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Lily half closed her eyes, and saw sun-dappled shadows dancing over a lean golden torso as the breeze stirred the leaves of a tree outside the window. ‘For five days straight?’
Rachel angled an amused look at Lily’s face. ‘Hey, get your own fantasy!’ she protested.
Lily blushed, which made Rachel chuckle. ‘You have hidden murky depths, girl.’
You have no idea, Lily thought.
For a while after she’d come out of hospital Lily had thought she would never feel anything ever again. Now she wasn’t so sure that would have been such a bad thing! Oh, when were things ever going to get back to normal? So she could get on with being a librarian who lived in a Devon seaside town.
She knew that it wasn’t healthy or constructive to go down the ‘what if?’ road, but she couldn’t help wondering what her life would be like now if she hadn’t gone down to the pool that morning all those months ago. It had been such a small decision, but the consequences had been life-changing.
An early-morning swim hadn’t seemed sinister or significant, just a good way to clear her head after a long, sleepless night alone in the decadent honeymoon suite of a Spanish five-star hotel, which, rumour had it, had been fully booked up for the next decade or so.
It would have been understandable if the thoughts that had kept her awake had concerned her absent husband. Her husband who hadn’t been answering her calls. The same husband who had texted her the previous morning to say the problem at work that had forced him to leave her at the airport at the start of their holiday had turned into a crisis and, no, he wouldn’t be joining her after all.
Gordon wasn’t to know that, following his text, determined to make the best of her holiday to this enchanting area, Lily had booked herself onto an excursion to the charming nearby Renaissance town of Baeza. Places like this were part of the reason she had fallen in love with Andalucia.
She hadn’t immediately placed the middle-aged man and his wife bearing down on her as the tour guide was in full flow. Then as she’d looked beyond the shorts and garish shirt she’d recognised a colleague of Gordon’s and his wife. She’d vaguely recalled meeting them on a few social occasions.
‘Matt…Susan.’ She called out to the couple.
They did the usual ‘small world, fancy meeting you here’ stuff, and then the older man looked around expectantly. ‘Gordon not with you?’
‘No, he couldn’t get away, I’m afraid.’
If he had, there was no way she’d have got to take this excursion; Gordon wouldn’t have budged from the five-star luxury of the hotel. If she had suggested that they go and see the real inland Andalucia, with its olive groves and rolling hills, he would have thought she was crazy.
‘Not surprised,’ the other man confessed. ‘He must be up to his eyes in it with his new venture. I couldn’t believe it when I heard on the grapevine he was leaving. I admit, I thought Gordon was a permanent fixture like me.’
Miraculously Lily’s smile stayed superglued in place. ‘So did I, Matt.’
‘And he was a sure bet for that promotion.’
Lily nodded in agreement. ‘He did mention that.’ One of the few things he had mentioned, it seemed.
‘But good for him, I say. You need to be a risk-taker sometimes.’ He looked across the square. ‘Is that your group moving on?’
‘Yes, it is. Lovely to see you.’
Blissfully oblivious to the fact that with a few words he had revealed her marriage to be a total joke, Matt shouted cheerily after her, ‘Remember me to Gordon and wish him all the luck in the future.’
He’s going to need all the luck he can get when I get hold of him. ‘I will,’ Lily promised with her best sincere smile.
Of course, she had known for some time that their marriage had problems, but she hadn’t suspected until now that they might be insurmountable.
My husband is leading a double life! What the hell is he up to?
At the first opportunity Lily slipped away from her tour group and sought refuge in the town’s delightful flower-filled plaza. She sat in a pavement café and ordered coffee, then, changing her mind, asked instead for wine in her clumsy, faltering Spanish. The proprietor brought a bottle.
She sat sipping the rich-bodied red and thinking about what she was going to do next. Didn’t a woman in her situation need a plan of action?
She could run up a credit-card bill, one guaranteed to bring tears to Gordon’s eyes. It wouldn’t be hard. Gordon had a deep, almost spiritual connection with his wallet—in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he was as mean as hell!
Then again, she mused, she could take the direct approach and get the next plane home, tell him straight if he didn’t want her to walk he’d better come clean about what he’d been up to. But was it a good idea to confront him when she wasn’t even sure any more if she wanted to save their marriage?
