He moved so swiftly she barely had a moment to realize what was happening, until he leaned forward, his mouth slanting across her lips, capturing her gasp of shock.
Ben couldn’t say what had driven him to kiss her, but he knew the second his lips touched hers that he’d done the right thing. Lying prone on the table while she’d massaged his aching body, draining away what had felt like a lifetime’s worth of tension, had been the kind of pleasure-pain he’d never thought he’d actively welcome into his life.
But under her long delicate fingers he’d felt the stirrings of desire—desire that demanded to be acknowledged and acted upon. Since discovering his infertility—and adding that on to the knowledge that due to his recklessness, he was directly responsible for that state—he’d wondered if he’d ever even want to make love again. Goodness only knew the pain of rehabilitation had driven all thoughts of sex from his mind.
Here, now, though, it was all different. While he might never father the son or daughter he’d always dreamed of having, he could at the very least reclaim his manhood, and with who better than the woman who’d remained on the periphery of his memory for more than three years? A woman who’d made all others since pale in comparison.
Beneath his touch he felt her resistance, the rigidity with which she held her body, her reluctance to part her lips. He teased the seam of her mouth with the tip of his tongue then gently caught her lower lip between his teeth and, ever so softly, tugged. Her capitulation was audible in the moan that rippled from her throat—tangible in the way her body relaxed into his. Ben felt a celebration of triumph as her mouth opened for him, gaining him access to her special sweet flavor and the passion she’d been hiding from him since his arrival.
Beneath his fingers her pulse bumped in a rapid beat at her wrist. He recognized its rhythm—it matched his own. Ben deepened their kiss, savoring her taste, the texture of her tongue as it danced with his.
Yes, this was what he’d needed. The unabashed, passionate response of a woman who was as attuned to his needs as he was to hers. He slid both his hands to her waist, pulling her more firmly against him, before easing his hands under the fitted T-shirt she wore, up across the satin smoothness of her belly, over her ribcage and finally over the cotton-covered mounds of her breasts.
Her nipples pebbled against the fabric of her bra and she shuddered as he cupped her in his palms. But he wanted no barriers between them now. He wanted to feel her—all of her. He slipped one hand to her back and released the catch. The material of her T-shirt was too snug, so he eased it up over her body, pushing her bra up along with it and exposing her full rose-tipped breasts. He cupped them briefly before tearing his lips from hers and placing them around one puckered nub and laving it with his tongue, drawing it deeper into his mouth.
Mia pressed her lower body deeper into the cradle of his hips, her hands gripping his shoulders, her head dropping back and arching her breasts toward him in supplication, wordlessly begging for more. He did not plan to disappoint her. His body continued to quicken, to respond to her unabashed desire. His hands dropped to the waistband of her trousers, sliding the button from its keeper before easing the zipper open—and then everything changed.
She stiffened in his arms—one hand fluttering down from where her nails had only seconds ago been digging into his skin to halt him and to push his hand from her.
“N-no,” she breathed.
He kissed her again, sweeping his tongue across her lip. “Yes.”
“We can’t,” she said, pulling away from him. “I can’t.”
He let his hands drop from her, watching as she struggled to do up her bra and pull her T-shirt back down. In the dim lighting of the room her eyes were shadowed, but he could see the moisture that gathered at their corners and threatened to spill over.
“Mia—” He reached for her again.
“No! Don’t touch me. Please, just go.” Her voice broke on the last word.
“I didn’t force you, Mia. There’s no need to act like an outraged virgin when we both know nothing could be further from the truth.”
Frustration clawed at his insides. Frustration tempered with unaccustomed shame at the harshness of his words. He hadn’t meant to lash out like that. He certainly hadn’t wanted to make her cry.
One solitary tear spilled over the rim of her lower eyelid and tracked a line of silver down her cheek. She dashed it away with a shaking hand.
“I should never have let it go that far. I apologize. It was most unprofessional of me.” She turned and grabbed a robe from behind the door and thrust it at him. “Please, use this. I’ll see to it that your clothing is laundered and returned to your room by the morning.”
He accepted the robe and wrapped it around his body. He wasn’t about to let her pretend that nothing had happened. Not when that all-too-brief embrace had made him feel more alive than anything else had since his accident.
“This isn’t over between us,” he growled as he pulled open the door and stepped out into the foyer of the spa.
“Over? It never began. I’m not the person you think I am.”
“I know this much,” he said, “you ache for me just about as much as I do for you right now and we will see this to its natural conclusion.”
He yanked the belt into a knot at his waist and stalked off, his body vibrating with a tension which warred with the cold hard truth that the nascent desire which had begun to blossom within him, was now dormant again.
He fought back the irritation he felt and instead brought forth a new resolve. He would break down the barriers of Mia’s resistance, piece by piece. And he would delight in every minute of it.
Four
Mia collapsed against the table the instant he walked out the door. So much for being strong and in control. If he hadn’t listened to her, hadn’t stopped when she’d asked, she had no doubt he’d be making love to her right now.
God, she was so weak! He’d been here one day. One! And still, just a touch, a kiss from him, was all it had taken to turn her into a scrambled mess of seething need. He had her on every level and she was apparently helpless against his sensual onslaught.
