by Various
But events seemed to be conspiring against her, even though she attempted to use the remaining hours as constructively as possible. The oven took some getting used to—and in between all the juggling of ingredients and familiarizing herself with an astonishingly large store cupboard, there was still the table to lay.
‘Where does Carlos usually eat?’ she asked Mike distractedly.
‘It varies,’ answered Mike, snapping open a can of cold cola and then swallowing half of it. ‘Sometimes with us, sometimes up on deck. Depends if he’s working—usually he has some big deal on and rarely comes up for air, and it’s best to leave him be. He’s…well, he’s a bit of a loner.’ The engineer shrugged, and smiled. ‘But when he eats with the crew—well, he’s pretty laid-back.’
Kat didn’t respond to that. Personally, she found Carlos Guerrero about as laid-back as a piranha fish. but she was not going to let her own feelings ruin what she was determined was going to be a fantastic meal.
‘He seems to want breakfast at the crack of dawn—and my watch is broken,’ she said slowly.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mike. ‘I can lend you an alarm clock if it helps. He’s dead hot on punctuality.’
Kat grimaced. ‘So I gather.’
The evening didn’t start very promisingly. All her timings were out so that the fish was cooked before the starter was even ready, the sauce she’d cobbled together had started to curdle and she forgot all about the accompanying vegetables until the last minute. With a grimace she lifted up the lid of the boiling potatoes—only for a cloud of steam to hit her in the face and make her feel as if she’d been thrown into a sauna.
There wasn’t even enough time for her to touch up her make-up and brush her hair before the hungry crew arrived. They crowded in a cluster around the table outside, onto which she’d just piled a haphazard collection of crockery and glasses.
And then Carlos appeared, looking infuriatingly cool and sexy. He had clearly found time to shower and change because the thick black hair was still damp and Kat thought she could detect the raw clean tang of sandalwood.
For a moment he just stood there, surveying the general air of disarray—and his mouth twisted.
‘Has someone trashed the boat while I’ve been showering, or are you trying to sabotage the meal in order to prove a point, Princesa?’
An image of Carlos in the shower was the last thing Kat needed to add to her already-shot nerves, and a renewed waft of sandalwood as he waved a disparaging arm around didn’t help. She gritted her teeth in a grim replica of a smile. ‘Would…would you like to sit down?’
‘Where?’ he questioned pointedly.
Kat leant over and cleared a space at the table. ‘Right there. Dinner is about to be served.’
‘I can hardly wait.’
Horrible, sarcastic tyrant! I’ll show him, vowed Kat silently, as she went back into the cramped galley to prod at a boiling potato which unfortunately still had the consistency of a rock. She tipped salad onto eight plates and drizzled on some of the dressing she’d made, trying desperately to remember what was supposed to go in it, but afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid.
But she knew the moment that everyone had started eating that something was wrong.
‘Is every thing…okay?’ she questioned.
There was a brief but loaded silence.
‘Salad dressing which tastes of washing-up liquid is an interesting innovation, querida, but perhaps it’s easy to see why it hasn’t yet come to dominate the market,’ came Carlos’s sarcastic assessment, and Kat felt like hurling a dish at his arrogant face as the rest of the crew burst into relieved laughter and pushed their barely touched plates away.
The main course was no better. The fish was stone-cold, the potatoes still rock-hard and the overambitious sauce had congealed into a horrible mess around the plate. As Carlos pointed out, it was a waste of a perfectly good fish, and once again Kat ended up scraping most of it into the garbage.
She felt hot from the heat of the kitchen when she appeared on deck again after crushing amaretto biscuits and cooking some mixed berries which now resembled roadkill. They looked up at her expectantly. Seven faces in all, but Kat could see only one. It swam before her line of vision with cold ebony eyes that mocked her which made her aware that her face must be flushed and her hair falling down.
‘Everyone ready for pudding?’
‘What kind of pudding?’ questioned Mike.
‘I’m calling it “Berry Surprise”,’ said Kat brightly.
