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It had told him that he could have yanked down her jeans and explored and enjoyed her and she would not have said a single word in denial.
And then in the morning she would no doubt expect to receive her payment—a piece of jewellery, a telephone call from an exclusive shop inviting her to choose herself something expensive…
That was the way things were done in her world.
He was wasting too much time on her, he warned himself. His primary reason for what he was doing was the potential acquisition of Prêt a Party, not the inevitable sexual acquisition of Carly Carlisle who, although she did not know it yet, would be one of the first in line to lose her job.
Carly frowned as the large, elegant steel-grey car drew up alongside her.
A limo, Lucy had said, and she had pictured a huge, shiny black ostentatious vehicle, not something so supremely understated. But the rear door was opening and Ricardo was getting out.
‘Is this all your luggage?’
She gaped at him as he reached for her case, and then looked uncertainly towards the chauffeur.
‘Charles is driving. I am perfectly capable of picking up a case,’ Ricardo told her dryly, following her uncertain look.
‘The…my case is heavy,’ she told him, but he ignored her, picked it up and put it in to the boot of the car as if it was as light as a feather pillow.
He was wearing a black tee shirt and a pair of tan-coloured casual trousers, and the muscles in his arms were hardening as he lifted her case. He looked more like a man who worked outdoors than one who sat at a desk, she acknowledged, unwilling to admit to the response that the sight of him was eliciting from her own body.
After what had happened when she had given her imagination its head, she was now keeping it on a controlling diet of bread and water, and that meant no thinking about the effect Ricardo could have on her! So he had a good enough body to carry off the macho male thing—so what? she told herself dispassionately.
But the sight of his black-clad back, bent over the open boot, suddenly transformed by her rebellious thoughts into a totally naked back bent over her equally naked body, evoked such a powerful sensual image that she felt as though she were transfixed to the spot.
So it was true. You could go weak at the knees, Carly reflected several minutes later as she sat primly straight in the back seat of the powerful car, dizzily aware that her private thoughts were anything but prim. All those enforced deportment classes at school had definitely left her with an automatic ‘sit up straight’ reflex.
She was accomplished, Ricardo admitted to himself. That cool, remote pose she had adopted, that said Pursue me would certainly work with most men. Unfortunately for her, he was not most men. He opened his briefcase and extracted some papers.
As soon as they were free of the city traffic the powerful car picked up speed. Carly was pleased that Ricardo was engrossed in his work, because that left her free to think about hers, instead of having to make polite conversation with him.
Since their clients were using their own yacht as the venue for their party there was no construction work in the shape of marquees on the like for her to oversee. The client’s chef and kitchen staff were being augmented by a chef from the upmarket caterers she had sourced. They were already on the yacht. Menus had been agreed, floral arrangements decided on—she would be meeting with the florists, who had also been flown in from London.
The arrival and deployment of the hostess’s hairdresser, make-up artist, and a dresser from the couture house she favoured were also Carly’s responsibility, plus a hundred or more other small but vitally important arrangements.
She had an inch-thick pile of assorted coloured and coded lists in her briefcase, most of which she had actually memorised.
‘You’re so much better at this than me,’ Lucy had told her ruefully before she left.
Carly had smiled, but she knew that it was true.
Carly shifted her body against the leather upholstery. It was ridiculous that she should be so acutely conscious of Ricardo’s presence in the car with her—and even more ridiculous that she should be so acutely aware of the impact he was having on her physically. So much for the ‘bread and water’ regime, then!
The grand slam of his raw sensuality had sliced through her defences, leaving an alarming trail of female awareness in its wake. Her jeans, normally a comfortable easy fit, suddenly seemed to be uncomfortably tight, clinging to her flesh in a way she could only mentally describe as erotic, as though somehow she were being caressed by the lean, powerful male hands she couldn’t resist looking towards.
She could feel the heat expanding inside her, dangerous little languorous curls of it thrusting against her sensitive flesh. She crossed her legs and then uncrossed them. Her arm accidentally brushed against her own breast and immediately she was aware of the hot pulsing of her nipples.
This was crazy. It felt as though somehow or other an unfamiliar and certainly unwanted very sexual alter ego had been released inside her. And, what was more, it seemed to be attempting to take her over! Or had it always been there and it had simply taken meeting Ricardo Salvatore to make her aware of it, just as her own senses were making her aware of him?
This was definitely crazy.
She realised with relief that they had reached the airport. The car slowed down and turned into an entrance marked ‘Strictly Private’.
A uniformed customs officer stepped out of a nearby office and came over to the car.
‘Your passport, please,’ Ricardo demanded, turning to Carly.
Foolishly, she had not been ready for this formality, and it took her several seconds to open her bag, find her passport, and then hand it over to Ricardo.
As he took it from her, her open bag slipped from her hand, showering the immaculate leather and the car’s floor with coins, her lipstick, her purse and several other small personal items.
Her face hot, she undid her seatbelt and tried to pick them up as fast as she could, but the lipstick rolled away out of her reach with the movement of the car as the driver set it in motion again.
To her dismay the lipstick had rolled along the leather and come to rest right next to Ricardo’s thigh.
She couldn’t retrieve it without touching him.
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.
‘Could I have my lipstick, please? It’s…You’re sitting on it,’ she told Ricardo.
‘What?’
The look he gave her was totally male and uncomprehending.
‘My lipstick!’ Carly repeated. ‘It fell out of my bag and now it’s…’
She looked meaningfully at the leather seat, somehow managing at the same time to keep her gaze off his thigh.
His sigh was definitely exasperated as he reached down and picked up the small slim tube.
It was a relief to release her own pent-up breath as he handed the lipstick to her. She reached out for it, too focused on what she was doing to be aware of a deep pothole in the tarmac, which the driver couldn’t avoid because of an oncoming vehicle.
The violent movement of the car flung her bodily against Ricardo, sending her slamming into his side. The air was driven out of her lungs by the force of the impact, leaving her half lying against him, her face buried in his tee shirt, her hand ignominiously clutching at his arm.
A shock of unfamiliar sensation hit her all at once, like a hail of sharp-pointed arrows. His personal man-scent, the texture of his tee shirt, the hardness of his chest beneath her cheek, the softness of something that she realised must be his body hair. The slow, heavy thud of his heartbeat…
Somewhere inside her head unwanted images were forming. A man—Ricardo—carrying her in his arms, his torso bare, his flesh warm beneath her fingertips. She could feel the heat of her own desire for him. Her fingers tightened automatically on his arm, her nails digging into his flesh.
Abruptly Carly snapped back to reality, and to the humiliating awareness of what she was doing. Her face burning, she rel
eased Ricardo’s arm and pulled away for him, refusing to look at him.
As she retreated to her side of the car Ricardo shifted his own position and turned away from her, to conceal the telltale thick ridge of flesh pressing against the fabric of his trousers.
He was beginning to realise that he had badly underestimated the effect Carly was going to have on him. It was one thing for him to acknowledge to himself that he was happy to have sex with her, but it was quite another to have to admit that his desire for her was far more urgent than he had planned for—and, even worse, that it was threatening to overwhelm his self-control. He simply did not want this fierce, thrusting surge of need, this urgent, compelling hunger to take hold of her and fill himself with the scent and the feel of her; the taste of her, to fill her with himself and to…
The ache in his body was intensifying instead of fading, and he had to resort to the subterfuge of opening his newspaper and busying himself re-reading it in order to conceal that fact.
