He felt her nerves, the way she stiffened, and he began whispering into her ear, soothing her as he eased himself in.
She was so wonderfully tight, scared and nervous now but, oh, so eager for him.
Dante had to grit his teeth not to push hard and satisfy himself. Bit by bit he entered her, her wetness easing a path, her groans escalating in volume the deeper he was and when, at last, he had that final thrust, Caitlin was ready for him and her body responded with enthusiasm. He moved and she moved as well, their bodies in total harmony.
It felt so good. Unbelievably so. Dante came with an explosion that shocked him in its intensity.
Her own orgasm followed his. She arched up to him and cried out, all inhibitions gone in that moment.
Afterwards, it was like swimming back up to the surface having been underwater. Caitlin sighed and shifted so that they were belly to belly. Never had she felt closer to anyone and yet, even as she knew that, she also knew that that was an admission she should never make.
‘That was the best,’ she said with honesty. ‘At least,’ she added, even more honestly, ‘for me. I don’t suppose it was much of a deal for you.’
‘Don’t even think of saying something like that.’ Dante kissed the side of her mouth and ran his fingers through her tangle of colourful hair.
Dante had become jaded over time. In business, he got what he wanted. He was single-minded, focused, ambitious and feared. Born into wealth, he had continued climbing up that ladder, unimpeded. The sense of satisfaction he had felt when he had first started diversifying and doing his own thing, setting up his own empire, had become a dull, background acceptance of success. Winning deals, absorbing companies, the thrill of being the first to spot the gold mine waiting in the wings...the shine had worn off. Thinking about his brother and his dislike of the job he had inherited, his forays into other worlds that had nothing to do with money but were adventures to be had and nothing more, Dante felt a sharp pang of envy.
He was the younger but a lot more cynical.
And when it came to women...
Dante gazed at the woman lying next to him, warm and drowsy post-sex.
He would tire of her. He always did. He wondered whether his defence mechanisms against becoming too involved with any woman were so finely honed that it made it impossible for him to have anything approaching a normal relationship. No sooner had he slept with a woman than his attention began to stray. It was something he had long accepted. It was why he found the idea of marriage so inconceivable and why, if it ever hovered at the back of his mind, it was in the shape of something convenient, without the exhausting, futile and complicated shenanigans associated with emotion.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Caitlin said lightly, her clear green eyes not shying away from him.
She had her life to get on with. He had his. She would find someone eventually and her belief in love would be rekindled.
‘You could stay awhile,’ he murmured.
Caitlin looked at him seriously. ‘I have a job to go back to.’
‘Jobs can wait.’
‘That’s fine for you to say. You’re your own boss and you can afford to do what you want.’
But that invitation was so tempting, even though she could read the corollary... Stay awhile because pretty soon I’ll get fed up anyway...
‘Don’t you want to...to do this all over again?’
She hesitated, and in that pause he smiled slowly.
‘Because I really want to.’
‘I have responsibilities.’
‘I’m not talking about a long-term arrangement, Caitlin. I’m talking about a few days of uncomplicated fun before we go our separate ways.’ He stroked her side and her eyelids fluttered. ‘Your responsibilities will be waiting for you when you get back to London, I’m sure.’
They would, Caitlin thought. Her parents...the stress...the uncertainty...none of that would be going anywhere any time soon. Alejandro had told her that he had instructed his bank to deposit the promised money into her account. She had no intention of keeping any of it so she would be back to square one when she returned to London.
But was she really the sort of person who could enjoy a few days of guilt-free pleasure without consequences? She’d shrugged off the whole business of relationships but, looking back at it, she hadn’t been tempted into any anyway, so shrugging them off hadn’t been an issue.
But she and Dante had slept together.
Lust.
That was what it had all been about. Lust and maybe the allure of being in a different country, where grim day-to-day reality could be kept at a distance... It was as real as stardust.
He wanted days. She could do days. Lust faded. And what was wrong with snatching a little time out?
His parents wouldn’t know. Alejandro would probably suspect but he would be amused. They would live in a little bubble for a week and then the bubble would burst and that would be that. No harm done.
‘Okay.’ She blushed. She reached out and did what he was doing to her: she stroked him, her fingers sliding over taut sinew and muscle, then lower to where his stirring erection left her in no doubt that what he felt for her was very, very genuine. ‘You’re right. Responsibilities can wait awhile...’
* * *
His parents wouldn’t know. They would be spared the bewilderment of thinking that she had been engaged to one brother only to move on to the next. Without the complexities of the situation being explained, how could they think otherwise? They lived some distance away so it wouldn’t be an issue. Somehow, Caitlin had managed to avoid another dinner invitation and she suspected that that was because they were too wrapped up with events to even think about entertaining their son’s fiancée, however much they might have wanted to.
