Tropical Temptation: Exotic Seduction
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They didn’t require that much light, since the boxes they needed to search were in the attic. She didn’t care. With tension zinging through her, and Nick making no bones about the fact that he wouldn’t be averse to repeating their one night together, she wasn’t taking any risks.
The blazing lights illuminated the small sunroom to the left, the larger sitting room to the right and the stairs directly ahead.
Sending Nick a smile she was aware was overbright and strained, she started up the stairs. “Help yourself to a drink in the kitchen. I’ll change and be right back.”
There were four bedrooms upstairs. The doors to each were open, allowing air to circulate. Elena stepped inside the master bedroom she had claimed as her own. A room her aunt had refused to use and which was, incidentally, the same room she and Nick had shared six years ago.
With white walls and dramatic, midnight-dark floorboards, the bedroom was decorated in the typical Medinian style, with a four-poster dominating. Once a starkly romantic but empty testament to her aunt’s lost love, Elena had worked hard to inject a little warmth.
Now, with its lush, piled cushions and rich pomegranate-red coverlet picked out in gold, the bed glowed like a warm, exotic nest. A lavish slice of paradise in an otherwise very simply furnished house.
Closing the door behind her, she began working on the line of silk-covered buttons that fastened the pink dress, her fingers fumbling in their haste.
As she hung the lavish cascade of silk and lace in her closet, her reflection, captured by an antique oval mirror on a stand, distracted her. In pink lingerie and high heels, her hair falling in soft waves around her face, jewels gleaming at her lobes and her navel, she looked like nothing so much as a high-priced courtesan.
Not a good thought to have when she was committed to spending the next two hours with Nick.
Dragging her gaze from an image she was still struggling to adjust to, she pulled on a summer dress in a rich shade of red.
Unfortunately the thin straps revealed the butterfly transfer on her shoulder. Maybe it was ridiculous, but she didn’t want Nick to see the full extent of the fake tattoo. With all of the changes she had made, the addition of a tattoo now seemed like overkill and just a little desperate.
Unfastening the gorgeous pink heels, she slipped on a pair of comfortable red sandals that made the best of her spray-on tan, shrugged into a thin, black cardigan and walked downstairs.
When she entered the sitting room, she saw Nick’s jacket tossed over the back of a chair. The French doors that led out to the garden were open, warm light spilling out onto a small patio.
As she flicked on another lamp, Nick stepped in out of the darkness, the scents of salt and sea flowing in with him. He half turned, locking the door behind him, and the simple, intimate motion of closing out the night made her heart squeeze tight.
With his jaw dark and stubbled, his shirt open at the throat, he looked rumpled and sexy and heartbreakingly like the young man she had used to daydream about on the beach.
Although the instant his cool, green gaze connected with hers that impression evaporated. “Are you ready?”
“Absolutely. This way.” She started back up the stairs, her heart thumping faster as she registered Nick’s tread behind her.
As she passed her bedroom, she noted that in her rush to get downstairs she had forgotten to close the door. The full weight of her decision to invite the only man she had a passionate past with to the scene of her seduction, hit home.
If she had been thinking straight she would have asked someone to come with them. A third person would have canceled out the tension and the angst.
Relieved when Nick didn’t appear to notice her room or the exotic makeover she’d given the bed, she ascended another small flight of stairs. Pushing the door open into a small, airless attic, she switched on the light. Nick ducked underneath the low lintel and stepped inside.
He stared at the conglomeration of old furniture, trunks and boxes. “Did Katherine ever throw anything away?”
“Not that I’ve noticed. I suppose that if the ring is anywhere on the property, it’ll be here.”
As always when she thought of her aunt, Elena felt a sentimental softness and warmth. She knew Katherine had adored all of her nieces and nephews, but she and Elena had shared a special bond. She had often thought that had been because Katherine hadn’t had children of her own.
Feeling stifled by the stale air and oppressive heat, Elena walked to one end of the room to open a window. The sound of a corresponding click and a cooling flow of air told her that Nick had opened the window at the other end.
