She made a grab for it and instantly he caught hold of her, wrapping his fingers around her wrist.
‘Let’s go!’
‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’
She struggled against him, her long blonde hair slipping free of the ponytail at the base of her neck, but he simply tightened his grip and began propelling her past the determinedly blank faces of his security team towards the first of the two large black SUVs idling down a side street at the edge of the square.
‘What are you doing?’
She was struggling to break free of his grip, and a voice inside his head was telling him that he was acting like some Stone Age throwback—only his fingers refused to let go of her arm.
‘Escorting you to the car,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Before someone recognises you.’
Eyes narrowing, she tugged at his arm. ‘This is not escorting...it’s abducting.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
He stopped so abruptly that her flailing body collided with his, and desire, hot and potent, punched him in the stomach as she grabbed at his shirt to steady herself. For perhaps twenty seconds his exasperated eyes met her furious ones, and then she snatched her hand away as if she’d been stung, in a way that utterly infuriated him.
‘Either way, I don’t much care.’ Glancing past her at the departing crowds, he gave her a small, mocking smile. ‘And I’m not getting the feeling anyone else does either. So I suggest you get in the car—or, so help me, I will put you over my shoulder and carry you there myself.’
And then what?
The question slid into his head and his breath caught in his throat as he remembered her body twined around his as he’d carried her onto the bed in his room at Fairbourne. Blanking his mind to the memory of her bare thighs sliding around his hips, he tightened his grip on her wrist.
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she said. ‘You’re far too worried about what somebody might see or say.’
‘Try me,’ he said softly.
He watched her eyes narrow.
‘I already did.’ She was shaking with anger, her cheeks flushed with red flags of defiance. ‘And it wasn’t worth the effort of stripping.’
Basa stared at her, shock and anger flooding through him. No, not anger. It was rage—the kind of white-hot fury that blanked out everything but the darkening bruise around his heart and the blue of her eyes.
‘And yet you still did it,’ he said, his fingers squeezing around her arm. ‘You went up to my room, took off your clothes and got into bed with me.’
His throat tightened. There had been a honeyed sweetness to her eagerness. Her skin had been smooth, her mouth soft and her body even softer as she’d melted into him in a way that no other woman had.
‘I guess the thought of spending your share of the pension pot helped you overcome whatever limited scruples you possess.’
Her face was so white it looked as if it was ossified.
‘That’s not why I went to your room.’
He heard the catch in her voice and knew he had the upper hand.
‘Of course it wasn’t.’ His mouth curved into a sneer. ‘You’ll be telling me next you wanted to look at the view from my window.’
She took a quick breath. ‘I went up to your room because I wanted to have sex with you.’
The bluntness of her words momentarily caught him off balance, but, recovering his composure, he shook his head. ‘That’s not true. You had no intention of sleeping with me; you were just there as a decoy.’
Her pupils flared with anger. ‘It is true.’
‘Then why weren’t you prepared?’ he snarled.
‘Because I’d never slept with anyone before, that’s why,’ she said, and the shake in her voice made it sound as if she was close to tears.
The pavement seemed to ripple beneath his feet as her reply ricocheted around his head like a firecracker. In the square, the excited crowd were setting off flares, and he stared at her in confusion as trails of blue and yellow smoke began swirling around them. His head was spinning and he was struggling to keep his face composed. Shock—raw, unfettered shock—vied with disbelief.
Why hadn’t she told him that on the night?
Was it true? Or was she just playing with him?
Her cheeks were flushed, but he didn’t know if that was down to anger or chagrin at having blurted out something she would likely rather have kept hidden from him. All he knew was that this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have in the street, in front of hundreds of strangers and the averted gaze of his bodyguards.
He wanted answers. He wanted the truth. And once he had her safely inside the car, he intended to get it.
‘We’re not talking about this here,’ he said curtly.
‘Actually, I don’t want to talk about it anywhere.’
Seriously? He stared down at her, a beat of exasperation pulsing over his skin.
‘So you think you can just toss that grenade into the conversation and then—what? Bat your eyelashes and swan off into the sunset?’
She glared at him. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she repeated.
‘In that case, you can not talk about it in the car.’
‘I don’t want to get in the car.’
Glancing from her face to her tightly closed fists, he swore softly. But, even though her stubbornness was exasperating, he found himself admiring her defiance. He was six foot four and, thanks to his head of security, Arturo, he knew how to handle himself. But Mimi was fronting up to him like a boxer.
‘Tough. You don’t have a choice. Because I’m sure as hell not leaving you here.’
Their eyes locked. Eventually she lowered her gaze and he felt her body go limp.
‘Then let go of my arm,’ she muttered.
Her sudden capitulation chafed at something inside his chest and again he had to suppress a swift, incomprehensible urge to pull her against him.
‘Fine. But don’t mess me around,’ he warned.
Slowly he uncurled his hand and, giving him a baleful glare, she stalked towards the waiting SUV like a cat on a hot tin roof.
