Mark and Maria would not be returning to the country for a few days yet, and as they approached the outskirts of London he said in a lazy drawl that already expected agreement to his proposal, ‘I don’t think you should carry on living in that dump.’
Aggie laughed, amused.
‘I’m not kidding. I can’t have you living there.’
‘Where would you have me living, Luiz?’
‘Kensington has some decent property. I could get you somewhere.’
‘Thanks, but I think we’ve already covered the problem of rent in London and how expensive it is.’
‘You misunderstand me. When I say that I could get you somewhere, I mean I could buy you somewhere.’
Aggie’s mouth dropped open and she looked at him in astonishment and disbelief.
‘Well?’ Luiz prompted, when there was silence following this remark.
‘You can’t just go and buy somewhere for a woman you happen to be sleeping with, Luiz.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s not right.’
‘I want you to live somewhere halfway decent. I have the money to turn that wish into reality. What could be more right?’
‘And just for the sake of argument, what would happen with this halfway decent house when we broke up?’
Luiz frowned, not liking the way that sounded. He knew he was the one who’d laid down that rule, but was there really any need to underline it and stick three exclamation marks after it for good measure?
‘You’d keep it, naturally. I never give a woman gifts and then take them away from her when the relationship goes sour.’
‘You’ve had way too much your own way for too long,’ Aggie told him. It was hardly surprising. He had grown up with money and it had always been second nature to indulge his women with gifts. ‘I’m not going to accept a house from you. Or a flat, or whatever. I’m perfectly happy where I am.’
‘You’re not,’ Luiz contradicted bluntly. ‘No one could be perfectly happy in that hovel. The closest anyone could get to feeling anything about that place is that it’s a roof over your head.’
‘I don’t want anything from you.’ After the great open spaces of up north, the business of London felt like four walls pressing down on her.
That was not what Luiz wanted to hear, because for once he wanted to give her things. He wanted to see that smile on her face and know that he was responsible for putting it there.
‘Actually,’ Aggie continued thoughtfully, ‘I think we should just enjoy whatever we have. I don’t want you giving me any presents or taking me to expensive places.’
‘I don’t do home-cooked meals in front of the television.’
‘And I don’t do lavish meals out. Now and again, it’s nice to go somewhere for dinner, but it’s nice not to as well.’ Aggie knew that she was treading on thin ice here. Any threat of domesticity would have him running a mile, but how much should she sacrifice for the sake of love and lust?
‘I’m not into all that stuff,’ she said. ‘I don’t wear jewels and I don’t have expensive tastes.’
‘Why are you so difficult?’
‘I didn’t realise I was.’
‘From a practical point of view, your house is going to be a little cramped with your brother there and my niece popping her head in every three minutes. I’m not spending time at your place with the four of us sitting on a sagging sofa, watching television while my car gets broken into outside.’
Aggie laughed aloud. ‘That’s a very weak argument for getting your own way.’
‘Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.’
But he wished to God he had tried a little harder when they finally arrived back at her dismal house in west London. Snow had turned to slush and seemed to have infused the area with a layer of unappealing grey.
Aggie looked at him as he reviewed the house with an expression of thinly concealed disgust and she smiled. He was so spoiled, so used to getting everything he wanted. It was true that he had not complained once at any of the discomforts he had had to endure on their little trip, at least at any of the things which in his rarefied world would have counted as discomforts. But it would be getting on his nerves that he couldn’t sort this one out. Especially when he had a point. Mr Cholmsey couldn’t have created a less appealing abode to rent if he had tried.
She wondered how she could have forgotten the state of disrepair it was in.
‘You could at least come back with me to my apartment,’ Luiz said, lounging against the wall in the hallway as Aggie dumped her bag on the ground. ‘Indulge yourself, Aggie.’ His voice was as smooth as chocolate and as tempting. ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to relax in a place where the central heating doesn’t sound like a car backfiring every two minutes.’
Aggie looked helplessly at him, caught up in a moment of indecision. He bent to kiss her, a sweet, delicate kiss as he tasted her mouth, not touching her anywhere else, in fact hardly moving from his indolent pose against the wall.
‘Not fair,’ she murmured.
‘I want to get you into my bath,’ Luiz murmured softly. ‘My very big, very clean bath, a bath that can easily fit the both of us. And then afterwards I want you in my bed, my extra-wide and extra-long king-sized bed with clean linen. And if you’re really intent on us doing the telly thing, you can switch on the television in my bedroom; it’s as big as a cinema screen. But before that, I want to make love to you in comfort, and then when we’re both spent I want to send out for a meal from my guy at the Savoy. No need for you to dress up or go out, just the two of us. He does an excellent chocolate mousse for dessert. I’d really like to have it flavoured with a bit of you …’
‘You win,’ Aggie said on a sigh of pure pleasure. She reached up and pulled him down to her and in the end they found themselves clinging to one another as they wended an unsteady path up to her bedroom.
