by Tessa Radley
“Whatever you try, you’ll be a success. I’ll remind you of that one day.” Rico gave her a slow smile.
But even his smile couldn’t stop the cold wash of dread from running over her. The warm contentment she’d felt drained away as she said, “But you won’t be here. I need to learn to find my way alone.” She felt Rico recoil. Quickly she murmured, “Rico?”
“Does that mean you no longer need me in your bed, either? That you’ll satisfy your newly discovered desires alone?”
“No!” She stared at him, regret searing her. “I wasn’t talking about right now. I was musing aloud about the future.”
“Of course! The future. I’ll have my son or daughter…and you’ll have some executive position in some important company.”
Pain shattered inside her, icy splinters piercing her heart, until she wanted to shout out loud that that wasn’t what she wanted. She loved him, dammit! So why the hell couldn’t he love her back?
But he was already rolling over, taking her with him, trapping her beneath the hard bulk of his body. “Enough talk, let’s get down to action.”
The angry note in his voice made her wriggle beneath him in an effort to escape, reluctant to make love like this. “Rico, maybe not—”
“—tonight, because I’ve got a headache, hmm?” But he lifted his torso so that she could free herself. Thwarted, she lay still and stared up into angry, mocking eyes. Suddenly she wanted to wipe that masculine fury clean off his face.
“Where’s the respect you promised me only minutes ago?” she retorted, holding him at bay with palms pressed against his chest. “I demand respect from the man who shares my bed, understand?” Danielle raised an eyebrow and watched his mouth drop open.
She gave him a shove, and he rolled back against the pillows. Danielle pushed the covers away from his body and quickly twisted around until she was kneeling on the bed beside him. “Do you understand?” With tantalisingly slow movements she began to unbutton the row of tiny buttons down the front of her nightdress.
He swallowed. “Yes, Princess. I understand…perfectly.”
“Good,” she purred, and lifted a slim leg over his hips. Lowering herself, she straddled him. His body jerked beneath her, and she rewarded him with a slow smile. Heat penetrated every nerve ending, banishing the empty ache his mockery had created. Arousal flamed through her, and she felt him harden beneath her thighs. The passion promised to knock the pain out her mind, to replace it with a hot need that she could embrace and share with Rico, until satisfaction claimed them both, granting an escape from obstacles that seemed insurmountable.
Filled with bravado by his response, she bent over him, caught his wrist and directed his hands to the wooden slats of the headboard. “Now hold on, I don’t want to lose you during the ride,” she said, shooting him a sultry smile.
“Oh, my hell!” Rico’s eyes were wide with a combination of shock and surprise.
A heady confidence that she’d never known swelled inside her at the sight of the awe on Rico’s face. The hem of the nightgown was soft under her fingers and she lifted it, swishing it from side to side as it rose higher, exposing tantalising glimpses of her tummy…then tugged again. Aside from Rico’s rough breathing, the only sound in the room was the whisper of silk against skin.
For a moment she wondered what she was doing, whether she could carry this impromptu seduction off. A chill of uncertainty swept her as memory flashed of another time she’d stripped off in front of him. And his harsh rejection. But this time it was different. She was a woman now—not an insecure girl. And this time Rico was free to love her. Now was no time to get cold feet. Especially not under the heat of his heavy-lidded gaze. Taking a deep breath, Danielle threw caution to the winds and whipped the nightie over her head.
The expression on Rico’s face as he gazed at her naked body told her that she was doing something right. She sat back, hooked her hands into the waistband of the boxers he wore and slid them down his thighs. Rico assisted by kicking them off. She rewarded him with another of those slow smiles that made his eyes go darker than the bitterest chocolate.
Then she leaned forward and brushed her breasts against his chest, the scattering of dark hair creating a friction that made her nipples tighten and caused a rush of tingles. Simultaneously she moved her lower body against his in slow sweeps.
