At the Spaniard's Pleasure

by Jacqueline Baird

  ‘No, let go of me or I’ll scream,’ Liza cried, struggling to break free. Suddenly she was afraid; she glimpsed the icy resolve in Nick’s long, hard glance, the barely controlled anger, and she had a horrible conviction once in the cabin she would never get away, and, worse, her traitorous body would not want to.

  ‘Scream all you like, cause an avalanche, get us both killed,’ Nick said grimly. ‘Or let’s get inside, and talk like two reasonable human beings.’

  She was getting soaked, she was shivering and if she had given in to her impulse to scream… It didn’t bear thinking about. But what were her options? A swift glance at the towering hills and snow-filled sky and she knew she didn’t have any. Liza huffed, ‘You…reasonable—that will be the day,’ but let him lead her into the dry comfort of the cabin. She was a fool where Nick was concerned, but she was not foolish enough to risk pneumonia, or her life.

  ‘I’ll get a fire going; the kitchen is through there—you can put the kettle on,’ Nick ordered with a gesture to one of two doors at the back of the room. ‘The other door leads to the bedroom and bathroom, if you need it.’ And, dropping to his knees in front of the open grate set in a large stone chimney breast, he began laying the fire.

  Nick had tricked her into coming here—why, Liza had no idea, but that did not mean she had to obey his every command. If he wanted a hot drink he could get it himself, and she stood defiantly in the middle of the room.

  Her angry gaze roamed over his crouched figure, white flakes of snow covered his head and as she watched they vanished into the blue-black hair, leaving it sleek and gleaming as a raven’s wing. His shoulder blades flexed as he reached for some logs from the store box at the side of the hearth, and his tight buttocks strained the fabric of his jeans. Swallowing hard, Liza tore her gaze away from his powerful body—she was not going down that erotic route again—and looked around the room.

  The simple living room revealed a black hide sofa and matching armchair, an occasional table with a few magazines, the top one featuring a figure leaping off a ski-jump—obviously winter-sports chronicles.

  A solid wooden table, four chairs and a bookcase were the only other items of furniture. Liza wandered over to the table, picked up a magazine and settled herself in the armchair and contrived to appear relaxed. After the scuffle outside, she knew ranting and raving would get her nowhere. Cool reasoning was what she needed.

  Nick was a complex man; highly respected in the business world, conservative where family were concerned, he projected an aloofness mingled with impeccable courtesy that most people found very charismatic, especially women. Yet he could also be hard and implacable, as he had been when he found her in the stable. Then again, yesterday, when he had hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her into the hacienda, he had unleashed a controlled violence that, as Liza recalled the scene now in the close confines of the cabin, made her shiver with inexplicable fear.

  He had not become super-rich without taking risks, Liza knew, but kidnapping must be up there with one of the biggest. She didn’t believe he would hurt her, not physically. As a child she had known him to be kind, considerate and with endless patience. Now she needed to exhibit some of that patience herself. He would have to tell her eventually why he had brought her here.

  The fire crackled into life, flames casting eerie shadows on the cabin walls, and a moment later Liza watched as Nick stood up and took a step towards her, his broad frame vaguely threatening. ‘Where are we?’ she burst out, tilting her head back to look up into his coldly handsome face. Unfortunately patience was not one of her strong points. ‘And why?’

  For what seemed an age he surveyed her with dark, impenetrable eyes, his tall, strong body tense, then he thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers. ‘We are in my ski-cabin in the sierra an hour or so drive above Granada,’ Nick responded with cool assurance. ‘The ski resort is not far away, and I am hungry, so we can eat there or here; the choice is yours.’

  ‘Eat. Is that your answer?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Do you ever think of anything except your appetite?’

  An aristocratic black brow arched sardonically. ‘You don’t really want me to answer such a provocative question, Liza.’

  ‘Yes—no…’ she amended swiftly, agitation getting the better of her. ‘But I do want to know why my winter holiday in the sun has left me freezing and stuck halfway up a mountain in the snow, with a man who could quite easily double as a maniac.’