She could always cut the sleeves off his favourite designer suits, give the bottles of wine he’d put down as an investment to the church raffle…But, no, that had been done before by other, more imaginative wronged wives. But wasn’t she jumping the gun? Maybe her deepest suspicions were off and another woman wasn’t involved.
Sure, because Gordon’s never cheated before.
Lily toyed with the idea of sleeping with the first attractive man she saw. It would certainly be one way to have her revenge.
She knew the alcohol was partially responsible for her audacious line of thought, but for a while it was good to feel daring and in charge, not a damned victim.
When the bottle was empty she still hadn’t decided what course, if any, to take. The helpful proprietor of the café offered to call her a taxi and for once she thought, Hang the cost, and let him.
Given the day’s revelations and the fact she spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping off the unaccustomed alcohol, Lily never expected to sleep that night, and she didn’t, but not for the reason she had anticipated. No, all thoughts of her secretive husband and his mysterious new venture were crowded out of her head by the dark, chiselled features of a total stranger! This probably said something about her character. Lily wasn’t sure what, but she doubted it was flattering.
The next morning the solitude of the pool and exercise had the desired therapeutic effect, or so she naively believed at the time. After several slow, steady lengths she succeeded in rationalising what had happened in the hotel restaurant the night before. So she had been the victim of instant lust—it happened, she told herself with a mental shrug. Admittedly never before to her.
It was silly to get hung up about it.
It wasn’t as if she had done anything awful like cheat—at least only in her mind. And she suspected every woman who ever laid eyes on the tall, dynamic Spaniard with his sinfully sexy smile and incredible voice was guilty of that.
By the time exhaustion forced her to flip over onto her back and get her breath back Lily had reached the comfortable mental position of concluding she had handled the evening pretty well, under the circumstances.
The circumstances being she had hardly been capable of stringing two words together in the man’s presence, but there was no need to dwell on that! As for that frisson when their eyes had met and the tug, the feeling of connection, she had felt, such things did not happen between total strangers except in her feverish imagination.
Sensual fantasies aside, their brief encounter had actually been pretty much a non-event.
Lying on her back in the water, she couldn’t help her thoughts drifting back to the moment she had seen him. Lily involuntarily inhaled as the tall figure with a dark, classically featured face crystallised in her head.
He had achingly perfect, chiselled cheekbones, a proud nose, a strong jaw, dark, smouldering eyes and a sternly sexy mouth that just had to have fuelled countless female fantasies.
She had been lending half an ear to the elderly couple who had invited her to share their table at dinner when she had seen him framed in the doorway.
A tall, dark figure, dressed in a pale linen suit and open-necked shirt that revealed a tantalising section of olive-toned skin and undoubtedly had a designer name hand-stitched into the lining.
It hadn’t just been her, lots of people had looked, but Lily had carried on looking a lot longer than most others. She hadn’t been able to help herself. The stranger had been quite simply spectacular!
He’d been deliciously dark in a typically Spanish way, but nothing else about him had been typical! For a start he’d been much taller than the average Spanish male; she’d estimated that he had to be six four or five. Even the way he’d moved, with a fluid animal grace that had made her tummy muscles quiver, had been rivetingly different. His features had been classical, but strong. Her fascinated glance had lingered on his sensually moulded mouth.
It had felt like a long time, but it had probably only been a few seconds, before she’d managed to drag her hungry eyes clear, but in the process she’d connected briefly with his eyes. For a split second the rest of the room had faded away, and something that had felt like a mild electric shock had travelled through her body.
Lily had been utterly overwhelmed by emotions that she hadn’t recognised or understood. Rachel would no doubt have identified what she’d been suffering from as lust, but Lily knew it hadn’t been that simple.
White and shaking with reaction, she’d examined the pattern in the marble floor. Her heart had continued to race while some inner instinct had told her of his approach. By the time he’d reached her side every nerve ending in her body had been taut with anticipation.
