Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (22 page)

‘He’s fine,’ Luiz murmured huskily beside her, reading her mind as if it already belonged to him. ‘Stop worrying about him.’

Caroline heaved out a soft deriding laugh at the remark. For when had she
not
worried about her father? He had been a good old-fashioned rake in his heyday, and marriage hadn’t really changed him. Though she thought—
hoped
that he had at least remained faithful to her mother.

No, she told herself firmly. Her father had been no philanderer. A rogue and a gambler, yes, but he’d loved her mother. If anything, all his old weaknesses had only reemerged after her mother had died and he’d missed her so badly that he’d had to look for forgetfulness somewhere.

Or at least that was how it had been in the beginning. Now…? Her eyes glassed over, blocking out the need to look for the answer to that question because she already knew it.

The car began to climb out of the bay and into private villa country. Caroline recognised the area because she’d used to know so many people who owned holiday homes here. This had been her playground, a place for fun and carefree vacations away from the restrictions of boarding school during the long summer breaks. She’d used to have as many friends here as she had back home in England then. Now she could barely remember a single one of
them, and could only shudder at the memory of her last disastrous visit to Marbella.

The car made a sudden turn to the right, driving through a pair of open gates and up the driveway to a private villa. Built on one level, it sprawled hacienda-style right and left of a stone-built archway which took them into a central courtyard.

As soon as the car stopped at an imposing wide framed entrance, Luiz was out of the car and coming around to her side to help her to alight.

‘What is this place?’ she asked, glancing furtively around the whitewashed vine strewn walls that were now surrounding them. But what really captured her attention was the fleet of other cars all parked up here. Cars meant people, and people meant—

‘Luiz!’ she protested in dismay when he caught hold of her hand and began pulling her in through the entrance. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘A party,’ he said.

Caroline began to wonder if she was losing her sanity. He had just put her through one of the worst evening in her entire life, and now he was casually dragging her off to a party?

‘No way,’ she refused, tugging to a standstill. ‘I don’t want to party. And I certainly don’t want to do it looking like—this!’

He turned round to look at her, and something very hot suddenly burned in his eyes. ‘You look sensational,’ he told her huskily.

Sensational? She almost laughed in his face! ‘That’s the best lie you’ve told me to date!’ she scoffed. ‘I’ve just been swimming. My hair is a mess and I have on no make-up. My skin smells of chlorine and I’m not even wearing a bra!’

He just smiled a sinfully sexy smile and murmured, ‘I know. I was there, remember?’

The smile had her floundering—floundering because it was pure
old
Luiz. The one who’d used to smile at her just like that when they’d been passionate lovers and so very at ease together that she would have cut out anyone’s tongue if they’d tried to tell her he was using her for a fool!

It played oddly on her defences to remember that. Made her want to relax her guard and smile back at him, be the old Caroline, from when life had been wonderful and she’d been in love and thought she didn’t have a single care in the world.

Her hand twitched in his—reacting to secret wishes. His own fingers tightened, as if he thought she was trying to get away and he was making sure that she didn’t.

‘Luiz…’ she pleaded, responding to that glimpse of the man she used to know.

It was like watching warm living tissue turn to stone. ‘If you are going to start begging, then don’t,’ he advised. ‘We went way beyond the point where it could be of any use to you to do so, a long time ago.’

When had that point been exactly? she wondered, taking his verbal slap-down with a wince she didn’t even bother to try and hide. When they’d been kissing each other into a frenzy in the pool room, perhaps? The twist to her mouth mocked the suggestion, because the man who had all but completely devoured her had recovered too quickly and too well to be vulnerable to anything—including the begging voice of the woman he’d held in his arms at the time.

In his office then, when he had cruelly and efficiently slayed her with words? No room for begging there, she thought grimly. No room for anything but bitterness and anger and pain and…

‘Negotiations are over, I take it,’ she clipped.

He gave a curt nod. ‘All I want from you now is a simple yes or no to my proposition.’

