“We? I’m not your tour guide, Ava.”
She ignored his scathing retort. “No, you’re my employer,” she simpered, then with the past so clear in her mind, “Why do you insist on calling me Ava?”
He took a step towards her, his body taut. “You were once very happy for me to call you by this name.”
Her lips twisted wistfully. “No, I wasn’t. I always hated it. You can’t imagine how much I longed to hear you say my real name.” Her eyes lifted to his, challenging him, willing him, to call her Adeline.
He moved closer again, his powerful stride closing the distance between them. He lifted a fingertip to her cheek and held it there, his eyes locked to the small, insignificant contact as though it were paradigm-redefining.
“Then you should have told me your name sooner.” He didn’t move away. His finger dropped lower, to the shoulder strap of her bikini, pressing beneath the fabric, liberating it from her flesh. Addie’s breath caught in her throat.
“I wanted to.”
He made a noise of disbelief, a soft ‘tsking’ sound, and pushed her strap all the way down, so that one breast was exposed to him. Addie looked around, aware they weren’t alone, worried about being seen even when her pulse was hammering through her veins like a soda can that had been shaken for days.
“The captain could be watching--,” the words were thick and husky.
“My crew stays on the island while I’m moored here. We are alone.”
His hand lifted to her breast, cupping it, and her head thrust back on a soft moan. His fingers found the pink aureole of her nipple, brushing over it so lightly it was a torment.
“What are you doing?” She whispered, levering her hips forward, pressing her body to his.
“What does it look like?” With his body he pushed her back against the windows that framed the boat’s front deck; the glass was warm beneath her skin. His body was hard against her, his arousal like stone against her stomach.
“Who else did you play this game with?” He asked, pushing the other strap downwards, the touch of his fingers on her goosebumped flesh momentarily distracting her from the question he’d posed.
“What game?” She whispered, bright silver stars flashing behind her eyelids as he dropped his face and ran his stubbled jaw across her breasts, marking them pink with his attention. She pushed her head back, squeezing her eyes closed, as his fingers found the bottom of her bikini and slid into the waistband.
“The game in which you lie to a man, pretending to be someone you are not. You do it very well. I cannot have been the first.”
His hands pushed her bikini lower and she whimpered as the sea air collided with her femininity. Her eyes locked to his and with every fibre of truth in her heart, she spoke forcefully, “You were. The first. The only. I swear to you.”
His lips lifted in a mocking look of amusement. “It’s very hard to believe anything that comes from your mouth, Ava.” But then, for a moment, his eyes held hers and their souls connected, beating as one, as they’d done before. “Except this.” And his lips dropped to hers, almost against his will, as though dragged there by forces greater than him or her. He took her mouth, claiming it, possessing it and owning it, marking his stamp on her with every single movement. She was weak against the glass, but it provided her strength, a backbone when her own was morphing into jelly. His fingers moved towards her core, finding her slick heat and running across it so that she whimpered into his mouth.
Her hands lifted, tangling in his hair, holding his mouth where she needed it at the same time she pushed her own lips to his, dueling with his tongue, demanding more from him than he was giving.
Every single nerve ending was vibrating with an ancient, undeniable heat and need.
He pressed his mouth to her neck, finding the sensitive cluster of receptors just beneath her jaw, teasing them with his teeth until her stomach was in knots and her body was at a fever pitch.
“You weren’t a virgin,” he said, the same silky tone making her wonder if he wasn’t as affected as she was.
“No,” she whimpered, as his fingers moved faster, harder and his mouth dropped lower, to her breasts, teasing one nipple with a flick of his tongue that ran in time with his touch. She was quivering against the glass, a mess of feeling and sensation, a jumble of needs.
“So? Was this your game? Your way out of a job you hate? You don’t want to scrub toilets all your life so you dress this very beautiful body of yours in expensive outfits and hope to hook some rich fool who’ll fund your existence?”
His words were lashing her with painful accusations but his fingers were making it better, wiping away any hurts she’d ever suffered, reminding her of only the pleasures in life, reminding her of bliss and release.
But her brain was shaking Addie, begging her to speak. To say something. A denial, anything, to refute his opinion of her.
“There was only one man before you,” she said, digging her nails into his shoulder as wave after wave of pleasure built within her. “One man, and he was years ago. Years before I met you.”
His eyes flashed with an animalistic sense of ownership but Addie didn’t see it.
Addie was falling apart.
She cried out as a white-hot orgasm began to unfurl in her body, starting in her abdomen and spreading like flashes of lightning to the rest of her body.
He slid his tongue across her breast, from one nipple to the other, and he clamped his teeth down on it, nipping it just hard enough to make her pleasure spike in all the best possible ways.
“You are usually a better liar than this,” he said with dangerously soft tone to his voice.
“I’m not lying,” she whispered, her breath coming in fits and spurts, her brain refusing to cooperate with thought now as pure pleasure swallowed her alive.
“You lie as easily as you breathe,” he contradicted, and pulled away from her, removing his touch, his kiss, his warmth, leaving her quivering and on the brink of exploding. She stared at him in confusion and disbelief, her eyes heavy, a drugging need to be with him overpowering everything else.