She couldn’t even think about it now with a clear head, in the cold light of day without her pulses racing. She hadn’t been able to breathe; excitement had lodged itself like a tight fist behind her breastbone. Of course, when he’d walked straight past her as though she were invisible and clasped the elderly man beside her on the shoulder she’d felt every kind of fool.
CHAPTER THREE
AFTER exchanging a few polite words with the couple, who were apparently frequent visitors to the hotel, the handsome stranger had walked away. It had only been later in the evening that Lily had found out his identity—his name was Santiago Morais, and he owned the hotel, and, so it appeared, a whole lot else.
He had barely even acknowledged she was there.
Except for a kind of stiff inclination of his head in her general direction, no eye contact—even the most generous of judges would have to conclude that it had been pretty thin material for a night’s steamy fantasies. The eyes across a crowded room, soul-mate stuff had been a product of her overactive imagination.
She was shaking her head over her own pathetic self-delusion as she heaved herself out of the pool and sat, knees up to her chin, eyes closed and head tilted back to catch the warmth of the early-morning rays.
When she opened them the cause of her sleepless night, Santiago Morais, was standing there looking down at her.
‘Good morning. I trust you slept well?’ In contrast to his formal enquiry there was nothing vaguely formal about the restless febrile glitter she saw in his deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes before he slid a pair of designer shades on.
Lily didn’t say anything, partly because the sight of him casually peeling off his shirt had paralysed her vocal cords.
She watched, too shocked to guard her expression as he dragged a hand through his dark hair and set off a sequence of distracting muscle-rippling. He really didn’t have an ounce of surplus flesh on his athletically lean frame.
‘I didn’t sleep well at all,’ he revealed without waiting for Lily to answer his question.
‘Sorry,’ she croaked, thinking he didn’t look as if he’d had a disturbed night. He was oozing an indecent degree of vitality, or was that testosterone? Things deep in her pelvis tightened and ached as she focused hazily on his criminally sexy mouth. Bad idea!
Don’t drool, be objective, Lily, she warned herself severely.
‘Did you have a good swim?’ he asked, unzipping his jeans to reveal a flat stomach with perfect muscle definition and a light dusting of dark hair.
‘I was just leaving.’
He had been watching her…? The thought caused a secret shiver to pass through Lily’s body. She lifted her arm in a concealing arc over her tingling nipples, and pulled herself up onto her knees just as the worn denim of his jeans slid down his narrow hips.
As she took in his muscular thighs complete with a light dusting of body hair her breath quickened to the point where she was not so much breathing as noisily gasping for air.
If only for the sake of her own traumatised heart, she knew she ought to avert her eyes. Heaven knew, she tried, but she couldn’t; her eyes were glued to his body. He was so beautiful. She could remember feeling awkward, clumsy and overweight in comparison to his sleek hardness.
‘I meant to lose some weight for this summer,’ she explained, feeling the sudden need to apologise for her appearance.
Above his designer shades Santiago’s sable brows lifted. Behind the dark lenses it was hard to see what he was thinking, but she could guess—Crazy woman, where is security when I need it?
She smiled to show she was actually sane. ‘But you know how it is.’ Stupid, of course he doesn’t.
Her attention was irresistibly drawn back to his body. By this point he had stripped down to a pair of black swimming shorts that left enough to the imagination to send her temperature soaring several degrees.
The sensation she experienced when she looked at his streamlined golden body was a lot as she imagined drowning might be. The inability to breathe; the heavy pounding of her heart…only drowning would feel cold and she was hot…very hot! She took a deep, shaky breath as she struggled to get her breathing back on track and averted her eyes from the arrow of dark hair that dived below the waistband of his shorts.
‘Why would you want to lose any pounds?’
Lily didn’t take Santiago’s bewilderment seriously. ‘You’ve got very nice manners, but I know I’m fat,’ she explained matter-of-factly. ‘I can’t even blame it on my genes; apparently my mother was slim.’ Her grandmother, who like many people equated extra pounds with laziness, had been fond of regretfully observing that Lily had missed out on her mother’s good looks.
‘Fat…!’ His incredulity gave way to laughter, deep, warm laughter. Through the smoky lenses of his sunglasses she was aware of his eyes moving in a broad, caressing sweep down the length of her body. When he reached her toes he released a long, appreciative sigh. ‘You are not fat!’ He dismissed the claim with a contemptuous motion of his hand.
