But none of that seemed to matter. All he could think about was the aching in his groin which felt as if he were about to explode. ‘Carly,’ he said unsteadily, even though he hadn’t been planning to say her name like that.
Her eyes widened. She licked her lips again and made them gleam. ‘What’s...wrong?’
Her words whispered over his skin like silk and suddenly Luis found himself fighting temptation as he’d never had to fight it before. In the past, if he wanted a woman—he would simply take her, if she was willing. And they were always willing.
But even though her lips had parted with unconscious longing, she was staff, and everyone knew that sleeping with your staff was a recipe for disaster. Even if she weren’t, she was all wrong for a man like him. She was caring and wholesome. She was the clean light to the darkness which filled the space where once he’d had a soul. What right did he have to mess with her? To take her just because he could and then to leave her broken-hearted afterwards?
‘No, nothing’s wrong,’ he said abruptly. ‘I thought I’d show you the way to lunch because I know how easy it is to get lost in this place, but, as usual, you’re late. What is it with you?’ He scowled at her. ‘I’ll meet you on the upper terrace in fifteen minutes—and for God’s sake, get a move on.’
CHAPTER FIVE
THE INCIDENT AT her bedroom door unsettled her more than it should have done. Carly told herself that Luis had seen her in the swimming pool loads of times so a glimpse of her unexciting bra strap was hardly likely to send him into paroxysms of delight.
But while she might not be very experienced, neither was she stupid. She could read people and their body language—they were two of the traits which made her believe that one day she might make a good doctor. And she had seen the way he had looked at her when she’d stood wrapped in her towel. That hadn’t been shock or revulsion she’d seen in the Argentinian playboy’s eyes, it had been hunger—potent and powerful and almost tangible.
And hadn’t she felt it, too? Hadn’t what had silently passed between them made her feel as if she were being swept away by something? As if some dark and invisible wave were dragging her towards something outside her control? She found herself thinking how cruel nature could be, that her body should be so attracted to someone who was out of bounds for about a million different reasons.
She knew her cheeks were still flushed as she joined Luis for lunch that day and she knew, too, that something between them had changed. That no matter how hard she focused her mind, she couldn’t seem to make things the same as they’d been before.
Suddenly a new and achingly raw awareness had sprung up between them. She tried not to let it affect her work, but how could it not? The nervous trembling of her fingers when she massaged him reminded her of the first time she’d done it. She found herself missing the confidence which she’d acquired with practice. But what she mourned most was the loss of the ease between them. When for a while she’d felt as if they were almost equals. When she could say exactly what was on her mind and sometimes even make him laugh.
Now there was a terrible and fraught kind of atmosphere whenever they were alone. Their curious alliance must have been more fragile than she’d thought or maybe she really was naïve after all. Because now he seemed to go out of his way to avoid her unless absolutely necessary, closeting himself in his study and immersing himself in work and leaving Carly largely to her own devices.
Their days settled into an awkward kind of routine. Carly woke early and swam in the pool, long before any of the other staff were around, slightly worried that it might appear presumptuous of her to be enjoying the ‘facilities’. She would swim furiously in an attempt to rid herself of the night-time demons which had been haunting her. And afterwards, she would lie floating on her back, looking up as the sun rose higher in the blue sky.
After that, she would take Luis through his exercises and give him a fairly rigorous massage before breakfast—a pattern she repeated three times throughout the day. And whenever she got the opportunity, she would scuttle away to some largely hidden corner of the vast complex to tackle some reading.
There had been a couple of visitors, each arriving unannounced on separate occasions—Carly had heard their giggles long before she’d seen them. A beautiful blonde and a foxy-looking redhead, who had sat wearing big sun hats and tiny bikinis, draping themselves around the pool without ever managing to get themselves wet.
And Carly had forced herself to stem the unreasonable jealousy which had risen up inside her. She told herself that, of course, Luis would have women round—he usually did—and she should be glad that he was showing very obvious signs of complete recovery. Though she noticed that neither woman stayed the night. Each was dispatched home in one of his luxury cars, usually a sign that he was bored.
He had been out a couple of times, too. His driver had taken him along the coast to Monaco, where, according to Simone, a Hollywood actress had taken over a famous restaurant to give a lunch in his honour.
That had been the day when Carly had uninterestedly pushed her salade Niçoise around her plate, telling herself not to behave like a possessive child. Of course he would leave her behind! Or had she really pictured herself bursting in on some glamour lunch wearing one of her pastel-coloured T-shirts with her knee-length denim skirt?
At least she’d managed to get through two books she’d been meaning to read for ages, and the fresh air, good food and regular exercise meant that, physically, she felt better than she’d done in a long time, despite her lack of sleep.
One afternoon, her thoughts were travelling along the fascinating labyrinth of quantum physics when a dark shadow fell over the page and she glanced up to see Luis blocking out the light. Behind him the turquoise waters of the infinity pool danced in the sunlight and beyond that was the infinitely darker blue of the sea. But the only things she noticed were his powerful body and that battered straw hat he always wore in the sunshine, and her mouth dried.