Rico raised his hips in an insistent rhythm, and uttered a throaty groan. His hand came around the back of her neck and pulled her lips down to his. His mouth was hot and hungry. At her eager response, his mouth grew more demanding, his body vibrating beneath hers.
“Didn’t I tell you to hold on to the headboard?” she murmured in his ear, then bit his earlobe.
“Witch!” The hand against her nape tightened. “I couldn’t keep my hands off you,” he growled. And matched his actions to his words by running his other hand across her shoulder, along the indent of her spine, to rest at the base of her spine and draw her closer. At the unremitting pressure her heart hammered, and she shifted until she felt him—there at the entrance to her core.
She nudged him, but instead of the penetration she craved, he moved against her, his hardness filling the hidden furrow. Slowly he slid to and fro, until she wanted to scream as the heat built relentlessly inside her.
“Ngh…” She tried to thrash her head from side to side, but he held her tightly, sealing her mouth with his. Wildly she licked the inside of his lower lip, and immediately he increased the pace of the rocking against her. She shuddered, grimacing, then her skin pulled tight around her body.
She moaned, her body tensing.
Swiftly he rolled over, holding her against him, under him, and, pressing his face into the junction between her jaw and her shoulder, he plunged into her frenzied body, driven beyond the boundaries of his control.
Danielle cried out, a hoarse sound that made him instantly respond by tonguing the tender skin beneath her ear. Shivers raced across her skin, and the contractions rippled through her until her whole body quivered in reaction. He groaned, the speed of his thrusts increased, and then he started to shudder.
After a long silence her murmured, “Danielle,” his arms tightening around her. Then, “You’re something else, cara. Wow!”
Her breath caught at the note in his voice. Wordlessly she snuggled closer. It took a while for her to come down from the high that their intense lovemaking had created. As she lay in Rico’s arms and stared into the dark while his chest rose and fell evenly beneath her ear, Danielle struggled to sleep. Discovering that she loved him had changed everything.
Because love went hand in hand with trust.
And she’d lied to Rico, deceived him.
Her heart fluttered with anxiety. There was no doubt that once she revealed the extent of her deception she’d lose him. Rico wouldn’t stay.
Not for a woman like her.
Ten
“D anielle!”
His head pounding, Rico burst through the glass sliding doors onto the patio, his gaze frantically searching for Danielle. Three long paces took him to where she crouched over an arrangement of ceramic pots.
“What the hell are you doing!”
“Planting pots.”
She was staring at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. Perhaps he had. He raked a shaking hand through his hair and inhaled deeply to slow the adrenaline that had rushed through him when he’d entered the house and failed instantly to locate her.
He’d left her in the sitting room to answer the doorbell. It had been Ken Pascal, Sinco’s head of security. Rico had gone with Ken to collect a dossier from the other man’s car. He hadn’t wanted Danielle standing in the street. Leaving her safely inside had seemed the lesser of two evils. Except had she stayed put? No.
He glared at her down-bent head. Her bare hands were plunged deep into a mix of rich, dark soil. “You should be wearing gloves.”
Danielle squinted back up at him. “I like the feel of potting soil beneath my hands. It’s thera
peutic.” She picked up a punnet of seedlings and deftly pushed the small green plants into the hollows she’d created.
“What are those?” he asked, as his heart rate slowly returned to normal.
“Impatiens. People often call them busy lizzies.”
“Oh.” The silence stretched reminding him of how withdrawn she’d been all day. Moodiness was the last thing he’d expected after the wild sex they’d shared last night. Maybe she was coming down with something. He pointed to another plastic holder filled with fine-leafed plants. “And those?”
“Lobelia,” she replied.
“Where are you going to plant them?”
“I thought I’d use them as a border, plant them around the edge of the pot and let them trail over the side.”
“You enjoy this, don’t you?”
“You mean getting my hands dirty?” She glanced up. “I love it. Gardening in the evenings after a day at the office is always a good time for me to work out my frustrations—and to think.”