‘Your blackmail, you mean,’ she countered thinly.

‘Okay, blackmail.’ He gave an indifferent shrug to her play on words, and took her into a large white hall constructed almost entirely of marble.

A pair of narrow hallways led off to the left and the right of her, linking the separate wings of the villa, she assumed. But it was to one of the rooms directly off this main hallway that Luiz took her.

‘Who does this house belong to?’ she asked tartly. ‘Only I suppose I should know just whose hospitality I will be offending, coming to their party looking like this…’

‘Then you don’t need to think about it,’ Luiz answered pragmatically. ‘Since it is me you will be offending.’

In a night of hard shocks, this was just another one to help keep her knocked permanently out of kilter, she supposed, remembering the Luiz of seven years ago telling her smilingly that he lived out of hotels. ‘Homes are for families, and I don’t have one,’ he’d told her casually, but she’d seen the bleakness in his eyes when he’d said it, and known that inside he hadn’t been feeling casual at all.

It was a memory that brought with it another question that almost blew her mind apart. ‘You’re not married now, are you?’ she choked out.

His answering burst of laughter took them in through the door and offered no warning whatsoever of what she was about to come face to face with.

Her heart dropped with a sickening thump to the pit of her stomach. The roller coaster ride of emotion she seemed to be on swung her through yet another violently swerving dive. Admittedly, it was a beautiful room, furnished in the very best that was tasteful in Spanish architecture.

But it wasn’t the room that held her frozen. Or even the blanket awareness of a couple of dozen people turning in
their direction—though their sheer elegance was enough to have her shrinking back to half hide behind Luiz, while sheer vanity sent her fingers up to self-consciously touch her tangle-dried hair.

No, being aware that she must look as if Luiz had just plucked her out of the sea like a mermaid and decided to bring her along here for her novelty value was not what was filling her with a dizzying dismay. It was the sight of a green baize table waiting at the ready, barely three feet away from where she stood, with a solemn-faced croupier standing nearby, counting different coloured gambling chips into neat stacks on a separate counter.

‘Where is he?’ she whispered, her voice thickened by the actual reality of what Luiz had set up here.

He didn’t even try to misunderstand the question. ‘In one of the bedrooms,’ he replied. ‘Taking a rest before the evening begins.’

Begins… The word played back and forth across her frozen senses, her glazed eyes barely seeing the waiting party of people now, even though they were standing there in expectant silence, obviously waiting for Luiz to introduce her.

But Caroline didn’t want to be introduced. In fact she felt positively sick with revulsion at the very idea. Because if they were here, and that table was there, then they were all no-good gamblers like her own wretched father. Like the man standing at her side.

And it was decision time, she realised starkly. Now, before this situation got any worse!

Without any further consideration of what she was about to do, she slid herself stealthily round until she was standing directly in front of Luiz. ‘All right,’ she breathed into his left shoulder.

‘All right, what?’ he quizzed, aiming a puzzled frown down at her.

‘All right. I’ll sleep with you,’ she whispered. Cold fingers took a fierce grip on his sleeve. ‘Now,’ she added tautly. ‘We’ll go and do it right now…’

H
IS
sudden tension suggested that she had just managed to shock him. Caroline didn’t care. She wanted out of this room and she wanted her father kept out of it too.

Hard hands suddenly grasped her shoulders, the slender bones almost snapped under the tension she was placing them under. ‘Caroline—’

‘No!’ she interrupted with a choke that was almost a sob. Her mouth was quivering, she couldn’t seem to stop it, and her throat was hot and tight. ‘Negotiations are over, you told me,’ she reminded him. ‘You wanted my answer. Well, you’ve got it. So now get me out of here!’

His chest heaved on the sigh that shot from him; his fingers increased their grip. ‘You fool!’ he muttered, then, on a complete change of manner, said sardonically to their audience. ‘My apologies, but
I
seem to have inadvertently embarrassed my companion. Please, go on enjoying yourselves while
I
take her away and attempt to make my peace before
I
bring her back again.’