Even now, after he was gone, her entire body continued to hum with desire for his touch, her nipples still contracted and abrading the soft cotton of her bra. The taste of him still on her tongue. She clenched her hands in the covers on the massage table and dragged in a deep, steadying breath.
She had to harden up. Rebuild that control she’d forged in the past three years. Remember what was most important. Slipping into automatic mode, Mia stripped the table and remade it to be ready for the next day. Ready for Ben. She quelled the shiver of apprehension that rippled down her spine. Each day she would have to go through this again. Well, she’d just have to pull on her big-girl panties and get on with it, she told herself sternly. And find something particularly nasty to think about while she did it so that there was no fear he’d ambush her again like he had today.
She reached for the jumble of clothes Ben had left on the chair in the corner of the room and gathered them up. The crisp, citrusy scent of his aftershave wafted up to her in a wave that hit her with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Somehow she didn’t quite think that big-girl panties were going to cut it this time. Something in cast iron, perhaps, she thought with a cynical laugh out loud.
Mia bagged his clothes and set them aside to be attended to by the laundry staff overnight and finished tidying the room. It was getting late and if she didn’t hurry, she’d miss Jasper’s bath time and story before bed. It was precious time they spent together—just mother and son. Right now she couldn’t wait to wrap her arms around his sturdy little body and ground herself again.
Later that night, after Jasper had gone to bed and Mia’s mother, Elsa, had returned to her own private apartment at the back of what had been the guest house, Mia fired up her personal computer and did an Internet search on Benedict del Castillo. Many of the results that popped up in a list on her screen were in Span
ish—a language she’d always loved to hear but didn’t understand a single word of.
She quickly scanned through them, searching for anything with an English translation, and fortunately, there were plenty of them. Mostly tabloid links to pictures of Ben with an ever-changing bevy of beautiful women hanging off his arm at one celebrity-studded function after another. Then she found what she’d been looking for. The details of his accident.
It made for chilling reading. Apparently, he’d been speeding on the coast road toward his home when for some reason his car had gone into a skid. There was conjecture that he’d swerved to miss something on the road and that when his rear tires had hit some loose gravel, he hadn’t been able to regain control. Either way, it had been early the next morning when one of his vineyard workers had noticed the marks on the bitumen and investigated the trail of rubber to the edge.
Rescue workers called his survival nothing short of a miracle. A stand of trees clinging to the steep hillside had prevented his car from tumbling to the rocks and sea below. However, those trees had exacted their own damage when a branch had penetrated the vehicle and quite literally pinned him in the wreckage.
Mia leaned back in her chair. No wonder the scarring to his lower abdomen had been so ragged. And no wonder, if he’d survived all of that, that his demeanor should be so different to that of the laugh-a-minute sex god who’d swept her off her feet when they’d first met. An experience like that changed a person—irrevocably. She knew that herself. While the damage to her life hadn’t been physical, the emotional toll had been huge. The fight to survive both monumental and ongoing.
She could understand the complexities that made up Benedict del Castillo a little better now, she thought. But as she shut down her computer and got ready for bed she forced herself to acknowledge that understanding him would not make it any easier to resist him. She could only hope against hope that she would remain strong.
She slept surprisingly deeply and dreamlessly and was woken only by a sharp cry from Jasper’s bedroom. She flung off her sheets and ran to his room.
The nightlight in the corner cast a warm glow over his bed. She felt a pang of regret that her baby boy was growing up so fast. He’d transferred from his crib and into a “big boy’s bed” about six months ago after she’d lost patience with the number of times he’d climbed from the crib and she’d found him pattering around the apartment. Since he’d been in the bed, however, he’d been an angel. Never once rising through the night unless he needed the potty or had a bad dream.
Checking her tearful son now, though, gave her cause for concern. His forehead was hot and his voice croaky as he tried to talk. She scooped him into her arms and took him through to the bathroom. After soaking a face cloth with cool water and squeezing out the excess, she wiped his little red face. Once he’d settled somewhat, she gave him a drink of water but swallowing just had him crying all over again. She scoured her medicine cabinet for the infant pain reliever she knew should be there somewhere and used a tiny dropper to encourage him to take the liquid.
At times like this she felt so incredibly alone. What would it be like, she wondered, to be able to share these kinds of concerns with a broad pair of shoulders at her side? Mia tried to settle Jasper back in his bed but he was having none of it.
“Mommy’s bed,” he cried and the big fat tears rolling from his dark brown eyes, eyes so like his father’s, were her total undoing.
“Just for tonight, then,” she whispered. “But don’t tell Grandma, okay?”
Her mother was a stickler for children sleeping in their own beds but sometimes rules were meant to be stretched.
“Okay,” Jasper croaked with a conspiratorial wee smile.
Mia was relieved to see he was feeling better with the pain reliever but she had no doubts that once it wore off he’d be miserable again. She put the bottle and dropper next to her side of the bed. At least this way, if he woke again within the prescribed time, she could administer more without disturbing either of them unduly.
