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Natalia sympathised with her. She could tell that Maya was like her in that she set herself very exacting standards and she knew just how she would be feeling in her shoes. ‘Couldn’t I do the massage for you?’ she offered impulsively.
‘Would you?’ Immediately Maya was all relieved and grateful smiles. ‘We were hoping you might offer,’ she admitted honestly, adding, only half jokingly, ‘Natalia, are you sure you would not like a partnership with us? Only you would be the most wonderful asset to the business.’
Don’t tempt me, was Natalia’s immediate private reaction as she smiled and shook her head. The explanation she had given the other couple for her decision to sell the spa had been her wish to focus on developing her skills as a perfumier. Another lie, but a necessary one, according to King Giorgio.
‘What time is he booked in for?’ she asked Maya quietly, slipping into her professional persona.
‘Half past. You’ve got twenty minutes to get ready. I’ve already brought up a uniform for you. His name is Leon Perez. Since his injury is a polo injury I imagine he must be South American. He’s requested the massage in his suite, by the way, but there’s nothing untoward in that, as you will know. We do offer that facility. However, if for any reason his behaviour should become unacceptable, just press the buzzer at the side of the bed. We’ve had them installed in all of the rooms just in case. We intend to keep a list of those guests who mistake our services for those of a very different kind, so that we can make sure they don’t repeat their mistake.’
‘A wise precaution,’ Natalia agreed. ‘I did the same thing, although fortunately they haven’t been used as yet.’
‘When you’ve finished, we’ll have drinks and dinner and continue our business discussions then,’ Maya said as she handed Natalia a spa uniform.
The spa’s uniform was a simple cap-sleeved, high-necked, linen-mix, A-line shift dress in plain white. The fabric was thick and heavy enough not to reveal what its wearer might be wearing underneath, Natalia noted approvingly. She liked the fact that Maya respected her employees enough not to give them a uniform that was in any way provocative. There was just about enough time for her to go to her own suite to shower, plait her hair to keep it out of the way and change into the uniform. It was rather shorter perhaps than she would have liked, and a bit tighter, but that was a problem one became accustomed to when one was tall and had a voluptuously curved hourglass figure. She gathered together everything Maya had given her that she would need before making her way to the guest’s suite.
Natalia had given clients massages a hundred thousand times and more so there was no reason at all for that funny little sensation to curl its way through her stomach as she pressed the bell and then stood outside the suite waiting to be let in.
The suite door was being opened. A man was standing just inside it, wearing the ubiquitous white hotel bathrobe.
As she looked at him Natalia found that she was blinking dizzily in much the same way she had done when she’d first looked at the perfume bottle. It was him. Leon Perez was the man she had seen earlier, crossing the square. That it should be him was surely against all the laws of reason and logic, and yet there was no mistake. It was him. Her senses were telling her that very loudly and clearly. Her senses. What right had they to get themselves involved in what was after all a purely professional matter? This was dreadful. And what was worse, far worse, was that everything she had just told herself about there being no need for her to feel anxious had just been blown totally out of the water by the force of one single look from those impossibly long-lashed jade green eyes.
Her heart swung crazily through her chest as though suspended from a pendulum and then stopped dead. She felt as though she were drowning in the depths of his eyes; as though she were being sucked under by some powerful sensual undertow come out of nowhere to possess her. Through the clamouring tumult of her senses she could think only one clear thought. And that was how very, very badly she wanted him.
CHAPTER TWO
WHATwas this…this lightning dart of pure volcanic sexual desire shooting up inside Natalia to spill past the long-closed gates of her own restraint, melting them into nothing?
Leave! Leave now, an inner voice was urging her. You can’t afford this. Just turn around and go…because if you don’t…
‘You booked a massage?’