  Nick didn’t move and she felt her breath quicken slightly, and for a moment she almost believed there was a glimmer of regret in the dark eyes he had fixed on her with hypnotic, probing force. Then the moment was gone as he reached down and she flinched as he brushed his hand over her head.

  ‘Your hair is wet with snow.’

  ‘Hardly surprising,’ she snorted and tossed her head, shaking off his hand. She was glad that she was sitting down as it made it easier to escape his too intent gaze, and she focused instead on the solid mass of his chest.

  Nick studied Liza’s down-bent head, her pale features, and felt a flicker of remorse and squared his broad shoulders. ‘I know it is all my fault, Liza,’ he confessed and, dropping to his haunches, he placed a hand on her shoulder, ‘but I did it for us,’ and with his other hand caught her chin and turned her head to face him. ‘I wanted us to be alone together. I want you, and you said no sex in my mother’s house. So…’ He elevated one broad shoulder and rested dark, smouldering eyes on Liza’s face.

  ‘Do you honestly think I am stupid enough to fall for that line a second time?’ Liza cried, about ready to explode with rage at the sheer cheek of the man. ‘My God, you spent last night with Sophia—what kind of idiot do you take me for?’ Shoving him hard, she leapt to her feet, gratified to see he had fallen on his bum, but couldn’t help wishing it were his head.

  Nick swore in Spanish and leapt to his feet, reaching out for her, but Liza took a quick step back. ‘You really are a piece of work, Nick. Talk about double standards.’ She studied him with contemptuous eyes. ‘You think I am a slut… So what does that make you?’ she derided with a shake of her head. ‘Just get me out of here.’ There was no point in arguing with the man.

  ‘No.’ Nick stilled, struck by the pained look in her eyes and appalled to realise she had taken words said in youthful anger years ago so much to heart. Dios! He was an unfeeling brute. ‘Liza, I have never thought of you as anything other than a lovely girl.’ He took a swift step toward her. ‘And I never slept with Sophia.’

  A lovely girl. For a second Liza almost believed him until she remembered where she was, and why, according to Nick? Because he wanted her alone! After what she had learned last night, she could not believe he was still prepared to lie through his teeth. Had she ever known Nick at all? she wondered bitterly.

  She bit her lip and lowered her eyes; she had no illusions left. Loss of pride and humiliation lived inside her like a cancer, eating away at her self-respect, when she thought of how eager, how willingly she had fallen into his arms, her body warm and pliant to his every desire. Well, never again. She gritted her teeth and pushed the self-destructive feelings to the back of her mind. It had been a fleeting desire at best on his part, and it crossed her mind to wonder just how far the swine was prepared to go to achieve his own ends.

  With that thought uppermost in her mind, Liza lifted her head and responded with an elegantly arched brow, cynicism evident. ‘Never slept with your fiancée?’

  ‘That was years ago!’ Nick exclaimed with incredulously long-suffering masculine outrage at the vagrancy of the female. Any sane man would have concluded she was talking about last night. He could not do right for doing wrong in Liza’s eyes, and he was getting mighty fed up with it.

  ‘Last night for old time’s sake, was it?’ she prompted icily.

  ‘There was no last night,’ Nick snapped; as he knew to his cost, his rampant arousal had kept him up all night in both senses and it was this blue-eyed vixen’s fault. He had spent the
whole night seated on a chair by the connecting door to her room, keeping guard.

  ‘Your bed wasn’t slept in.’ Liza realised with a sickening jolt she was in danger of revealing more than she wanted him to know. ‘I happened to notice on my way out this morning.’ She lifted a slight shoulder and dropped it again, feigning indifference.

  Nick closed his eyes and breathed in deep and slow. She had turned his perfectly ordered life upside-down in a matter of days. He was furious with himself and furious with her, and lack of control was not a sensation he was accustomed to around women. But on the plus side he realised Liza was obviously jealous, which was something, and when he opened his eyes none of his emotions showed on his hard, handsome face.

  ‘Why, Liza, I do believe you’re jealous,’ he drawled mockingly.

