She stopped several feet away to turn back and face him, auburn brows raised in mocking query. ‘Changed your mind, Rafe?’ she taunted.
He shook his head. ‘This isn’t like you, Cairo—’
‘I thought we had agreed that you don’t really know me!’ she scorned. ‘Last chance, Rafe,’ she added. ‘A once-in-a-lifetime offer!’ Her eyes glittered.
Not with anger, but with tears, Rafe recognized with horror.
Cairo knew she was almost at breaking point. That much more of this conversation and she was going to end up blubbering like a complete idiot. Which was ridiculous. She was a twenty-eight-year-old recently divorced woman, for goodness’ sake; most women in her position would have been only too happy to be offered a night of uncomplicated sex with Rafe Montero!
Except Cairo wasn’t ‘most women’ and, loving Rafe as she now knew she still did, it wouldn’t be just uncomplicated sex to her, either….
‘Time’s up, I’m afraid,’ she announced with faux brightness as Rafe still made no response to her offer. ‘You had your chance and you—’ She broke off suddenly as Rafe stepped forward to wrap his arms about her and hold her against him with a gentleness that was completely her undoing.
A sob caught at the back of Cairo’s throat as she allowed her head to drop forward onto Rafe’s shoulder and the tears began to fall hotly down her cheeks. Then his arms tightened about her as she began to cry in earnest.
‘I’m sorry, Cairo,’ he groaned into her hair. ‘I am so sorry!’
Rafe’s apology—for what exactly …?—just made her cry all the harder, deep, racking tears that she hadn’t allowed to fall during the last ten months. Probably because she had known that once she started she wouldn’t be able to stop!
The tears fell like a river now, completely drenching the front of Rafe’s shirt as he continued to hold her.
She cried for the loss of Rafe eight years ago.
She cried for her years of being married to Lionel.
She cried for the end of that marriage.
She cried for the loneliness that was so deep inside her it threatened to completely overwhelm her.
But finally there were no more tears left, and instead Cairo became aware of exactly where she was—and in whose arms she was crying.
Rafe Montero’s.
The man who had so cruelly broken her heart eight years ago, and had so unwittingly—uncaringly?—shaped those intervening years….
She began to extricate herself from his arms, brushing the tears from her cheeks as she straightened, her gaze avoiding his as she pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘Well, that was a little—embarrassing, wasn’t it?’ She gave a broken laugh, frowning as she saw the lip gloss smeared across the front of Rafe’s now very damp white shirt. ‘I’m sorry about that.’ She brushed ineffectually at the smear before stepping back. ‘If it doesn’t come out in the wash let me know and I’ll replace the shirt—’
‘Cairo.’
‘It’s silk, right?’ Cairo continued. ‘Although you’ll have to tell me your size, I’m afraid—’
‘Cairo.’
‘I’ve never been very good at guessing a man’s shirt size. I remember I once—’
‘Cairo, just stop, will you?’ Rafe cut in forcefully, a dark scowl on his brow.
Her gaze was guarded as she looked up at him, her eyes red and puffy from the tears she had cried, her cheeks blotchy and her nose slightly red for the same reason.
She had never looked more beautiful to Rafe….
After an interminable pause, she finally murmured warily, ‘Unless it’s escaped your notice, Rafe, I have stopped now.’
He gave a rueful smile. ‘I noticed.’
She frowned slightly. ‘And …?’
‘You really do need to eat this evening, so how about we pick up a Chinese takeaway on the way back to your apartment?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s the least I can do after behaving so badly I made you miss dinner,’ he added persuasively as her eyes widened. ‘We can make it a Chinese takeaway for one, if that’s what you would prefer?’ he offered as Cairo continued to look at him suspiciously.
‘If we make it a meal for two, what happens afterwards?’
Rafe’s mouth tightened. ‘Afterwards I’ll leave,’ he said curtly. ‘Hell, Cairo, just because I don’t have someone in my life at the moment doesn’t mean I spend my every waking hour trying to devise ways of getting you into bed!’ he added as she still hesitated.
