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The sound of that familiar term of endearment closed Lucy’s throat over. She gazed up at him, strained eyes wide and wary. ‘I was tactless—’
‘What you said was right. I’ve made mistakes…I can’t afford to make many more with her…’
He was close, and she was so intent on him that she had already lost the thread of the conversation. Those beautiful eyes of his filled her with such a powerful longing to touch him that she clenched her hands by her sides to keep them there.
‘Where have you been for the past two weeks?’ Joaquin asked levelly.
‘I told you in my letter…the flat—the one you said didn’t exist,’ she framed as a reminder. ‘It’s sold, but it had to be cleared for the new owner.’
‘No such property appeared in the list of your assets.’
Lucy was having a real struggle to concentrate. ‘Someone slipped up—’
‘So it would seem.’ His dark rich drawl seemed to slow down and lower in timbre, sending a delicious shiver down her taut spinal cord.
Her lower limbs untrustworthy supports, she trembled. In the charged silence, her heartbeat had speeded up to a mile a minute. The fierce tension of her taut muscles made her all the more aware of the swollen sensitivity of her breasts and the ungovernable ache building between her thighs. Nor was she so lost to all reason that she heard no inner voice urging retreat; she heard it but blanked it out, for the craving was stronger.
‘Dios mio…’ Joaquin sounded thickly, his fingers winding into her luxuriant caramel-coloured hair to tug her head back very gently. His scorching gaze raked over her face. ‘Do you know how difficult it was to put you back into your own bed that morning? I didn’t like that…I didn’t like being that hungry, gatita. I didn’t like aching to have just one more chance to feel you going wild under me…’
‘No?’ Her voice was a mere thread, for she was mesmerized by what he was telling her.
‘No,’ Joaquin breathed in roughened confirmation. ‘Only a weak man lets desire come between him and reason. But two weeks has been enough of a deprivation for me to feel I have more than made my point.’
‘You missed me…’ Lucy muttered, hanging on his every word.
‘Every hour on the hour…’ Joaquin let his hands drop to her hips, to skim up her skirt and then hoist her up against him. ‘More cold showers than I could bear. But I know now what it is that draws me. You’re like a split personality, querida. I’m fascinated. How could I be anything else?’
Drawn only partially from her sensual abstraction, Lucy blinked, assuming she had misunderstood. ‘A split—?’
Joaquin let his tongue delve between her parted lips with an erotic expertise and promise that was not best suited to enabling her to hold up her end of a sensible conversation. She jerked against him, a stifled moan breaking low in her throat as the feverish hunger he had already ignited took fire in excitement.
‘Of course, I know what you are…I know exactly what you’re capable of,’ Joaquin murmured against her cheekbone while she was fighting to get back the strength to breathe. ‘But you’ve honed your camouflage skills to the level of an art form.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’
Both arms banded round her, Joaquin settled fluidly down on to a sofa with her astride him. One hand closing into her hair to tip her head back, he pressed his lips to the delicate skin just below her ear. Suddenly it felt like the most erotic spot in her whole screaming body. She gasped out loud, clutched at his hair, feeling the burn of her own excitement in sensual shock.
‘Don’t you?’ Joaquin prompted almost roughly, framing her flushed cheekbones with both hands and holding her entrapped, scorching green eyes delving into passion-glazed violet-blue. ‘You’re like a chameleon and you’re very clever. You give every man what he wants: in fact you become what he wants.’
‘Joaquin, I—’
‘Silencio, por favor.’ He rested a warning fingertip against her lips.
‘B-but—’
‘It’s the secret of your success, querida.’ Joaquin scanned her shaken expression with satisfaction and lowered his hands again. ‘Where did you swot up on Mayan ruins to impress me? In my own library? That romantic little dip you took in the forest, knowing that I was on your trail—’
‘No…you’re wrong!’ Lucy was appalled by the suggestion that she had planned everything that had happened between them, had indeed waged a campaign to attract him.
‘And that night in my bed you gave me the shy but eager virgin that every Latin American male fantasises about. It was an illusion, naturally, but it was a brilliant performance,’ Joaquin assured her appreciatively as he let his sure hands stroke caressingly from her slim hips along the extended length of her taut slender thighs.
The arousing glide of his hands on her over-sensitive flesh made her tremble, but she was taken aback by the rock-solid conviction with which he spoke.
‘If I didn’t excite you quite so much, you would be white with shock,’ Joaquin forecast with galling amusement. ‘Did I neglect to mention that you can continue moulding yourself into being exactly what I want with my full support?’
‘You’re calling me one big fake!’ Lucy condemned strickenly, and then she froze on the awareness that that was exactly what she was. Fake name, fake appearance, fake everything!
‘Big hurt eyes and cue for tears that well up,’ Joaquin labelled silkily, throwing his arrogant dark head back to study her with intense concentration while retaining his imprisoning hold on her. ‘And, even though I know it’s a superb act, I feel like a bastard for hurting your feelings.’
‘Let go of me!’ Lucy wailed, anchored to his muscular thighs in what now seemed to her to be the most mortifyingly inappropriate position.
‘No…’ Joaquin told her, taking her soft mouth with a sudden dark passionate force that caught her totally by surprise.
She brought her hands thumping down on his broad shoulders but somehow forgot to coil them into fists. And then that moment of resistance was gone. Her need for him was greater. Within seconds she was kissing him back with the same drugging intensity he was teaching her. Raw seething excitement gripped her. She pressed herself as close as she could get, which wasn’t close enough, and with a husky growl Joaquin started rearranging her, an operation complicated by his apparent reluctance to separate from her for a single moment.
‘Por Dios…you can set me on fire with a kiss, querida,’ Joaquin breathed raggedly.
Lucy looked up at him, vaguely wondering how they had got to be lying down full length on the sofa, but considerably more aware of how incredibly good it felt to have the heavy masculine weight of him against her again. And then she heard a curious little metallic rendition of what sounded remarkably like the opening to the ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’…
Just as suddenly, Joaquin thrust himself away from her and vaulted upright. He snatched up the mobile phone and extended it to her with a hand that was noticeably unsteady. ‘Yolanda, it must be…make the lies good,’ he urged unevenly, dulled colour lying along his taut cheekbones.
But as it turned out Lucy had no need to tell a single lie. Indeed, during the brief conversation which followed she had more trouble getting a word in edgeways. Yolanda had had her purse stolen from her bag in a shop and was in floods of tears. ‘I’ve got no money…what do I do?’ she asked brokenly.
‘We’ll be right there…OK?’ Lucy promised soothingly.
On the way back out to the limousine, Joaquin said incredulously, ‘You said only four words and yet you betrayed my presence—’
‘She’s far too upset to worry about who “we” stands for,’ Lucy muttered shakily, still in shock at her own behaviour—and his. Her wanton body was still all of a quiver. She was desperate to put some distance between herself and Joaquin while she dealt with her emotional turmoil, but she also felt the need to rush to Yolanda’s side, because somehow she had become fond of the younger girl.
And Yolanda, touched fo
r the first time in her life by crime, only froze for a split second when she saw her brother approaching a step in Lucy’s wake. Although she was relieved to see Lucy, it was self-evident that the arrival of a strong male figure on the scene was even more welcome after the shock the Guatemalan girl had suffered. As bursts of rapid Spanish were exchanged and Yolanda turned instinctively to her bossy big brother for support, Lucy felt very much like a third wheel.