Too late…too late. Why hadn’t she done what that inner voice had urged her? she wondered shakily as she stepped into the warm womb of semi darkness that was the dimly lit foyer of the suite. Her ‘nose’, so sensitive always, too much sometimes, went into overdrive. She was being overwhelmed by the flood of scents washing over her, the new decorations smell of paint and carpet and fibres all mingled together. The scent of the lilies in the hallway, overlaying the special signature perfume she had created for herself and always wore, a special recipe based on roses, with a hint of musk sharpened with the unique oil she had produced by blending grapes as they ripened, and vines as they thrust out new growth, maturity blended with the raw, powerful surge of new life. Normally it pleased and soothed her, but now was distorted perhaps by the smell of her own fear and she discovered that she was fighting against its unfamiliar demanding sensuality.
But most powerful of all was the scent of him. Images flashed inside her head; heat; the scent of something alien and unknown to her carried on a hot wind, the scent of male power both physical and mental; a rawness and vitality merging into something so intimate that she felt almost as though he had physically imprisoned her. Something dangerous and very unwanted was happening to her, Natalia admitted, grand slamming her senses, rushing over her and through her, forcing her to surrender to it.
‘This way.’
With a tremendous effort Natalia forced herself to ignore what she was feeling. For a moment she had wanted him. So what? That was probably just a knee-jerk reaction to her own knowledge that her unplanned years of celibacy were shortly to be brought to an end via her marriage. There was perhaps nothing like recognising that something was about to be taken ‘off the menu’ for it suddenly to be extraordinarily desirable. As for that dizzy, soft-boned feeling sliding through her like warmed precious oils, that was probably caused by the unfamiliar act of having to tilt her head back to look up at him, instead of him being on her own eye level as most men were. How tall was he, exactly?
King Giorgio had not offered her any information as to the physical make-up of his illegitimate son, other than his very proud boast that he was ‘obviously his son’. All she knew about him was that he was forty years old, had never been married, and had been brought up as a sheikh-in-waiting, but that on being offered the throne of Niroli he had handed over the rulership of Hadiya to his younger half brother.
There had been days since she had agreed to the king’s proposition when it had been a hard call not picturing someone squat, plump and wearing too much gold, especially in his teeth, despite King Giorgio’s obvious admiration for him.
In contrast, this man was six feet three at least, powerfully muscled without an ounce of excess weight and, as for his teeth, well, that small chip in one of the front pair suggested that despite their excellent shape and colour they were all his own. It would be wonderful to dance with a man whose height was so perfectly devised by nature to physically match her own. Just to dance, what about…? She tensed her body against what she was thinking. It was tilting her head that was responsible for her out-of-character response to him, she told herself feverishly. After all, at that angle the flow of blood to the brain would be diminished and that alone would be enough to induce…to induce what? Mind blowing images of such sensory sensuality that her nerve endings felt stripped of their protective covering.
For such a tall and powerfully built man he moved very lightly and easily—and very confidently, walking ahead of her, leaving her to follow in his wake like some harem woman following her master? Now where on earth had that idea come from? This man was South American, Maya had told her.
Maya and Howard had chosen to renovate the interior of the small palazzo they had transformed into their spa hotel in a way that was naturally holistic and an example of pared-down minimalism. The luxurious comfort of its rooms and décor came from the quality of the natural furnishings and fabrics they had used. This suite, the most exclusive of all the rooms, had plain off-white walls to offset its marble floors. All the rooms had specially designed massage tables in addition to their huge king-sized beds.
‘You booked one of the spa’s special neck and back massages,’ Natalia checked as they approached the massage table.
‘Yes. And let me warn you, you had better know what you are doing.’
He sounded almost antagonistic towards her, something that Natalia wasn’t used to either as a woman or as a professional, and somehow, instead of dampening down the unwanted feverish intensity of her reaction to him, it only seemed to inflame it. Was she really so immature? Wanting what she couldn’t have because she couldn’t have it? That was ridiculous. She just wasn’t that kind of person.