Well, not his every waking hour … but Rafe had to admit—to himself, at least!—that he hadn’t thought of too much else since arriving at the villa two days ago and finding Cairo there, and it had got even worse since their stormy lovemaking the previous evening.
‘I didn’t imagine that you did,’ she said dryly.
He quirked dark brows. ‘No?’
‘No!’
‘Okay, then,’ Rafe said. ‘So do we get Chinese food for one or two?’
She needed her head examined, Cairo knew, to even be thinking of prolonging this evening with Rafe. And yet she was thinking about it….
No doubt the two of them would end up arguing again before the evening was over. They seemed to do little else nowadays. And yet Cairo still felt a certain reluctance to say a final goodbye to him….
‘Two,’ she decided at last. ‘I’ll probably have cause to regret that, too, but—’
‘You never did know quite when to stop talking,’ Rafe remarked as they began to walk back to the car.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I’m already starting to regret it—’
‘Please just get in the car, Cairo,’ he instructed as he opened the passenger door for her, having no intention of arguing with her again before they had eaten.
No doubt it would be another matter afterwards!
‘So you’re going back to work, after all? And in the theatre?’ Rafe couldn’t hide his surprise as the two of them sat on the carpeted floor in the sitting-room of Cairo’s apartment using chopsticks to eat the Chinese food directly from the cartons, and finishing off the bottle of red wine Cairo had opened earlier.
Cairo had suggested warming plates and laying the table, but Rafe had vetoed the idea, opting for this less formal way of dining once Cairo had changed into comfortable worn jeans and a green cashmere sweater so that she could sit cross-legged on the floor.
‘I start rehearsals in a little under two weeks and open in three.’ Cairo nodded as she reached over to pick up a prawn.
Rafe found himself watching as she lifted the chopsticks and deftly popped the food into her mouth, her lips bare of gloss—well, they would be, as most of it was still on his shirt!
He had always loved Cairo’s mouth. The fullness of her lips. The way they tilted slightly at the corners. Their pouting softness when he kissed them….
‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ she added, before licking the sauce from those delectable lips.
Rafe dragged his gaze away, aware that it was only the way he was also sitting cross-legged on the carpet that prevented Cairo from seeing his purely physical response to the provocation that was her mouth.
He nodded. ‘I remember you saying years ago that it was your first love. But it’s hard work, and there’s no money in it—’
‘I’m not interested in the money, Rafe.’ Cairo turned to him impatiently. ‘I want the immediacy of the theatre. The audience response as each performance is just slightly different. The adrenalin rush each night just before you step onto the stage for the first time.’ She shook her head, her eyes glowing. ‘There’s nothing quite like it.’
Rafe could see that for Cairo there wasn’t.
His own years of performing off-Broadway, before he was ‘discovered’ by a movie producer, seemed like a lifetime ago, but he did still remember that adrenalin rush.
He was just surprised, that after years of starring in increasingly popular box-office hits—the millions Cairo was paid for each performance increasing as a result—she was actually going back to the
gruelling demand of theatre work with very little monetary reward.
‘Maybe I’ll come to your opening night …’ he murmured.
Cairo gave him a sharp glance. ‘What on earth for?’
He tensed. ‘Why not?’
Admittedly this last hour of just sitting on the floor, eating informally and chatting about everything and nothing—mainly nothing, as it was less controversial!—had been very pleasant after the previously fraught forty-eight hours.
But the last thing Cairo needed was to know that Rafe was sitting out in the audience on the first night of her return to the theatre after a break of almost eight years.
What if she was awful?
Making films was totally different from working on stage—no retakes for one thing!—and Cairo was nervous enough already without the added pressure of knowing Rafe was sitting beyond the footlights watching her.
‘I would really rather you didn’t, Rafe.’ She grimaced.
He frowned his irritation. ‘Why the hell not?’ he repeated harshly.
Well, Cairo supposed it would have been too much to expect ‘very pleasant’ to last for too much longer!
She sat back. ‘Why would you want to bother? Just so that you can see me fall flat on my face?’
‘That’s damned unfair, Cairo, and you know it!’ Rafe protested.
