A flush of heat crept up her throat. “Figure this out,” she warned him. “If you take off one more stitch of clothing, I’ll call hotel security and have you carted off to a jungle prison, where you’ll rot and putrify like maggot food. And if you call me sweetness one more time, I’ll—” She seemed to be struggling for something gruesome enough. “I’ll poke out your eye with a sharp stick!”
“Now you’ve got me scared.”
She glared threateningly, but Geoff only laughed, his hands on the tab fastener of his fatigue pants. She might be angry, but he could see by the way she was watching him that she wasn’t unaffected by what she saw. Her focus seemed momentarily riveted on his upper torso, her breath quickening as she took in his golden body hair and the honed muscles of his chest and arms. As her gaze dropped to his pants, she shuddered.
“I don’t have to put up with this,” she said. “I can fire you.”
She seemed to be fighting the desire to look down, which was just where he wanted her to look. He undid the tab, letting the waistband of his pants hang open. “Then who would find Hugh for you?”
“I’ll find him myself. I don’t need you.”
“Don’t be so sure.” He moved as if to unzip his fly, and she gasped softly, her gaze darting to his crotch. Geoff felt a jolt of pleasure, almost as if she’d touched him there. His thoughts careened backward to another time when she had touched him there. He’d felt a fluttery lightness at first, like a hummingbird hovering near a flower, stealing some nectar, discovering and retreating, driving him wild.
“Why are you being like this?” she asked, interrupting his reverie just as it was getting good.
“Maybe because your rules don’t make sense, Randy. They aren’t realistic, especially the first one. Physical contact is hard to avoid when two people are living together in close quarters.”
“These quarters aren’t close.”
“They could get close. Accidents happen.” He waited a moment until she defiantly met his gaze, and then he started slowly toward her. She thrust a hand out to ward him off, but he paid no attention. He didn’t stop, not completely, not until her hand was touching his bare chest.
The contact of skin on skin seemed to paralyze her. Her hand was rigid against his pectorals, but he could feel the erratic pulsebeat coursing through her fingertips. She was vibrating inside. Good. He wanted her as rattled as he was, as rattled as he’d been ten years ago.
“Close like now,” he said. He glanced down at her hand, at her fingers nestling tautly in his chest hair, and felt a tightening all the way to the soles of his feet. Every part of his body was going hard on him, including the one she seemed so curious about. His heart began to pound and he wondered if she could feel its force. God knew he was feeling it. He was feeling things he couldn’t remember ever experiencing before with another woman, except maybe her.
“Is this the physical contact you were talking about?” he asked. “Or was it something more like this?” He caught hold of her wrist, his grip firm as he drew her hand up, inching her closer to him.
“Stop it,” she whispered.
“I almost wish I could. But I have a hard time doing that with you, Randy. A very hard time.”
He tugged on her wrist, and she stumbled a little closer, cursing under her breath. But he didn’t let up. He kept increasing the pressure until she was so close their thighs were brushing.
“I won’t allow this,” she hissed. “Either you let me go and agree never to touch me again, or—”
“Or what?”
“I want you out of here! Now!”
“Don’t make idle threats, Randy. You’ll never get to Santeras without me. You won’t even be able to make contact. And if you did, you wouldn’t last five minutes with a viper like him. He’d amuse himself with you until you were begging for mercy, and then he’d hand you over to his thugs.”
He pulled her closer and bent toward her mouth. “You need me, Randy.” His breath went husky and hot, bathing her face. “You need me, baby. Admit it.”
She jerked her head away, refusing to submit, and at the same time, exposing the curve of her throat to him. He blew away strands of her silky dark hair, then drew his tongue lightly along the graceful arc of her neck, all the time locking her wrist so that she couldn’t get away.
The urgent sound that slipped from her throat wasn’t quite a moan ... but it became one as he caught a tiny section of pale flesh between his teeth. He gave her a sharp little nip, then touched his lips to her reddening skin, a hummingbird kiss, light and hovering, just the way she’d tortured him on the bike.