Perhaps now wasn’t the time to tell him that she was the one responsible for creating the massage in the first place, Natalia admitted, even if his attitude towards her had put her on her mettle. She knew without vanity that she was an excellent masseuse—it was a gift and an instinct she had known she possessed virtually from childhood, this power to soothe and heal with the touch of her hands. Had she been doing this in her own spa she would have been talking with her clients, drawing them out about themselves whilst she assessed which of her own specially blended oils would suit their needs best. She had no intention of trying that with this man though. She had no idea why she should feel this instinctive awareness of a need to protect herself from him.
Don’t you? an inner voice taunted her. Take a good look at him—that should tell you. No woman with red blood in her veins could fail to be affected by his maleness, especially not one who has just agreed to a passionless dynastic marriage.
Was that it? Was her unexpected and definitely unwanted reaction to him solely some unfamiliar last-minute and reckless desire to rebel against her own decision; a reminder by her senses of just what she would be giving up? She had never been promiscuous, she reminded herself, so why on earth should her senses suddenly have her physically yearning for an unknown man now? Physically yearning? She was doing no such thing! Yes, you are, her senses responded smartly. Determinedly Natalia fought to subdue them. She was here to work, nothing else. Just to work.
He had his back to her now and was stripping off the spa’s robe, letting it drop to the floor. Natalia held her breath. If he was nude, beneath the robe—and he certainly had the kind of male confidence that would mean that he could quite easily be. But he wasn’t. And she wasn’t prepared to let herself know whether she was pleased or disappointed to see that he had a small towel wrapped around his hips. Far better from a masseur’s point of view than underwear, it showed her that he was familiar with this kind of experience. How many other foolish women had felt as she was feeling right now? Had he looked at them as indifferently as he was looking at her or had they seen desire for them in those dark green eyes? From out of nowhere like a fierce tornado, jealousy gripped hold of her. The shock of it made her hands tremble as she waited for him to lie face down on the table.
She was, Natalia discovered, holding in her breath, and no wonder, when she saw the way those superbly defined muscles rippled with pure male strength. Yes, he was obviously a horseman, she acknowledged—those thighs certainly indicated that. And as for him being a polo player—he certainly had the requisite muscle structure, and the wealth if the understated but still discreetly logoed expensive watch and the fact that he was in this suite were anything to go by. His flesh shone a subtle warm bronze in the room’s lights, moving sleekly over the heavy padding of his muscles. He moved like a hunting cheetah, light on his feet, swift, silent and deadly. If she had not known he was South American she suspected that she might have put him down as Italian, although there was something within the devastatingly hard-boned masculinity of his face that hinted at a cultural legacy she could not quite define, something alien—and challenging to her as a woman? Ignore it, she warned herself speedily, trying to focus on other aspects of her client. His manner was certainly European, and yet it was also not. Because he was South American? Irritatingly that something ‘other’ for some reason was nagging at her subconscious, trying to tell her something, though she didn’t know what. More out of habit than anything she turned away whilst he settled himself on the massage table.
An important part of this particular form of massage was the mood music and lighting that accompanied it. Maya had instructed her how to activate the sound and light systems, both pretty similar to her own, although she preferred whenever possible to open the windows and have the simple sounds of nature as the only auditory accompaniment to her massage. But then of course she also used her oils and she was a great believer in not overloading the senses with too many strong stimuli at once.
She poured a small amount of oil into the waiting bowl and warmed it over a tea light and then poured a very small amount into her own cupped palm.
‘This massage is designed to work on tensions and blocks within the deep muscle structure,’ she explained calmly. ‘You may find that it gives rise to the occasional uncontrollable movement of one or other of those muscles depending on the degree of stress they are under, but that’s completely normal.’
The sound of him exhaling conveyed his impatience far more effectively than any words could have done—and his desire for her to keep her distance from him by not talking. Well, that certainly suited her.
