltage tension in the air.
‘Look, let’s forget the post-mortems, what’s done is done, no point crying over spilt—’
‘Milk?’ he suggested, cutting across her.
Nell flushed. ‘Well, anyway, that’s it, then. Could you drop me off somewhere I can get a taxi to the airport on your way back?’ Her smile faded. ‘I’ll never see you again.’ Until he responded Nell wasn’t even aware she had voiced the realisation.
‘It is not impossible.’
The mortified colour rushed to her cheeks. ‘Well, our paths are not likely to cross unless you come into the library to borrow a book.’
He lowered his glance with slow deliberation, causing Nell to lift her hands in a protective gesture across her stomach. ‘Or you are carrying my child.’
Nell gave an embarrassed hollow laugh. ‘That isn’t going to happen.’ Anyone would think, from the way he kept harking on about it, that he wanted it to happen.
‘As you say, not likely, but I think we should stay in contact,’ Luiz heard himself say.
‘You do?’ Why?
‘Just in case—’ Just in case I wake up in the night and nothing but you will stop the ache—as the thought formed a flicker of movement in the periphery of his vision made Luiz turn his head.