  Liza went red then white and in a voice laced with pain she snarled, ‘Of you, never,’ her control suddenly breaking at his mocking assessment. ‘Sophia is welcome to you.’ Her voice cracked. ‘You took up with me, made love…no, had sex with me simply to make her jealous. You probably dragged me up here because you’re afraid I would tell her what a two-timing rat you are. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Dios! You have some opinion of me if you think I would make love to two women in the same day,’ Nick said grimly, and when he took a step forward into the light she could see faint lines of what looked like strain etched into his skin.

  ‘My opinion does not matter, but God help Sophia when she marries you. I can almost feel sorry for her.’

  ‘Married to Sophia, are you nuts?’ Nick exclaimed and crossed the floor swiftly, grasping her chin before she could turn away, his breath warm against her skin, his eyes dark and shocked as he forced her to meet them. Of all the things he thought she might accuse him of when she discovered where they were…marrying Sophia was not one of them. He surveyed her with dark, impenetrable eyes, his tall, strong body tense, he saw the hurt she was trying valiantly to hide, and he felt like pond life. ‘I don’t know who has been filling your head with wild stories about Sophia, and me, but they are not true.’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ Liza said angrily. ‘I always suspected you had an ulterior motive for bringing me to Spain, and the party.’ She had tried living in a fool’s paradise but it didn’t work and now she decided to tell him the truth, she had nothing to lose…

  ‘Marco told me everything. Apparently it’s common knowledge you have been…’ she couldn’t say in love ‘…hankering after Sophia ever since she broke the engagement, and went to work in Brussels. And it was also common knowledge she was back in Spain for the first time in years and was attending the party. You used me to make her jealous and I will never forgive you for it. Now get me out of here.’

  ‘No,’ Nick said evenly. ‘You have got it all wrong.’ In this at least he could tell her the truth. ‘Please, Liza, listen to me.’

  ‘I have listened to you too damn much, which is why I am stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere instead of the cabin of a plane,’ she declared hotly.

  She was the most beautiful, infuriating, crazy, mixed-up lady he had ever known, and he couldn’t help it—he laughed.

  Incensed, Liza raised her hand and would have slapped his face but he caught her wrist. ‘Calm down, Liza, and let me tell you the truth about my so-called engagement to Sophia. It was an engagement of convenience, nothing more.’

  ‘Pull the other one,’ Liza mocked, and frowned ferociously, determined not to listen to him.

  Seeing her frown, Nick made a wry face. ‘I am not proud of the fact, but at the time I got engaged you might remember my father had been diagnosed with cancer. His one wish was to see me settled with the firm and with a wife.’

  She did remember her mother telling her that Señor Menendez was ill one Christmas, and the next summer Nick had been engaged.

  ‘Work was no problem—I joined the firm, and I got engaged to Sophia to keep him happy. Sophia agreed because she wanted to go to university, and the engagement stopped her father grumbling about her wasting her time studying, when she should be finding a husband. I helped her out financially. It was a business agreement, nothing more, and it ended two months after my father died.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that after last night?’ Liza said flatly. But her own innate honesty forced her to admit if Marco had not told her the rumour about Nick and his unrequited love she probably would have believed him, because it had been a sudden engagement yet it had dragged on for three years, ending after the death of his father. The facts fitted. She was no longer sure what to believe, or who.

  Nick stepped back and spread his hands wide. ‘Why else would I tell you?’ His mouth was sardonic. ‘Think about it. If what you thought was true, and I was afraid you were going to speak to Sophia about us, it would make more sense to put you on the first plane out of Malaga.’

  He always had an answer for everything, but he was right, damn him! Liza collapsed down on the sofa. ‘Then why…’ she demanded, shaking her head and looking confusedly around the small cabin ‘…why here?’

  ‘Enough, let’s stop this pointless argument,’ Nick growled, his frustration getting the better of him, and, bending down, he flung a strong arm around her waist, lifted her bodily off the sofa and held her hard against him. ‘All I am trying to do is protect your reputation.’ And it was as near the truth as he dared tell her.

