The Housekeeper's Awakening

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘But...what about the staff?’

  ‘What about them? The only member of my staff I’m interested in is standing right in front of me, wearing far too many clothes.’ He patted the empty space beside him. ‘So come over here, querida, before I grow too impatient.’

  Carly swallowed down the sudden apprehension which had risen in her throat. It would probably be better to resist him, when even now the gardeners would be arriving and the chef sending his assistant down to the markets in Nice to buy fresh fish and vegetables for the day. To tell him that this was an extremely unwise move and surely they could arrange a rather more discreet meeting later.

  It would be much better.

  So why was she walking towards the bed and pulling back the sheets?

  And why was Luis shaking his head like that?

  ‘No. Not yet. Lose the robe,’ he instructed silkily. ‘And don’t tell me you’re shy, not now, when I happen to know more about your body than any man on the planet.’

  It was difficult to act nonchalantly when the harsh light of day was showing no mercy to her too-generous curves, but Carly did her best. ‘I’m glad to see that nothing ever manages to deflate your ego,’ she said, unknotting the robe and letting it fall to the floor, before quickly sliding between the sheets and colliding with his warm, hard body.

  ‘Not just my ego,’ he said as he guided her hand to his groin and bent his head to kiss her. ‘Mmm. Toothpaste.’

  He kissed her until she relaxed. Until her body had begun to call out to her with a hunger which was already familiar and impossible to ignore. And again, Carly was lost as her whole world became centred on what he was doing to her.

  She closed her eyes as he cupped her breasts, his palms rolling rhythmically over her peaking nipples. She squirmed with pleasure as he moved over her, parting her thighs and positioning himself there. She gasped as he entered her with one long, slow thrust, her head tipping back as he began to move inside her. Her fingertips roved over his skin, greedily exploring all the different textures, from the hard, hair-roughened thighs to the silken expanse of his broad back.

  She wanted to revel in this feeling of intimacy and pleasure, but her orgasm rushed upon her with the speed and power of a freight train crashing over eggshells. She heard him cry out almost immediately, that strangely vulnerable moan he made as he shuddered into stillness inside her. She cradled her arms tightly around him and snuggled up close, her head resting comfortably on his shoulder.

  And then she fell asleep.

  When she awoke he had gone, just as he’d done last night, and when she appeared at the breakfast table, Simone informed her that Monsieur Martinez had gone into Nice on business and she didn’t know when he’d be back.

  The morning seemed to pass like an eternity and Carly found it impossible to concentrate on anything. He didn’t return until late in the afternoon and by the time he came to her room to find her, she was convinced he was regretting what had happened.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she blurted out, before she could stop herself.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’

  He gave a short laugh as he pulled her into his arms. ‘I needed space, and I needed to do some business without any distractions. But now I find I’m in the mood for distraction.’

  He pushed her down onto the bed, removing her clothes with almost clinical efficiency, and as Carly looked into the hungry gleam of his black eyes she guessed that this was a demonstration that sex could be fast and furious, too.

  Afterwards, she lay there feeling slightly dazed, drawing little circles on his skin and realising that he knew far more about her than she did about him. And in her dreamy post-orgasmic state, she felt she could ask him anything.

  ‘Luis?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  She turned onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow so that spills of hair fell down over her shoulders and covered her breasts. ‘Have you never wanted children of your own?’

  His mouth tightened as he brushed away the curtain of hair to expose her nipple. ‘Another word of advice,’ he drawled. ‘As a post-coital topic, fatherhood isn’t really a winner. Be warned, any dreamy little references to babies is likely to send any future lovers running off into the sunset. They might worry that you’re starting to fall in love with them.’

  She ignored the stab of disappointment that he seemed totally without sexual jealousy; she didn’t think she could have been quite so casual about any future lovers he might have. But she stuck to her guns. To consider the question logically, as she had been taught. ‘You think a question about children automatically means I’m falling in love with you?’

  ‘I know the signs,’ he drawled.

  ‘Well, in my case you are misreading them,’ she said coolly. ‘I’m interested purely from a human interest point of view. Most men want to recreate—it’s in their DNA. Continuation of the human race, that sort of thing. You’ve built up a massive empire, you’re a millionaire many times over, surely you want your own flesh and blood to inherit all that?’

  Luis rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. It was a topic he usually snapped the lid on—fast. He didn’t like women probing and it bored him when they searched for feelings which weren’t there. He wondered why was she was spoiling things by asking him this kind of question.

  Yet Carly wasn’t looking for the kinds of things which most women wanted, was she? A question he’d normally consider loaded, and which he would deflect with ease, sounded different when it came from her. With Carly, he had laid out all his ground rules from the start. She knew what he would or wouldn’t tolerate. She was ambitious for a career, not marriage, and perhaps that was why he felt relaxed enough to answer her question.

  ‘I think the human race will survive very well without any miniature versions of Luis Martinez,’ he said drily.

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘I can see that you’re going to make a very good doctor.’ He turned his head to meet her eyes. ‘Since you’re very persistent with your questions.’

