LITMIR.BIZ

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to its being there than mere affection? Was it a warning that this lean, dark, smoothly sophisticated man had another side to him that was as lethal as the scorpion’s tail?

      Glancing back at him, she found him watching her with the kind of mocking twist to his mouth that said he knew what she was thinking and was wryly amused by it.

      ‘A scorpion stings its victims quick and clean, Luiz,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘What you are proposing here is neither clean nor quick.’

      ‘Unparallelled sex between two people who excite the hell out of each other? I should hope not.’ He smiled, picking up the dossier to replace it in its drawer.

      Then he was suddenly on his feet. ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s go…’

      Let’s go? Caroline’s skin began to prickle as a fresh burst of alarm went chasing through her. ‘But I haven’t agreed to do anything with you yet!’ she protested.

      ‘Decide later,’ he said as he came striding round the desk towards her. ‘We haven’t got time to deal with it right now.’

      With that, Caroline found herself being lifted firmly to her feet. Her options, she realised, had dwindled to nothing. Time had seemingly run out. Without another word, Luiz was escorting her from the room and they were outside in the silky warm darkness before she realised what they were doing.

      A top-of-the-range black BMW stood purring at the front entrance. Luiz opened the rear door and urged her inside before going round to climb in on the other side of the car. The moment the door shut the car was moving, driven by a man who was hidden behind a shield of smoked glass.

      ‘Where are we going?’

      ‘You’ll see,’ was the very uninformative reply she received.

      It was late, but outside, beyond the car’s side window, the resort was still alive with people out to enjoy themselves with a visit to one of Marbella’s elegant night-spots or just simply taking a late stroll along the yacht-lined waterfront.

      It was years since she’d been able to do what they were doing, since she’d felt carefree enough to want to.

      Years and years of self-restraint, of living under a thick grey cloud with no hint of a silver lining. Years playing watchdog to her father’s sickness, because she knew that if she didn’t look out for him then nobody else was going to do it.

      ‘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

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