Despite Luiz’s adamant proclamations that he wanted to have her in his house, she was so damned delectable that he couldn’t resist.
Her top was off by the time they hit the top of the stairs. By the bedroom door, her bra was draped over the banister and she had wriggled out of her jeans just as they both collapsed onto the bed which, far from being king-sized, was only slightly bigger than a single.
‘I’ve been wanting to do this from the second we got into my car to drive back to London,’ Luiz growled, in a manner that was decidedly un-cool. ‘In fact, I was very tempted to book us into a room in the first hotel we came to just so that I could do this. I don’t know what it is about you, but the second I’m near you I turn into a caveman.’
Aggie decided that she liked the sound of that. She lay back and watched as he rid himself of his clothes. This was frantic sex, two slippery bodies entwined. Leisurely foreplay would have to wait, he told her, he just needed to feel himself inside her, hot and wet and waiting for him.
Luiz could say things that drove her wild, and he drove her wild now as he huskily told her just how she made him feel when they were having sex.
Every graphic description made her wetter and more turned on and when he entered her she was so close to the edge that she had to grit her teeth together to hold herself back.
His movements were deep, his shaft big and powerful, taking her higher and higher until she cried out as she climaxed. Her nails dug into his shoulder blades and she arched back, her head tilted back, her eyes closed, her nostrils slightly flared.
She was the most beautiful creature Luiz had ever laid eyes on. He felt himself explode inside her and by then it was too late. He couldn’t hold it back. He certainly couldn’t retrieve the results of his ferocious orgasm and he collapsed next to her with a groan.
‘I didn’t use protection.’ He was still coming down from a high but his voice was harshly self-admonishing, bitterly angry for his oversight. He looked at her, then sat up, legs over the side of the bed, head in his hands, and cursed silently under his breath.
‘It’s okay,’ Aggie said
quickly. Well, if she hadn’t got the message that this was a man who didn’t want to settle down, then she was getting it now loud and clear. Not only did he not want to settle down, but the mere thought of a pregnancy was enough to turn him white with horror.
‘I’m safe.’
Luiz exhaled with relief and lay back down next to her. ‘Hell, I’ve never made that mistake in my life before. I don’t know what happened.’ But he did. He had lost control. This was not the man he was. He didn’t lose control.
Looking at him, Aggie could see the disgust on his face that he could ever have been stupid enough, human enough to make a slip-up.
For all the ways he could get under her skin, she reminded herself that Luiz Montes was not available for anything other than a casual affair. She might love him but she should look for nothing more than unrequited love.
CHAPTER NINE
‘WHAT’S wrong?’ Luiz looked at Aggie across the width of the table in the small chain restaurant where he had just been subjected to a distinctly mediocre pizza and some even more mediocre wine.
‘Nothing’s wrong.’ But Aggie couldn’t meet his eyes. He had a way of looking at her. It made her feel as though he could see down to the bottom of her soul, as though he could dredge up things she wanted to keep to herself.
The past month had been the most amazing time of her life. She had had the last week at school, where the snow had lingered for a few days until finally all that had been left were the remains of two snowmen which the children had built.
Luiz had visited her twice at school. The first time he had just shown up. All the other teachers had been agog. The children had stared. Aggie had felt embarrassed, but embarrassed in a proud way. Everyone, all her friends at the school, would be wondering how she had managed to grab the attention of someone like Luiz, even if they didn’t come right out and say it. And, frankly, Aggie still wondered how she had managed to achieve that. She didn’t think that she could ever fail to get a kick just looking at him and when those dark, fabulous eyes rested on her she didn’t think that she could ever fail to melt.
He had returned to Brazil for a few days over Christmas. Aggie had decided that it would be a good time to get her act together and use his absence to start building a protective shell around her, but the very second she had seen him again she had fallen straight back into the bottomless hole from which she had intended to start climbing out.
She felt as though she was on a rollercoaster. Her whole system was fired up when he was around and there wasn’t a single second when she didn’t want to be in his company, although at the back of her mind she knew that the rollercoaster ride would end and when it did she would be left dazed and shaken and turned inside out.
‘It’s this place!’ Luiz flung his napkin on his half-eaten pizza and sat back in his chair.
‘What?’
‘Why are you too proud to accept my invitations to restaurants where the food is at least edible?’
Aggie looked at him, momentarily distracted by the brooding sulkiness on his dark face. He looked ridiculously out of place here. So tall, striking and exotic, surrounded by families with chattering kids and teenagers. But she hadn’t wanted to go anywhere intimate with him. She had wanted somewhere bright, loud and impersonal.
‘You’ve taken me to loads of expensive restaurants,’ she reminded him. ‘I could start listing them if you’d like.’
Luiz waved his hand dismissively. Something was wrong and he didn’t like it. He had grown accustomed to her effervescence, to her teasing, to the way she made him feel as though the only satisfactory end to his day was when he saw her. Right now she was subdued, her bright-blue eyes clouded, and he didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t reach her.