  ‘You’re stalling.’

  ‘So I am.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. About your life. Where you grew up. Why you’re so adamant you don’t want children.’

  He linked his fingers together and put them behind his head, allowing a slow stream of memories to pass through his mind. ‘I grew up on a big ranch outside Buenos Aires,’ he said. ‘Where we farmed cattle in great rolling sweeps of land with the biggest skies you ever saw.’

  She wriggled a little closer. ‘We?’

  ‘Me, my mother and my father. We were quite unusual in that there weren’t loads of children running around. But I guess that made us especially close as a family, and my parents...’ He shrugged. ‘Well, they adored me, I guess. The farm was hugely profitable, my father had business interests in the city which were equally successful...’

  ‘So everything was lovely?’ she prompted as his voice faded away.

  ‘For a while.’ He looked at her and when he spoke again his voice had grown hard. ‘My mother had a friend called Amelita, and she and her husband had a son about my age. Vicente was like the brother I’d never had, and the two families used to do everything together. We skied in the winter and hit the beaches in the summer. We ate Christmas dinner around the same table. We were all like one great big unit.’

  He paused, not sure why he was telling her all this. Not sure that he should. Was it because she had shared her secrets with him and something was telling him that he needed to redress the balance? Or because he suspected that she was insistent enough to keep probing if he didn’t?

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  He stroked her hair. ‘I developed a love of speed early on and my father built a small go-kart circuit on our property for me to practise on, which was pretty innovativ
e at the time. Vicente and I spent hours bombing around that dusty trail. Then at sixteen, I moved away to the San Luis province so that I could use the famous Potrero de los Funes track. I didn’t come home that often, but when I did, things seemed different. I thought that my father and Amelita had grown...close. Closer than was right. I used to see the way she looked at him. The way she dressed around him. For a while I managed to convince myself that I must be mistaken, because I wanted to be mistaken. And she was my mother’s best friend.’

  He swallowed. His own sexual experience had been at a fledgling stage—he was barely out of single figures himself at that time. But he had been hit on often enough to realise that his mother’s best friend really was coming onto his father. He remembered trying to talk to him about it and being shocked by the old man’s sudden spurt of rage; his gritted threat to punch his only son. He had allowed himself to be placated by the furious denials which had followed, because hadn’t it been easier that way, even if deep down he had known the words to be lies?

  ‘And then one afternoon I rose early from my siesta,’ he said slowly. ‘The day was so still and so hot that I felt I could hardly breathe. I walked outside, seeking the shade of the trees, but it was no better there. There was no relief to be found anywhere. And then I heard a sound, something which seemed out of place in my home. I found myself walking towards the summer house and that is where I found them. My father and Amelita...’

  Carly’s hand flew over her mouth so that her words came out muffled. ‘And were they...?’

  ‘Not quite,’ he said, repressing a painful shudder of recall. ‘Amelita was in the middle of some kind of tacky striptease at the time, while my father...’ His voice shook with rage. ‘And all this while my mother slept in the house nearby. It was the lack of respect as much as the betrayal which made me want to kill him.’

  He stopped speaking and she didn’t say anything. She moved her hand to his face to try to comfort him, but he shook it off as if a fly had landed there.

  ‘It all came out, of course. These things always do,’ he said. ‘I suspect Amelita made sure that it did, since my father was one of the richest men in Argentina. And predictably, it blew everyone’s world apart. My mother never really recovered. She felt the sting of the double betrayal, of being cheated on not just by her husband, but by her best friend, too. She moved out of the ranch and bought a place in the city, but she stopped eating. Stopped caring, really. She used to stay in her rooms, afraid to leave, haunted by the fact that people would be looking at her and mocking her. Didn’t matter what I did or what anyone said, she refused to listen, and she died just three years later.’

  ‘Oh, Luis. I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.

  He shook his head as he tried to hold back the tide of dark emotion which he had battened down for so long. But for once in his life, it kept on coming and some instinct told him that maybe it was better this way. He had never told anyone, and if he told someone who ultimately didn’t matter, then couldn’t he loosen some of his own dark chains? Because one thing he knew was that Carly would never go anywhere with this. He could see the makings of the doctor in her already, not just in her firm but ultimately gentle care of him, but in a moral compass, which was rare. She would not need to swear the Hippocratic oath to have her discretion guaranteed.

  ‘You want to hear the rest?’ he questioned bitterly. ‘Because it doesn’t make for a particularly happy bedtime story.’

  ‘I want to hear it,’ she said.

  ‘The husband of my father’s mistress also felt humiliated by the public laughing stock he’d become, but he sought a different remedy than the self-imposed isolation of my mother. He took what he thought was the only honourable way out. He put a revolver to his head and blew his brains out. It was Vicente who found him.’

  She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Oh, Luis.’

  He stared up at the ceiling again. ‘So there you have it. Now do you see why I don’t believe in family life and happy ever after, Carly?’

  There was a pause. He could almost hear her thinking aloud as she sifted through all the possible words and tried to find the right ones to say. Except that there were no right words. He knew that.

