Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (25 page)

The doctor’s beeper began sounding then, cutting short any more discussion other than for him to step up and give Caroline’s cheek an affectionate peck before turning briskly away with, ‘See you both at the church, God willing!’

Then he was gone, scooting away as abruptly as he had arrived.

‘What did he mean, you need a food-taster?’ she asked in his uncle’s wake. ‘And what castle—what wedding?’

‘The wedding you should have been expecting,’ Luiz drawled. ‘The castle is the one I inherited along with my illustrious title. And the food-tasting quip was a joke—though not a very funny joke, I will admit,’ he conceded.

It hadn’t sounded like a joke to Caroline. In fact it had sounded like a bit of very serious advice! ‘I wish you would tell me what is really going on here,’ she bit out angrily.

‘Feuds and fortunes,’ Luiz replied laconically, and halted any further discussion by leading her out into a
corridor that had too many other people walking about to allow for private conversation.

Vito Martinez was standing by the car waiting for them as they came outside. ‘Any messages?’ was Luiz’s instant enquiry as they approached him.

‘Nothing that can’t wait,’ the other man answered with a telling glance in Caroline’s direction.

It niggled her to catch that glance. Just as a lot of other things were now niggling her. ‘You two should think about joining the Secret Service,’ she snapped out tartly, and climbed into the back of the car without waiting for a response.

A few seconds went by before Luiz eventually joined her. Car doors slammed, the engine fired and behind his protective shield of glass Vito Martinez set them all into smooth motion.

‘Vito meant no offence,’ Luiz said quietly.

Caroline twisted her head to show him amethyst eyes turned smoky grey with anger. ‘Tell me, is that Vito the croupier, Vito the waiter, or Vito the chauffeur you are talking about?’ she asked sarcastically.

‘It is Vito my security chief and most trusted employee,’ he replied very levelly, but it was a silken warning to watch her tongue.

Caroline was feeling too fed up with the whole darn situation to watch her tongue. ‘Oh, I see, Mr Versatility, then,’ she mocked. ‘Does that mean he’s the one that pulls out the toenails of your enemies for you in between making sure that sick old men catch flights out of a country you don’t want them to be in?’

‘Vito did not chauffeur your father to the airport; he chauffeured you to the hospital, if you recall.’

‘Ah, he has assistants, then.’ She nodded understandingly.

The steady gaze hardened fractionally. ‘You, I think, are gunning for a fight.’

He was right; she was.

Luiz’s eyes narrowed. ‘Be very—very careful,
querida
,’ he warned.

‘Stop the car,’ she demanded.

Why she said it Caroline certainly didn’t know—but without hesitation Luiz leant forward and pressed a switch that sent the glass sliding downwards.

‘Stop the car, Vito,’ he commanded. The car came to a smooth halt.

Caroline was out on the side of the road before she’d had a chance to realise she was there. It was crazy. The whole situation was crazy! She didn’t know what she was doing here in Marbella! She didn’t know what she was doing letting Luiz Vazquez control her life! And she certainly didn’t know what she was doing standing here looking out over the Bay of Malaga beneath a burning hot summer sun—shivering like a block of ice!

She heard Luiz’s feet scrape on loose tarmac but didn’t turn around. She felt his closeness when he came to stand behind her but didn’t acknowledge he was there. Her eyes were hurting, and so was her head. And, lower down, that band of steel was encasing her chest again.

‘In the hours since we met, you’ve tricked me, blackmailed me, kidnapped me and seduced me,’ she told him in a tight little voice. ‘You’ve helped me put my father into hospital, then had him neatly spirited away. In short, you’ve layered shock after shock after shock on me, in some neatly worked out little sequence aimed, I think, to keep me constantly knocked off balance. And you know what, Luiz?’

‘What?’ he prompted.

‘I haven’t got a single shred of an idea as to
why
you’ve decided to do this to me!’

He didn’t reply—had she really expected him to? Caroline asked herself bitterly as she swung round to look directly at him. His lean hard face was giving nothing away—as usual. And as she stood there, letting the silence stretch between them in the hopes that it would force an explanation out of him, she found her mind scanning back to their seven-week romance seven years ago, looking for clues as to why he was treating her like this.