She started to sweep her hands over his skin, assessing the tone and texture of the muscles beneath it, breathing evenly and slowly as she let herself sink down into and be absorbed into her gift for her work. So many things could be learned by this silent communication of touch and flesh, so many secrets withdrawn—he, for instance, was tensing himself against her even though he might be pretending with his steady, even breathing not to be doing so. At some stage in his life he had fallen heavily on his left hip, possibly from a horse. Polo again? There was no obvious damage but she could feel the muscle’s sensitive flutter as it whispered to her of its secret trauma. Automatically she responded to its need, stroking first reassurance and then, once it had accepted her touch, using a deeper, more searching kneading technique to send strength back into it, giving it power and confidence, telling it with her touch that it need not fear, that it could trust itself.
His hair, thick and dark—darker than her own, in fact—would, as she already knew, brush his collar when he was dressed. Now it felt sweetly soft against her fingertips as she swept up over his back and searched out the tensions in his neck muscles. She had been working for nearly fifteen minutes and her own muscles were beginning to ache slightly. Beneath the A-line shift all she was wearing was a pair of boy shorts, a practical decision, she had thought, but one she was regretting now as the movements required by the massage had brought her nipples into the kind of contact with the shift dress that was making them swell and ache. At least she assumed it was the fabric of her uniform.
She had never seen, never mind touched, a man with such a perfect body. She wanted to go on stroking and learning his flesh for ever. The feel of it intoxicated and delighted her whilst the scent of his massage-warmed skin was surely the scent of sensuality and sex itself, distilled to perfection. It possessed her ‘nose’ as physically and completely as though he had actually taken possession of her, causing a weakening of her own muscles and a corresponding ache deep within her belly, a sense of mingling heat and need that flowed up through her, affecting her like alcohol might do a drinker, melting bonds of her inhibitions and taking from her her ability to make rational decisions or to think rational thoughts. Her fingertips traced the long length of his spine, delicately tracing each vertebra. No wonder he stood so tall and proud. She had reached the edge of the towel wrapped low on his hips now. Since his request had been for a deep-textured neck and upper back massage there was no reason for her to be touching his body here. No reason other than her own need to indulge herself. All bodies had their strengths and their weaknesses, their good and their bad, but this body, his body, was so perfectly constructed that the pleasure of touching it was acting on her like a drug. Automatically her fingertips eased down the towel and sought the small indents either side of his spine just above the covered curve of his buttocks. She breathed in slowly and closed her eyes, stroking and circling, savouring the rush of pleasure surging through her as she caressed him.
‘What the hell…?’
The angry curse with which he rejected her unplanned intimacy made her step back, exhaling shakily as her face started to burn at her own lack of professionalism, and then stand completely still as though transfixed. When he had moved away from her he had started to turn over. As he had done so the towel had slipped from his body allowing her to see that, no matter what that angry curse might have been intended to convey, the real evidence of the effect of her touch on him was there for her to see in the thick, strong erection he had inadvertently revealed.
Natalia couldn’t take her gaze off it. He wasn’t the first client with a hard-on she had ever seen, of course; it was a natural and automatic male reaction to female touch, after all, she reminded herself. But this was the first time she had reacted like this to a client. Massage was a form of therapy and healing; she did not use it as an aid to turning herself on. By rights she should apologise, but what was there for her to say? That she had loved the feel of his flesh so much she had wanted to have more of it? Hardly. She bent down, intending to pick up his robe and hand it to him. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that he was getting up off the massage table. Would he complain about her to Maya and Howard?
How embarrassing would that be, given the true nature of her business relationship with them? She held out the robe to him, determined not to look at him, but some power greater than her own was obviously at work because against all logic she was reaching out and running her fingertip down the dark line of hair that would take her in only one direction.
She felt him contract his stomach muscles. Against her touch or against his reaction to it?
‘Look,’ she heard him saying bitingly, ‘I don’t want…’ And then abruptly he stopped speaking and swung his legs to the floor, reaching for her as he did so.