Dante, perhaps, had engineered things so that they could have time to themselves, in that very special bubble where the past and the future didn’t exist, just a very physical and very exciting present.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ he had told her the evening before, when they had lain together, their limbs entangled so that they were almost a single unit, ‘but this is the best sex I’ve ever had.’
Caitlin had laughed and quelled the unexpected hurt she had felt. The best sex... Maybe there were women who would have seen that as a compliment. She could understand that. Dante was a man of experience, a man who could have any woman he wanted at the snap of an imperious finger, so doubtless when he’d said that, it had been said as a compliment.
But for Caitlin...since when had that ever been her dream? Since when had she ever thought that she would end up snatching time with a guy who wasn’t interested in anything beyond a romp in the sack? Had she ever thought that she would be helplessly sucked into the sort of non-relationship she had been schooled to avoid at all costs?
And yet, those words had filled her with a guilty pleasure.
She had to keep reminding herself that none of that really mattered because she would soon be gone.
Alejandro would soon be leaving hospital. She had visited him first thing this morning and he had been upbeat. He had shrewdly asked her about Dante and she had not committed to any kind of answer, but he had gone ahead and warned her off him again anyway, as if she had needed that warning.
Right now, Dante would be on his way back from the hospital. He had gone to work—an urgent meeting, he’d said, but he would much rather have lazed in bed with her—and would be stopping on the way back to his house.
Caitlin had already been there for an extra three days. Mentally, she had dealt with extending her stay by a week. That gave her four more days to bask in their short-lived relationship. When she thought about boarding that plane back to London, her mind skittered away from the unpleasant feeling that that was the last thing she wanted to do and, she told herself sternly, that had nothing to do with the fact that she hated the thought
of never seeing Dante again. It was simply because she was having a holiday from all her stress and who ever wanted a holiday to come to an end? No one.
Standing in the kitchen now, with a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge and a meal in the oven, prepared by one of the three members of staff permanently employed to make sure that no need of Dante’s ever went untended, including the need to eat extremely fine food and drink extremely fine wine, Caitlin glanced down at her outfit.
She had forgone the usual uniform of loose skirt and loose top, which Dante referred to as her hippie chick outfits, and was wearing a pair of skinny jeans and a fitted top, which she had bought the day before. Huge extravagance and she had no idea why she had done that, except she’d been out with Dante and he had practically shoved her into the shop and then had declared the outfit an amazing fit when she had grudgingly paraded it for him. She’d been squirrelling every spare penny into an account for her parents and hadn’t spent anything on herself for ages and suddenly, for no reason, she’d felt reckless.
Regrettable, considering her arrangement with Alejandro had bitten the dust, even though, up to this morning, he’d pressed her to take the money, which he didn’t need and she desperately did, and not be silly. He’d refused to give her his bank details. She would sort that out as soon as he was out of hospital, she’d decided.
And she had to agree with Dante—the outfit suited her.
An uneasy thought surfaced. Was she, subconsciously, dressing to please him because she wanted to somehow persuade him into a relationship he had declared he didn’t want? Did she want a week to stretch into a month? A year? Longer?
If that were the case, which she wasn’t even going to give houseroom in her head, then she had obviously lost her mind.
She didn’t hear him enter.
She’d been lost in her thoughts. Then she looked up and there he was and her heart skipped several beats.
He was so breathtakingly beautiful, so spectacular in every possible way, that she could only stare and blink for a few seconds, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. He was magnificent naked but no less so when he was kitted out in his handmade leather shoes and the designer suit that would have cost the earth.
He’d dumped his jacket somewhere along the way and unbuttoned the top three buttons of his white shirt, which was cuffed to the elbows. His trousers, pale grey and hand-tailored, were a beautiful fit and somehow managed to make him look businesslike yet crazily sexy. Quite an achievement, she thought faintly.
Eventually, their eyes met and she blinked.
‘What’s wrong?’ How quickly she had become used to his eyes darkening when they rested on her, to the slow, unfurling smile that could make her toes curl and bring a surge of heated colour to her face.
Right now, as he remained standing by the kitchen door, his face was grave and that sent a chill of foreboding through her.
‘We need to talk.’ Dante didn’t take his eyes off her as he walked directly to the fridge to pour them both a generous glass of Rioja.
‘You think I might need a drink to cope with whatever you have to say?’
He’d moved to sit at the table and she followed suit, although adjacent to him with a chair between them. Close enough to lean into whatever conversation was about to take place but far enough for her to remove herself from the suffocating effect he had on her senses.
She tried to read what he was thinking but he was adept at concealing what he wanted hidden.
‘It’s about my brother.’