But the only thing she could come up with was the ugly scene they had had on the night she’d left Marbella for good. Luiz had been standing there, much as he was now, tall and tense, while she’d flung accusation after accusation at him.

‘How could you do it, Luiz?’ she could hear herself sobbing. ‘How could you take everything I had to offer you then leave my arms to go and win money from my father in the casino night after night?’

‘I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that it was your father who was trying to win money from me?’ he’d bitten back coldly.

His attempt to shift the blame to her father had only infuriated her more. ‘
You’re
the professional!’ she’d cried. ‘You told me yourself that you used to make a living from gambling—whereas my father is just a gullible fool!’

‘He’s an
addict
, Caroline,’ Luiz had hit back brutally. ‘A compulsive gambler who is therefore willing to play
anyone
so long as he plays!’

‘Well, he says he played you,’ she’d told him. ‘Are you telling me that he lied?’

‘No,’ he’d said heavily. ‘He didn’t lie.’

It had been the death of a beautiful love affair, she recalled as she came swimming back to the present. She had walked away. Luiz had let her go. And not a single day had gone by since when she hadn’t closed her eyes and seen his ice-cold expression as she’d left him standing
there—and wished more than anything that things could have been different.

‘This has nothing to do with the past, but with the future.’

Luiz spoke so suddenly that she had to blink a couple of times before she could realise that he was actually answering the question she’d put to him before she’d gone floating off into memories.

‘I need a wife to secure the final part of my inheritance,’ he explained. ‘And, having come to terms with the fact that I have to have one, I have decided that I would prefer that wife to be you. Does that make you feel any better?’ he taunted lazily.

No, it didn’t. She went pale. ‘I’m just a convenient means to an end, then,’ she said, seeing just how
conveniently
vulnerable to persuasion she had been for him. He hadn’t even had to woo her, just make her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

‘As I am to you,’ he pointed out coldly. ‘Which seems pretty fair all the way round, don’t you think?’

She found herself stumped for an argument because, put like that, he was right! Luiz waited, though, ruthless devil, until he was sure she was not going to throw him yet another tantrum on some other quickly thought up charge.

Then, ‘Can we go now?’ he requested, oh, so sardonically. ‘Only I have a lot of things to do before we leave here in the morning.’

Leave…

He was doing it again! Knocking her off balance with yet another one of his little surprises! ‘Leave for where?’ she gasped out.

‘Cordoba,’ he replied, then turned on his heel and strode back to the car.

Caroline followed—did she really have any choice? she
angrily mocked herself. ‘What’s in Cordoba?’ she demanded, the moment she was back inside the car.

‘A small valley in the mountains that goes by the name of Valle de los Angeles,’ he explained as the car began to accelerate. ‘And there in the valley stands the Castillo de los Angeles, which belongs to Luiz Angeles de Vazquez, Conde del Valle de los Angeles…’

And if she thought she’d plumbed the depths of cynicism in her own way a while back, then Luiz was now demonstrating what little she knew about cynicism at all.

‘There,
el conde,’
he continued in the same nerve-wincing tone, ‘will wed his betrothed in the church of the Valle de los Angeles, as is tradition for all condes del Valle de los Angeles. Then he will carry his bride off to his impressive
castillo
—just in time to banish the resident wicked witch before he ravishes his new Condesa.’

‘Wicked witch?’ she quizzed, picking out the only part in the acutely sarcastic agenda that managed to completely baffle her.

‘Sí.’
He nodded. ‘Doña Consuela Engracia de Vazquez—the present Condesa del Valle de los Angeles.’

‘The lady your uncle mentioned earlier,’ she remembered.

‘Sí,’
he said again. ‘Tío Fidel is a very shrewd man,’ he allowed. ‘He is also the only member of my family that you can safely trust,’ he then added, more seriously. ‘It will be wise of you,
querida
, to mark that I said that…’

M
ARK
it, he’d said…

But twenty-four hours later it was Luiz who seemed to be marking what he’d said, Caroline noted, as the closer they got to Cordoba, the more uptight he became.