The answering rumble of surprise and consternation flicked at her like the stinging tip of a whip. Luiz was smiling back at them through violently gritted teeth. His hands left her shoulders, an arm returning to clamp around them instead. Then he walked her stiff and quivering frame back through the doors, letting them shut behind them.

He was furious with her for causing that scene. Caroline knew that, but had gone way beyond the point where she could do anything about it. The knowledge of what she had just agreed to was clinging like a tight steel band
around her aching chest and stopping her from uttering a single word in her own defence.

With a grimness that made her feel like a child being marched off by a stern parent, Luiz took her across the foyer and along the opposite hallway. At the other end was a door that opened into a large bedroom furnished with the same stylish elegance as the other room, only this room had a king-size bed occupying prominent position instead of a card table.

The door closed them in. Caroline stood just in front of it with her head held high and waited to find out what was to come at her next.

Would he order her to take all her clothes off and climb into the bed? Or was he going to offload whatever it was he was keeping severely damped down inside him before he ordered her out of her clothes?

She couldn’t see his face because he had his back to her, but she could certainly see his tension. And on one level she was rather satisfied to see that she seemed to have managed to rock the unrockable poise of Luiz Vazquez.

He moved at last, breaking the throbbing silence with a short heavy explosion of air before dipping his hand into one of the pockets of his cream tux. It came out again with her evening bag, which he tossed onto a nearby chair. She’d forgotten he even had it. Next came her black silk bra—which she had forgotten about also. But she was now painfully reminded of their passionate interlude in the pool room as she watched that item land on top of the bag.

He removed his jacket next. It landed on the bed. Broad shoulders, tanned neck, bright white dress shirt made of a fine enough linen for her to see the darkness of his skin showing through. Her heart began to stutter. Her throat went dry. The steel band around her chest tightened its
grip a little more. He swung around to look at her appraisingly, making her sharply catch her breath.

She couldn’t speak. She was too stressed out to speak. But even if she’d been able to she knew that she wouldn’t. She had played her last card. Whatever was left was for Luiz to play.

‘You have fifteen minutes to do whatever it takes to make you face my guests without the expression of horror.’

The command utterly threw her. She had expected anger, she had expected seduction, she had even expected a heavy mix of both! But she hadn’t expected to feel the slap of his icy contempt.

But her chin tilted even higher, amethyst eyes glinting with a defiance that hid whatever she was feeling inside. ‘But I don’t want to face your guests in any way,’ she stiffly informed him.

‘Nevertheless,’ he drawled, ‘it is what you are going to do.’

‘They have nothing to do with what we are here for!’ she protested, breaking free from her steel casing when all Luiz did was swing away again, to stride across the room towards a long line of floor-to-ceiling cupboards.

‘And it wasn’t your friends that filled me with horror,’ she added as she followed angrily in his footsteps. ‘It was that card table standing there ready and waiting, like a stage prop, for you to play out some hideous act of destruction on my father!’

‘You are still assuming that I am going to win, then,’ he remarked, opening one of the cupboard doors.

Her footsteps stopped. ‘Whether you will or not no longer comes into it!’ Despite the anger, her anxiety was beginning to show in the faint tremor of her voice. ‘We made a deal where if I sleep with you, you don’t play him!
You proposed it, Luiz!’ she reminded him. ‘And I just agreed!’

In the process of withdrawing a fresh dinner jacket from inside the cupboard, Luiz glanced at her anxious, defiant face, flicked a similar glance at the waiting bed, then smiled the kind of smile that could freeze a fast-flowing river. ‘I just upped the ante,’ he told her softly. Then calmly shrugged himself into his jacket while Caroline just stood there dumbfounded.

‘I d-don’t understand…’ she stammered. ‘W-what do you m-mean?’