“You need me, Randy.”
She jerked back her hand. But when he wouldn’t release her, she shuddered and softened. Slowly she turned her face back to his, and the liquid desire in her velvet eyes told him she was aroused, terribly aroused. She gazed up at him helplessly, her lips parted. “All right,” she admitted, her voice a throb. “I need you ... but don’t do this. Don’t take advantage.”
She moved against him, her breath quickening. He didn’t know what she was doing. She might have been trying to get away, but the silky float of her breasts against his bare chest was more invitation than he could resist.
His body urged him to do exactly what she was asking him not to. Go ahead, Dias, a voice whispered. Take advantage. Lay her down on that couch you just dirtied up and take whatever you can get. Take it all, just like she did.
With his free hand he combed her hair, gathering it up like a ruffle of black silk as he gazed down at her. His body was pounding at him, talking to him, but he held off the voices, the inner forces. There was gratification in knowing he could control the impulses, in knowing he could curb desire. It was all part of the self-mastery he sought.
Just a kiss, he told himself. One stolen kiss.
He covered her mouth with his, moving against her, shocked at the hunger he felt. His hands curled into fists, lifting her, pressing her body into his as if he could make up for all the years of waiting with this one kiss. She resisted for an instant, her lips taut against his, but then, as he took hold of her face and began to gentle her, his fingers stroking her jaw, his thumb playing at the sensitive corner of her mouth, she seemed to melt.
“Don’t make me do this,” she pleaded, but the throaty quality of her voice sounded more like urgent need than a refusal.
“Kiss me back, Randy,” he said.
She shuddered, but her answering moan told him all the fight had gone out of her. She was yielding to whatever forces had built inside her. He released her wrist, and his hands fell immediately to her waist, then slid to her hips, her buttocks. Her trembling increased as he cupped her, and she raised her arms in a gesture of such helplessness it made him suddenly, painfully harder. His fingers curled hungrily into her soft flesh.
The urge for completion was like a force of nature inside him. He hardly knew how to stave it off. And yet, at the same time, he realized he had no intention of taking advantage in the way she meant, not then, not yet. He’d seen the heat in her eyes when she looked at him, the erotic fascination. That might have been enough incentive for him once, but he wanted more than simple physical lust from her now. He wanted the satisfaction of hearing her utter his name with the same passionate conviction with which she said Hugh’s. He wanted to be the man she dreamed of.
His breath shook with the effort it took to control himself. He touched her lips lightly, wanting to deepen the kiss, to take possession of her with his mouth. Muscles were tightening at the base of his body, aching. But somewhere in the midst of all his pent-up ardor, he heard a strange faint sound.
At first it was just a soft shrill in the depths of his consciousness. He hardly heard it, and even when he did, he dismissed it as some errant impulse from his nervous system, just blood roaring in his ears. But it became louder and more insistent, and finally he realized it was something else, a telephone or a door.
Bells were ringing. And someone was shouting in a Portuguese accent.
It took him another moment to connect the bell and the shouting. It was their bags, he realized. The porter was at the door with their bags.
“What is that?” Randy asked, gazing up at him as though she’d just emerged from another plane of consciousness.
“I think you’ve been saved by the bellboy,” Geoff said. She drew back, but continued to cling to him, her hands on his shoulders as if she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stand on her own. She seemed even more vulnerable in that moment than when he’d been kissing her, and it made him want to sweep her up and carry her to a bedroom.
“Go ahead,” she said, stepping back and waving him toward the door. “Answer it. I’m all right.”
“I wish that made two of us,” he said under his breath. He was glad for the looseness of his fatigue pants as he headed for the door.
The porter turned out to be a rail-thin young boy who was frantic to please as he rolled the luggage cart into the room. He rushed to unload the luggage, struggling with one of Randy’s heavy suitcases first. Geoff immediately took pity and helped him. When they’d finished, he pulled a ten-dollar bill from the money clip in his pocket and ushered the boy to the door. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” he said, tucking the money into the shirt pocket of the kid’s uniform.
