Oh, she hated to even let that thought race through her mind. Hated knowing that her body and heart were still vulnerable to Rico even after five years.
When she’d first met him, he had been open, warm. He’d drawn her in so easily, sweeping her into an affair and a romance and into marriage before she’d even had time to notice how quickly things were moving between them. Even if she had noticed, she wouldn’t have cared. It had all felt so right. As if they’d somehow been fated to find each other. She had loved completely, for the first time in her life, and she had hoped it was forever.
Now his warmth was gone, covered by a veneer of ice that put a hard glint in his pale blue eyes, and Teresa knew that she was to blame for the change in him. She set her water glass aside and scrubbed her hands up and down her arms, as if she could chase away the chills dancing along her skin. Despite the sexual heat simmering inside her, the cold sensation of impending disaster just wouldn’t dissipate.
“Where is he?” she muttered aloud, more to hear a sound in the stillness than for anything else. “What’s he waiting for?”
Why wasn’t he storming into the bedroom and finding a way to make her beg for him?
Another rush of heat swamped her and she pushed up from the chair. Her knees were weak, but her will was strong. Whatever game Rico was playing, she wasn’t going to cooperate. She refused to sit still and worry herself into what her mother used to call a state. Rico expected her to just sit here in this lush cell and await his arrival. No doubt he knew exactly what she was going through and was enjoying it.
“But what choice do you have?” she murmured. “Where could you go, even if you were willing to run away again? You’re on an island, for heaven’s sake.”
Even if she could, she wouldn’t have run. Not again. Everyone made mistakes, she assured herself, but only really foolish people made the same ones over and over again.
Muttering, grumbling and trying to get a grip on her own skittering hormones, Teresa stepped out of the bedroom onto the flagstone terrace.
Instantly, the flower-scented breeze wrapped itself around her as it rattled the leaves on the surrounding trees, sounding like hushed whispers in the dark. At the edge of Rico’s property, the ocean sighed into shore, moonlight shimmering on the surface of the water. It was perfect. Dreamlike. She only wished she wasn’t too tense to enjoy it.
“Planning to run again?” Rico asked from behind her.
As she whirled around to face him, he continued, “There’s nowhere to go this time, Teresa. You can’t get off the island until I let you go.”
He was backlit by the room behind him and in his black clothes, with his black hair and his face in darkness…he looked like a shadow of doom. He wasn’t, though. Because ghosts or shades or whatever you wanted to call them didn’t give off heat as Rico did. Even from across the patio, she was dazzled by it.
“I wasn’t running,” she managed to say. “I was waiting.”
“For?” He stepped out of the bedroom and walked across the patio toward her. Moonlight shone in his eyes, but his luscious mouth was a grim line and his body language was anything but relaxed.
“I was waiting for you, Rico, and you know it,” she said. “I’ve been here. Alone. For two hours. Is making me wait part of the thrill for you?”
“Thrill?” He moved in so close, she instinctively took a step back. But the metal railing around the patio stopped her retreat and dug into the small of her back. “You think I’m enjoying this?”