“Where do we start?” Nick picked up an ancient book, a dusty tome on Medinian history.
“Everything on that side of the room has been searched and sorted.” She indicated a stack of trunks. “This is where we need to start.”
“Cool. Sea trunks.” Nick bent down to study one of the old leather trunks with their distinctive Medinian labeling. “When did these come out?”
“Probably in 1944. That’s when the Lyon family immigrated to New Zealand.”
“During the war, about the same time my family landed. I wonder if they traveled on the same ship.”
“It’s possible,” Elena muttered. “Although, since your family owned the ships it was unlikely they would have socialized.”
Nick flipped a trunk open. Another wave of dust rose in the air. “Let me get this right. My grandparents would have traveled first-class so they wouldn’t have spoken to your relatives?”
Still feeling overheated, Elena ignored her longing to discard her cardigan. “The Lyons were market gardeners and domestic servants. They would have been on the lower decks.”
With a muffled imprecation, Nick shrugged out of his tightly fitted waistcoat. Tossing it over the back of a chair, he unfastened another button on his shirt, revealing more brown, tanned skin.
Dragging her gaze from the way the shirt clung across his chest, Elena concentrated on her trunk, which was filled with yellowed, fragile magazines and newspapers.
Nick, by some painful coincidence, had opened a trunk filled with ancient women’s foundation garments. He held up a pair of king-size knickers in heavy, serviceable cotton. “And the fact that some of them settled here in Dolphin Bay was just a coincidence, right?”
The tension sawing at her nerves morphed into annoyance. She had never paid any particular attention to her family’s history of settlement, especially since her parents lived in Auckland. But now that Nick was pointing it out, the link seemed obvious. “Okay, so maybe they did meet.”
Nick extracted a corset that appeared to rely on a network of small steel girders to control the hefty curves of one of her ancestors. “It was a little more than that. Pretty sure Katherine’s grandparents worked for mine.”
Elena vowed to burn the trunk, contents and all, at the earliest possible moment. “I suppose they could have been offered jobs.”
He closed the lid on the evidence that past Lyon women had been sturdy, buxom specimens and pulled the lid off a tea chest. “So, maybe the Messena family aren’t all monsters.”
Feeling increasingly overheated and smothered by the cardigan, Elena discreetly undid the buttons and let it flap open. The neckline of her dress was scooped, revealing a hint of cleavage, but she would have to live with that. “I didn’t say you were. Aunt Katherine liked working for your family.”
The echoing silence that greeted her quiet comment, was a reminder of the cold rift that still existed between their families—the abyss that separated their lifestyles— and made her mood plummet.
Although she was fiercely glad she had ruined the camaraderie that had been building. Stuck in the confined space with Nick, the past linking them at every turn, she had needed the reminder.
Elena opened the trunk nearest her. A cloud of dust made her nose itch and her eyes feel even more irritated. She blinked to ease the burning sensation.
Too late to wish she’d taken the time to remove her colored contacts before she’d rejoined Nick.
Nick dumped an ancient bedpan, which looked like it had come out of the ark, on the floor. When she glanced at him, he caught her eye and lifted a brow, and the cool tension evaporated.
Suddenly irrationally happy, Elena tried to concentrate on her trunk, which appeared to be filled with items that might be found in a torturer’s toolbox. She held up a pair of shackles that looked like restraints of some kind.
“Know what you’re thinking.” Nick grinned as he straightened, ducking his head to avoid the sloping ceiling. “They’re not bondage.” He closed the box of books he’d finished sorting through. “They’re a piece of Medinian kitchen equipment, designed to hang hams in the pantry. We’ve got a set at home.”
Elena replaced the shackles and tried not to melt at Nick’s easy grin. She couldn’t afford to slip back into the old addictive attraction. With just minutes to go before he was out of her life, now was not the time to soften.
She glanced at her watch, although her eyes were now watering enough that she had difficulty reading the dial.
“Are those contacts bothering you?”
“They’re driving me nuts. I’ll take them out when I go downstairs.”
Once Nick was gone.