Carlos took a mouthful of wine and put his glass down, a sardonic smile curving the edges of his lips. ‘Please, no more surprises—not tonight—I don’t think I could take it.’ There was an answering peal of laughter from the other men before he fixed her with a cool stare. ‘I don’t really think you’re up to it—at least, not tonight. Perhaps you could bring some cheese and fruit upstairs and I’ll eat there instead.’
She wanted to tell him to get it himself. That she wasn’t his slave. But in a way, that’s exactly what she was. And if she threw some sort of tantrum about her treatment, wouldn’t that only increase his glaring contempt for her?
And stupidly, his assessment hurt. Really hurt. I don’t really think you’re up to it. With those few wounding words he had made her feel so…so inferior. And the trouble was that he had been right. Was he a man who enjoyed wounding, she wondered bitterly, and was that why he had been such a success as a bullfighter?
Determined to salvage something of the evening, Kat put a ridiculous amount of care into arranging a dish for him, washing and drying all the fruit and arranging it in an artful rainbow display. Placing two pieces of cheese at the dish’s centre, she added bread and crackers and took it upstairs, to a deck that was washed with moonlight and empty save for a tall figure which dominated the skyline.
Carlos was leaning over the rail, looking out to sea—and there was something so silent and imposing about his frozen stance that, for a moment, Kat just stood in the shadows silently watching him. Seemingly lost in thought, she’d never seen anyone looking quite so alone before—nor quite so comfortable with his own sense of solitude.
And despite his wounding words, she found herself realising that she knew little of the man who was now effectively her employer. Not even how old he was. Midthirties, perhaps—maybe more, for his handsome face was hard and lined with experience and he carried with him a habitual and faint air of cynicism. Why hadn’t he settled down with a wife and a family, she wondered, when women must have been beating a path to his door for most of his adult life? Was it because, as Mike had said, he was a true loner?
He must have heard her, or sensed her presence, because he turned round and Kat forced herself to stir into life, to step out of the shadows and into his private circle of silver moonlight.
‘I’ll…I’ll put this over here,’ she said, holding the platter up, her voice suddenly faltering and she wasn’t sure why. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Thanks.’
He watched as she bent over the table, the dark hair falling in untidy strands around her face and the linen she wore now looking crumpled. And yet she looked…delicious—more womanly than at any other time he’d seen her, and curiously accessible without her ridiculous high-fashion status symbols and dripping with jewels. Her face was flushed with heat and the effects of probably the only honest day’s work she’d ever done.
How ironic that this sexy creature was as unlike the real Kat Balfour as it was possible to imagine.
Kat straightened up to find the ebony eyes fixed on her and, as she stared into the shadowed and shuttered features, her heart began a strange, rhythmical pounding. Nervously, her tongue flicked over her lips as she looked up into the impenetrable black eyes. ‘Will…will there be anything else?’
Oh, what a question, he thought wryly. Innocent or deliberately provocative? Was she doing her best to slip into her role as domestic, or simply acknowledging the silent hunger which was sizzling between them? He felt the th
ud of his heart. As if sexy Kat Balfour would ever do innocence! ‘No. Nothing else.’ He shook his head as he read the silent yearning on her face—was she mirroring something of his own, he wondered frustratedly.
She went to walk past him but something made him stop her. Something in the gleam of moonlight which glanced off the thick abundance of her dark hair and arrested his attention as much as the pure lines of her perfect profile and the parted promise of her soft lips.
He stayed her with a touch of his hand to her bare forearm and she looked down at it and then up at him and he could feel her shiver beneath him. Could feel an answering tremor in his own body—the familiar tightening, like a bow being stretched by the sharp point of the arrow.
‘Kat,’ he murmured, barely aware that he had said her name.