“I want you,” she said. “That’s no lie.”
“I’m aware of that.” He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes holding hers with an intensity that pulsed in the air around them.
“And you want me,” she said bravely, already doubting the proof of what she’d just felt. Of what he’d shown her he wanted.
“Perhaps,” he shrugged his broad shoulders, giving her the impression that he was ‘take it or leave it’ with regards to their intimacy.
“No,” she shook her head. “You can’t call me a liar and then lie yourself.”
“Fine,” he said, his brows drawing closer together. “I want you. But not enough. Not enough to debase myself by sleeping with you while you continue to insist that the charade of our relationship was real.”
She was too flummoxed by pleasure to comprehend. She didn’t immediately understand his meaning.
“You are still trying to perpetuate your lies. Tell me the truth and I’ll take you to bed right now.”
The words hung between them like a challenge, a challenge that Addie felt building around her. Tell him the truth? Tell him the truth?
She ground her teeth together, her expression defiant. “I’ve been telling you the truth. Since that night at the restaurant, I’ve been completely honest with you…”
“Why do you need fifty thousand pounds?” he pushed ruthlessly, swiping the carpet right out from under her feet, leaving her unbalanced and gasping for air.
Out of nowhere, she pictured her mother. Not as she was now, but as she’d been then, before the accident. When her mother had been a respected, middle-class career woman, always in the latest fashions, hosting elegant dinner parties and impressing the neighbours with her ability to run a house, raise a family and hold down a job she loved.
Addie thought of her mother as she’d been and tears cloyed in her throat. That was the woman she had promised
to protect, the woman she owed her silence and allegiance to.
She loved Guy, and she wanted, more than anything, for him to believe her. But her mother’s secrets were not Addie’s to share. They never had been.
“It’s personal,” she said with a small shake of her head. Her body was cold, now. Though the sun was shining, she felt as though she’d slipped behind a storm cloud. Belatedly, she realized she was practically naked. Though the bikini offered little protection, she slipped it back into place, her fingers not cooperating as efficiently as she’d have liked.
His expression was sardonic. “And yet you tell me you are being honest with me?”
“I am,” she said, refusing to be cowered by him. “About what matters.”
He visibly rejected her assertion. “None of this matters anymore, Ava. It’s all ancient history.”
He stalked away, leaving her standing in the middle of a Mediterranean paradise, more miserable and confused than she’d ever been in her whole life.
She thought about following him. About trying harder to open a dialogue, but Addie had been beating her head against that particular brick wall with him since the night at the restaurant. She couldn’t tell him the truth. She had to show him.
That was why she’d come to Spain, wasn’t it?
To make him remember what they shared? To remember the truth that defied words and explanations, the truth of a love that simply was?
Her lips curved into a self-mocking grimace. She wasn’t doing a particularly good job. But the week was young, and, thanks to Cherie, her wardrobe was stocked with outfits designed with one thing in mind: seduction.
Addie moved purposefully through the yacht, her determination growing with each step.
He said he was angry with her, and he was. But he’d brought her to Spain, and she didn’t believe it was just because he thought her a talented actress. The same desire that was licking the soles of her feet was scorching him as well.
She chose a red sheathe dress that had spaghetti straps and showed more than a hint of cleavage. It fell to mid-thigh and was far shorter than anything she’d normally wear. She had a matching red thong out ready to go, but at the last minute, decided to skip it altogether.
He wasn’t the only one who could call the shots. When he came knocking, she’d be ready for him!
Only Guy didn’t come knocking. Not for a long time, in any event. Addie sat with her book, on the deck, her legs out in the sun, her mind – and eyes – wandering from time to time to the windows he’d pressed her against that afternoon, before guiltily flashing back to the words on the pages of her book.
Sometime in the early afternoon, going by the sun’s trajectory, he appeared beside her, his manner as imposing as if she were applying for a job at his firm wearing a hot-dog costume.
“Have you eaten lunch?”
“Lunch?” She frowned, like she’d never so much as heard of it.
“Yes, Ava. You know, the meal that follows breakfast?”
She refused to rise to the bait. “I haven’t,” she said with a shake of her head. “I hadn’t realized the time.”
“It is nearly four o’clock,” he said with obvious disapproval.
“Oh,” she shrugged. “That’s okay. I’m not particularly hungry.”
“Fine,” he said. “That’s your decision. The kitchen is fully stocked if you should change your mind.”
It was hardly a gracious offer to whip her up her favourite dish, but it was a civility she no longer expected from Guy. “Thank you.”
He spun and stormed away, his mood apparently dark.
An hour later, he was back. “Did you eat?”
She stared at him, her frown deep. “No. I told you, I’m not hungry.”
He looked, to all the world, like he was going to say something, but he compressed his lips and shrugged. “We are due at Santiago’s within the hour. You should get ready.”
Addie arched a brow and slowly, painstakingly slowly, pressed a finger into the page of her book before standing. At full height, she was still at least a foot shorter than Guy, and the difference in their sizes was somehow more apparent like this – with him in jeans and a button-down shirt and her in a skimpy, sexy designer dress that would look more at home at a hip nightclub opening than at dinner with his grandfather.