Nick closed the lid on the box with a snap that echoed through the night.
There was a moment of heavy silence in which the tension that coiled between them pulled almost suffocatingly tight.
“Damn,” he said softly. “Why are you so intent on resisting me?”
Seven
The words seemed to reverberate through the room.
Elena glared at Nick. “What I don’t get is why you want me?”
“I’ve wanted you for six years.”
“I’ve barely seen you in six years.”
Nick frowned as a gust of wind hit the side of the house. “I’ve been busy.”
Building up a fortune and dating a long line of beautiful girls who never seemed to hold his interest for long…and avoiding her like the plague because she would have reminded him of that night.
And in that moment Elena acknowledged a truth she had been avoiding for weeks.
Now, just when she was on the point of getting free and clear, and at absolutely the wrong time—while they were alone together—it dawned on her that Nick was just as fatally attracted as she.
Outside it had started to rain, large droplets exploding on the roof.
Elena rubbed at her eyes, which was exactly the wrong thing to do, as one of the contacts dropped out. Muttering beneath her breath, she began to search, although with the dim lighting and with both eyes stinging, she didn’t expect to find it.
Sound exploded as the rain turned tropically heavy. Moist air swirled through the open window.
She was suddenly aware that Nick was close beside her.
“Sit down, before the other one drops out.”
“No. I need to find the lens, although it’s probably lost forever.” Added to that, her eyes were still watering, which meant her mascara was running.
Swiping at the damp skin beneath her eyes, Elena continued to search the dusty floorboards.
Something glittered, but when she reached for it, it turned out to be a loose bead. At that moment the wind gusted, flinging the window wide. Jumping to her feet, she grabbed at the latch and jammed it closed.
A corresponding bang informed her that Nick had closed the other window. As she double-checked the latch, Nick loomed behind her, reflected in the glass.
“Don’t you ever listen?” The low, impatient timbre of his voice cut through the heavy drumming on the roof. His hands closed around her arms, burning through the thin, damp cotton of her cardigan. “You need to sit down.”
Obediently, Elena sat on an ancient chair. Nick crouched in front of her, but even so he loomed large, his shoulders broad, his bronzed skin gleaming through the transparent dampness of his shirt. The piercing lightness of his eyes pinned her. “Hold still while I get the other lens out for you.”
Elena inhaled, her nostrils filling with his heat and scent. Her stomach clenched on the now-familiar jolt of sensual tension. “I don’t need help. All I need is a few minutes in the bathroom—”
Cupping her jaw with one large hand, he peered into her eyes. “And some drops.”
Nick was close enough that she could study the translucence of his irises, the intriguing scar on his nose to her heart’s content. “How would you know?” But she was suddenly close enough to see.
“I’ve worn contacts for years. Hold still.”
As Nick bent close, his breath mingled with hers. She swallowed and tried not to remember the softness and heat of the kiss they’d shared on the steps of the church.
With a deft movement he secured the second contact on the tip of his forefinger.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small container of eyedrops and a tiny lens case. Setting the drops on the top of a nearby trunk he placed the lens gently in the case and snapped it closed.
Before he could bulldoze her into letting him put the drops in, Elena picked up the small plastic bottle and inserted a droplet of the cooling solution in each eye. The relief was instant. Blinking, she waited for her vision to clear.
Nick pressed the folded handkerchief she had given him earlier in the day into her hand. “It’s almost clean.”
“Thank you.” Elena dabbed in the corners and beneath both eyes, then, feeling self-conscious, peeled out of the damp cardigan. “What else have you got in those pockets?”
“Don’t ask.”
Acutely aware that if Nick had another item in his pockets, it was probably a condom, Elena peered into a dusty mirror propped against the wall.
For a disorienting moment she was surprised by the way she looked, the tousled hair and exotic curve of her cheekbones, the pale lushness of her mouth.
She had definitely made outward changes, but inside she wasn’t nearly as confident as that image would suggest.
Although according to Giorgio, that would change once she resurrected her sex life.
The thought that she could resume her sex life, here, now, if she wanted, made her heart pound and put her even more on edge.
