The car made a sudden turn to the right, driving through a pair of open gates and up the driveway to a private villa. Built on one level, it sprawled hacienda-style right and left of a stone-built archway which took them into a central courtyard.
As soon as the car stopped at an imposing wide framed entrance, Luiz was out of the car and coming around to her side to help her to alight.
‘What is this place?’ she asked, glancing furtively around the whitewashed vine strewn walls that were now surrounding them. But what really captured her attention was the fleet of other cars all parked up here. Cars meant people, and people meant—
‘Luiz!’ she protested in dismay when he caught hold of her hand and began pulling her in through the entrance. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘A party,’ he said.
Caroline began to wonder if she was losing her sanity. He had just put her through one of the worst evening in her entire life, and now he was casually dragging her off to a party?
‘No way,’ she refused, tugging to a standstill. ‘I don’t want to party. And I certainly don’t want to do it looking like—this!’
He turned round to look at her, and something very hot suddenly burned in his eyes. ‘You look sensational,’ he told her huskily.
Sensational? She almost laughed in his face! ‘That’s the best lie you’ve told me to date!’ she scoffed. ‘I’ve just been swimming. My hair is a mess and I have on no make-up. My skin smells of chlorine and I’m not even wearing a bra!’
He just smiled a sinfully sexy smile and murmured, ‘I know. I was there, remember?’
The smile had her floundering—floundering because it was pure old Luiz. The one who’d used to smile at her just like that when they’d been passionate lovers and so very at ease together that she would have cut out anyone’s tongue if they’d tried to tell her he was using her for a fool!
It played oddly on her defences to remember that. Made her want to relax her guard and smile back at him, be the old Caroline, from when life had been wonderful and she’d been in love and thought she didn’t have a single care in the world.
Her hand twitched in his—reacting to secret wishes. His own fingers tightened, as if he thought she was trying to get away and he was making sure that she didn’t.
‘Luiz…’ she pleaded, responding to that glimpse of the man she used to know.
It was like watching warm living tissue turn to stone. ‘If you are going to start begging, then don’t,’ he advised. ‘We went way beyond the point where it could be of any use to you to do so, a long time ago.’
When had that point been exactly? she wondered, taking his verbal slap-down with a wince she didn’t even bother to try and hide. When they’d been kissing each other into a frenzy in the pool room, perhaps? The twist to her mouth mocked the suggestion, because the man who had all but completely devoured her had recovered too quickly and too well to be vulnerable to anything—including the begging voice of the woman he’d held in his arms at the time.
In his office then, when he had cruelly and efficiently slayed her with words? No room for begging there, she thought grimly. No room for anything but bitterness and anger and pain and…
‘Negotiations are over, I take it,’ she clipped.
He gave a curt nod. ‘All I want from you now is a simple yes or no to my proposition.’
‘Your blackmail, you mean,’ she countered thinly.
‘Okay, blackmail.’ He gave an indifferent shrug to her play on words, and took her into a large white hall constructed almost entirely of marble.
A pair of narrow hallways led off to the left and the right of her, linking the separate wings of the villa, she assumed. But it was to one of the rooms directly off this main hallway that Luiz took her.
‘Who does this house belong to?’ she asked tartly. ‘Only I suppose I should know just whose hospitality I will be offending, coming to their party looking like this…’
‘Then you don’t need to think about it,’ Luiz answered pragmatically. ‘Since it is me you will be offending.’
In a night of hard shocks, this was just another one to help keep her knocked permanently out of kilter, she supposed, remembering the Luiz of seven years ago telling her smilingly that he lived out of hotels. ‘Homes are for families, and I don’t have one,’ he’d told her casually, but she’d seen the bleakness in his eyes when he’d said it, and known that inside he hadn’t been feeling casual at all.
It was a memory that brought with it another question that almost blew her mind apart. ‘You’re not married now, are you?’ she choked out.