‘I won’t be facing them, Dante,’ Caitlin said with alarm. ‘I’m leaving in a few days. There’s really no need for me to meet up with them again.’
Still accepting of her departure, Dante thought with appreciation. Not going beyond the brief. A first. He was accustomed to having his freedom threatened sooner or later by women who wanted more longevity than he was prepared to give.
He shrugged and smiled. ‘You can go at the end of the week,’ he concurred, ‘or you can stay on. Better still, I can arrange to temporarily transfer to London, sort things out in my brother’s absence...’
‘You want to carry on?’
‘For a while,’ Dante said hurriedly.
He isn’t bored yet, Caitlin thought. But soon he will be.
He wanted everything on his terms, but what about hers? She was in danger of forgetting them, and she couldn’t afford to do that because every day something deep inside was being chipped away.
‘I don’t think so.’ She didn’t wait for temptation to start interfering with common sense. ‘Let’s have fun and then, at the end of the week, let’s do what we agreed to do. Let’s say goodbye.’
CHAPTER NINE
IT WASN’T DIFFICULT to find out where Caitlin lived. Far more difficult had been Dante’s decision to travel to London and search her out, because it just wasn’t in his nature to pursue anyone. Pursuit equated to weakness, but, after more than two weeks without her, Dante had managed to convince himself that the real weakness would be in staying put, in ignoring the perfectly reasonable desire to finish something that had not quite reached its natural conclusion. How could he live with himself if he remained where he was, pointlessly thinking about her and having nightly cold showers? Did that make any sense at all? If she turned him away, then so be it. He would shrug it off but at least he would have tried, and you couldn’t do more than that. The not trying would have been the less courageous option.
As promised, she had remained in Spain for the remainder of the week, daily visiting Alejandro, who, having awakened from his deep sleep bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, had been frustrated at not being able to get out of hospital as fast as he had hoped, thanks to the small detail of broken bones that needed to rest awhile.
Part of his urgency to leave had been sheer relief at having come out. He had told the world and the world had been a lot more forgiving than he had anticipated.
What his traditional and old-fashioned parents had made of the whole thing was a mystery to Dante. Outwardly, at least, they had been supportive and that had been the main thing.
And now that barriers had broken down between himself and his brother, they had begun the rocky but well-intentioned road of making amends for the silent relationship that had developed between them over the years.
Between building bridges with Alejandro, engaging with his parents and all those family members now on the receiving end of what would have been, at the very least, pretty startling revelations, and focusing on some major deals in the pipeline, he should have found Caitlin’s easy disappearance from his life barely left a ripple in its wake.
It had been a source of constant frustration that he couldn’t get her out of his head. He had been forced to conclude that it hadn’t been just about the sex. He had enjoyed her company and he didn’t much like that recognition, because it wasn’t something he had factored into their short-lived relationship.
So here he was.
He could have asked Alejandro for her address, but he knew, instinctively, that his brother would have cautioned him against prolonging a relationship with someone he obviously cared about. Deep and meaningful conversations he and Alejandro might not have had, but that didn’t mean that Alejandro was ignorant of Dante’s womanising lifestyle choices. He wouldn’t have understood that he and Caitlin were on the same page when it came to their relationship. She wasn’t going to lose her head over him. She wasn’t going to get hurt. Why else would she have found it so easy to walk away? There hadn’t been so much as a hint that she’d been looking for more than what had been put on the table.
He’d asked his PA to get hold of her address and, lo and behold, it had taken under half an hour.
He hadn’t known what to expect of her living arrangements and was shocked to discover himself standing, now, outside something that looked as though an act of kindness would have been to take a wrecking ball to it. But then, he acknowledged grimly, his background had not prepared him for the reality of living on the breadline.
It was a squat, rectangular block of flats, all connected by outside concrete walkways. Washing lines groaning under the weight of clothes only partially concealed chipping paint. Bikes were leaning in front of most of the flats. The lighting was poor and Dante concluded that that was probably a good thing, because in the unforgiving light of day the sight would probably be twice as depressing. He had never been anywhere like this in his life before and he was shocked and alarmed that she lived in a place like this.
Was she going to be in?
He’d taken a chance. It was after nine on a Wednesday evening. He was playing the odds.
He took the steps two at a time. There was a pervasive odour in the stairwell but he didn’t dwell on that as he headed up to the third floor, then along the walkway, brushing past the washing, dodging the bikes and random kids’ toys and finally banging on her front door because there was no bell.
And then, suddenly nervous, Dante stepped back and waited to see what would happen.
Caitlin heard the banging on the door and assumed it was Shirley three doors down. She had a good relationship with the much older woman. Too good, in some ways, because Shirley was a lonely seventy-something and, for her, Caitlin was the daughter she’d had but who now never visited.
Caitlin slipped on her bedroom slippers, pulled open the door and then stared.