‘No, I don’t know it, Rafe.’ Cairo shook her head. ‘We aren’t really even friends any more, so why on earth would you want to come to the theatre to watch me on my opening night?’
His eyes were glacial. ‘Maybe I would just like to wish you well?’
‘A bouquet of flowers would do that, don’t you think?’
No, Rafe didn’t. He found himself annoyed far beyond reason by Cairo’s dismissal of his suggestion. Dammit, he wanted to come to London in three weeks’ time and watch her opening performance!
She looked about eighteen again, sitting there in her tight jeans and that soft green sweater, her face almost bare of make-up, her hair pulled up into a band at her crown, leaving the long arch of her neck vulnerably bare.
Rafe’s anger faded as quickly as it had flared into life. ‘Are yellow roses still your favourite flowers?’ he asked huskily.
Cairo gave him a startled look. ‘I— Yes. Yes, they are.’
His mouth twisted self-derisively. ‘You thought I’d forgotten.’
‘I—’ She broke off to once again moisten the pout of her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘It’s been eight years, Rafe,’ she pointed out.
Eight or eighty, Rafe hadn’t forgotten a single thing about this woman’s likes and dislikes. Either in bed or out of it!
She gave him a teasing smile. ‘A lot of other women have passed through your—’
‘Cairo,’ Rafe bit out warningly.
‘—life, since then,’ she continued ruefully.
Rafe held her gaze with his as he reached over and plucked the chopsticks from her unresisting fingers. ‘And I couldn’t tell you the favourite flower of a single one of them,’ he admitted softly.
Cairo blinked, totally disorientated by the way the atmosphere between them had once again changed from being charged with anger to sexual tension instead.
She shook her head as she nervously moistened her lips—
‘Don’t do that, Cairo!’ Rafe groaned.
‘Don’t do what?’ She was barely breathing as Rafe’s head slowly bent towards hers.
‘This,’ he murmured throatily as his tongue stroked softly against her lips, lightly, erotically, igniting a warmth deep in the pit of Cairo’s stomach as Rafe continued the caress.
Cairo closed her eyes as she gave herself up to the sensation, to that heat spreading to her thighs and causing her breasts to swell in tingling awareness as Rafe’s tongue now dipped temptingly between her parted lips.
She groaned low in her throat as Rafe’s lips slowly sipped and tasted hers and he pulled her closer against the hardness of his chest. Cairo’s hands moved up of their own volition so that she could entangle her fingers in the dark thickness of his hair as he deepened the kiss to one of hungry demand.
Rafe had no idea how long he and Cairo kissed, deeply, hungrily, her breasts pressed against him as one of his hands moved beneath the softness of her sweater to caress the length of her spine from her nape to the dipping hollow at its base, her skin like silky velvet beneath his touch.
But it wasn’t enough; he needed to kiss that velvety skin, too, wanted to cup her breasts in his hands and worship them with his lips and tongue until he heard those little noises in Cairo’s throat that told him she was about to explode.
Dammit, he wished at that moment that he had the petals of dozens of yellow roses to scatter over the carpet before laying Cairo’s naked body down on them as he parted her thighs and plunged his aching arousal inside their moist heat!
But instead, as Rafe attempted to lie down on the carpet with her, he found himself—and Cairo—surrounded by the smell and cartons of half-eaten Chinese food!
His mouth left hers and he raised his head to look at the offending cartons. ‘Hell!’ he muttered in frustration.
‘I don’t suppose chicken chow mein has the same appeal as whipped cream, does it?’
Rafe turned slowly back to look at Cairo, a smile curving his own lips as he saw the gleam of laughter in her eyes. ‘We could try it, I suppose …’
‘No, we could not!’ Cairo protested laughingly as she turned on her side away from the food, taking Rafe with her so that she now lay on his chest. ‘That’s disgusting!’ She shuddered just at the thought of those rapidly cooling noodles against her skin, slowly sobering as she found herself now looking down at Rafe, his eyes warm with intent. ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea, Rafe,’ she breathed.
He raised a hand to curve it about her cheek as his thumb moved caressingly against her lower lip. ‘Live dangerously,’ he encouraged.