All Kat was aware of was the wild black buccaneer curls which framed the shuttered face. The way that the moonlight cast indigo shadows on the golden-olive skin. The powerful physique and the long, long legs. She swallowed. It was as if he had cast some dark and silken net over her, rendering her incapable of sensible thought and feeling. Making her world telescope down and focus on the vibrant allure of the Spaniard. He had done it unconsciously on the night of the Balfour Ball but now she was certain that he was doing it deliberately. Why? Why? Was he simply playing with her—as a cat played with a foolish mouse before it moved in for the careless kill?
‘Stop it,’ she whispered, hardly realising what she was saying.
‘Stop what?’ he echoed.
‘Making me…’ Embarrassed now, her words tailed off—for how could she possibly admit to him what she didn’t even want to acknowledge to herself?
Yet it seemed that Carlos had no such similar qualms, for he gave her a mocking smile.
‘Stop making you want me?’ he taunted softly. ‘But I’m not. You’re doing that all by yourself. You just can’t help yourself, can you, Kat?’
She shook her head, rooted to the spot as if he had turned her into a statue. Where was the wisecracking Kat now? The woman who was left cold by members of the opposite sex? ‘Yes, I can,’ she whispered, but even to her own ears the denial sounded phony.
‘Liar.’ His voice dipped to become a verbal caress. ‘I can read your desire for me in your eyes—it’s so obvious that you might as well be carrying a banner saying so. And I can see it in your lips too—their beautiful pout forgotten. Everything forgotten, in fact—because there’s only one thing on your mind and we both know what that is.’
‘Please!’ Her protest came out like a squeak—and now she even sounded like a mouse. Was that because she couldn’t bring herself to inject the word with any real conviction? Because despite Carlos’s clear disdain for her on so many levels, she stupidly wanted him just as much as she’d always wanted him?
‘You’re longing for me to kiss you, aren’t you, Kat?’ he mused. ‘To kiss you—only this time, not to stop. To lie you down and part your silken thighs and to thrust into you long and hard and deep until you cry out your pleasure.’
Kat’s knees buckled and for a very real moment she was afraid that she might faint, because the graphic words were only increasing her desire. And how shameful was that? Tell him no. Tell him no and then push past him and go back down to the galley. He might be a practised seducer with a cruel tongue which could lash out at her, but she doubted that he would actually pull her into his arms and take her by force. Hating herself for the shiver of longing which accompanied this dark fantasy, Kat stayed mute.
‘Aren’t you?’ he prompted silkily.
Her desire became intolerable. Unbearable. She fought and fought it but in the end it was no good. ‘Yes!’ she burst out at last. ‘Yes, I am!’
Carlos nodded, recognising what it must have cost her to admit it. ‘Well, that makes two of us,’ he said unsteadily, and leaned forward to kiss her unprotesting lips.
She had expected urgency. A rapid escalation into full-blown desire. An unashamed seduction. But Kat was wrong. Instead, he slowly pushed the fallen strands of hair away from her face as if he had all the time in the world, studying it like a scientist looking through a microscope for some rogue cell. He let his gaze drift from her brow to her eyes, then slowly down until it focused entirely upon her lips, and she felt them automatically part beneath his scrutiny.
‘Flawless,’ he said slowly, shaking his head a little. ‘Absolutely flawless.’
The kiss, when it came, was nothing like she expected. More of a graze than a kiss—a quicksilver brush of his lips against hers. And then again. Back and forth his mouth teased her, light as a butterfly and as tantalising as the first warmth of the morning sun. His breath was warm and she could smell his own particular raw, clean scent. It was a kiss which managed to be both innocent and sensual all at the same time. Nothing more than that, but enough to make Kat sway and weaken.
‘Oh!’ she breathed, and hungrily she reached for him.
But, using an expertise which he’d employed more than most men—often to literally save his own skin in the bullring—Carlos neatly sidestepped the movement. Putting out his hand he caught and steadied her, though he kept his body at an untouchable distance from hers, his face tight with tension. Because this was, in a way, the ultimate demonstration of his formidable control over his body.
‘No. No.’ There was a moment while he steadied his breath, and when he spoke he seemed to be speaking to himself as much as to her. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said flatly.