An hour later, they emptied the final trunk. “That’s it.” Relief filled Elena as she closed the lid. “If the ring isn’t here, then Katherine didn’t receive it. I’ve already been through everything else.”
“You searched all of the desks and bureaus downstairs?”
Elena wiped her hands off on a cloth. “Every cupboard and drawer.”
Absently, she picked up a photo album, which she’d decided to take downstairs.
Picking up the cloth, she wiped the cover of the album. Glancing at the first page of photos, her interest was piqued. Unusually, many of the photos were of the Messena family.
She was aware of Nick’s gaze fixing on the album. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind disparate pieces of information fused into a conclusion she should have arrived at a long time ago. Nick had taken a special interest in any photo album he had come across.
As she tucked the album under her arm and bent to retrieve her damp cardigan, a small bundle of letters dropped out from between the pages. Bending, she picked them up. The envelopes were plain, although of very good parchment, a rich cream that seemed to glow in the stark light. They were tied together with a white satin ribbon that shimmered with a pearlized sheen.
Her throat closed up. Love letters.
The top envelope was addressed to her aunt. Heart beating just a little faster, because she knew without doubt that she had found a remnant of the relationship her aunt had kept secret until she died, Elena turned the small bundle over.
The name Carlos Messena leaped out at her, and the final piece in the puzzle of just why her aunt and Stefano Messena had been personally linked fell into place. “Mystery solved,” she said softly.
Nick tossed the cloth he’d used to wipe his hands with over the back of a broken chair. Stepping over a pile of old newspapers that were destined for the fire, he took the letters.
“Uncle Carlos,” he said quietly, satisfaction edging his voice. “My father was the first son, he was the second. Carlos died on active duty overseas around thirty years ago. So that’s why Dad gave Katherine the ring. It was traditionally given to the brides of the second son in the family. If Katherine and Carlos had married, it would have been hers.”
With careful movements, he untied the faded ribbon and fanned the letters out on the top of a trunk, checking the dates on each letter.
Holding her breath, because to read the personal exchanges, even now, seemed an invasion of privacy, Elena picked up the first letter. It was written in a strong, slanting hand, and she was instantly drawn into the clear narrative of a love affair that had ended almost before it had begun, after just one night together.
Empathy held her in thrall as she was drawn into the brief affair that had ended abruptly when Carlos, a naval officer, had shipped out.
Elena refolded the letter and replaced it back in its envelope. Nick passed her the contents of the envelope he had just opened. On plainer, cheaper paper, it was written in a different hand. There was no love letter, but in some ways the content was even more personal: a short note, a black-and-white snapshot of a toddler, a birth certificate and adoption papers for a baby named Michael Carlos.
The mystery of Stefano’s relationship with Katherine was finally solved: he had been helping her find the child she had adopted out. A Messena child.
Nick studied the address on the final envelope. “Emilia Ambrosi.” He shook his head. “She’s a distant cousin of the Pearl House Ambrosis. I could be wrong, but as far as I know she still lives on Medinos.” He let out a breath. “Medinos was the one place we didn’t look.”
Elena dragged her attention from the sparse details of the Messena child. “You knew Aunt Katherine had had a baby?”
“It seemed possible, but we had no proof.”
Feeling stunned at the secret her aunt had kept, she handed Nick the note, the snapshot and the birth certificate.
Gathering up the letters, she tied them together with the ribbon and braced herself for the fact that Nick would be gone in a matter of minutes.
She should be happy they had solved the mystery and found closure. Her aunt had tragically lost Carlos, but she had at least experienced the heights—she had been loved. They hadn’t found the ring but, at a guess, Katherine had sent it to her son, who was probably a resident on Medinos.
Elena made her way downstairs to the second level. Placing the album and the sadly rumpled cardigan on a side dresser in the hall, she washed her hands and face, then waited out in the hall while Nick did the same.
Curious to see if Aunt Katherine had included any further shots of her small son in the album, she flipped to the first page. Unexpectedly, it was dotted with snapshots of the Messena children when they had been babies.