He breathed out through gritted teeth and then made his way across the street, stopping to give instructions to his driver. He climbed into the car, glancing over at Mimi. As expected, she was scrunched up in the opposite corner, pointedly staring out of the window. Short of sitting on the roof, she couldn’t have put any more distance between them, but that was fine with him.
He needed space to bring order to the chaos of his thoughts, and time to adjust to the revelation she had so casually tossed into the conversation.
His heartbeat accelerated. He couldn’t comprehend that he might have been wrong about her. Surely she couldn’t have been a virgin that night? It didn’t make sense; she must be lying. But there had been a tension in her voice that had sounded real...
With an effort, he forced himself to replay that night at Fairbourne. He tried to remember whether she had been tense or apprehensive, or had acted in a way that might have suggested she hadn’t had sex before. Could he have been so stunned by his own febrile reaction to her that he’d missed it? Had there been a moment, just a fraction of a second, before he’d asked her if she had protection, when he’d pushed against the slick warmth between her thighs and she’d gripped his arm tightly...? With what?
At the time it had felt like hunger, urgency. Now he wondered if it had been uncertainty and panic.
At the time she’d said nothing. In fact, she’d pulled him closer, kissing him frantically and—
It had never crossed his mind that he would have been her first lover. He’d thought he had her all figured out—that in the years when he’d been studying at university and then taking over from his father she’d done a lot of growing up. With that heart-stopping body, her mass of blonde hair and soft pout, he
’d had no trouble imagining her being most men’s fantasy come to life, so he’d assumed that she knew what she was doing, knew what men liked, and that was why she was being so responsive, so hungry, so uninhibited.
Only...what if it had been nervousness about losing her virginity that had made her so frantic?
His stomach felt as if it was full of stones.
For so long he’d been certain that she had cold-bloodedly lied to him, with that same soft mouth that had kissed him so sweetly. He had thought she was the kind of woman who would effortlessly seduce a family friend to give her crooked relations time to cover their tracks. A woman who would have thought nothing of having unprotected sex with him even though she must have known indisputably that any future baby would have been born into an irreversible feud between their two families.
That she had acted like that, with such determined ruthlessness, had been as shattering as it had unfathomable. But now he was finding out that he had been wrong about how sexually experienced she was. And the fact that he’d been wrong about that was making him question everything else he’d thought to be true about the woman sitting next to him.
His jaw was suddenly so tense it was difficult to release the breath he’d been holding in.
Had he been wrong?
Rather than questioning the ‘facts’, had it just been easier to accept them at face value?
Maybe... But if she really had been a virgin surely she would have said something?
‘Mimi—’
He started to speak, but as the car began to move she cut him off.
‘I have nothing to say to you.’
He shrugged. ‘Then I’ll do the talking.’
‘But just so we’re clear,’ she said, and carried on speaking as if he’d not said a word, ‘I am not stepping foot in that house again. So if you could just drop me at the airport...?’
He stared at her, his body tense with incredulous anger. Did she really think she could just explode a bomb into his world and then walk away without so much as a word of explanation?
‘This is not a taxi service, and you will go where I take you.’
The hostile expression on her face did nothing to improve his mood.
‘I’m not going anywhere with you except to a hotel or the airport,’ she snapped back.
Her eyes were the same shifting capricious blue as the lake surrounding his house in Patagonia, and just looking into them made him want to strip naked and dive in. Or maybe it was the smooth skin of her bare legs, or her pink, kissable lips that were making him want to tear off both his clothes and hers?
‘There’s no point going to a hotel. None of them will have any rooms,’ he said curtly.
‘Then I’ll wait at the airport.’ Her soft mouth was fixed into a steely line.
‘You won’t need to wait.’
Rolling her eyes, she muttered something under her breath that sounded like ‘entitled, arrogant jerk’, and turned towards the window. But less than thirty seconds later she turned back to face him, a frown creasing her beautiful face.
‘I don’t understand...we just passed the sign to the airport.’
‘Yes, we did,’ he said evenly.
‘But you said you were taking me there.’
He shook his head. ‘No, you just made that assumption.’
As he had assumed she was sexually experienced?
The question popped into his head without warning and, gritting his teeth, he pushed it to the back of his mind. He would get answers, but with the aftershock from her revelation still juddering inside his head he didn’t know up from down—knew only that it would be a bad idea to try and resolve this now.
‘So where are we going, then?’
Her hands had curled into fists and he could hear the undercurrent of panic in her voice.
‘Somewhere private.’ He stared at her steadily. ‘Somewhere you won’t be able to embarrass my family. Somewhere a long way from civilisation, where nobody knows who you are. Somewhere you and I can have a nice long chat without any interruptions.’
‘What do you mean by a long way from civilisation?’
It was testament to the level of her panic that she didn’t even blink at his threat of a chat. He watched as she stared at him blankly, and then a flicker of alarm travelled across her face and she started shaking her head.