Sitting beside him, she stared at the forever-changing vista beyond the car window and wondered what it was that was eating into him today. He should be happy, she mused testily. After all, he’d got himself one very meek and obedient passenger here, who hadn’t put up a single protest against his arrogant take-over of her life—well, not since her performance out on the Marbella road yesterday, anyway.

But then she hadn’t been given the opportunity to protest about anything else, she reminded herself. Because as soon as he’d delivered her back to his villa Luiz had shot off again with his security chief, and she hadn’t set eyes on him until he’d come to collect her for this journey this morning.

And he had arrived dressed for travelling, in a lightweight black linen suit and white shirt, looking almost as uptight as he did right now!

‘Are you ready? Is that your case? Do you think we can go, then?’ Terse to the point of rudeness, he had barely given her chance to reply. And other than for a quick down and away glance at the dusky mauve skinny top and cream tailored skirt she had chosen to wear for the journey, not once had he allowed himself to make full eye contact with her.

Because he’d known that to do so would give her an
invitation to start speaking her mind again. Something Luiz obviously didn’t want. Something Luiz obviously
still
didn’t want, since he’d maintained that barrier throughout the whole time they had been travelling.

Maybe he was afraid she was going to start demanding to know where he had spent last night, she mused with an acidity that stung in her blood. Because he certainly hadn’t spent it with her, in his own bed. And he might be refusing to look at her, but she had certainly looked at him enough to notice the signs of a man who hadn’t got much sleep!

She had, she recalled smugly. She’d slept like a baby and hadn’t even missed him until she’d woken up this morning to find the place beside her was still as smooth as it had been when she’d fallen asleep!

Liar, a tiny voice in her head said. You woke several times and worried because he wasn’t there. You missed him too! Which makes the lie all that more pathetic!

‘Damn,’ Luiz muttered, bringing the car to a sudden stop. ‘I think we just missed the turning…’

Slamming the car into reverse gear, he began driving them back the way they had just come, past a junction sporting a road sign indicating that a place called Los Aminos was off to the left.

He stopped the car again, uttered an irritated sigh and reached for the glove compartment to extract a road map, which he then spread out across the steering wheel and began to frown at.

Caroline frowned too. ‘Don’t you
know
where we’re going?’

‘No,’ he replied.

Blunt and gruff, it didn’t really encourage more questioning. But she was confused. It didn’t seem likely, knowing his gift of near photo-perfect memory, that he could have actually got them lost!

‘How often have you made this journey?’ she asked, condescension feathering her tone.

A long index finger was following the wavy red line that cut a path through from Marbella to Cordoba. A sudden vision of that same finger tracing circles around her navel sent an injection of heat directly to her thighs. It was shameful. She despised herself.

‘I haven’t,’ Luiz said.

It took a moment for her to take that answer in. Then she noticed that the finger had stopped at a road junction. This road junction, Caroline supposed, glancing up at the sign, then back at the map to see that indeed the finger was touching this precise point on the map.

‘You mean you haven’t done it from Marbella before?’ she finally decided.

The finger began moving again, mesmerising her when she knew she shouldn’t let it, as it traced a line off to the left that went skirting around Cordoba.

‘I meant I have not been there—period,’ he clarified, bringing the finger to a stop at a tiny dot on the map that bore the name Valle de los Angeles.

The remark came as such a surprise that it had her turning in her seat to stare at his grimly taut profile. ‘Why not?’ she demanded.

He didn’t answer. Instead he began neatly folding up the map again, and just let the silence fill with the same tension they had been travelling with before he’d lost his sense of direction.

‘Luiz?’ she prompted.

‘Because I knew I wouldn’t be welcome, okay?’ he launched at her tightly.

‘But it belongs to you!’ she exclaimed.

‘What does that have to do with being made welcome?’ Leaning across her, he put the map back into the glove compartment.

Sudden enlightenment hit. ‘The one who might poison you,’ she murmured softly. ‘The resident wicked witch—your father’s widow?’