The shock of feeling his hands on her flesh beneath her shift sliding up her bare thighs, and then further until his fingers were massaging the rounded curves of her buttocks beneath her underwear, jolted through her, making her shudder in violent mindless pleasure. She could smell as well as feel her own arousal, with its familiar sleek wetness and softly swollen flesh. She had thought she had gone beyond the hyper-sexuality of those late teenage years when learning about her body and its reactions, along with learning about her own desires, had been safely in a haven of deliberately chosen abstinence, where not experiencing sexual desire had been something she had accepted and preferred. But now she was having the security of that comfort wrenched from her, leaving her naked and exposed to what she was feeling. And as to what she was feeling…
Natalia was fighting hard to suppress her unwanted and unacceptable desire, but already she could feel the gathering tightness presaging an orgasm. As though a switch had been thrown inside that part of her mind that regulated how she thought and felt, suddenly she wasn’t sensible, respectable Natalia Carini, bride-to-be of Prince Kadir, but a far more pagan Natalia, who was all hedonistic, sensual woman. Instinctively she struggled to hold back her body’s response—not now out of rejection of her orgasm, but instead because, shockingly, this other Natalia actively wanted to prolong each millisecond of pleasure for as long as she could. Everything about Leon Perez dominated her senses, in a way that flooded past her defences. She had nothing within her experience to hold up to herself as a pattern card of what she could do to stop what she was feeling, because quite simply she had never, ever felt like this before. She longed, not just to touch him, but to taste him as well, to hear the sound of his breathing in the last seconds before he lost control, ragged and tortured in his need to possess her. She wanted to smell the hot, aroused male scent of him as it mingled with her own scent, creating a new fragrance that was unique to them, as potent and alive in its own way as though between them they had created a new life.
But most of all she wanted the experience of feeling him within her, her flesh sheathing his and holding it, her muscles stroking the most pleasurable of all pleasures into his, drawing the essence of life itself from him as sweetly and perfectly as she knew how to draw the essence of its perfume from a flower. It bemused her that she, who prided herself on her mature restraint, should not only feel this depth of passion, but actively relish giving in to it. Why? Because she was about to get married? Because she had not had sex in such a long, long time? Because of him, the man himself?
Of the three options the one she preferred was the second, but wilfully her brain refused to accept her offer of it. The warning of the closed door brought about by her marriage, then? It had to be that. It could not be him, this man. It must not be, she told herself determinedly, knowing she could not allow herself to accept what that might mean.
‘Who are you? What are you…?’ she could hear him demanding thickly as he slid the shift from her body. ‘Or need I ask? No, don’t tell me,’ he answered his own question. ‘Because we both know the answer. You are what your sex knows so well how to be, deceit, full of promises and tricks, all things to all men, for so long as it pleases you to be.’ There was a hard contempt in his voice matched with bitterness and anger, but Natalia was oblivious to its warning and had no sensual space left to hear it, anyway. She was totally lost in the dark surf like curl of pleasure she was riding. Her soft, husky purr of approval at their intimacy swelled into the soft notes of the music and became part of it. Never once had her thoughts ever even come close to conjuring up a fulfilment for her as all consuming as the one her senses told her she would have with this magnificent male. It felt so right to want him as completely as she did. They were standing body to body, the aching pressure between her legs growing with every breath she took. She leaned forward, breathing in the scent of his flesh, and then, placing her lips against it, she stroked her hands down over him.
‘No!’
The harshness of his rejection shocked through her. Her heart was thudding in uneven beats.
‘You may have stolen from the other men you have shared your body with their right to be in control of your pleasure, but you will not do so with me,’ he warned her. ‘Where I come from it is the man who leads and the woman who follows, not the other way around. It is the man who takes and the woman who gives.’ His hands were on her body, stroking far too slowly upwards towards her breasts, causing her breathing to become an uneven, jagged sound of repressed need.