‘No, Basa. I am not going to your house in Patagonia now.’
‘Too late,’ he said calmly. ‘We’re already on our way.’
* * *
Mimi felt as though a bucket of icy water had been upended over her head, like in one of those internet challenges. But at least with those you knew what to expect. How could she possibly have foreseen that he would pull a stunt like this?
She bit her lip. He couldn’t be serious. Patagonia was hundreds of miles away, and he’d already told her he couldn’t put his job on hold like she could.
Relief flooded through her veins.
Surely this was just part of his ongoing mission to show her who was the boss—or maybe he was trying to scare her, to punish her for sneaking off. But whatever it was, it couldn’t have anything to do with wanting to talk about her virginity. Why would that matter to him?
Her skin felt as if it was melting.
It was awkward enough that she had admitted her inexperience to one of the most eligible bachelors in the world, but any conversation about her sex life was quickly going to reveal that she was still a virgin—and, frankly, that wasn’t something she wanted to share with Basa Caine right now.
Actually, make that not ever.
It wasn’t that she was embarrassed. All her closest friends, including Alicia, knew that she hadn’t slept with anyone yet, but she would rather set fire to her own head than open her mouth and share that particular piece of information with a man who had kissed her and found her wanting.
For a moment she considered her options.
It didn’t take long as there was only one.
She gritted her teeth. She didn’t want to do it but she had to do something—and she was willing to do anything to derail his plan to take her to Patagonia...including apologise.
Taking a steadying breath, she gave him a small, taut smile. ‘I know you’re angry with me, and I’m sorry for disappearing like that. I probably shouldn’t have left without telling you first—’
His gaze rested on her face. ‘There’s no “probably” about it, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re good at sneaking off when nobody’s looking.’
Her heart began to beat a little faster. It was the second time he’d said that, and she still didn’t know what he meant by it, but now was not the time to get distracted.
‘Like I said, I’m sorry, okay? I just thought there wasn’t much point in my staying when every time we talk we just end up arguing.’
And, of course, there had been the small but embarrassing matter of her kissing him, and it would be even more embarrassing if he realised she was still a virgin.
His dark eyes rested on her face. ‘We don’t only end up arguing,’ he said softly.
She blinked, and breathed out unsteadily. She was still shocked at her own behaviour—the kissing part, anyway. Obviously running away after she’d kissed him was completely understandable, but of course that didn’t mean she could pretend it hadn’t happened—particularly when he was sitting approximately three feet away from her.
Forcing herself to meet his gaze, she shrugged with a casualness she didn’t feel. ‘That was a mistake.’
‘Define mistake,’ he said softly, his eyes glittering.
Her breath seemed bottled in her throat. That would be because of getting in the car with him. It was too small a space, and he was too close, and when he looked at her like that it seemed even smaller.
Ignoring the prickle of heat seeping over her skin, she
sucked in a breath, trying to stay calm. ‘It was stupid and rash and I don’t know why it happened,’ she lied, keeping her eyes locked on his and away from the tempting curve of his mouth.
Earlier, in the crowded city streets, it had been easy to blank out the kiss he had so helpfully brought up, but now, with his lean, muscle-packed body sprawled only a few feet away from hers, she could feel the same insistent hunger curling through her body that had been her undoing in the dining room.
‘I promise you don’t need to worry about me doing anything else stupid or rash that might embarrass your family.’
‘Oh, but I do worry, and that’s why we can’t stay in Buenos Aires.’ His dark eyes locked onto hers, holding her captive. ‘That and the fact that I intend to have a conversation that clearly needed to happen two years ago.’
Her chest was pressing so tightly against her lungs it was difficult to breathe.
‘No, that’s not—’ she began, but he cut her off.
‘I’m not going to let you draw me into another argument, Mimi. This is the airfield and that—’ he gestured to a sleek white plane sitting on the runway ‘—is my jet. And now you have a choice to make. Either we use my jet, which will take approximately three hours, or we drive. That will take nearer eleven hours, so—’
She stared at him, her heart beating in her throat. ‘You’re joking. This is a joke, right?’
‘No, it’s not.’ His dark gaze rested impatiently on her disbelieving expression. ‘One way or another we are going to Patagonia as planned.’ As she pulled out her phone, he sighed. ‘There’s no point trying to call anyone. You won’t get a signal here, nor where we’re going either.’
Glancing down at the screen, she tightened her fingers around the phone. He was right.
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this.’
He shrugged. ‘You’re not going anywhere without me until this is resolved.’
Mimi felt dizzy. This couldn’t be happening. It was too crazy, too preposterous to be real, and yet the expression on his face told her he meant what he said.
Her heart began to pound. Fifteen long minutes ago having a conversation with him in the car about her non-existent sex life had seemed like a form of torture, but compared to being trapped with him for who knew how long, in the middle of nowhere, it was clearly the lesser of two evils.
Craving His Forbidden Innocent Page 8