‘You bet,’ he replied, shifting the car into gear.

‘And she—resents you?’ She tried to put it kindly, but still Luiz released a scornful laugh.

‘Wouldn’t you resent the man who has usurped your own son’s position in the family?’

His father had
another
son? Luiz had a half-brother? While she sat there absorbing this latest piece of news, Luiz spun the steering wheel and set them moving into the left-hand fork in the road. A long and dusty winding road lay ahead of them. With a surge of power Luiz accelerated along it. Top-of-the-range plush as the car was, custom-built for quality performance with optimum comfort as it was, the BMW could do nothing about the kind of atmosphere its occupants created for themselves. It proceeded to throb with a hundred questions one of them wanted to ask, mingling with answers the other was clearly reluctant to provide.

In the end Caroline plumped for the most pressing question. ‘Why you instead of him?’ she queried.

‘Because I am the bastard and he is not?’ Luiz mockingly questioned the question.

Caroline flushed slightly at his blunt candour. Luiz might be possessive of his privacy now, but he had not been seven years ago. He had been very open then about his life as a fatherless child, living in a run-down tenement in the backstreets of New York with a mother who had struggled to make ends meet. She knew his mother had died when he was only nine years old and that Luiz had lived out the rest of his childhood in a state institution.

‘I was chosen because I possess a lot of individual wealth and the family itself is practically bankrupt.’

In other words, his father had named Luiz as his successor
out of expediency rather than desire, she realised. It was no wonder Luiz sounded so bitter and cynical about the whole thing.

‘And your half-brother and his mother?’ she asked. ‘Where does it leave them in all of this?’

If it was at all possible, his expression turned even harder. ‘Out in the cold, as far as I am concerned. As they have kept me out in the cold for most of my life.’

No wonder he had left it so long without bothering to go and meet his inheritance face on, she grimly concluded. For Luiz was not a fool; he knew what he was going to find waiting for him. Which left begging just one more question she couldn’t leave unasked.

‘Our marriage?’ she prompted. ‘What has it to do with all of this?’

For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. His mouth was tight, his eyes shot through with a hard glitter as they followed the snaking line of the road ahead. Then, ‘Our marriage is the means by which I put them in the cold,’ he replied. ‘For by my father’s decree they may continue to live in the castle only until I marry.’

His ruthless streak was showing again. And Caroline was beginning to feel sorry for Luiz’s new-found family. She had a horrible feeling they had no idea what kind of man it was who was coming to meet them today, or they would have packed their bags and got out before he arrived.

‘Ever heard of the word forgiveness?’ she advanced huskily.

‘Forgiveness is usually only given to those that want it,’ he replied.

Slick and shrewd though his reply was, it still made her shiver. She fell silent after that. And they didn’t speak again throughout the miles they ate up until they entered the sleepy little village of Los Aminos.

‘We’ll stop here for some lunch,’ Luiz decided.

Caroline didn’t demur. She was beginning to feel stiff and thirsty, and a break for lunch was a preferable option to keeping on driving towards she knew not what.

Luiz found a little café with wooden tables set outside beneath a faded blue awning. Pulling into the kerb, he climbed out of the car, then stood stretching taut muscles while he waited for Caroline to join him. The inn wasn’t what you would call a fashionable place, but the basket of bread and bowl of crisp salad they were served were fresh and tasty.

She asked for a Coke, and Luiz did the same, then they sat sharing the lunch between them as if they did this kind of thing all the time. But the silence was still there, pulsing between them.

Reaching for another thick chunk of bread, she asked, ‘How much further?’ in an effort to break the deadlock.

‘Same again,’ Luiz answered briefly, while reaching for some more bread himself.

She huffed out a weary sigh that turned into a yawn. The day was hot and the air was humid, and she had lied about sleeping well last night, so now she was beginning to feel the dragging effects of hardly any sleep at all.

‘Tired?’ Luiz asked.

‘It’s the heat,’ she blamed. ‘And the travelling. Where did you sleep last night?’

