by Various
‘I want you eating your lunch up here with me today,’ he informed her silkily. ‘Understand?’
Kat stared into the shuttered black eyes, convinced that his autocratic statement had more to do with possession than because he actually enjoyed her company. Wasn’t it just a demonstration of his power over her—and could she possibly maintain this air of nonchalance if she had long periods of being alone with him?
‘As you wish,’ she said carelessly. ‘You’re the boss after all.’ And she headed off towards the galley.
Carlos was left looking at the empty space she left behind with a feeling of disbelief, and it was several minutes before he was able to lose himself in his work.
But he wasn’t deaf to the sounds of laughter which occasionally drifted upwards from the galley, and as the morning wore on, he found that his mood was growing increasingly sour. So that by the time Kat appeared, bearing a bowl of salad and some sort of pasta dish, his nerves were frayed and he felt the slow and relentless beat of frustration.
‘Hungry?’ she questioned with a smile which sent his pulse rate soaring.
‘I can always eat, Princesa.’
Sitting down opposite him, Kat wondered if he knew that her heart was racing erratically or that the desire to touch him felt almost like a physical pain. What on earth were they going to talk about, when all she could think of was how it felt to have his warm skin next to hers. Especially when he was behaving as if she was completely invisible. Pretend you’re at some tedious social function and have just been sat next to the guest of honour.
‘Why don’t you tell me how you got into bullfighting in the first place?’ she enquired politely, doling out a spoonful of pasta onto one of the plates.
There was a pause. ‘I thought I told you I don’t like talking about it?’ he snapped.
‘Did you? Okay. Then let’s try something else.’ She picked up a dish of salad and held it towards him with a polite smile. ‘Tell me about your business interests instead, Carlos. How you got started, how you made the jump from bullfighter to international tycoon—that must be quite some story.’
Black eyes were narrowed at her in disbelief. She sounded like one of those women he occasionally ran into at diplomatic parties—the kind who had been schooled in making polite small talk to a variety of guests. And Kat would have grown up learning how to do that too, he recognised. ‘I don’t want to talk about my damned business either.’
She shrugged. ‘Well, we’ve got to talk about something over the next couple of weeks, haven’t we? Otherwise what else are we going to do?’
Carlos stared at the blue-black gleam of her ebony hair and felt all his good intentions dissolving by the second. Her blue-eyed beauty and breezy attitude were shattering his equilibrium and making a mockery of his determination not to touch her—but when he stopped to think about it, why had he insisted on her joining him for lunch unless it was to do precisely that?
‘Put the dish down, Kat,’ he said slowly.
‘What did you think I was going to…?’ But her bravado suddenly deserted her as she saw something written on his face—a look which pierced her heart and her body like an erotic arrow. It was desire—raw, undisguised and urgent. ‘C-Carlos?’ she questioned, her voice and her hand shaking as she put the pasta down. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’ll give you three guesses.’
He was on his feet now, moving with the lithe grace of some dark panther as he stalked towards her, as if he were the predator and she his prey. Almost roughly, he pulled her into his arms and Kat stared up at him in confusion.
‘But you said…’ she whispered in confusion.
‘To hell with what I said—I’ve already broken every rule in the book for you, Kat Balfour, so why not break one more and have done with it?’ he demanded, as his mouth came down hungrily on hers.
The kiss was hot, breathless. Two mouths meeting and mingling with urgent greed. Kat shuddered as her hands flew to his shoulders while his own snaked possessively around her waist. She tried telling herself that his stark declaration of desire hadn’t contained a single word of affection, and surely she shouldn’t settle for that. But as his lips continued to sweetly plunder hers, all her doubts just melted away. Sucked into the powerful vortex of newly awoken desire, she found herself wondering just where all this was going to lead. Up here, on deck…surely he wasn’t planning to…to…
But abruptly, he terminated the kiss and, catching hold of her hand, wordlessly led her towards his cabin.
