Tall, dark, handsome Luis, with the beautiful English accent and the sensational smile. Her heart gave a pained little throb, and, curling up against Gabriel, she told him everything—almost everything—from their instant attraction to each other to her moving into his apartment to live with him.
Her missing year had been a wonderful year, filled with love and passion and laughter, an introduction to the kind of world she had never believed really existed outside the pages of romantic books. His apartment on the Copacabana had been a haven in which they’d lost themselves.
‘…then his papa died in a car accident and he had to go back to England,’ she concluded.
‘End of story?’
End of them, Cristina thought bleakly. ‘Sim,’ she said.
‘You simply waved this passionate lover farewell, then went back to Santa Rosa?’
That came three months later, Cristina remembered bleakly. ‘We did not part—pleasantly,’ was all she said out loud.
‘He wanted you to go with him?’
No answer to that one.
‘But you preferred to marry Vaasco Ordoniz instead?’
No answer to that one either. But he felt her fine shudder of revulsion when he mentioned her dead husband’s name.
‘And now your passionate ex-lover is back?’
‘Sim.’ She did answer that one. No use denying it. Luis was back. Bigger than she remembered him to be, leaner and harder, and colder than she remembered him to be, and so much more potently desirable than she remembered him to be—and the memories had been potent enough.
‘He has offered to bail me out,’ she admitted.
‘And the price?’
Cristina moved restively. Sex was the price. Retribution was the price. Last time he had offered her marriage. This time she would be offered—something else. She could deal with something else. In fact, she was truly shocked and terrified by how much she wanted to have something else with Luis again.
‘I will find that out tomorrow, when I meet with him.’
‘You have already arranged this?’
‘Sim.’
Gabriel sat up. ‘And when were you going to get around to telling me of this meeting?’ he demanded.
‘I’m only just getting used to the idea for myself!’
He made a sound of impatience. ‘You had better give me the time, so I can free myself up. I have a very busy schedule tomorrow, and if Senhor Scott-Lee is moving this quickly then we will—’
‘No, Gabriel,’ Cristina cut in softly, placing a hand on his arm. ‘I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming to my aid tonight, but from now on I will deal with this by myself.’
‘Don’t be foolish, Cristina.’ He frowned down at her. ‘The man is a shark beneath that smooth cloak of English sophistication. And he’s hungry. I saw it in his eyes when he looked at you. He wants to eat you, querida. If he is about to offer you a rescue package then he means to play with you a little first.’
And he is powerful enough to play with you too, if I let him, she thought sadly. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I know him. I can deal with him better if I do it by myself.’
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS all right to be brave, and determined to go it alone like this, but from the moment Cristina stepped into the hotel lift that would take her up to the top floor suite she knew that she wasn’t feeling brave at all.
Gabriel was right. She had to be a complete fool to come here alone. She was just asking for trouble—begging for it.
The lift came to a stop. Her insides began to tingle, but what worried her most was that the tingle was not entirely to do with fear. As she stood facing the doors, waiting for them to open, those tingles went chasing down her arms and her legs in tight anticipation of—what?
Seeing Luis waiting for her dressed in one of those white bathrobes he’d always used to favour? Luis with his long tanned legs peppered with crisp black hair on show, and the triangle of hair that used to curl temptingly around the lapels of the robe?
An otherwise naked Luis. A man making a statement—a You are here to please me or else kind of statement.
Would he be that obvious, that crass, that—?
The doors began to move. Suddenly she lost the ability to breathe. Then her chin was lifting in the automatic response of a woman who’d learnt to meet trouble with defiance. If Luis was thinking he could march her into the nearest bed then he was going to have a—
A woman stood there. The same blonde woman Luis had been with the night before.
‘Mrs Ordoniz?’ she enquired in coldly cultured English, giving no hint whatsoever that she had so much as set eyes on Cristina before in her life. ‘I am Kinsella Lane, Mr Scott-Lee’s personal secretary. If you will follow me, please, I will take you to him…’
No Luis to greet her personally—dressed or undressed. No threatening intimacy of a hotel suite with a bed very much on show. Just a private foyer, with several closed doors leading from it, and a woman who called herself Luis’s personal secretary—but only a fool would believe that. Why else would she be here, in Luis’s private suite? Did she share the accommodation with him? Did they share his bed as well as his suite?
Anger rose, fizzing on the edge of jealousy as she followed in Kinsella Lane’s blue-suited wake. She knocked briefly on a door, then swung it inwards and was gliding forward on her long model’s legs.
‘Mrs Ordoniz to see you, Anton,’ she announced in a low, intimate voice.
Several things struck Cristina hard at the same moment, the name Anton being the hardest strike, tugging her to a stop as the man himself came into view. He was leaning against the edge of a long conference table that spanned almost the full width of a room made up almost entirely of pale wood.
Two other men were with him. Cristina didn’t see them. She only saw Luis, but not Luis, wearing a steel-grey business suit with a waistcoat that hugged his front like a piece of finely tooled armour worn over a bright white shirt and silver tie. His neat black hair, his golden features, even the long-fingered hands he used to add expression to whatever he was saying placed an aura around him that trapped the breath in her chest. And he was speaking in English, laying out instructions in clean, crisp, deep-bodied tones laced with authority that held his audience captive and mute.
This man was not the magical warm dark Luis she’d used to know. He was Anton, the ruthless banker, a gladiator of business, wearing the suit of armour of a man used to and comfortable with power in a way he had not been six years ago.