The morning brought her a very unhappy little boy and a weariness in herself that had come from calming him several times over the past few hours. It was at times like this that Mia sorely missed the convenience of living in town, as she had when she’d been footloose and fancy-free. In Queenstown, she could have taken Jasper to an emergency doctor during the night and he could already have been receiving medical care. Now, she’d have to rely on her mother to take Jasper, who was becoming clingier by the minute, to their family doctor.
In an ideal world she’d be able to take him herself, but she had a staff meeting this morning and a telephone conference scheduled with her bank manager just before midday. She was no different from any other working mother, she reminded herself. Women the world over faced tough decisions about their children’s care every day. But the reminder was no consolation when her mother came to share breakfast with them and the time approached when Mia would have to turn her sick baby over to someone else’s care.
Elsa readily agreed to take Jasper to the doctor that morning, and made the necessary calls to the surgery and let Don know what time they’d need the boat, while Mia dressed for work.
“There, it’s all sorted. It’s probably just a bit of a cold coming on. You know, in my day we didn’t race off to the doctor at the hint of a snuffle like you young mothers do today,” Elsa said, but her smile belied the censure in her words.
“I know, Mom, but he had a fever through the night. I’d just like him checked over,” Mia responded firmly.
“Of course you would. And you’re going to be right as rain in no time, aren’t you, Jasper?” Elsa ruffled her grandson’s hair with a loving hand and pulled him into her lap for a cuddle. “How’s it going with the new guest? Did he settle in all right?”
“Seems to have. I haven’t had a great deal to do with him so far.”
Mia felt her cheeks burn at the lie she told her mother. Under no extreme of imagination could their kiss ever be described as “not a great deal.”
“What’s he like?” her mother pressed. “I got the impression you two had met before.”
“Just once, years ago. Besides, you saw what he’s like. Tall, dark, handsome.”
“Single?”
“Mom!”
“Well, it doesn’t hurt to ask. I take it you’re not interested in him, then?” Elsa arched one perfectly plucked brow in her daughter’s direction. “It’s about time you started dating again. You’ve worn your hair shirt for quite long enough.”
The hair-shirt comment stung. Mia had done her best to atone for what she’d realized were her shortcomings. If she’d been a better daughter she might have seen her father’s business concerns before they’d overwhelmed him. She could most certainly have cut back on her own extravagant lifestyle if she’d had any idea of the toll it was taking on their financial position.
Since Reuben Parker’s death, she’d done everything in her power to restore some semblance of normality into their lives. Now that she was almost there, she didn’t want to do a single thing that would rock the fragile balance of this particular boat.
“If and when I feel ready to date again, I will,” she replied stiffly.
“No need to get all huffy on me, Mia.” Elsa put one hand on Mia’s across the table. “I know how hard you’ve worked and I appreciate it. None of it was your fault, you know.”
“Mom—”
“No, you need to listen to me. You’ve been an absolute rock since your father died and it’s past time I stepped up and helped out a bit more. You’ve had far more responsibility on your shoulders than you deserved. I know you call me your chatelaine, but I’m not so stupid or selfish that I haven’t noticed that I haven’t been much help to you. Honey, I’m ready now. You gave me my time to grieve and I appreciate that, even when I know it must have been so hard for you on your own. Now I want to do my bit.”
Tears pricked at Mia’s eyes at her mother’s words. She knew firsthand how devastated and be
trayed Elsa had been when all the bad stuff had hit the proverbial fan. It had been a hard lesson for them all. Her mother still rocked Jasper absently in her arms, the little boy already starting to doze again, his cheeks still flushed with a trace of fever. Having her grandson to focus upon had been an anchor for Elsa, one that had helped both mother and daughter immeasurably.
“Mom, you already help me more than you know by being here for Jasper.”
“Yes, but he isn’t going to need me forever. Before you know it, he’ll be five and in new entrants at school. I need to get back in the saddle, so to speak. It’s time I reengaged my mind on matters other than what we’ve lost.”
Mia squeezed her mother’s hand. This was the strongest she’d seen, or heard, Elsa be in years. Before everything had fallen apart, Elsa Parker had been a force to be reckoned with, leading the charitable organizations where she volunteered with her organizational skills and efficiency. It had been a double blow for Mia that after her father’s death, she’d also lost sight of the strong, confident, capable woman her mother had always been. It would be an enormous relief to have her back. To be able to begin to share some of the responsibility for the hotel and spa would be monumental, even if she knew that realistically it would take some time for her mother to get up to speed with how things were run.
“Thanks, Mom. Let’s take it in small steps first—see if you even like what we do here.”
Elsa laughed. “Like it or not, it’s our livelihood. I’ll learn to love it—just you wait and see.”
Mia’s cell phone chirped in her trouser pocket. “That’s my reminder. I’d better get into the office.”
She bent and kissed Jasper, who promptly woke and broke into tears. He insisted on a very long cuddle before he’d go to his grandmother again. It was with a worried frown that Mia left the house and headed for the hotel. She hoped he’d settle and be good for her mother, and she hoped like mad that all would be okay at the doctor. With Benedict del Castillo here at the hotel she couldn’t afford for her concentration to be off, not by as much as a single thought.
For the Sake of the Secret Child Page 4