Kat hadn’t been in Carlos’s bedroom since she’d taken that rather resentful tour of the yacht on the day she’d arrived, before he had flown in by helicopter. It seemed a lifetime ago, and yet she could count off the days on one hand. A few days and your life could change for ever…
‘Carlos—’
‘Do you know what we’re going to do for the next two weeks?’ he questioned silkily. ‘I am going to take you to heaven and back, Princesa. I am going to show you a hundred different ways to make love.’ His voice dipped. ‘And then a hundred more.’
‘I…I—’
‘Sssh. Just kiss me,’ he commanded unsteadily.
An unmistakable note of hunger had now deepened his voice and it was strong enough to make her forget her fears. Strong enough to make her feel his equal again—her, the woefully inexperienced Kat Balfour feeling the equal of this worldly wise and powerful Spaniard. How crazy was that? But she did. In that hot and breathless moment she did. ‘Oh, Carlos,’ she whispered helplessly, as she drifted her mouth against his.
Inexplicably, Carlos’s hands were trembling, and for the first time in his life he had difficulty yanking down the zip on a pair of woman’s jeans. But Kat proved bold. She slid his silk shirt off as if she had just been taught the most erotic way to remove an article of clothing—and where she laid his flesh bare, her lips followed, anointing tiny butterfly kisses on his skin.
Her soft, sweet seduction almost took his breath away, and Carlos tumbled her down onto the silken counterpane which covered his vast bed, his hands reacquainting themselves with all her soft curves and secret places as if it had been months since he’d last touched her body, instead of hours. Burying his head between the lush warm globes of her breasts, he could feel her squirm with excitement beneath the flickering path of his tongue. His mouth drifted to one rose-peaked nipple and he heard her gasp as it puckered in his mouth.
‘Carlos!’
‘Sí, Princesa—qué pasa?’
Kat’s fingers tangled in his black curls as waves of pure pleasure washed over her. ‘K-kiss me.’
‘Oh, I will kiss you,’ he murmured, with a low growling laugh. ‘Don’t you worry your beautiful head about that.’
Kat had meant a kiss—a proper kiss—but now his dark head was drifting down towards her belly. And his tongue was sliding into the faint dip there and flicking at her so playfully that she felt quite faint. He was certainly kissing her, but…kissing her there? She shuddered as a wave of pleasure racked through her body, accompanied by another wave of disbelief and wonderment. ‘C-Carlos.’
‘Mmm?’ Now his lips were brushing over the soft fuzz of hair between her thighs, hearing her tiny gasp as he parted her legs and began to lick at her honeyed sweetness.
Kat couldn’t talk. Couldn’t think. She was aware that she was trembling as tiny shimmerings of pure excitement began to build inside her, promising the same pleasure as he’d bestowed on her during the night. Just as she was aware of the sensation of Carlos’s mouth kissing her at the focal point of her femininity. It felt almost unbearably intimate and yet—bizarrely—it also felt like the most natural thing in the world.
The shimmerings now became little peaks—a whole range of sensations which began to hum and throb deep inside her, like a heavily laden honeybee about to topple from a flower.
‘Oh!’ she breathed—and then she clutched his broad shoulders. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’
Inhaling the distinctive scent of her arousal
, Carlos sucked deeply on her throbbing flesh while she orgasmed against his mouth, her sighs of satisfaction sounding like tiny gasps of disbelief.
He moved back up to lie over her, brushing her tousled black hair away from her flushed face. ‘You liked that?’ he asked eventually, a finger moving to trace the trembling outline of her lips.
Liked it? Kat was so overawed by what had just happened to her—so seduced by the subsequent gentling of his tone—that she couldn’t hold back on the way she was feeling. Lifting her hand to one olive cheek, she let it trail deliciously over the dark rasp of his jaw. ‘It was…it was wonderful.’
