‘You don’t like it here,’ he sighed.
‘I love it here,’ she insisted, knowing it was a lie and that at that precise moment she hated this valley and everything in it. ‘I just need some time away from it for a little while. Is that too much to ask?’
‘No.’ He was still frowning, because he knew she wasn’t telling him the entire truth, but one of his hands flicked a staying motion at the pilot aimed to make him keep the engine running. ‘Where would you like to go? To Marbella?’ he suggested. ‘We can be there in—’
But Caroline was shaking her head. ‘There’s this little place I know. A secret place,’ she whispered confidingly, and her eyes began to warm with sensual promise. ‘It has the softest bed on this earth, I think. No air conditioning and a bathroom down the hall. But it has the most wonderfully cool and crinkly starched cotton sheets on the bed, and there won’t be a frosty face in sight…’
He was gazing down at her as if having to convince himself that she was suggesting what it seemed that she was. And Caroline’s breath snagged in her chest while she waited for some kind of response.
Agreement or rejection? He was so unpredictable, burning hot, turning cold. Pounce and retreat. Trying to preempt his response was impossible, she acknowledged as his silence began to sew fine threads of tension beneath the surface of her skin.
Then a sleek brow arched, mockery spiked his eyes. ‘Is this your ladylike way of inviting me for a dirty weekend, by any chance?’ he questioned sardonically.
Put like that, it sounded so brazen that she felt her cheeks go red—then she caught the beginnings of his lazy smile and she smiled too. ‘I suppose I am,’ she admitted. ‘Though if you prefer the company of your family,’ she added innocently, ‘then I am open to compromise…’
His dark head went back and he started laughing. It was the best sound she had heard in days. Her heart literally swelled on the pleasure of it, and he was still laughing after he’d captured her hand and walked her back towards the waiting helicopter.
Neither saw his half-brother watching them from the shrubbery. Neither saw the malignant glint in his eyes as he watched them lift off and fly away.
They were dropped off in a clearing just outside Los Aminos and walked into the village hand in hand. They must look an odd kind of couple, Caroline decided wryly, with Luiz in his razor-sharp suit and her in her simple cream skirt and lavender top.
The hotel proprietor was the same, and his eyes rounded as they stepped through the door. At the appearance of an exorbitant amount of money, the round-eyed look changed to one of obsequious respect which produced the same key to the same room with exactly the same bed.
‘I’m even wearing the same clothes,’ Caroline whispered to Luiz as they climbed the stairs hand in hand.
‘And the same pink bloom on your cheeks,’ he added teasingly. And as the bloom deepened on her first realisation of what she had actually dared to propose here, he shut the door with one hand and reached for her with the other.
They didn’t go back to the castle that night. It was a wonderful warm, enchanted experience, where Caroline felt as if she had found the lover she had carelessly lost—not once but twice, when she thought about the last few lonely days.
They made love as if there would be no tomorrow. They touched and kissed and caressed each other as if this would be their last opportunity. It was all very hot, very serious and intense.
‘You were my first true love,’ she softly confessed to him at one point.
His eyes turned black in their sleepy sockets. ‘And you, believe it or not, were mine,’ he replied.
But—no, she couldn’t accept that. For a man who loved someone didn’t take her family for every penny he could squeeze out of it, she thought sadly, and to bury the sadness she took his dark face between her hands and brought his mouth crushing down on top of her own.
Maybe he sensed her sadness, maybe he saw it just before she buried it away. Whatever—something thrust him onto a whole new plane of passion. It was devastatingly rich, and left her floating in a place of boneless satiation from which she didn’t return for ages.
When she eventually did decide to open her eyes, she found herself curled into Luiz’s side with her cheek resting on his shoulder; it was growing dark outside.
‘We didn’t tell anyone we were leaving,’ she remarked—without much concern for the omission.
‘I sent the pilot back to make our excuses,’ he replied. ‘They are to expect us when they see us.’
He sounded so arrogant then, so much the lord of his valley that she released a soft chuckle. The sound brought his hand to her nape so he could make her look at him.