And she could have bitten off her tongue the moment she caught the sudden gleam in his eyes. ‘Missed me, did you?’ he murmured silkily.

‘No,’ she denied. ‘I slept like a log.’

‘Well, I missed you,’ he told her huskily.

Warily she glanced up, thinking he was just teasing—but he wasn’t. And the atmosphere between them suddenly took a violent change. He was looking at her as if he was seeing her sitting there naked.

She looked away again quickly—but not quickly enough to stop her insides from coiling tightly, and she could feel a sensual tingling between her thighs.

‘We could go somewhere,’ Luiz suggested.

Caroline almost choked on her bread. Was he saying what she thought he was saying? She picked up her Coke and gulped at it in an effort to disperse the bread.

‘You only have to say yes…’

Oh, for goodness’ sake! she thought. ‘No, Luiz!’ she whispered hoarsely. And made the mistake of looking into his eyes again.

They were on fire. He wanted her. And he wanted her now! ‘Stop it,’ she breathed, feeling her cheeks begin to glow, and sent trembling fingers on a wild foray of the salad bowl—only to meet his fingers halfway, because he was reaching for her.

It was like making contact with a high-voltage cable. Caroline snatched her hand away on a sharp gasp; Luiz did more than that—he released a low, short, explicit curse, then lurched angrily to his feet.

It a state of near shock, because she didn’t know what had happened between them, she watched him dig into his pocket for some money and toss it onto the table before reaching out to grab her hand.

And this time there was no snatching it back as if the contact was too electrifying to tolerate because Luiz wasn’t letting go. He turned and began striding off down the sundrenched and dusty street, trailing her behind him like some recalcitrant child he was taking off to be smacked.

She wanted to protest—demand where he thought he was going, when the car was parked the other way! But the sheer ferocity etched into his lean face was enough to keep the words locked up tight in her throat.

Suddenly he stopped dead, tightened his grip on her
hand and turned to walk her inside the foyer to what turned out to be a small hotel.

‘Luiz—no!’ she managed to gasp out at last, when the disturbing suspicion of what he was intending began to take horrifying shape in her head.

He completely ignored her. It was as if the devil was driving him. His face was taut, his jaw set, and she felt her cheeks suffuse with hot self-conscious colour as he grimly began negotiating the price of the hotel’s best suite—on an hourly basis.

It was awful, the most embarrassing situation she had ever experienced in her life! The concierge kept on sending her brief but knowing little glances, and she didn’t know where to put herself as Luiz placed a wad of notes on the desk, scrawled his signature in the register, then accepted the key the concierge was holding out to him before turning towards the stairs.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this!’ Caroline choked out as he began striding upwards, pulling her with him.

He didn’t even bother to answer, his expression so fierce that she began to quail inside her shoes as he led her along a narrow landing then unlocked a door and swung her inside.

The hotel was small and very simple; the room—darkened by closed shutters over the window—was nothing more than a bed, a table and a couple of chairs set on floorboards, and there was no air conditioning to help take away the suffocating heat. But by the time he had closed the door behind them she couldn’t have cared less what the room was like. She was out of breath, feeling a nerve-tingling excitement that didn’t go down well with how she knew she should be feeling in a situation like this!

‘What the hell has got into you?’ she demanded, managing to get her hand free at last.

Again he didn’t answer, but then he didn’t really need
to, because she knew what had
got into
him. In fact it was written all over his hard-boned, muscle-locked face!

With a growing sense of awareness she stepped warily away from him, only to watch in a kind of wide-eyed fascination as he shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it aside, then began pulling his shirt off over his head.

The two items landed on a chair. His bronzed torso expanded, then relaxed, as if removing those garments had been a matter of life or death.

Fire and ice, she found herself likening, as she waited breathlessly to discover what was going to come next. The fire was in his passion, the ice the medium he used to keep the other suppressed. It was a dynamic combination, one that set some secret engine she hadn’t known she possessed humming throughout her entire system. She had never experienced anything like it. But it held her completely captivated as she watched the passion melt its way through the ice until all that was left was a blistering intent that began scorching her flesh.