‘Then let’s make it even more wonderful, shall we?’ But this time he reached for the condom he’d laid in readiness by the bedside and he saw her watching him from between slitted blue eyes as he carefully ripped open the wrapping. ‘Better not make the same mistake again,’ he declared, as he took her into his arms once more, softening her with kiss after kiss until she was ready for that first sweet thrust.
And afterwards, Kat lay there, curled against his hard body, watching the sunlight which was shafting in from the portholes while one word danced around in her mind. Mistake, he had said, as he had slid on the protection and moved over her with dark intent in his eyes.
Carefully, she turned her head to look at him, but his eyes were closed—the harsh lines of strain on his face now dissolved by the recuperative power of sleep. In repose, his face seemed softer, but no less formidable for that. The strong line of his jaw and the proud slash of his cheekbones still spoke of a certain arrogance, and strength.
His was the face and the body of the hunter—strong and powerful—with the finest genes and an unmistakable air of dominance. The kind of man that nature had conditioned women to desire. Instinctively, Kat let her hand flutter down to lie on her belly. How flat it felt—and yet, even now, his child might be growing there. Layer upon layer of tiny cells building by the minute, the hour. How big would it be by the end of the week? By the end of two?
Her heart gave a leap of something which felt uncomfortably close to excitement and, with an effort, she forced the thought away. But then, she’d had a lot of practice at pushing away disturbing memories. And it was pointless getting worked up by a pregnancy which probably didn’t exist outside her imagination.
What if it did? What if she was carrying the Spaniard’s child?
How had Carlos described it? Kat bit her lip, remembering the sudden tightening of his hard features and the words he had used.
Carlos had not viewed the prospect with anything other than a dark foreboding—hadn’t he made that clear with the very word he’d used?
A mistake, he had said.
Chapter Ten
‘SO HOW exactly did you get into bullfighting?’
Carlos slid the cork from the bottle of wine and slanted her a look of irritation as he poured some into her glass. ‘Infierno, Kat—why won’t you give up on that?’
‘Because I’m curious, that’s all. You know pretty much everything there is to know about me, Carlos, but you always get so tight-lipped about your own past.’
Staring at him across the table, which tonight—like most nights—she’d laid on deck beneath the stars, Kat didn’t bother pointing out that they had to talk about something. They couldn’t spend every spare minute having glorious sex and revelling in its lazy aftermath, as the luxury yacht skimmed the sapphire waters of the Mediterranean and they waited to find out if she was having his baby. It was the elephant in the room. The subject they never touched on.
Yet it was funny how life sometimes adapted to the strangest situations. Or maybe that was the enduring wonder of the human spirit—that you always got on and made the best of things. And with Carlos conducting business deals and Kat cooking up increasingly ambitious meals, sometimes it felt like playing house. Even if deep down she knew that all they were doing was a form of displacement therapy, while they tried to ignore the great question mark which hovered over them.
Sometimes it frightened her—the ease with which she had been able to push the burning issue far from her mind and to concentrate instead on the proud, dark allure of her Spanish lover. Even if she knew that she was storing up danger for the future—because she had started to care for him in a way which would never be reciprocated.
She had become his eager and responsive lover—though time after time she had told herself it was crazy to become emotionally involved with a man whose heart was famously as cold as ice. Why, hadn’t he warned her of that himself when he’d recounted with amusement just why his yacht had been given its unusual name of Corazón Frío? A Spanish newspaper had nicknamed him ‘Cold Heart’ because of a particularly ruthless takeover bid he had executed—which had coincided with a starlet selling her story of their doomed relationship. And Carlos had shown complete contempt for the article by adopting the name for his superyacht.
As the days ticked by, Kat found herself in a terrible dilemma—knowing that she should be praying that there was no baby. Because Carlos didn’t want a baby—he had made that quite clear.
‘If you are pregnant, then we will cope,’ he had stated in a flat voice which she had found especially chilling. ‘And our child will never want for anything.’
Except two parents who loved each other, Kat realised miserably.
Her troubled thoughts cleared and Kat found Carlos staring at her across the table, his expression curious as he pushed away his plate.