Rico wasn’t sure if he liked the sound of that. “What do you need to think about today?”
Her gaze fell, shrouding her eyes from his scrutiny. “Oh, this and that.”
“Be more specific,” he suggested, tension winding tight inside him.
“I was thinking about what I said last night, about moving on from Sinco.” But she kept her head bowed, and Rico had a frustrated notion that she’d been thinking about more than her career path. The idea that she was hiding stuff from him drove him wild. He hunkered down beside her. “So what happens next?”
“I’ll place the pots in a shady position and water them each day. Watch them grow. Soon the flowers will burst into colour.”
That wasn’t what he’d meant, but he didn’t have the heart to bring her back to a topic she clearly didn’t want to discuss. He let it rest. “And when they’ve finished flowering, what then?”
“Impatiens often self-seed themselves. They’ll grow thicker next year. Very efficient plants, they know how to create the next generation.” Her tone was strange, almost flat, but she was smiling at him.
Rico dismissed his unease. “I thought we might go out for a meal, you need a break.” Early this morning Danielle had called Martin Dunstan and unearthed the day care proposal her father had mentioned last night. She’d worked on it all day like a woman possessed. Was her father responsible for her gloominess? Awkwardly he placed an arm around her shoulder. She stiffened. Damn. When he made love to her, he could touch her confidently enough, so why did he feel so inept now? Flattening his hand, he slid it down her back, then up again.
“Where do you want to go?”
She turned to face him, and his hand fell away. Her eyes glistened with emotion like a silvery cloak of dew on a lawn at daybreak. “Could we have dinner at home? Just you and me?”
His chest contracted. “Of course. If that’s what you want.”
“Rico, why do you have to be so damn nice sometimes?” Her voice was husky.
“Hey.” He placed a finger under her chin and tilted it up. “Am I such an ogre to live with?”
The glimmer in her eyes grew brighter. “Never an ogre.”
“Only a dinosaur?” he teased gently.
She launched herself across the space that separated them. “Oh, Rico!” She threw her arms around his neck and locked them tight, until he could hardly breathe.
“Hey.” Falling to his knees, he closed his arms around her, inhaling her warm, flowery scent. The smell of soil and the plants was sharp and unfamiliar to him, but it was a perfume he could get used to. Bending his head over hers, he started to plan an evening of quiet relaxation…although snatches of more sensual images he hurriedly suppressed kept interrupting.
“Dinner at home it is.”
While Rico grilled snapper, Danielle tossed a salad together. She cut fat wedges of lemon to accompany the succulent fish. During dinner she tried her best to behave normally, but Rico’s sharp glances revealed that she hadn’t been wholly successful. Deception did not sit well with her and she was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the extent that she had deceived Rico. She suspected she wouldn’t find any peace until she told him exactly what was troubling her. Of course, her peace of mind would bear a price—the loss of Rico.
After the meal Danielle dropped onto the couch and picked up a copy of NZ House & Garden, but she barely saw the brightly coloured photos of the family homes as she paged listlessly through. All she could see was Rico, kneeling in front of her pots, his expression soft…almost caring…after he’d teased her.
“Coffee?” asked Rico.
Danielle set the magazine aside and wrinkled her nose. “I seem to have lost the taste for it. I might have a cup of hot chocolate later.”
When Rico joined her on the couch, the cloying aroma of his espresso coffee coupled with the edgy restlessness that filled her made her feel slightly ill. Picking up a cushion, she tucked it in behind her back. “Rico, we have to talk.”
“That sounds ominous,” he commented, setting his coffee mug down.
Her small smile did little to ease her misery. “I think perhaps the time has come for us to be honest with each other.”
His expression grew wary. “Honest? I’ve always told you the truth.” He scanned her face. “But perhaps you have things you’ve been hiding, hmm? Spit them out, they can’t be so bad that we can’t work them out.”