Smoothly, he repeated it for her. ‘I just upped the ante.’ With a deft tug he pulled bright white cuffs with black and gold cufflinks into view. He worded it differently. ‘The deal has just changed.’

‘But—you can’t do that!’ she protested.

He looked at her. ‘How,’ he oh, so tauntingly enquired, ‘are you going to stop me?’

‘But—I’ve already agreed to your sordid little deal,’ she cried out in complete bewilderment. ‘What else can you possibly want from me, Luiz?’

‘That’s it.’ He nodded, as if she’d said something memorably fortuitous. ‘Sordid,’ he explained. ‘I’ve decided that I don’t want sordid.’ He moved briskly to check out his bow tie in the sleek gold-framed mirror hanging on the wall above a rosewood tallboy. ‘In fact sordid doesn’t suit my plans at all, which is why I’ve decided to up the ante.’

‘To what, for goodness’ sake?’ she asked in pure frustration.

His fingers stilled against the bow tie. Via the mirror he looked at her. Via the mirror his cold, dark inscrutable eyes captured hers. And Caroline found herself holding onto her breath in a way that starved her brain of oxygen during a pause that seemed to go on for ever—before he answered
her with the silk-voiced simplistic use of a single word that completely blew her mind.

‘Marriage,’ he said.

Seconds, minutes—Caroline didn’t know how long it was that she just stood there staring at him, as if he was on one planet while she was on another.

Then she gave a shaky laugh. ‘You’re joking,’ she decided.

But his deadly smooth, deadly calm, deadly serious expression told her that this was no joke. He meant it. Marriage. Luiz wanted marriage. To her.

Without a single word, she turned and walked back to the bedroom door. This had gone far enough, she was telling herself grimly. And it had gone on long enough. Now she was—

‘We have been here before, Caroline, but I am quite happy to act out the scene again if you need me to do it…’ Luiz’s voice slid snake-like after her. ‘So, walk out of that door and I
will
play your father tonight at poker…’

Her fingers curled around the brass doorhandle, actually gripped and began to turn it before she lost the will. Slowly she turned, weakly she leaned against the door now behind her, defeatedly she stared across the room to where Luiz was now propped up against the rosewood tallboy, with his ankles crossed casually and his hands resting comfortably in his trouser pockets.

Tall, dark, undoubtedly the most attractive man she had ever met in her entire life, he exuded self-assurance from every supremely relaxed pore.

The self-assured kind of man who wanted his pound of flesh, for some utterly obscure reason. ‘I suppose you have a good reason for making this proposition?’ she prompted shakily.

His lashes flickered, hiding dark brown eyes as they slid over her. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed.

Caroline’s mouth tightened. ‘Am I to know what that reason is?’ she asked.

‘Not until you agree to do it,’ he replied. ‘And maybe not even then, depending on
how
you agree to it.’

‘Then how would you
like
me to agree to it?’ she enquired ever so, ever so sweetly, beginning to pulse with anger at the way he was making her pull answers out of him.

A smile touched his mouth, a very wry smile that acknowledged her sarcasm. ‘Well, a simple
yes
would do for starters,’ he drawled. ‘But to hear you say yes because you simply can’t imagine the rest of your life without me in it would be absolutely perfect.’

Since the chances of that happening were less than nil, she didn’t even bother to remark on the suggestion. ‘And what are the chances of the ante going up again before you’re finished with me?’ she asked instead.

‘Finished with you?’ Curiously he picked up on the word, then gave a shake of his head. ‘In this case, my ever being
finished
with you doesn’t apply,’ he told her. ‘I may sound like a fully emancipated all-American guy,’ he said, thickening his accent to suit the remark, ‘but remember that I
am
Spanish. And, being Spanish, I marry once and for life. So take that on board while you make your decision,’ he advised her. ‘I want your
life
Caroline,’ he spelled out. ‘And, because I have raised the stakes,’ he added, ‘I will not only
not
play your father tonight, but I will also agree to pay off all his outstanding debts, get your home out of hock and ensure that it remains that way for the rest of your life. At the same time I will take over your watchdog role with your father.’ He seemed to decide that covered it nicely. ‘Does that sweeten the deal a little for you?’