  ‘Not...really,’ she said tentatively. ‘I mean—those were terrible things which happened, but they weren’t really anything to do with you, were they? None of that was your fault. Just because of the way your father behaved, doesn’t automatically follow that you would do the same. Infidelity and betrayal aren’t hereditary, you know.’

  He turned to look at her again. He could see empathy clouding her eyes and he couldn’t help admire her kindness, as well as her perception. Because Carly was clever, he realised. Clever enough to realise that there was more.

  ‘But I’ve lived a life on the racing circuit,’ he said simply. ‘And I’ve seen what it does to men—especially to champions.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘There are characteristics which make men like me succeed. We’re driven—literally—by the desire to win. We spend years in pursuit of the elusive perfect lap and when we achieve it we want to repeat it, over and over again. There aren’t many of us at the top, but when you get there you realise that it is both a seductive and a dangerous place to be. People revere you. They want a piece of you. Especially women.’

  ‘Women who are “as interchangeable as the tyres I used to get through”?’ she quoted quietly.

  ‘Exactamente.’ His face tightened. ‘I have seen the strongest marriages break down under the strain of all the temptations the sport has to offer. When the adrenaline is flowing and some sexy little creature puts on a skirt the size of a handkerchief and presses her breasts against your windshield, most men can’t say no. Most are arrogant enough to feel they don’t have to say no.’

  ‘So.’ She sat up, folding her arms across her naked breasts. ‘What you’re really saying is that world champions get given so much forbidden fruit, that they find it impossible to exist on normal fare like most normal people?’

  He shrugged. ‘If you like.’

  ‘But you no longer race for a living, Luis,’ she said. ‘So how does that even apply?’

  ‘My father wasn’t a racer,’ he said stonily. ‘He was a farmer who’d been married for twenty-one years. Who used to tell me that my mother was his soulmate.’

  ‘So what you’re really saying is that you think men generally are incapable of fidelity?’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes. I think that’s right.’

  ‘So men really are the weaker sex?’

  ‘Or the more realistic?’ he countered coolly. ‘How can two people possibly make promises of fidelity to each other, when they have no guarantee of keeping them?’

  Carly didn’t respond. His words had made her heart sink, even though she knew she had no right to be hurt by them. He had never promised her anything other than what he’d just given her, had he? In fact, he had explicitly warned her off the very things he had just been talking about. She pushed back the sheet and got out of bed. ‘I need to use the bathroom,’ she said.

  She walked across the bedroom and closed the bathroom door behind her, though maybe you were supposed to leave it open in circumstances like these? She realised what a novice she still was and how little she knew about how to interact with a man on such an intimate basis. She told herself that she couldn’t complain about his honesty, just because he was telling her something she didn’t want to hear. She had to accept this on the terms he had offered her, or she would end up getting her heart broken.

  She flicked cold water over her face and practised a few convincing-looking smiles in the mirror so that when she walked back into the bedroom she felt almost calm. At least, until she saw him sitting propped up against the bank of snowy pillows, looking very dark and rugged.

  His black eyes seemed to pierce through her still-tender skin. ‘Would you like to go out for lunch tomorrow?’ he questioned.

&
nbsp; ‘Lunch?’ She blinked, because she had assumed that they would assume their normal boss/employee relationship during daylight hours. She had thought that they would be together only in bed. ‘You mean—not here?’

  He gave the faint flicker of a smile, as if her lack of imagination had amused him. ‘No, not here. There is a whole beautiful coastline out there, querida—with some of the most famous restaurants in the world just waiting to be eaten in. There are beaches and mountains and tiny villages which are like stepping back in time. And since this is your first visit to France, I think it’s time I showed you some of them.’

  ‘But...I thought you’d decided it was best if we weren’t seen together?’

  ‘And maybe I’ve changed my mind.’ His mouth tightened. ‘I don’t live my life trying to please other people, and neither should you.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  HE TOOK HER to Juan-les-Pins, to a restaurant on a beach, where he was recognised immediately. But Carly was still too busy thinking about what he’d told her to take much notice of the heads turning to watch them as they walked over the sand-covered boards to a table which looked directly over the lapping blue waves. She thought about his sad upbringing and the conclusions he’d drawn. Conclusions which had only been compounded by his championship status in the glamorous sport of motor racing.

  He didn’t think that men were capable of fidelity.

  It had been a bald statement to make to someone you’d only just seduced and the message had been plain, even for someone as naïve as her. He was warning her off. Telling her to keep this bizarre liaison in the right place and not start building any fantasies. Because he wasn’t stupid. He must guess that being sexually awoken by a man like him would be powerful enough to turn the head of any woman, no matter how much she protested that she wasn’t looking for love or marriage.

  They ordered shellfish salads, and iced lime juice flavoured with coconut, and Luis devoured his food with a voracious appetite before noticing that she wasn’t doing the same. He put his fork down and looked at her, dark eyebrows disappearing into the tangle of his dark hair.