The whole hit her before the detail. She knew it was Dante. Half lounging against the wall, hand poised to bang once again on the door. Yes, she registered that, then she absorbed, numbly, the detail. The faded black jeans, the grey polo shirt, the weathered bomber jacket because summer was morphing into autumn and the nights were getting cooler.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked faintly, hovering by the door, so shocked that she could barely think straight.
She’d been thinking about him and he’d materialised like a genie from a lamp, as beautiful and as cruelly mesmerising as she’d remembered. She’d stayed those last few days and stuck fast to her insouciant this-is-fun-but-it’s-got-to-end routine, but every second had been filled with the wrenching pain of knowing that she would never see him again, and since she’d returned to London the pain had not subsided. He’d filled her head every waking moment, obliterating everything, even the ongoing anxiety about her parents. And now, shockingly, here he was. They’d had a straightforward deal and she’d spent the past weeks reminding herself of that baldly unappetising fact, but now he was here and she felt the electric buzz of awareness zip through her body like a toxin.
Dante lowered his eyes, his long, dark lashes brushing his slanting cheekbones and shielding his expression.
The nerves had gone. She was standing in front of him and the nerves had been replaced by a racing excitement. She was in some loose, hanging-around, who-cares-how-I-look? clothes. Baggy jogging bottoms, baggy sweatshirt, weird fluffy slippers. Her hair was loose, a riot of vibrant curls spilling over her shoulders and down her narrow back.
He’d never seen anything quite so beautiful in his life before.
She’d asked him a question. What was it? His breathing had slowed and when he raised his eyes to meet hers, it was like being hit by a sledgehammer.
He said the one and only thing that came to mind.
‘I’ve missed you.’
If it hadn’t been for those three words...
Caitlin looked at the man sprawled in her bed with the sta
mp of lazy ownership embedded in the very core of his lean, elegant body. He was as addictive as the finest of Belgian chocolate and she couldn’t peel her eyes away from his reflection in the mirror as she brushed her hair.
It was eight thirty. It was Sunday. They’d been talking about Alejandro and his rapid recovery. He had left the hospital a mere six weeks previously, but only now was he really fit to travel and he was packing up to return to London.
He was a changed man, light of heart and easy of spirit. Friends and family had been so supportive, he had repeatedly told Caitlin, in between preaching to her about the dangers of going out with his brother.
‘Although,’ he had mused only three days previously, ‘he does seem to have changed. Very understanding about the whole work thing. I’m going to be heading up a team overseeing a new direction with the company. Boutique hotels. Three of them. Much more my thing than pretending to be interested in the financial side of things. He seems relaxed and I’m not the only one to have said that. He’s been in touch with our parents several times since he went to London to take over, and off his own bat, which has always, it seems, been a rare occurrence. He’s less stressed out. You’ve obviously removed a couple of his high-energy batteries when he wasn’t looking.’
As a postscript, he had added, mischievously, ‘At any rate, it’s put Luisa fully in the picture. I had no idea she’d been that set on Dante.’
‘Luisa’s spending lots of time with your brother,’ Caitlin said now, standing up and blushing because she recognised the brooding, sensual appreciation in his gaze as his eyes rested on her, naked and fresh from a shower.
‘Poor Alejandro. The woman has always clung to our family like a limpet. Come to bed.’
‘I know you said that that’s because she has no family of her own.’ Why was she worried about Luisa? Caitlin didn’t know and her run-ins with her had been few, but she didn’t trust the woman and her hands were tied when it came to saying anything to Alejandro because he never saw the bad in anyone. Besides, there was no way that she could set her sights on brother number two, bearing in mind that Alejandro had come clean about his sexuality! But the other woman’s name had cropped up time and again, indicating a presence on the scene that felt vaguely threatening.
‘Come to bed...’ Dante repeated, and Caitlin smiled, their eyes still locking in the mirror on the wall.
Her breasts ached and her limbs felt languorous and there was a familiar ache between her thighs.
She’d never been so uninhibited. He did that to her. He’d shown up on her doorstep a month ago, had uttered those three words, and she’d been his. Her determination not to be swept away on a tide of pointless emotion had bitten the dust in record time.
He’d missed her. There had been a naked honesty in that statement of fact and it had echoed her own feelings. She had opened the door to him and even as she was doing so, she had been helplessly aware that the common sense that had driven her departure a fortnight previously was going to be ditched.
‘I have things to do.’
‘With me.’
‘I have a deadline to finish a layout on that shoot I did last week...’
She was smiling, though, and not moving as he eased himself off the bed, splendid in all his proud, masculine, impressive and very turned-on glory.
He absently held himself as he strolled towards her, then he was standing behind her, so much taller and broader, his bronzed skin such a striking contrast to her own smooth, milky pallor. Two naked lovers, looking at one another in the mirror, eyes tangling. There was something wildly erotic about the way they were standing, her back pressed against his chest. He reached to cover her breast with one hand and she arched back, eyelids fluttering as he caressed it. Through half-closed eyes, she followed the motion of his fingers as they played with her pulsing nipple, teasing it, rubbing the stiffened peak. When he licked his finger and touched her again, she groaned and squirmed. He leant down to kiss her neck but he wouldn’t let her turn around.