Incredulity made her voice falter even while her body screamed out for the closeness of his. ‘C-can’t?’
Carlos narrowed his eyes. Did the little witch think he was incapable of giving her what she wanted? ‘Forgive me if I have not made myself clear, Princes a. Sometimes when I speak in English, the subtleties of your language escape me. What I should have said is that I won’t make love to you.’ Her bright blue eyes continued to stare at him in puzzled query. Maldición, but she was persistent. And shameless, he reminded himself. For a woman like this was used to getting exactly what she wanted—and she wanted him. Too bad. ‘It would be an abuse of my role as your employer,’ he finished softly.
The rejection hurt more than it should have done and the telltale pricking of her eyes warned her that she might be about to do something intolerable, like burst into tears. And that Mr Ego might think she was crying over him. As if she would ever shed a tear over a man as unfeeling as Carlos Guerrero!
But Kat knew she needed to get away from here—and quickly—before he inflicted any more emotional damage on her.
As she lifted her head with a proud gesture, she was grateful at that moment for all the poise which her years as a Balfour had taught her. All the showy affairs where she had learnt to put on a careless expression.
‘You’re probably right,’ she said, and the surprised narrowing of his eyes gave her the courage to continue, even though her voice was threatening to tremble. ‘Affairs in the work place are never a good idea, or so they tell me. So if you’ve got everything you want, I’ll go downstairs and start clearing up.’
Just let him try to stop me, she thought fiercely, as she brushed past him. Just let him try.
But he didn’t try. Although his shuttered black eyes were watchful, he let her go without a further word.
And frustration only increased her bitter sense of rejection, as Kat half ran from the deck and back downstairs to the galley with tears blinding her eyes.
Chapter Six
THE alarm clock shrilled out like a fire alarm and Kat woke with a start. Fumblingly, she switched it off and made herself get straight out of bed before she fell asleep again, surprised at how deeply she’d slept. And surprised that the restless night she’d anticipated hadn’t materialised—despite the fact that Carlos had rejected her for a second time. Maybe because it had been past midnight when she’d finally crept to bed after clearing away the remains of the disastrous meal—and she’d been too tired to do anything but fall into a dreamless sleep.
Quickly,
she showered, dressed and was on deck soon after six, determined to salvage something of her pride. She was not going to think of Carlos—or his teasing and provocative kisses and the fact that he seemed to like playing with her. As if it gave him some sort of kick to demonstrate his power over her. Kat stared out to sea, her lips set in a line of grim determination. What had happened couldn’t be reversed, and this morning she was damned well going to show Señor Guerrero that she was worth something.
And despite the bizarre circumstances in which she found herself and her trepidation of what the day might bring, Kat couldn’t deny the beauty of her surroundings as she stood quietly for a moment. The light was soft and milky, the sky tinged with rose and tangerine and the dark blue sea stretched towards the horizon as far as the eye could see.
Even the oven in the galley seemed like an old friend this morning so that she was able to warm the half-baked bread without mishap and assemble it on a tray with fruit and a pot of strong, dark coffee which she carried up just before seven, just as Carlos appeared, laptop under his arm.
Dressed in jeans and a soft silk shirt, his face was shuttered as he walked out onto the sun-washed deck—but the way he carried himself was so full of grace that just for a moment Kat was dazzled. How easily she could imagine him in the bullring—his head held proud and his narrow hips encased in those dark, tight breeches as he weaved a mystifying dance around a huge, quivering bull. Stop it, she told herself fiercely. Stop fantasising about him.
Hadn’t she told herself that from now on she was going to remain immune to his dark beauty? That he had little respect for her as a person and had rejected her as a woman. So why was it that she seemed to be powerless over the thunder of her heart as she carried the tray towards the table?
‘Good morning!’ she said.
Carlos watched her approach and his eyes narrowed. There was something different about her this morning and he couldn’t quite work out what it was. ‘No me lo creo,’ he observed, his voice silky. ‘I don’t believe it. The princesa is up and working—and what is more…she’s on time.’