‘What are you reading?’
She screwed up her eyes, wishing her heart would stop doing that noisy, drum-like thing. Wishing that by now she would have acquired some sort of immunity to him. ‘I didn’t know it was time for your massage,’ she replied.
‘That’s an odd title for a book.’
‘Very funny.’ She held up the cover so he could see it.
‘And why are you lying in the sunshine reading...’ he narrowed his eyes, and read ‘...“Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You”?’
‘Stop laughing at me. You know why. I told you before that I like science.’
‘I like cars, but I don’t spend my time lolling round the pool reading maintenance manuals. There are plenty of novels in the library—just help yourself.’
‘Thanks, but I don’t particularly want to read a novel. This is...’
‘What?’ He lifted his walking stick and used it to point at the dog-eared dust jacket. ‘Heavy? Indecipherable?’
‘Completely fascinating,’ she said quietly. ‘In my opinion.’
He rested his stick against one of the sunbeds and gave short laugh. ‘You know, you really are something of an enigma, Carly. What are you planning to do with all these qualifications you keep accumulating? Sooner or later, you’re surely going to run out of exams to take.’
She hesitated. ‘And is there something the matter with that?’
He gave a shrug. ‘You’ll just become one of those people with a stack of diplomas you never use.’
‘Who says I’ll never use them?’
He smiled. ‘Science may make you understand why cornstarch is vital when making alfajores, but it isn’t really necessary, is it?’
Carly felt a stir of resentment as she met the mocking question in his eyes, because wasn’t that just typical of him? There was no praise or even a glimmer of surprise that his housekeeper should have been working hard at exams as she went about her lowly job. It hadn’t even occurred to him that she might want more from life than this. The world revo
lved around Luis, didn’t it? Stung by his attitude, she turned on him.
‘Maybe I’m not just stockpiling certificates,’ she retorted. ‘Maybe I’m going to use the exams to make something of myself.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, a doctor.’
‘You? A doctor?’
Any momentary doubt that it might not be a good idea to tell your employer you were planning on leaving immediately dissolved. Was he arrogant enough to think that she’d be fulfilled for the rest of her life keeping house for him and making sure his favourite cakes were on the table whenever he was in town? Watching and waiting in the background while he lived his life, without having any real life of her own.
‘Why not?’ she flared. ‘Do you think I’m incapable of being a medic?’
‘I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought.’
What he meant was that he hadn’t given her a lot of thought. Oh, he might have felt the odd flickering of desire—because she was a woman of child-bearing age who was closeted up with him, and that was how nature had programmed him to react. But he didn’t really think about her as a person.
Carly stared at him. ‘If you must know, I’ve already applied for medical school and I have a deferred place waiting for me. I’m planning on going just as soon as I’ve saved up enough money to support myself during the course. I’ve dreamt about being a doctor for a long time and I don’t intend to give up on my dreams any time soon.’
She sat up and pushed her sunglasses on top of her head, but the jiggling movement of her breasts seemed to have distracted him. Or maybe he’d just grown bored with hearing about her dreams. Whatever the reason, he was suddenly staring at her as if he couldn’t drag his gaze away. He was staring at her and glaring as if he liked what he saw and yet resented feeling that way—all at the same time.
‘You’ve got a tan,’ he said.
Following the direction of his gaze, she glanced down to see the glimpse of white where her shoulder strap had shifted. ‘A bit.’ She smiled, trying for a little levity to lighten the heavy atmosphere which had suddenly descended on them. ‘That is what tends to happen when you expose your skin to the sun, Luis.’
‘And you’ve lost weight.’
‘Have I?’
Their eyes met. ‘You know you have.’
‘If I have, it wasn’t intentional.’ She shrugged. ‘This climate doesn’t...well, it doesn’t give me much of an appetite, and Simone’s been serving those delicious salads. And I’ve been swimming every morning—in this weather it seems criminal not to. All that helps.’
There was another factor, of course. One which she wouldn’t be confiding in him any time soon—and the main reason why her normally healthy appetite seemed to have deserted her.
She wondered what he would say if he knew. If he’d be shocked to learn that these days she had grown to dread and long for their massage sessions, in equal measure. That just the thought of going anywhere near his warm skin started a terrible aching deep inside her. And it was getting worse. She found her hands wanting to linger on his flesh. She wanted to bend her head to the base of his neck and kiss the dark tendrils which curled there. She wondered how her attitude towards men and sex could have changed so radically. Was it possible that all her hard-wired fears of intimacy had been melted by daily exposure to Luis Martinez and his magnificent body?
‘Don’t you own a bikini?’
His impatient question startled her and Carly looked at him. ‘A bikini?’
‘You know, the garment of choice for most women your age rather than something your grandmother might be seen wearing.’
Her cheeks grew hot as she looked down to where her thighs were outlined against the cushions of the sunlounger. ‘I’m the wrong sort of shape for a bikini.’
‘And what sort of shape is that?’
She lifted her gaze to his. ‘Too fat.’