‘But...’ she half rose ‘...I was with him this morning and he was absolutely fine.’
Dante tilted his head to one side. ‘He told me.’
‘He told you...?’
‘Caitlin...you should have said. No, scratch that...of course, you couldn’t have broken the promise you made him but...’ Dante rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘I wish I had known.’
‘Alejandro told you?’ Shocked, Caitlin leaned towards Dante, her urgent green eyes colliding with his weary dark ones. He looked drained. More than that...he looked saddened.
She reached out and covered his hand with hers and breathed a sigh of relief when he curled his fingers into hers. He slumped back in the chair for a few seconds, eyes closed, then he opened his eyes and looked at her.
‘We spent years growing more and more distant from one another. I had no idea how he felt about working for the company until you told me. I had no inkling that he was gay and the worst of it was that he felt so damned apprehensive about telling me. Yet he had every right to keep it to himself. When have I ever given Alejandro any indication that I was interested in his personal life? We were ships that crossed in the night, exchanging as little as possible of any significance.’
‘That’s sometimes how it goes,’ Caitlin told him gently. ‘But there is an opportunity now for things to change between you. He’s your brother and you’re so lucky to have a sibling.’ She thought of the cares and troubles she was having to manage single-handedly. ‘Alejandro is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met and I know he would be so happy, so thrilled and excited, to have you in his life. I mean, properly in his life.’ She paused. ‘Has he...er...broken this news to anyone else?’
‘He’s going to tell our parents later today. He’s wary, he tells me, but it’s something he said he should have done a long time ago. I think coming here under those false pretences, his fall...brought home to him the need to come out and be honest.’
‘I’m really glad he has,’ Caitlin admitted. ‘You have no idea how hard I’ve tried to persuade him that living a lie wasn’t a good idea.’
‘You agreed to the charade,’ Dante mused softly, ‘because he was so desperate to do what he thought he needed to do, didn’t you? He talked you into pretending to be his fiancée and you agreed because that’s just the kind of person you are...’
Uncomfortable with this summary of events, Caitlin shuffled in the chair and wondered whether she should launch into the full account of the hare-brained scheme they had agreed upon.
She remained silent. What would be the point? The main thing was that all the hiding behind closed doors was over for Alejandro and a new chapter in his life was about to begin.
‘Yes, I’m a saint,’ she quipped. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just vanish upstairs for a minute so that I can polish my halo.’
Dante burst out laughing. His eyes darkened with appreciation.
There was something special about her. The fact that she had stepped up to the plate and done something as dramatic as she had, for the sake of friendship, struck him as almost noble.
Would she have carried on with the pretence? And for how long? Yes, she had been hurt in the past, but would that hurt have propelled her into a permanent arrangement with Alejandro if events had not played out the way they had?
He also admired the fact that she could have told him. She could have broken that confidence, knowing that it would have put a completely different slant on things. She must have known, after that kiss they had shared at the pool, that his opinion of her would have been in the dirt when he’d walked away. But she hadn’t followed him. She had remained true to the promise she had made his brother.
Self-serving she was not, and he really liked that.
And now...
Dante had truly thought that her novelty value would have worn off by now. Here they were, playing truant from reality like a couple of heady teenagers, and he had assumed that the sheer difference about her, the very thing he figured had got to him in the first place, would have worn thin by now.
Yet he saw her and he wanted her. He touched her and he had to stop himself from shaking. He heard that infectious laugh and he smiled.
And now everything had changed and a forbidden thought crept into his head like a thief in the dark.
What if they carried on for longer than the week prescribed? He w
asn’t looking for permanence and neither was she. He’d half feared that she might have begun to view what they had as more significant than he had told her it was destined to be, but there had been no hesitant forays into a future beyond the coming weekend. She had not hinted at wanting any more than what they had agreed upon. She had been as casual as him, living in the moment and enjoying it.
‘I like your sense of humour,’ Dante confessed, his thoughts still running unchecked. ‘Women have always been way too eager to do what they think I might like. You’re not like that...’
‘You live in a different world, Dante.’ But Caitlin was inordinately pleased by the compliment. ‘I guess people suck up to you because of who you are and you’ve become accustomed to that. I don’t live in that world and it’s not how I’ve been brought up.’ She smiled. ‘We’re all different.’
‘And I like that. More than I thought I would.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Things have changed with Alejandro’s revelation. My parents, for better or worse, will find out that the engagement they had such high hopes for was all a pretence. Well intentioned, but still a pretence. Alejandro is terrified that they will pass judgement and he will be found wanting. I like to think that that is not going to be the case. At any rate...’ he looked at her, his lean, handsome features decisive ‘...you will be able to face them for who you really are.’
‘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.
The Forbidden Cabrera Brother Page 13