That maybe wasn’t such a good idea, either, when she had just spent the last eight years living with the repercussions of the last time she had acted so impulsively!
‘Cairo, you think too much …’ Rafe groaned as he obviously saw her uncertainty.
‘First I talk too much, and now I think too much, too?’
‘Sometimes you do, yes—’
‘Well, one of us needs to, don’t you think?’ she asked tensely.
‘You’re deliberately trying to provoke an argument,’ he said slowly. ‘Why is that, Cairo? Why do you need to keep putting me at a distance?’
‘You’re hardly at a distance at this moment!’ Her breasts were pressed against the hardness of his chest, her legs lying between his, the hardness of his arousal straining against her own heated thighs….
But the mood was broken, along with that tenuous link between them that had temporarily allowed Cairo to forget all the reasons why she should not allow herself to be here like this with Rafe.
‘I’m not trying to provoke an argument.’ She rolled away from him to sit up with her arms wrapped about her bent knees. ‘I just don’t want to make another mistake where you’re concerned,’ she explained.
Rafe sat up slowly, his gaze deliberately holding hers. ‘I don’t believe we were a mistake the first time around.’
She shrugged. ‘You’re entitled to your opinion, of course.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Exactly why did you finish things between us before, Cairo?’
She gave an impatient shake of her head. ‘Isn’t it a little bit late for the two of us to be having this conversation?’
‘It’s certainly long overdue, I would have thought,’ he grated.
She sighed. ‘You know exactly why I stopped seeing you.’
‘You wanted to marry Bond—’
‘You and I had parted before I so much as went out to dinner with him!’ she defended herself heatedly.
‘You broke up with me at lunchtime and went out with Bond the same evening!’ Rafe’s voice rose, too. ‘I went shopping that morning and when the two of us met
up for lunch, you told me that you didn’t want to see me any more, that you needed to be free to concentrate on your career!’ He scowled. ‘Considering you went out with Bond that same evening, got engaged to him three days later, and then married him three weeks after that, your concentration must have been incredible!’
Cairo gasped at the insult. ‘Don’t try and turn this around on me, Rafe.’
‘Who else am I supposed to blame?’
‘I should try looking at your affair with Pamela Raines, if I were you!’ she accused as she stood up to pace the room restlessly. ‘You even spent the afternoon of my wedding in bed with her!’
Rafe scowled darkly. ‘Well, I was hardly going to attend the wedding and wish you well, now, was—’ He broke off to give her a narrow-eyed look. ‘How the hell do you know how I spent that afternoon?’
Cairo glared at him. ‘How do you think I know?’
‘I have no idea—’ He stopped and looked at her disbelievingly. ‘Pamela told you?’
Cairo nodded. ‘It was the excuse she gave when she arrived extremely late and dishevelled to the wedding reception, yes.’
Rafe shook his head. ‘I can’t believe she would— Why on earth did she do that?’
For the same reason the other woman had told Cairo three weeks previously that she and Rafe had been having an affair for weeks—because it was the truth!
That morning Rafe claimed to have gone shopping, Cairo had finished filming early and decided to go to Rafe’s hotel suite, only to have the door opened—shockingly!—by a completely nude Pamela Raines, her hair rumpled, the bedclothes in disarray on the bed in the room behind her. Pamela’s sympathy had been unbearable as she’d told Cairo that Rafe had been trying to tell her about the two of them for days now, but that he knew she was in love with him and was worried about how she would react if he told her about himself and Pamela, that he feared she might do something stupid.
Cairo had saved him the trouble and broken things off with him instead!
Calmly.
Coolly.
And then she had done something totally stupid!
Lionel had been asking Cairo to have dinner with him for several weeks, ever since his arrival in London to see how filming was going, and when he’d asked Cairo out again later that same afternoon, she had accepted. Still in the same reckless ‘I’ll show Rafe’ state of mind, she had also accepted Lionel’s whirlwind marriage proposal only three days later….
Hot Nights with a Spaniard (Mills & Boon M&B) (Mills & Boon Special Releases) Page 12