Sweeten it? It made it positively compelling, she thought with heaviness that took her that little bit closer
to defeat—though if she had any choices at all she wished someone would point them out to her. ‘If this is for life, then why me?’ She frowned, wishing she understood what was really going on. And she knew there just had to be something going on that Luiz wasn’t talking about.

‘Why not you?’ Luiz countered with a shrug. ‘You are beautiful, you are well bred, and you would enhance the arm of any man,’

‘A trophy, in other words,’ she likened bitterly.

‘If you like.’ He wasn’t going to argue with that belittling description. ‘But honesty forces me to add that I still fancy the hell out of you or you wouldn’t be standing here at all, believe me.’

His dry smile made her flinch. But she received the message well enough. Be glad I do still fancy you, Caroline, or you would now be standing in deep trouble somewhere else entirely.

‘Yes. I will marry you,’ she said, that briefly and that simply.

To give him credit, Luiz didn’t try to draw out his victory. ‘Good,’ was all he said, then, straightening his lean frame away from the tallboy, turned to slide open the top drawer.

Standing there, watching him, Caroline thought she saw the merest glimpse of a tremor in his hand as he took it out of his pocket to open the drawer. But by the time he turned, with a clean handkerchief in a hand that revealed only super-sure steadiness, she decided that she must have been mistaken.

‘You now have ten minutes to make yourself feel better about meeting our guests,’ he said, with a subtle alteration in the possessive that didn’t pass Caroline by. ‘Bathroom through that door.’ He indicated. ‘Clothes in the cupboards. I have a few phone calls to make.’

With that he began walking towards her, looking the
cool, calm, inscrutable Luiz Vazquez who utterly scorned the idea that anything so weak as a tremor could dare to touch him.

She was blocking the door he obviously wished to go through to make his precious calls, but for the life of her Caroline couldn’t give another single inch to him by stepping meekly to one side.

He reached her, stopped. Her heart began to thump. Taller than her, wider than her, darker than her in every way there was, he intimidated her on levels she had not known existed before she knew him.

His eyebrows arched. ‘Is there something we missed?’ he prompted, softly mocking her stubborn refusal to budge.

She had to swallow through a terrible tension before saying what was on her mind, but she was determined to say it anyway. ‘Didn’t you hurt me enough seven years ago without continuing this vendetta you seem to have going for my family?’

His hand came up, touched her pale cheek, and the skin beneath began to burn as if branded. ‘Seven years ago you would not have needed to ask that question,’ he murmured.

‘Seven years ago I thought you loved me,’ she replied huskily. ‘But it wasn’t love, was it, Luiz? I was merely there, and easy, which provided you with a bit of light amusement in between all the really serious stuff.’

He smiled an odd smile. ‘Is that what you think?’

‘It’s what I know,’ she insisted—even now, seven years on, still able to feel the bitterness of learning that eating away at her.

His dark head came down, making her stiffen and tingle when he brought his lips into contact with her ear. ‘Then how can you bear to have me touch you?’ he whispered in soft, moist, sensual derision—and dropped his fingers from her cheek to place them over her breast where the
thin fabric of her dress did nothing to disguise her instant response to him.

With a jerk she stepped sideways and right out of his reach, hating herself and despising him so much that she could barely cope with what was now tumbling about inside her.

Luiz said nothing, but then he really didn’t need to—which was the real humiliation as he simply opened the door she was no longer guarding and stepped through it.

Left alone, it was all she could do just to sink weakly into the nearest chair. Instantly she felt something beneath her, and reached down and plucked out both her bag and her bra. The flimsy piece of black silk dangled like a taunt from her trembling fingers, reminding her why it wasn’t on her body.