LITMIR.BIZ

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a switch and the interior of the plush car was filled with weak light.

      A gusty sigh escaped her tight, aching throat.

      He dragged a hand through his dark hair and looked at her pale face. ‘You scare easily.’

      It might not be his fault that the pale light drew attention to the hard, chiselled angles of his face, making him look sinister and dangerous, but it was his fault that he had scared her witless.

      ‘No, I don’t,’ she retorted with feeling.

      A grimace that might have suggested regret crossed his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, pressing his head deep into the leather head rest.

      Sorry was a word she suspected didn’t cross his lips too frequently. She watched as he stared out the window. The thoughts he appeared lost in were, if his expression was any measure, pretty dark. ‘I didn’t know of her existence until now.’

      ‘Whose existence?’

      A muscle alongside his mouth clenched as his head turned. His blue eyes found hers. ‘Tamara’s.’

      Fleur grimaced in concentration and wrinkled her nose as she tried to follow what he was saying. ‘How could you not know you had a daughter?’

      ‘I did not know until last week that there was a Tamara. I didn’t know that Miranda was pregnant. My daughter and I are total strangers.’

      He watched her almond-shaped eyes fly open and cursed under his breath. What was it about her, he wondered, that loosened his tongue?

      ‘Strangers?’ she echoed.

      He nodded, reliving as he did so the moment he had been given the first glimpse of his daughter as she’d climbed out of the back seat of the Bentley. His trademark objectivity had been history.

       She’s mine…

      Fatherhood might be more than some matching strands of DNA, but in that moment what Antonio had felt had been nothing less than a connection.

      However, whatever hope he might have held that Tamara also felt that connection had been quickly dashed. Not content with abandoning Tamara, her so-called father, Charles Finch, had obviously done a number on her. And Antonio was clearly the villain of the piece, the heartless man who was stealing her away from the only home she had ever known and a father who, or so he’d told her, would give anything to keep her. And so his daughter never looked at him with anything but hate in her eyes.

      ‘That’s…that’s…’

      The past faded as beside him and very much in the present Fleur shook her head slowly from side to side.

      ‘That’s what she meant when she said you weren’t her real father?’

      He nodded.

      ‘Her father—the other one, I mean—does she have…? Is he…?’

      ‘He’s alive.’ His expression was savage as he tacked a furious volley of Spanish onto the terse statement.

      Fleur didn’t understand a word, but she was guessing—it didn’t seem a big leap—he wasn’t expressing warm affection for the other man.

      ‘I suppose,’ she conceded, ‘under the circumstances you’re bound to resent him, but you can’t really blame the poor man, can you? I mean, I don’t know the circumstances—’

      ‘No, you don’t.’

      ‘But this must be a tough situation for him too.’

      ‘Yes, the poor man has suffered so much, but you know what they say about karma—what goes around comes around. We can only hope that he will get all he deserves one day.’ And Antonio really hoped that he would be around to see it…better still deliver it!

      Puzzled by the edge to his voice that didn’t match the sentiment of his words, she studied him uncertainly.

      His lips curled into a sardonic smile. ‘You are trying to get into my head again, aren’t you, querida?’

      The husky accusation brought a guilty flush to her cheeks. ‘I’ve told you, it’s not somewhere I’ve any desire to be,’ she told him primly.

      ‘Maybe you just can’t help yourself where I’m concerned?’ he suggested silkily.

      Now that was a really scary thought. ‘And maybe you’re totally deluded—’ She broke off, her eyes widening as without warning he leaned across and took her face between his big hands.

      ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She felt the warmth of his breath on her cheek and with a whimper closed her eyes tight shut.

      ‘It is your birthday,’ he said in a voice that seemed much more thickly accented than she had noticed before.

      ‘I know that.’

      He tilted her framed face up to him. If he didn’t kiss that mouth he would always wonder…‘Is it not almost obligatory to kiss a person on her birthday?’

      ‘Not this per…’ She sucked in a deep startled breath and stilled as she felt the feathery touch of his lips on first one eyelid, then the other. At the corner of her mouth his touch was equally light.

      This was fine. This she could cope with, even laugh about with Jane at a later date. The day Fleur got kissed by a Spanish billionaire would be a joke between them.

      All I have to do, she told herself, is not make a big thing of it and breathe…yes, breathing was important.

      His head lifted.

      ‘Right, I consider myself kissed. Can we get on?’

      ‘Kissed…?’ he echoed, his blue eyes glittering with amusement and a lot of other things that she didn’t want to put a name to. ‘You haven’t been kissed, querida,’ he drawled.

      Then before she had a chance to react he lowered his mouth to hers.

      His warm lips moved against her mouth. She tried to signal her disapproval by not reacting, but there was a raw hunger in the skilful, sensuous friction that she couldn’t resist.

      Didn’t want to resist.

      His mouth lifted fractionally and Fleur gave a fractured moan before he claimed her parted lips again. This time the hunger he had leashed slipped a notch.

      As if he had all the time in the world Antonio slid his tongue deep into the warm, intimate crevices of her mouth. Tasting her and letting her taste him.

      As bright lights exploded behind her closed eyelids Fleur moaned into his mouth and kissed him back, winding her arms around his neck, her fingers trailing in the dark strands that curled at his nape.

      He said something indistinct against her mouth and lifted his mouth. Leaning back into his seat, he sat there staring straight ahead and breathing hard.

      At some point between him unwinding her hands from around his neck and fastening his seat belt her brain started functioning again.

      Well, I suppose that now I have been kissed.

      She lifted a shaky hand to her tender lips and swallowed past the constriction in her aching throat. Oh, yes, there was no doubt about it—she had been kissed!

       And what a kiss.

      Antonio turned the key in the ignition, nothing in his manner suggesting that he had just kissed her until she forgot her own name. And he still hadn’t said a word.

      Resentment mingled with the cocktail of confusion, shame and excitement that was already swirling in Fleur’s veins as she watched him.

       As if it had never happened!

      Kissing me probably registered somewhere below combing his hair on his scale of the totally forgettable, she decided wrathfully.

      And I,

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