As he turned back to Randy, he saw that she was staring out the windows, her arms tightly folded. She was still trembling, and Geoff didn’t need to be told why. He knew exactly what was troubling her. She was thinking about how close they’d come to making love and what would have happened if they had. Despite all of her pleas and his quest for control, they would have been all over each other, crazy, hungry, just like ten years ago. He knew that as well as he knew his name, rank, and serial number. And she knew it too.
“Ouch,” Randy said softly as she plucked a stubborn hair from the inner arch of her eyebrow. It was past midnight, her bedroom door was barricaded against the enemy, and the ritual of purification had begun. She sat on her bed, cross-legged, a cosmetic mirror in one hand, tweezers in the other.
Whenever she was frustrated or anxious she plunged herself into some insignificant but intensely concentrated activity. Counting backward was just one of the devices she used. If she was at home, she cross-indexed her personal library or bleached the grout in her bathroom tiles, scrubbing the grooves with a stiff toothbrush until they were snowy white. If she was at the office, she reorganized her Rolodex or reprogrammed her high-tech message phone. Often the focused action alone could restore her sense of control.
She was neither place tonight, so personal grooming would have to suffice. She’d just given herself a manicure and a pedicure, and now she was restructuring the shape of her eyebrows, admittedly a dangerous thing to do when one was distraught. She could easily end up looking like an extra from “Star Trek,” a Vulcan science officer.
She angled the mirror to catch the light from the table lamp beside the bed, then tweaked a tiny offending dark hair from the space between her brows. Tears stung her eyes, and she swore softly, setting the tweezers down. Not surprisingly, the ritual wasn’t working. It would take more than four coats of Wild Coral Kiss nail polish and Greta Garbo eyebrows to prepare her for the next go-around with Geoff Dias.
The man had a devastating effect on her. His strange green eyes were hypnotic, and his seemingly inhuman control made her feel defenseless against him. It didn’t seem to matter that she held womanizers like him in total contempt. It didn’t even seem to matter that she was engaged to be married. When he touched her, she was entrapped, helpless.
She tested her toenails for dryness, then plucked the cotton balls from between her toes. “You would have loved him, Edna,” she murmured, speaking as if her deceased mother were there. “He’s beautiful, he’s sexier than sin—and he’s a black-hearted devil if I ever saw one. He even rides a motorcycle with a broken heart on it.”
Sliding off the bed, she headed for the lavishly appointed marble-and-brass bathroom. “He doesn’t seem to care a damn that he might be ruining my life,” she added, continuing her soliloquy as she disposed of the cotton balls in the wastebasket. “All he wants is to salve his male ego because I disappeared on him. Being dumped must have been a brand-new experience for him, poor baby. He’s probably used to women worshiping at his feet.”
As Randy came out of her troubled reflections, she caught her own image in the wall of mirrors and hesitated, scrutinizing her pensive expression. There were purple smudges under her dark eyes, and her normal healthy flush had faded to paleness. She should have been in bed asleep—or if nothing else, thinking about how to find her fiancé. Instead, she was obsessively sifting through the lurid details of her most recent encounter with Geoff Dias.
“All he wants is to prove that he can have me,” she said, fingering the silk bodice of her black lace-trimmed teddy. The shivery sensations he evoked stirred inside her as she realized she was absently caressing herself with the cool, slick material. “Once he’s accomplished that, he’ll discard me, just like all those men discarded Edna.”
Staring in the mirror, thinking about the effect he had on her, she watched her eyes melt with dark pleasure and the flush return to her face. She tilted her chin, looking for the tender spot where he’d nipped her throat, and the strangest sensation of excitement spiraled in the depths of her belly. It wasn’t bad enough that he aroused her. She had to do it to herself!
She switched off the bathroom lights as she went out, then fell across the bed diagonally, pulling a pillow into her arms and resting her head on it. She tried to shut off her thoughts, but she couldn’t shut off her bodily responses. She felt as trembly as the moonlight shimmering across the bay, as loose and flowing as the water. Even when she drew up her legs, it did nothing to stop the excitement swirling inside her.