Lily was so startled when, without warning, he dropped down onto his heels until his eyes were almost level with hers that it didn’t even occur to her to protest when he reached across and took her chin in his hand.
He looked into her round, startled eyes. His slow smile made her stomach flip. In this enlightened age Lily wasn’t sure if predatory should be turning her on.
‘What you are is soft…’ His voice was deep and dark and textured like deepest velvet. She trembled violently as his thumb moved in a circular motion over the apple of her smooth cheek and she experienced another debilitating rush of heat. ‘And lush.’ His glance settled on her slightly parted lips. ‘And very, very feminine. An hourglass figure is something that men will always admire.’
Gordon hadn’t thought so, and Lily felt qualified to disagree. ‘Not all men,’ she contended huskily.
He dismissed this unappreciative minority with a contemptuous shrug. ‘Why do you constantly run yourself down?’ he wondered, letting his hand fall from her face and frowning.
‘I don’t,’ she protested, placing the back of her hand against the place his fingers had touched her skin and feeling ridiculously bereft.
He looked amused. ‘It is obviously an ingrained pattern of behaviour.’
‘That’s me, a hopeless case. Look, it’s been very nice talking to you…’ Surreal was much nearer the mark. There was no mystery about why she was hopelessly attracted to him, the mystery was why he should even pretend to feel similarly about her. ‘But I really must be—’ His deep voice cut smoothly across her.
‘Not hopeless, querida. An appreciative lover, someone who could teach you to enjoy your own body, could cure you.’
Having begun to get to her feet, Lily sank back down as her legs literally folded beneath her. ‘Are you offering?’ In her head it sounded ironic, the sort of slick comeback that invited laughter. Unfortunately it actually emerged sounding humiliatingly hopeful.
‘And if I was would you be interested?’
Lily didn’t smile; she was too busy panicking. To take him seriously would obviously be a major mistake and a direct route to total humiliation. ‘I suppose that’s your idea of a joke,’ she snapped.
‘I am not laughing,’ he pointed out tautly.
Lily, who had noticed this, swallowed. There was a driven intensity in his manner that she didn’t understand, but it excited her anyway. As she stared he lifted a hand and again dragged it through his hair. His brown fingers were long and elegant…sensitive, but strong. He had the sort of hands you would like to look at against the bare flesh of your stomach…other places too.
‘You did not know your mother?’
She looked at him startled by his sudden change of direction and she stopped thinking about his fingers on her bare skin.
‘You said “apparently” your mother was slim,’ he reminded her.
‘Did I?’ Lily frowned. Her ability to carry on any sort of conversation was severely hampered by the fact that every time she looked at him she experienced a fresh jolt of mind-mushing sexual longing.
‘You did.’
‘Will you stop doing that?’ She snapped, adjusting her towel.
‘What?’
‘Checking out my cleavage.’ Last night he had blanked her, this morning he was mentally undressing her and not trying to hide it. What was going on?
A laugh was drawn from his throat. ‘Don’t worry. I can discuss your family and admire your body at the same time.’
‘That’s an original slant on multi-tasking,’ she replied faintly. Inside her chest her heart was fluttering like a trapped animal. ‘But I have no desire to discuss my family with you…’
A white wolfish grin split his dark, lean face. ‘Then I will settle for admiring your body.’
Lily gave a frustrated little groan and felt a trickle of sweat pool in the valley between her breasts. What I need is a cold shower, she thought, picturing cold arrows of water hitting her overheated flesh.
Think cold water… Unfortunately the mental cooling-down process was hampered by the addition of a slickly wet male body in the imaginary shower with her.
‘I don’t want you to do that either,’ she replied hotly.
‘Don’t you…?’
Working on the basis that it was better to avoid outright lies whenever possible, Lily didn’t respond to this husky question. ‘Do you always hassle hotel guests this way?’ she demanded huskily.
Slowly he shook his head and the twisted smile he gave her was hard to read. ‘No, this is actually a unique experience for me.’
