His dark lashes floated downward as he looked her over. She looked delectably pagan, uninhibitedly wanton. A bride ready for the taking by her passionate Spanish husband.
Looking upwards again, he studied her soft, full, inviting mouth, pressed another claiming kiss to it, then let his eyes clash with hers. He was moving again. Back into the bedroom, across the priceless Indian carpet covering its solid oak floor, to the bed, which looked like an island you could quite easily live upon without needing to leave for a long, long time.
Caroline certainly didn’t want to leave it. She wanted to take off her clothes and crawl beneath its snowy white linen topped by the really decadent blood-red and dark gold brocade coverlet, to survive on hot kisses and rich dark flesh and the passions of a man who was incomparable.
Allowing her feet to slide to the floor, Luiz took a step back, then began undressing. She didn’t move, didn’t attempt to take her own dress off. That was for him to do. It was his duty to unwrap his bride himself.
But her breasts pouted provocatively at him all the while he was undressing, and the moist pink tip of her tongue kept snaking slowly around her kiss-swollen lips in needy anticipation.
‘You,’ he murmured when he eventually reached for her, ‘ought to be locked up.’
She just smiled a very wicked smile and lifted up her arms to receive him. The dress slipped lower. On a growl, Luiz helped it the rest of the way, and had seen off everything else she was wearing before he straightened up again.
Outside, beyond the four-foot thick walls, the party went on without them. Somewhere else, in another wing of the castle, two people were packing.
‘Luiz…’ Caroline murmured tentatively a long time later, when they lay curled up against each other. ‘Can we talk?’ she begged. ‘About Felipe?’
It ruined the moment. His body went taut, his jawline clenched. ‘Only if we have to do,’ he said tightly—which didn’t offer much encouragement.
Caroline pushed on anyway. ‘I know you have every right to hate him and his mother,’ she allowed. ‘And I know he behaved appallingly tonight. But…’ Leaning up a little, she looked anxiously into his ice-cold eyes. ‘It isn’t his fault his mother told wicked lies about your mother, or that she tricked and deceived your father! Just as it isn’t Felipe’s fault that you had the childhood you did. He is your cousin—and it’s been tough for him too, you know!’ she insisted at Luiz’s lowering frown. ‘Growing up in your shadow, with a mother who could barely live with herself for what she’d done to her own sister and a so-called father who rejected him at birth and hated his mother for putting him in your place. It’s all so very tragic and sad,’ she said. ‘And I know your father had a right to feel bitter as he wrote it. He broke his own heart by believing your aunt instead of your mother, and spent the rest of his life punishing himself for it. But Felipe should not have been made to pay. It—’
‘What do you mean—how my father wrote it?’ Luiz put in.
‘Oh!’ she gasped in horror when she realised what she’d said. Then a long sigh whispered from her, and with a twisted smile that acknowledged it was probably for the best she lifted sombre eyes to his darkly glowering ones. ‘How he wrote it in his diaries,’ she said gently.
Softly and quietly she began telling him everything she had learned.
When eventually Luiz asked her where the diaries were, she told him, and without another word he got out of bed, pulled on a robe and went to get them.
A long time later, on his way back from Caroline’s bedroom, he saw Felipe and his mother just about to leave the castle. Standing there on the upper gallery, he viewed their sober features and felt something pick at the stone it was reputed he had for a heart.
‘Felipe,’ he said. The other man’s dark head came up and he spun on his heel to glance upwards. ‘We need to talk,’ he murmured quietly.
Instantly Luiz could see the battle taking place behind the defensive aggression pasted onto his handsome features. Then, on a sigh, Felipe gave a curt nod of his head. ‘One day,’ he replied. Maybe he, like Luiz, had had enough of the lies and bitterness and betrayal. ‘One day…’ he repeated, and turned away again.
Luiz watched gravely as his aunt lifted her pale face up to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she said, but Luiz understood. After all, what else could she add that could take away what had gone before?
When he went back into his bedroom, he found his bride no longer there. Tossing the diaries onto the tumbled bed, he went looking for her and found her soaking in a bath of steaming bubbles. It took him ten seconds to join her, uncaringly sloshing water over the rim onto the tiled floor as he climbed in behind her then sat down and drew her back against him.