There was a part of her that wanted to go with the feelings. She couldn’t deny it. There had been moments in the years since she’d been with him that she’d caught herself remembering, almost reveling in the memories of what they’d done. And then the shame had hit her, the guilt and the fear. Fear that she had fallen heir to Edna’s curse, that she would start to like the way Geoff Dias made her feel, start to need it . . .
She couldn’t let that happen. There was too much at stake. “E ... N ... O,” she whispered, beginning to count backward.
Six
GEOFF HELD THE TUMBLER of rum to his breastbone and rolled it back and forth across his chest, absorbing the cold shock of the ice-filled glass against the heat of his body. He half expected to see steam rise off his skin. He’d lost track of the time, but it had to be at least two in the morning, and the temperature hadn’t dropped all that much from the high nineties of the late afternoon when they’d arrived. It was going to be one long, sultry bitch of a night.
Pulsing waves of Latin music rolled up to him from the street several stories below his bedroom balcony. A mounting frenzy seemed to have taken over the city in anticipation of Carnaval. Street bands beat out jungle rhythms on their drums, and throngs of tawny-skinned Cariocas danced and cavorted in the same bikinis they’d worn to the beach. They were practicing for the parades that would start in less than twenty-four hours, and nothing could wilt their spirits, not even the heat and steambath humidity.
He leaned against the balcony railing, holding the drink in both hands, his weight on his forearms as he watched the undulating dancers. Once it had started, Carnaval would run nonstop until Ash Wednesday, four days of wildly hedonistic and blatantly sensual celebration. Most Cariocas threw themselves into the revelry with total abandon. They donned elaborate costumes for the desfiles, as the parades were called. Men became women, or demons, or magical animals. Women became samba snakes, high priestesses of sensuality, both slave and mistress to the throbbing, unrelenting dance music.
Sex on parade, Geoff thought, remembering the Carnavals of his past. He’d celebrated the event, also known as Mardi Gras, all over the world, in Rio, France, New Orleans. It was always the same—a full-tilt st
riptease of the senses, where everyday conventions were wantonly discarded and normal behavior was totally unacceptable.
Geoff could think of only one other experience in his life that came anywhere close to the sexual spontaneity and dark excitement of Carnaval. And that experience was far more memorable in its way ...
He’d thought he was having a dream the night he caught sight of a virginal vision in a wedding gown walking down the lonely stretch of highway. She was carrying her high heels and an open bottle of champagne. When he pulled up alongside her on his bike, she threatened to break the bottle over his head if he came near her.
He’d finally convinced her she wasn’t safe out alone that time of night, and she’d reluctantly climbed on behind him, but not before telling him in no uncertain terms what no-good bastards men were. She’d railed about how her mother had always picked men who broke her heart—users, losers, and dance-away lovers. How she herself, determined not to repeat her mother’s mistakes, had fallen in love with the perfect man, a brilliant and wealthy young medical researcher, only to have him jilt her because his parents didn’t approve of her.
The tirade left her weepy and trembling. But once she was finished, she wiped the tears from her dark eyes and tilted her chin at the world. “Everybody thinks I’m a bad girl anyway,” she’d said defiantly, arranging her full skirt on the bike behind him and curling her arms tightly around his waist. “So I might as well be one.”
Geoff figured he’d latched onto a beautiful lunatic. His plan was to get her to the nearest phone booth, call a taxi, and send her home. That was before he realized she had something else in mind. It seemed as if one minute she was clutching him and sobbing against his back, and the next, she was touching him. It couldn’t have happened that fast, but everything must have accelerated in his mind when he glanced down and saw where her hands were.
She was very tentative at first, as if he were a bomb she was trying to defuse blindfolded. But her trembling fingers didn’t stay tentative. She turned him into a wild man. Before she was through with him, she had him so hot, he drove the bike into an alley, pulled her onto his lap, and took her right there in her wedding dress.
Surrender, Baby Page 7
