Exotic Affairs(110)

Caroline had frozen where she stood, the voice familiar enough to send her floundering in a sea of confusion as a tall, dark, very attractive man appeared from way down at the other end of the long drawing room.

He paused and smiled at her stunned expression, and—completely ignoring Luiz—went on in that same light, self-assured way which had repelled Caroline so much the first time she’d met him.

‘Felipe de Vazquez,’ he announced himself. ‘At your service, Miss Newbury.’ It was the man from the lift in Luiz’s hotel in Marbella. ‘We never did get around to introducing ourselves, did we?’ he added with a lazy smile.

‘Señor,’ she acknowledged. And it was only entrenched good manners that made her accept his outstretched hand.

His fingers closed around hers, cool and smooth and infinitely polite. ‘Felipe, please…’ he invited. ‘We are going to be related very soon, after all…’

Instinctively her other hand tightened in Luiz’s and she moved a small fraction closer to him.

It was strange in its own way, but as she found herself making comparisons between Luiz’s bone-crushing grip on one of her hands and his half-brother’s light clasp, on the other, she knew which grip she felt safer with. But then she was remembering the last time she’d met the man, and the suspicion she’d had then that if she’d tried to break away his grip would have tightened painfully—a sensation that was attacking her again right now.

‘Felipe,’ she acknowledged politely, and used the moment to slip her hand free and place it flat on Luiz’s chest. It was such an obvious declaration of intimacy that no one, not even Luiz, missed that fact. ‘Luiz, isn’t this a coincidence?’ She smiled, keeping her tone light with effort. ‘I met your half-brother in the hotel only the other evening, and had no idea he was related to you.’

‘Yes,’ Luiz drawled. ‘What a coincidence.’

It was too soft, too smooth, too lazy to be nice. She knew Luiz, knew the way he worked, the angrier he got the quieter he became.

Did Felipe recognise that? she wondered, when his dark eyes eventually moved to clash with his long lost half-brother’s eyes. ‘So we meet at last.’ Felipe smiled ruefully.

At last? The words hit Caroline like a punch to her solar plexus. Because surely if she had first seen Felipe at the hotel then Luiz must have known he was there?

Obviously not, she concluded, when Luiz replied dryly, ‘Not before time, maybe.’

The atmosphere suddenly became very complicated as a confusion of rather unpredictable emotions went skittering around all three of them.

There was ice—a lot of ice. There was curiosity. There was mutual antagonism born from an instant burst of sibling rivalry where both men carefully judged the weight of the other.

She wasn’t sure which one of them actually came out on top in that short silent battle, but she certainly knew which one of them held the position of power—no matter what the mental outcome.

‘Welcome home, Luiz.’ With a slightly wry smile that told her Felipe was acknowledging the same thing, he conceded the higher ground to his half-brother. ‘May your next twenty years be more fortuitous than your first twenty…’

It was such an openly cruel thing to say that even his mother released a gasp. So did Caroline, her fingers curling tensely into Luiz’s shirt in sheer reflex, as if she was trying to soothe the savage beast before it leapt into action.

But Luiz, to everyone’s surprise, laughed. ‘Let’s certainly hope so,’ he agreed. ‘Or this place could be in deep trouble—as we all know.’

Tit for tat. Cut and thrust. Luiz had won that round. And he hadn’t finished, not by a long shot. ‘Which reminds me,’ he went on in the brisk cool voice of a true business tycoon, ‘I have a lot I need to get through here before our wedding takes place next week. So can we start with a tour of the place, before I settle down to some good old-fashioned household accounting…?’





CHAPTER NINE


CAROLINE was sitting quietly in the window of her allotted valley-facing guestroom when a light tap sounded at her door. For a few precious moments she seriously contemplated not answering.

It had been a horrible few days. Days filled with wariness and tension and eyes watching everything she did and everywhere she went as if they were worried she might decide to run off with the silver!

On top of that, Luiz had taken on the mantle of responsibility here as if it was just another new acquisition in his multinational group. He was quiet, he was calm, he was cool and he was exceedingly businesslike. People—staff, mainly—were already in complete awe of him. They scuttled about like little rabbits earnestly eager to make a good impression. And, all in all, the changes he had put into place already were enough to make the average person gasp.