  ‘By dragging me off to a cabin when I was on my way back to some sun in Lanzarote? Some protection!’ Liza shot back derisively, and looked into his dark eyes, her own shooting sparks. Who the hell did he think he was? Hauling her around the countryside as if he was some mediaeval slave master, apparently for sex, without his precious family finding out. He wasn’t protecting her, he was protecting himself…

  ‘I wanted to be alone with you, and I had hoped you felt the same,’ Nick seethed and, swinging her up in his arms, he strode across the room and elbowed open a door. ‘I am looking after you and that is the end of it.’

  Imprisoned in his arms, Liza quailed at the barely leashed violence in his black eyes, and, looking away, her eyes collided with a massive white quilt-covered bed, and her temper soared. ‘Forcibly carrying me into a bedroom…’ she cried. ‘You call that looking after—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Nick roared, dropping her onto the bed, and before she could move a muscle he was over her, his mouth covering hers in a savage, possessive kiss. ‘This is our best line of communication,’ he rasped against her swollen lips a long, savagely passionate moment later. ‘The only one that need concern you. As for the rest, believe me, it is for your own good.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘FOR your own good.’ As a child Liza had hated that comment; it had invariably meant the opposite of what she wanted to do, and it sounded no better coming from Nick Menendez.

  ‘No,’ Liza yelped breathlessly, and was shocked by the darkening desire in his glittering eyes, felt it in the hard length of his body pressing her down into the mattress. ‘You are no good for me or any woman,’ she cried. ‘And I wouldn’t believe you if you were the last man on the planet.’ She could not dismiss the notion that he had an ulterior motive for getting her on her own. If not Sophia, then maybe her original suspicion of industrial espionage was not such a wild idea.

  Nick raised his head; he rolled off her, and flung an arm over his face. What the hell was he doing? She looked terrified.

  Scrambling off the bed, Liza turned and glanced down at Nick, her face hot, another second and she would have been putty in his hands and the thought appalled her. She watched as his arm fell down to his side.

  ‘It’s all right, Liza, you have nothing to be afraid of. I have never forced a woman into bed, and I am not going to start with you.’ His voice was flat and devoid of any emotion. ‘I told you the truth about my relationship with Sophia, and as for wanting you,’ a wry smile curved his mouth, ‘that is certainly true. I knew that night on the plane that sexually we are extremely compatible. I don’t think even you would a
rgue with that.’

  ‘No,’ she said thickly. Liza felt confused, unable to move or think, and far too intensely aware of his long body reclining on the bed. She lowered her head and stared at her tightly linked hands, clasped together to stop them trembling.

  ‘Good.’ Nick rose in one fluid motion to stand towering over her. ‘Then how about we start afresh?’ He captured both her hands in his. ‘Look at me, Liza,’ he said quietly, and warily Liza lifted her head and met his dark eyes. ‘We are two good friends on a skiing holiday.’ He let go of her hands and tipped her chin with one long finger. ‘That is all I ask. It can be a great holiday,’ his eyes darkened perceptibly, ‘or a fantastic holiday—the choice is yours; all you have to do is ask.’

  She wouldn’t have been human if she wasn’t tempted but the wounds were still raw from the first time he had suggested a holiday. Amazingly Liza reminded herself it was only two days ago, and her emotions had been on a roller-coaster ride from ecstasy to agony ever since.

  About to tell him no way, she changed her mind and took rapid mental stock. Nick was her first real lover, so it was hardly surprising doubt and suspicion plagued her. As for Sophia, she was inclined to believe Nick. He would hardly be here with her if he was madly in love with the other woman. Maybe his idea of being friends wasn’t such a bad one; as for the rest, she was in charge… ‘But why skiing?’ She didn’t realise she had spoken out loud.

  ‘Because it is the national championships this week; some of my friends are taking part, and I love skiing.’

  Liza’s blue eyes widened to their fullest extent on his handsome face, her mouth falling open in shock at the sheepish expression in his incredible eyes. ‘I don’t believe it.’