‘I like you watching what I’m doing to you,’ he murmured in a husky, shaky voice. ‘Can you feel how hard I am for you right now?’
In response, Caitlin reached back to lightly touch him. She stroked the tip of his erection, a feathery caress, one she knew he liked. She felt him stiffen and smiled drowsily.
‘You were saying something about work...’ Dante breathed.
‘I was...’
‘Then I’d best not keep you and if we climb into bed, then you won’t be getting much work done any time soon.’
Caitlin had to acknowledge that this was, indeed, very true. Dante never rushed things. When they lay in bed, he took his time. He touched her slowly, exploring every inch of her body until she was begging him for release. He was a man who could put his own desires on hold for as long as it took to satisfy hers. It showed a lack of selfishness when it came to making love and she had dimly registered, somewhere along the line, that underneath the sometimes ruthless and always sweepingly self-assured exterior was a guy who was, essentially, not driven at all by ego.
There was an overriding sense of fair play about him that was admirable. Both Dante and Alejandro had so many admirable qualities, in fact, that it was shocking that their relationship had disintegrated so much over the years, and she knew that one of the really great things to have emerged from the situation had been the slow meeting of ways between them, a gradual journey discovering themselves as brothers and appreciating that the bond that had been lost could be rebuilt with effort and goodwill.
She looked at Dante in the mirror, the incline of his dark head as he nuzzled her neck, and she was filled with a wave of such tenderness that she was, momentarily, disoriented and terrified.
‘We’ll just have to be quick,’ he was saying, his voice muffled because he was talking against her neck.
As he said that, he slipped his finger against the wet crease between her legs, and that momentary jolt of awareness, a feeling that something inside her was changing somehow, was lost as pure sensation took over.
She clutched his wrists with her hands, then they fell slack to her sides for a second, before she balled her hands into tight fists, straining against the rhythm of his finger as he stroked, delving deeper with each stroke, building up a tempo that left her breathless.
Their reflection in the mirror was unfocused because her eyes were half closed. She was dimly aware of their bodies pressed tightly together, her body at the forefront, partially concealing his. One big hand rested on her breast, the other was moving between her legs. Their eyes collided and she licked her lips in a gesture that was unconsciously erotic.
He’d said quick. She was going to oblige because she could feel the rise of her orgasm, starting as a ripple then growing in intensity until it was taking over and she spasmed in a rush against his hand, crying out and arching back, her whole body stiffening as she came.
For a while, her mind was a complete blank, then gradually she came down from that peak and swivelled so that she was facing him. She touched his sides lightly, running her hands up and down and delighting in the feel of muscle and sinew. She stroked his inner thigh, then she knelt in front of him and teased him with her mouth and her tongue.
Dante curled his fingers into her hair.
She could turn him on like no one else on the planet, turn him on to the point where he lost the ability to think. He gave a guttural sound of satisfaction as she remorselessly pleasured him with her mouth and when he could hold out no longer, he came with a shudder that ripped through him, sending him rocking back on his feet.
And she still had work to do, she thought!
But he could do this to her, point her in a direction, knowing that she would follow because, with him, she was helpless.
Caitlin didn’t get it because she had never been a helpless person. Even in the aftermath of her break-up with Jimmy, she had moved on, keeping
herself to herself and picking up all the pieces without fuss. If London had overwhelmed her when she’d first arrived, then she had, likewise, taken it in her stride and faced down the unknown because what was the worst that could happen? She had her health.
But Dante...this man...
He made her feel helpless. She knew that she had ended up doing what she had told herself she would never do, had ended up caving in to her emotions and that cowardice had made her vulnerable. Very vulnerable.
A world imagined without him was no world at all.
She had gone and done what she had been cautioned against. She had fallen in love with him and as she dithered and wondered what to do about it, the days went by, each one making her more dependent than the one before.
Meanwhile, loose ends piled up around her. She was saving hard, steadfastly ignoring Dante’s insistence that she move in with him, move in to the vast penthouse apartment in Mayfair that he had used as a base in the past whenever he’d happened to be in London. That final step, she knew, would be a huge mistake. At least her little one-bedroom flat was hers and he had given up trying to persuade her out of it. His solution was to avoid it at all costs because the area made him feel uncomfortable and, gradually, Caitlin had grown accustomed to a life largely led in his rarefied part of the world.
The money Alejandro had transferred was still sitting in her account, untouched.
He refused to give her the details of his bank account so that she could transfer it back to him.
He’d told her that it had been thanks to her that he had finally moved forward with his life and was no longer trapped in a cage of his own making.
The Forbidden Cabrera Brother (Mills & Boon Modern) Page 14