Still, Guy was the one who’d thrown it in her face that he’d moved on with other women; and she had no doubt just what those women would be like. Stunning, glamorous, wealthy.
An ancient feminine pride not only to compete with them but to utterly trounce them fired in her veins.
“Does it look like I’m not ready?” She prompted with an arched brow that invited him to argue.
“It looks like you are going to give my grandfather a heart attack,” he muttered.
Addie laughed, and suddenly, the sultry air around them dissipated. “I’ll get changed if you don’t think it’s appropriate. I like the dress…”
“Don’t.” His hand curled around her wrist, pulling her body to his, holding her against him. And his eyes showed a conflicting current of feelings as he stared down at her, just like when he’d kissed her. Like he wanted her and hated that he wanted her, all at once. “I like the dress too.”
* * *
As the golf buggy pulled up outside the home, Addie stepped out and Guy caught a hint of her fragrance. The perfume she wore, but also her, that indefinable sweetness that had always imprinted itself on his sheets and pillows, so that even when she was absent from his home, he was somehow surrounded by her.
Memories fired through him and he suppressed them, thrusting them deep into the recesses of his mind. They weren’t welcome.
Memories of pleasure that was borne from her lies had no place in his life.
He walked behind her, his eyes trained on the curve of her arse as she moved with a provocative sway towards the front door.
She knew what she was doing to him. No, she was doing it on purpose.
He could hardly blame her. If she wanted to weasel her way back into his good books, she was right to think sex was her only shot. He’d never trust her again, he’d never care for her again, but the way their bodies harmonized was something he’d never before experienced.
He could almost forget about her duplicity if it meant having the pleasure of her as his mistress. Almost, but not quite.
“Guy,” Addie paused by the door, her voice lowered, her head tilted backwards, towards him. Her hair was loose, falling half-way down her back, and he aimed to wrap it in his fist, tugging on it just hard enough to expose her beautiful mouth to his once more. To make her gasp in surprise so he could plunder her anew.
His body hardened and inwardly he swore. He didn’t particularly need to be dealing with visible proof of his attraction towards this woman when he entered Santiago’s home.
“There’s something I want to tell you.”
He barely caught the whispered statement and had to move closer, lowering his head. She stood on tiptoes and whispered, into his ear, so that the words were warm all the way to his brain, then right to his groin, “The dress is all I’m wearing. I just thought you should know.”
7
THE MOMENT THE DOOR opened, Addie wished she hadn’t chosen such a daring act of seduction. Sure, the dress was great for getting Guy hot under the collar and maybe even forcing him to act on the way they both felt, but for meeting his mother for the first time? It was definitely not how Addie would have chosen to do it.
She glared at Guy, her sense of betrayal obvious, as several family members turned to face the door, appraising the newest arrivals with undisguised interest.
“You didn’t want to tell me your family was going to be here?” She said through a false smile.
His frown was infinitesimal. “I told you my family was coming for the week.”
“But that we were early,” she responded in a low whisper. “I had no way of knowing they’d be here tonight.”
“Is this a problem?” H
e whispered back, but his expression showed a total lack of comprehension as to why she was so bothered.
“Well, yes,” she said crossly, her cheeks glowing pink. “For one thing, I’m dressed like…”
“I suggested you might like to change…”
“But you didn’t tell me why!”
“Guy!” A woman was pacing towards them, tall, brunette, and so incredibly beautiful that she could only be Guy’s mother.
“Luciana,” he said, putting an arm around Addie’s waist and pulling her closer. “I thought I heard a helicopter.”
“We arrived hours ago, and you are only just here now?” She volleyed in Spanish.
Guy responded pointedly in English. “We were invited for dinner.”
“You don’t need an invitation to Santiago’s, son,” his father appeared behind Luciana, a glass of red wine in hand, eyes smiling as they skimmed the apparently happy couple. “Then again, Santiago did mention you’ve got other things on your mind.”
Other things, Addie gathered, meant her. She swallowed, forcing a smile to her lips. She wished she was wearing something beautiful and modest, but instead, she was in this stripper dress, and there was nothing for it but to grin and bear it and pray she didn’t inadvertently flash her naked backside to anyone in Guy’s family.
“Luciana, Carlos, this is Ava Peters.”
Her heart throbbed heavily but her smile didn’t drop. “A pleasure to meet you,” she murmured, extending a hand to Luciana. The other woman took it, her smile reserved.
Carlos was less dubious. He shook Addie’s hand, then put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her deeper into the beautiful living space. Santiago was sitting on the balcony, as he had been the night before.
“We thought we’d eat outside, as the sun goes down. I presume these two have told you of their ritual?”
“Sunsets?” Addie asked, stepping out onto the balcony.
“Sunsets,” Carlos confirmed. “Always sunsets.”
“Only on the island,” Guy said from behind them, reaching for Addie’s hand and squeezing it in his. Could he sense her nervousness? Her apprehension?
Claiming his Secret Baby & Blackmailed by The Spaniard Page 26