Nick’s gaze touched on hers as he exited the bathroom, and the awareness that had vibrated between them in the attic sprang to life again.
She closed the album with a faint snap. “You must have suspected all along that a Medinian engagement ring, a family heirloom, was a strange gift for a mistress.”
With his waistcoat hanging open, his shirt unfastened partway down his chest, the sleeves rolled up over muscular forearms, Nick looked tough and masculine and faintly dissolute in the narrow confines of the hall. “It wouldn’t be my choice.”
The thought that Nick obviously gave gifts to women he loved and appreciated ignited a familiar coal of old hurt and anger. After their night together she hadn’t rated so much as a phone call.
“What would you choose? Roses? Dinner? A tropical holiday?”
She seemed to remember reading an exposé from a former PA of Nick’s and her claims that she had organized a number of tropical holidays for some of his shorter, more fiery flings.
His expression turned wary. “I don’t normally send gifts. Not when—”
“Great strategy.” She smiled brightly. “Why encourage the current woman when there’s always another one queuing up?”
There was a moment of heavy silence during which the humid, overwarm night seemed to close in, isolating them in the dimly lit hall.
Nick frowned. “Last I heard there is no queue.”
Probably because he was never in one place long enough for the queue to form. Nick was more a girl-in-every-port kind of guy.
Elena found herself blurting out a piece of advice he probably didn’t want to hear. “Maybe if you slowed down and stayed in one place for long enough there would be.”
And suddenly Nick was so close she could feel the heat radiating off him, smell the clean scents of soap and aftershave, and an electrifying whiff of fresh sweat generated by the stuffy, overheated attic.
She stared at a pulse beating along the strong column of his throat. Sweat shouldn’t be sexy, she thought a little desperately, but it suddenly, very palpably, was.
Nick’s hand landed on the wall beside her head, subtly fencing her in. “With my schedule, commitment has never been viable.”
“Then maybe you should take control of your schedule. Not,” she amended hastily, “that I have any interest in a committed relationship with you. I have—Robert.”
She didn’t, not really, and the small lie made her go hot all over. But suddenly it seemed very important that she should have someone, that she shouldn’t look like a total loser in the relationship stakes.
Nick’s brows jerked together. “I’m glad we’re clear on that point.”
“Totally. Crystal clear.” But her heart pounded at the edge in Nick’s voice, as if he hadn’t been entirely happy at her mention of Robert. Or that she had nixed the whole idea of a relationship with him.
Nick cupped her jaw, the heat of his fingers warm and slightly rough against her skin. “So this is just friendship?”
He dipped his head, slowly enough that she could avoid the kiss if she wanted.
A shaft of heat burned through her as he touched his mouth to hers. She could move away. One step and she could end the dizzying delight that was sweeping through her that maybe, just maybe, they had turned some kind of corner when they had uncovered the reason behind his father’s relationship with her aunt.
That now that the past was resolved, a relationship between them wasn’t so impossible.
Heart pounding as the kiss deepened, she lifted up on her toes, one hand curving over Nick’s broad shoulder as she hung on. The tingling heat that flooded her, the notion that they could have a future, were all achingly addictive. She couldn’t remember feeling so alive.
Except, maybe, six years ago.
That thought should have stopped her in her tracks. But the gap of time, the emotional desert she’d trudged through, after Nick, had taught her a salutary lesson.
She needed to be loved, and she absolutely did not want to remain alone. So far the search for a husband had proved anticlimactic. Good character and an appealing outward appearance just didn’t seem to generate the “in love” part of the equation. Bluntly put, so far there had been no chemistry.
On the other hand, while Nick failed every sensible requirement, with him there was nothing but chemistry.
If she could have the chemistry and the committed relationship with Nick, she would be…happy.
His mouth lifted. He released her jaw as if he was reluctant to do so, as if he hadn’t wanted the kiss to end, either.
Drawing a shaky breath, Elena relinquished her grip on Nick’s shoulder.
A relationship with Nick? Maybe even with a view to marriage?