On a sharp stab of pain she flicked her eyes away, because she couldn’t bear to look at him and give him that surrender.
It was then that she saw it. ‘Oh, good grief,’ she gasped. She had only just noticed the scorpion crawling down the wall behind him. The picture was so life-like that she actually reared back in the chair to take instinctive avoiding action. ‘Luiz—that thing is hideous!’
‘But effective,’ he smiled.
It was then she remembered that the first business he had ever owned outright had been a small nightclub in New York called, as he had informed her rather deridingly, The Scorpion, and bought from an old friend whose deteriorating health had forced him to accept a quieter way of life. Within two years Luiz had sold the club on to a big inner-city developer for the kind of money that had allowed him to give his own life new direction. ‘And I haven’t needed to look back since,’ she recalled him saying to her with quiet satisfaction.
But the scorpion itself must still linger on in his affections for him to have it hanging there on his wall. Or was there more to its being there than mere affection? Was it a warning that this lean, dark, smoothly sophisticated man had another side to him that was as lethal as the scorpion’s tail?
Glancing back at him, she found him watching her with the kind of mocking twist to his mouth that said he knew what she was thinking and was wryly amused by it.
‘A scorpion stings its victims quick and clean, Luiz,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘What you are proposing here is neither clean nor quick.’
‘Unparallelled sex between two people who excite the hell out of each other? I should hope not.’ He smiled, picking up the dossier to replace it in its drawer.
Then he was suddenly on his feet. ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s go…’
Let’s go? Caroline’s skin began to prickle as a fresh burst of alarm went chasing through her. ‘But I haven’t agreed to do anything with you yet!’ she protested.
‘Decide later,’ he said as he came striding round the desk towards her. ‘We haven’t got time to deal with it right now.’
With that, Caroline found herself being lifted firmly to her feet. Her options, she realised, had dwindled to nothing. Time had seemingly run out. Without another word, Luiz was escorting her from the room and they were outside in the silky warm darkness before she realised what they were doing.
A top-of-the-range black BMW stood purring at the front entrance. Luiz opened the rear door and urged her inside before going round to climb in on the other side of the car. The moment the door shut the car was moving, driven by a man who was hidden behind a shield of smoked glass.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see,’ was the very uninformative reply she received.
It was late, but outside, beyond the car’s side window, the resort was still alive with people out to enjoy themselves with a visit to one of Marbella’s elegant night-spots or just simply taking a late stroll along the yacht-lined waterfront.
It was years since she’d been able to do what they were doing, since she’d felt carefree enough to want to.
Years and years of self-restraint, of living under a thick grey cloud with no hint of a silver lining. Years playing watchdog to her father’s sickness, because she knew that if she didn’t look out for him then nobody else was going to do it.
‘He’s fine,’ Luiz murmured huskily beside her, reading her mind as if it already belonged to him. ‘Stop worrying about him.’
Caroline heaved out a soft deriding laugh at the remark. For when had she not worried about her father? He had been a good old-fashioned rake in his heyday, and marriage hadn’t really changed him. Though she thought—hoped that he had at least remained faithful to her mother.
No, she told herself firmly. Her father had been no philanderer. A rogue and a gambler, yes, but he’d loved her mother. If anything, all his old weaknesses had only reemerged after her mother had died and he’d missed her so badly that he’d had to look for forgetfulness somewhere.
Or at least that was how it had been in the beginning. Now…? Her eyes glassed over, blocking out the need to look for the answer to that question because she already knew it.
The car began to climb out of the bay and into private villa country. Caroline recognised the area because she’d used to know so many people who owned holiday homes here. This had been her playground, a place for fun and carefree vacations away from the restrictions of boarding school during the long summer breaks. She’d used to have as many friends here as she had back home in England then. Now she could barely remember a single one of them, and could only shudder at the memory of her last disastrous visit to Marbella.