‘You were miles away, Princesa,’ he observed softly.
Grateful for the candle-light which disguised a multitude of emotions, Kat shrugged. ‘Well, there’s a lot to think about.’
‘And it makes you frown?’ he prompted.
‘Sometimes.’ She met the question in his eyes. ‘Well, it’s not exactly…ideal—this situation we find ourselves in,’ she said carefully. ‘Is it?’
There was a pause and Carlos gave a ragged sigh, knowing that evasion would be kinder. But ultimately, what could he say—other than the truth? ‘No, of course it isn’t. But there’s no point in discussing it until we know one way or the other, is there? I thought we’d already decided that.’
‘Which is why I was asking you about bullfighting.’ Kat’s voice lowered defensively. ‘I’m certainly not trying to invade your precious privacy, Carlos—just trying to make conversation.’
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. Was he really the tyrant she sometimes hinted at? And if she was expecting his child, then did she not have the right to know something of his past?
But where to begin? He stared at her across the flickering candle-light. ‘We were poor,’ he said simply. ‘And I mean dirt poor. My mother used to work around the clock to provide for us—in fact, I hardly saw her when I was growing up.’
Kat remembered some of the remarks he’d made about spoilt, wealthy women. Was that why he had sounded so caustic—because his own mother had had nothing? ‘And…your father? What about him?’
‘My father?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, my father was too busy chasing his dreams of being Spain’s best matador to care about anything or anyone.’
‘So he was a bullfighter too?’
He drank a little more wine. ‘He was, until a horrific accident in the ring led to the loss of his arm—and the even greater loss of his dreams. For a while he was a broken man, until he realised that he might be able to live out those ambitions through his son. And that is what he set about doing.’
There was an odd, brooding kind of silence. ‘So?’ she prompted softly.
His mouth twisted. ‘So he sat me on my first bull at three.’
‘Three?’ Kat echoed in horror.
‘At five he armed me with my first sword,’ continued Carlos implacably. ‘And because Spanish law decrees that novice bullfighters must be at least sixteen, at ten he uprooted us all to Central America—where the rules are more…relaxed.’
He shrugged and there was another odd kind of silence while Kat watched a series of conflict
ing emotions chasing across the hard, handsome face of her Spanish lover. ‘And did you like it?’ she whispered. ‘Bullfighting, I mean.’
‘I loved it,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘And I was good at it.’ There was a pause, before he gave a brief, hard smile. ‘Too good.’
‘How can you be too good at something?’
‘Because it makes it difficult to walk away, even when you know it’s the right thing to do. I left the ring when I was barely twenty—when I was on the brink of a glittering career.’ His voice lowered as his mind took him back to that hot and dusty day—remembering the heat and the dust, the strong smell of death. ‘I made the kill, dropped my cloak and, as the crowd grew silent, walked away without a backward glance.’
There was a moment as Kat registered the sheer drama of his words. ‘But why?’ she whispered.
Carlos looked at her, knowing that, like her, he had secrets which at times had proved unbearable—and like her, he had buried them deep. How could a man admit to the humiliation of having been forced to endure cruelty in his own home? The fierce beatings he had suffered at the hands of his father. Because hadn’t that cruelty made him the man he was today?
‘Because my father beat me,’ he said slowly. ‘In fact, he spent most of my childhood beating me. It was all about control. To show me who was boss. To get me to do what he wanted—which was to be the greatest bullfighter in the world. And then, when I was a teenager and old enough to stand up for myself, he stopped.’ He paused, and his eyes glittered. ‘Because by then there was no longer any need to threaten me with physical violence since I stood on the brink of a career he had coveted all his life. Success and riches and fame were all there for the taking.’
Kat stared at him. ‘And that’s why you walked away from it,’ she breathed. ‘You took back control of your life—and, in doing so, you were punishing him for all the hardships you’d endured at his hands.’
Carlos nodded, her perception surprising him, even though he found it slightly unnerving. ‘Exactly.’