How many confidences had they exchanged during that long hot summer seven years ago? she wondered as a disturbing little ache took up residence in her stomach.
And how much of what he’d told her had been the truth? she then added cynically. And how much merely words calculated to earn her soft-hearted sympathy—while he quietly and calculatedly fleeced her father across a green baize table?
‘What’s the grimace for?’
Huskily intimate, disturbingly close. She blinked, glanced up, found he had shifted his stance slightly and now had a shoulder leaning against the crack between the two doors. It was such an obvious blocking tactic that Caroline was instantly on her guard.
‘My bag please, Luiz,’ she insisted, ignoring his question to hold out the hand from which her shoes now dangled from her own slender fingers.
He in turn ignored both the command and the outstretched hand. ‘Did you know that your eyes go grey when you’re angry?’ he murmured.
Messages began to sting through her blood. Sexual messages. ‘My bag,’ she repeated.
He sent her a spine-tingling smile. ‘And your mouth goes all prim and—’
‘Stop it,’ she snapped. ‘This is childish!’
‘Exciting…’ he argued.
She heaved out a breath that was supposed to relay irritation but only managed to sound fraught. And her outstretched fingers began to tremble, so she closed them into a fist and returned them to what they had been doing, which was keeping her towel in place.
‘I’m beginning to catch cold standing around here like this!’
And sure enough she started to shiver, though whether from cold or from something else entirely she refused to let herself consider. But, whatever the reason, it diverted Luiz away from his lazy teasing. And, with a swiftness that completely threw her, he straightened from the door to whip off his jacket then settle it around her wet shoulders.
The oddly gallant gesture sent her defences crumbling. Tears flooded into her eyes. ‘Don’t play him, Luiz,’ she pleaded huskily.
‘Here,’ he prompted, taking her dress and shoes from her fingers. ‘Feed your arms into the sleeves then get rid of that wet towel…’
It was a refusal to listen in anyone’s books. Despair wriggled through her while she obeyed him without thinking and pushed her arms into the sleeves of his jacket. The silk lining was warm against her cool damp skin, the scent of him suddenly swirling all around her.
‘I thought you were going to help me,’ she choked. ‘But all you’ve done is make matters worse!’
‘Madness only responds to the prospect of more madness,’ he answered quietly. ‘The only way to stop him tonight was by giving him a good reason to stop. So we play in an hour, away from the hotel, because I am not—’
His words were cut off mid-flow when Caroline reached up to press both hands to his shirt-front in pained appeal. ‘Please don’t do it! How can you want to do this to me all over again?’
But Luiz wasn’t listening. Instead he was staring down at the place where her hands lay spread across the fine white linen covering his breastbone. His own hands came up to cover hers, and suddenly she was made acutely aware of hot flesh, of the prickly evidence of very male body hair, of the hard pack of muscle and the solid thump of a living heart beating steadily beneath it all.
A heart she knew could rage out of control when he was in the throes of passion. A silk-fleshed body she could remember moving against her own. And that thick crisp mat of chest hair sweeping down like an arrow, aimed directly at his—
Her mouth ran dry. The sex was back. That burning, pulsing, nagging ache that was tugging her senses into life. His hands moved, leaving her hands so he could slide his fingers beneath his jacket, and the towel suddenly slid to the floor. Skin touched skin. Caroline arched on a gasping response.
‘No,’ she groaned when she dared to let her eyes make contact with the burn now taking place at the back of his.
Luiz didn’t answer. It was too late anyway, because he’d closed the gap and was kissing her—kissing her like a lover—fiercely, deeply, and so very intimately that she was utterly shattered by how beautiful it was.
I’ve missed him, she thought, and felt the tears return. I’ve missed the power with which we affect each other, the passion we can generate with just a simple touch. Her fingers moved, drifting up his shirt and to his face, where they traced each contour with the fever of a blind woman Braille-reading her most treasured possession.
He responded with a sigh that shivered through both of them, and he brought her into even closer contact with him, close enough for her senses to fly when she felt the throbbing evidence of his pleasure.