The hell of it was she wanted to believe him. She had always despised women who believed slick chat-up lines and here she was wanting to believe that a man who could have any woman he wanted thought she was unique and irresistible. Delusions didn’t get any grander than that!
‘Just for the record, my mother gave birth to me, and then dumped me with my grandmother, who brought me up. I haven’t seen her…ever…and as for my father I don’t know who he was, but the odds are she didn’t either.’ Now why did I tell him that?
Lily began to get angrily to her feet. This had to be some sort of game. ‘I’m not playing,’ she muttered from between clenched teeth.
To her way of thinking there was no way a man who possessed a perfect, hard, streamlined, muscular body like Santiago could possibly find anything to admire in her own over-generous curves.
She gave a startled yelp when halfway to her feet the towel she was clutching was unceremoniously wrenched from her fingers.
‘Give that back!’ she pleaded huskily.
He shook his head, slung the towel carelessly in the pool and removed his shades. His extravagant lashes lifted from the razor-edged curve of his cheekbones to reveal stunning eyes, so dark as to be almost black and flecked by pinpricks of silver. Lily gasped and shivered uncontrollably; the message glimmering in those mesmerising depths was inescapably sensual.
‘You didn’t ask me why I didn’t sleep last night…?’
Raw and driven, his voice drew a low moan from her throat. Lily pressed a hand to the base of her throat where a pulse was hammering away. ‘I find hot milk works a treat.’
This sterling advice caused his mouth to spasm slightly, but didn’t alter the hot, hungry expression in his eyes. His voice dropped to a low, sexy rasp as he explained. ‘I didn’t sleep last night because I was thinking about you, and this morning I come out to cool down and here you are. Do you believe in fate…?’
Lily discovered she believed in everything he said in that sinfully sexy voice of his—which probably made her certifiable. ‘I really should be going…’ This is pure physical attraction and not a good thing to act on, she told herself firmly. ‘It takes simply ages to dry my hair; it’s so thick—’
His authoritative voice cut slickly through her garbled flow of inanity. ‘Your hair is rich and lustrous.’ He let the damp strands fall through his fingers.
‘You think…?’ she echoed weakly.
‘I do.’
Lily fought to inject a sliver of sanity into the proceedings and shook her head. ‘No, it’s mousy.’ His incredibly long ebony lashes had golden tips and the fine lines that radiated from around his eyes were incredibly attractive.
‘We really are going to have to work on that self-esteem issue.’
‘We? There is no we. We can’t have this conversation. It isn’t…I don’t know you!’ Her voice rose in weak protest as her defences went into meltdown.
‘What has that got to do with anything?’
‘Everything,’ she replied, staring helplessly up into his incredible eyes.
He shook his head. ‘It is totally irrelevant. Can you deny this feels amazingly right?’ he challenged as he took her by the shoulders. ‘I can’t look at you without wanting to sink into your sweet satiny softness and lose myself.’
‘You can’t say things like to me!’ she gasped while thinking, You can do just anything to me! Please do it now!
His earthy laugh made every downy hair on her body stand on end. Either he had meant it, or he was a spectacularly good liar! By that point Lily didn’t care which it was; she was burning up from the inside out with need.
His shoulders lifted expressively. ‘But I just did.’ His smile was a potent mix of tenderness and predatory ferocity.
He didn’t make any move to stop her when Lily, unable to resist temptation any longer, reached up and touched his lean cheek. ‘I want to see you, touch you.’
His eyes didn’t leave hers for a second as he took her fingers from his face and raised them to his lips.
‘And you shall,’ he promised. ‘If that is what you want?’
Lily shook her head. ‘I think…I don’t know…’
Santiago turned her hand over and traced a path across her palm with the pad of his thumb before touching the plain wedding band on her finger. His head lifted. ‘But you are thinking about your husband?’
CHAPTER FOUR
I’M NOT thinking about him, but I should be.
Sucking in a mortified breath, Lily snatched her hand away. His question hadn’t just spoiled the mood, it had killed it stone-dead. And a good thing too, she told herself. Her marriage might be a total sham, but she was still married, and in Lily’s mind, despite yesterday’s reckless thoughts of revenge, Gordon’s repeated infidelities didn’t give her a licence to do the same.