‘You are not too fat,’ he said impatiently. ‘You’re curvy, yes—but in all the right places. And men like curves. Actually, they like to see them, instead of them being hidden away behind shapeless clothes which are deeply unflattering.’ His mouth hardened. ‘You ought to give it a try some time. Stop moaning about the way you look and try doing something to change it, if it makes you unhappy.’
‘You do say the nicest things, Luis.’
‘Maybe it was something you needed to hear,’ he said, unrepentantly.
She snapped her book shut. ‘What time is it?’
‘Ten after four.’
‘Then we’d better go for your massage.’
‘If you say so, Carly.’
‘I do say so.’
But Luis didn’t move. He couldn’t. Because massage was the last thing he was thinking about right then. From here all he could see were her legs. Legs which had turned a shade of the dulce de leche he used to eat as a child. A paler shade than the syrupy sweet which used to seep out from the facturas pastries his mother used to make—back in the days before betrayal had slipped its lethal knife into his world and changed it for ever.
He felt that familiar little stab of pain but it was overridden by the infinitely sharper spiralling of lust. He dragged his gaze away from her legs but today she was like a beacon who seemed to glow golden just about everywhere. Even her hair had caught the sun and there were pale licks of colour nestling in amid the sedate brown, making it look as if she’d spent hours at an expensive hairdresser’s. He shifted his position a little, but it had little effect on the heavy aching at his groin.
‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said tersely. ‘I need to make a phone call first.’
‘Fifteen minutes it is.’ She scrambled up from the lounger as if she couldn’t wait to get away from him. ‘I’ll see you in the massage room.’
He watched her go and the sway of her hips made him harder still. Her swimsuit was riding up and revealing more of her bottom than she probably would have liked, if only she’d been aware of it. He suspected she would be appalled if she knew just how much of her creamy buttocks he could see, because she was a prude, no question. She dressed like a prude and she acted like one, too.
Yet he knew enough about women to realise that she was as jumpy as a box of newly lit fireworks whenever he was around. And then some. Did she think he was blind to the way her cheeks went pink whenever he walked unexpectedly into the room? Her newly acquired tan wasn’t deep enough to conceal that. Did she think he hadn’t noticed that her breasts were diamond-nubbed and straining, whenever they were in the pool together? Or that during his massage sessions her hands had gone back to that same trembling she’d had at the beginning.
It was a powerful kind of chemistry, and if it had been anyone other than Carly she would have made a pass at him by now. And in truth, that probably would have been enough to deflate his interest—or certainly to cut it short. The easy lay had never been a problem; it was the potentially unobtainable which had always intrigued him. He realised that he’d never met anyone who had actively fought her attraction to him before. It was incredibly...arousing.
Propping his walking stick against the lounger, he pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his robe and called his office in Argentina. For a while he allowed his mind to be taken over with the practical considerations of his business empire, while his assistant read out the list of bullet points she had prepared for him. Most concerned his global building projects: the luxury apartments being constructed on Uruguay’s most beautiful beach and the new hospital in Santiago del Estero. As he listened to her neat summary, he realised that everything was going according to plan. The conservation measures he was instigating in the south of his country had been so successful that he’d been asked to chair a Pan-European convention in the fall.
But as he mentally filed away the information he was given, different images started crowding into his mind. Images which were painful and unwelcome. He tried to block them out, just as he’d spent the last four months blocking them, but for once it wasn’t working. He stared at his
walking stick and suddenly found himself remembering the accident with a crystal clarity which made him flinch.
It was all too easy to recall that strange split second of calm, moments before impact. And then the deafening crumple of metal as his car had smashed into the side of the track. He closed his eyes as he remembered the stench of burning rubber and the first hot lick of flames as the car had ignited around him. The distant sirens and muffled shouts of his rescuers had grown louder with their sense of urgency and panic. He remembered being trapped in that metal coffin, thinking that he was about to die.
And if he had died? What would he have had to show for his life? A bloated bank account and a shelf full of trophies. His mouth hardened. It wasn’t much of a legacy, was it?
The sound of a bird calling out from one of the trees brought him back to the present. He looked around at the luxury pool and the villa which rose like an elaborate white cake out of the tiered green gardens. Dusky-pink roses and starry-white jasmine scented the air and his senses suddenly felt saturated. How beautiful it was, he thought, and, ultimately, how fragile. It could all be over in a heartbeat.
Couldn’t it?
He felt something flicker and power into life inside him as he began walking towards the massage room, like a man in a trance.
Quietly opening the door, he blinked against the subdued light to see Carly with her back to him, lining up bottles of aromatic oils in a neat row. He stared at the set of her shoulders and the ponytail which hung down her back and he knew the exact moment when she heard him enter, for her long fingers stilled on a small vial which looked like some alchemist’s potion. She had changed into her uniform and the ice-blue dress stretched across the broad beam of her bottom, emphasising its generous curves.
He also knew the exact moment when his painful recall became transmuted into desire. Only this time it wasn’t the low-grade variety which had been nagging away at him for weeks. Suddenly it was gathering all the force of a tidal wave—whipped up by soft dulce de leche flesh and eyes the colour of iced tea.
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