He’d find out soon enough that they were worse than he could imagine. But for now she clung to the first part of his statement. “I think there are things that you haven’t told me. Last night it became clear to me that my father seems to think that you—” she searched for the right words “—tried something with me four years ago. I didn’t think he knew about that night.”
Rico said nothing, but his eyes narrowed to dark cracks.
Both she and Kim had caused Rico harm. Danielle shuddered. “You should never have left.” The words run away hung in the air between them. “You should have stood trial if you were charged.”
He gave her a look that burned with bitterness. “I know that. But I had no choice.”
“Because my father told Lucia that you’d go to prison for what Kim said had happened? You could have fought that, proved your innocence.”
“I shouldn’t have needed to.” It burst from him. “A man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Except when Robert Sinclair is involved…then the onus changes. I was fighting a battle I could never win, given the manufactured evidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those damn white lacy panties.”
Perplexed, Danielle frowned at him. “What?”
“The panties,” he uttered impatiently. “I suppose you must’ve wondered where they appeared from.”
She had? She knew nothing about any lace panties. Danielle waited for him to continue.
“The night before the fracas with Kimberly, you came to my room, remember?”
How could she ever forget? The old humiliation scorched her, and she huddled into a ball in the furthest corner of the couch.
“You took that white robe off and underneath you were wearing nothing but a pair of white, floral lace panties.”
Shamed, wanting to forget his fury and outrage, Danielle closed her eyes. She’d had a huge crush on him. She could see herself that night, running barefoot down the corridor back to her suite, her hair streaming behind her, her robe flapping, hastily pulled on, as she sought the sanctuary of her bedroom. She’d wanted nothing more than a quiet place to lick the wound that Rico’s uncompromising rejection had opened. Instead she’d run full tilt into Kim, who’d caught her arm and demanded to know where she’d been. She’d refused to say a word.
In her room she’d flung herself onto her bed, tears streaming down her face, while Kim had perched on the bed edge. It had been a tempest of weeping, full of the pent-up misery from her mother’s death, the crashing realisation that Rico did not share what she felt about him. The next day events had
started to snowball until she felt as if her heart was splintering.
But she hadn’t left her briefs behind, she’d still been wearing them. The same lacy style she still wore. Boring perhaps. But she liked the comfort of the familiar. “Your memory is good—I don’t remember the panties.”
Rico gave her a strange look. “I never forgot them, seeing that they were a key component in the investigation against me.”
Her gaze shot to his face. “What do you mean?”
“When I came out of the shower to find Kimberly in my bed the following night, she was wearing even less. She whipped back the covers to surprise me with her nakedness.”
Oh, God.
“I threw her out, tossing her nightdress after her. But she left a souvenir in the bottom of my bed.”
Danielle thought furiously. “Panties?”
“You got it. Your white lace panties.”
She froze. “Mine?” Kim. Her sister couldn’t have been so cruel. Had she really intended Danielle’s panties to be found in Rico’s bed?
He nodded. “Yep. The police found them. Apparently Kim didn’t own white panties. Plus there were forensic traces of your presence—a long blonde hair—in my room from the previous night. Which was why your father thought you and I were…involved.”
She gasped. “So Daddy thought I was sleeping with you?” The irony of it! Rico had rejected both her and Kim—in two nights. Her father couldn’t have left his two teenaged daughters in safer care.
“Your father pointed out that when his turn in the witness box came he would have to identify the garment as yours, to do otherwise would be to commit perjury. He told me that you had reacted to the prospect by threatening to commit suicide because you couldn’t face the scandal that would erupt.”
“That’s a lie! I never even knew about those damn panties.” Oh, Kim!
Rico’s breath caught, the sound loud in the room. “The lying bastard! I believed him. I thought you must know what Kim had done. Your father demanded that I leave the country, return my Sinco shares to him, in return he’d have the investigation quashed. He said he’d pay what he needed to ‘make it go away,’ that Kim—and particularly you—didn’t need the notoriety that would result if I stayed.”