‘We need to get the bill and clear out of here,’ he growled, signalling to a waitress, who appeared so quickly that Aggie thought she might have been hanging around waiting for him to call her across. ‘I can think of better things to do than sit here with cold, congealing food on our plates, waiting for our tempers to deteriorate.’
‘No!’
‘What do you mean, no?’ Luiz narrowed his eyes on her flushed face. Her gaze skittered away and she licked her lips nervously. The thought of her not wanting to head back to his place as fast as they could suddenly filled him with a sense of cold dread.
‘I mean, it’s still early.’ Aggie dragged the sentence out while she frantically tried to think of how she would say what she had to say. ‘Plus it’s a Saturday. Everyone’s out having fun.’
‘Well, let’s go have some fun somewhere else.’ He leaned towards her and shot her a wolfish grin. ‘Making love doesn’t have to be confined to a bedroom. A change of scenery would work for me too …’
‘A change of scenery?’ Aggie asked faintly. She giddily lost herself in his persuasive, sexy, slow smile. He had come directly to her house, straight from the office, and he was still in his work clothes: a dark grey, hand-tailored suit. The tie would be bunched up in the pocket of his jacket, which he had slung over the back of the chair along with his coat, and he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He looked every inch the billionaire businessman and once again she was swept away on an incredulous wave of not knowing how he could possibly be attracted to her.
And yet there were times, and lots of them, when they seemed like two halves of the same coin. Aggie had grown fond of recalling those times. Half of her knew that it was just wishful thinking on her part, a burning desire to see him relating to her in more than just an insatiably sexual capacity, but there was no harm in dreaming, was there?
‘I’m losing you again.’ Luiz ran his fingers through his hair and looked at her with an impatient shake of his head. ‘Come on. We’re getting out of here. I’ve had enough of this cheap and cheerful family eaterie. There’s more to a Saturday night than this.’
He stood up and waited as she scrambled to her feet. It was still cold outside, but without the bite of before Christmas, when it had hurt just being outdoors. Aggie knew she should have stayed put inside the warm, noisy, crowded restaurant but coward that she was, she wanted to leave as much as he did.
Once she would have been more than satisfied with a meal out at the local pizzeria but now she could see that it could hardly be called a dining experience. It was a place to grab something or to bring kids where they could make as much mess as they wanted without staff getting annoyed.
‘We could go back to my house,’ Aggie said reluctantly as Luiz swung his arm over her shoulders and reached out to hail a cab with the other.
He touched her as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It was just something else she had relegated to her wishful-thinking cupboard. If he can be so relaxed with me, surely there’s more to what we have than sex … ?
Except not once had he ever hinted at what that something else might be. He never spoke of a future and she knew that he was careful not to give her any ideas. He had warned her at the beginning of their relationship that he wasn’t into permanence and he had assumed that the warning held good.
He didn’t love her. She was a temporary part of his life and he enjoyed her and she had given him no indication that it was any different for her.
‘And where’s your brother?’
‘He might be there with Maria. I don’t know. As you know, he leaves for America on Monday. I think he was planning on cooking something special for them.’
‘So your suggestion is we return to that dump where we’ll be fighting for space alongside your brother and my niece, interrupting their final, presumably romantic meal together. Unless, of course, we hurry up to your unheated bedroom where we can squash into your tiny bed and make love as noiselessly as possible.’
Luiz loathed her house but he had given up trying to persuade her to move out to something bigger, more comfortable and paid for by him. She had dug her heels in and refused to budge, but the upshot was that they spent very little time there. In fact, the more Aggie saw her house through his eyes,
the more dissatisfied she was with it.
‘There’s no need to be difficult!’ Aggie snapped, pulling away to stare up at him. ‘Why do you always have to get your own way?’
‘If I always got my own way then explain why we’ve just spent an hour and a half in a place where the food is average and the noise levels are high enough to give people migraines. What the hell is going on, Aggie? I didn’t meet you so that I could battle my way through a bad mood!’
‘I can’t always be sunshine and light, Luiz!’
They stared at each other. Aggie was hardly aware of the approach of a black cab until she was being hustled into it. She heard Luiz curtly give his address and sighed with frustration, because the last place she wanted to be with him was at his apartment.
‘Now …’ He turned to face her and extended his arm along the back of the seat. ‘Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.’ His eyes drifted to the mutinous set of her mouth and he wanted to do nothing more than kiss it back into smiling submission. He wasn’t normally given to issuing invitations to women to talk. He was a man of action and his preferred choice, when faced with a woman who clearly wanted to talk, was to bury all chat between the sheets. But Aggie, he had to concede, was different. If he suggested burying the chat between the sheets, she would probably round on him with the full force of her feisty, outspoken, brazenly argumentative personality.
‘We do need to talk,’ she admitted quietly, and she felt him go still next to her.
‘Well, I’m all ears.’
‘Not here. We might as well wait till we get to your place, although I would have preferred to have this conversation in the restaurant.’
A Tempestuous Temptation Page 14