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Lisa’s eyes filled with emotional tears. She couldn’t help it. Her crazy heart seemed to turn to mush. He’d obviously meant to be scathing and he didn’t realise what he’d just unwittingly given away—that he, too, had remembered every word they’d ever said to each other. That wouldn’t happen, would it, if he’d thought of her as just a casual fling, something to amuse him and boost his inflated male ego?
She must have meant something to him… ‘Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’ she asked shakily. ‘I told you all about myself. What I mean is, I answered every question you ever asked. Why did you let me go on thinking you were scraping a living waiting on tables?’ She had believed a lie and he had let her. He must have been laughing at her misconception, thinking she was a real fool. That really hurt. She had been open and frank with him and he…‘Why were you so sly?’
‘Why do you think?’ Diego countered grittily. ‘And I’d prefer the word sensible to sly.’ He put his emptied glass on the table top and Lisa blinked the recent moisture from her eyes and narrowed them at him through tangled damp lashes.
A single glass with dinner was all she’d ever seen him take but this evening he was drinking steadily. To drown his guilty conscience over his foray into the world of blackmail? Or was he seeking Dutch courage before he meted out the punishment he’d mentioned earlier? So far he’d shown no sign of wanting to have his wicked way with her!
Barely breathing at the thought of that, Lisa found it difficult to concentrate on anything else and had to force herself to tune in to him when he told her edgily, ‘Since I turned seventeen I’ve been hunted down by females with their eyes on the main chance.’ A brief silence, loaded with cynicism, then more softly, almost as if he were talking to himself, ‘I rather liked the idea that you thought I was just an ordinary guy.’
Was that a hint of a smile in his voice? Lisa couldn’t be sure, but hoped it was. And, prince or pauper, no one could ever call him ordinary.
And then, of course, he spoiled it all by drawling, ‘You were very young. Both in years and experience. I would imagine it takes a little time for a girl to learn how to be more discriminating—financially speaking, that is—with her sexual favours.’
Still mooning over his liking her because she’d thought he hadn’t got two pennies to rub together, it took Lisa several seconds to work out the implication of what he’d just casually tossed at her.
He was calling her a gold-digger!
He obviously hadn’t believed a word of what she’d said about her reasons for finally agreeing to his callous proposition. He thought she’d jumped at it for what she hoped she could get out of him. Lazing around in the sun, waited on hand and foot, fabulous food, beautiful new clothes. Borrowed jewels!
She would rip the dress from her back if she could bring herself to stand in front of him in nothing but her underwear! As it was his hateful diamonds could go, she told herself in a fury of hating him for thinking she was the lowest of the low, for making her carry on loving him when he really and truly and thoroughly despised her!
Her face flaming with hectic colour, she jumped to her feet and dragged the fabulous bracelet off her wrist. The earrings followed, tossed carelessly down on the table. She would have thrown the whole lot over the edge of the terrace, to get lost in the sweetly flowering shrubs, if she hadn’t known he’d stand over her with a stick while she grovelled on her hands and knees until she’d found them—even if it took ten years!
The choker was a different matter. Frustrated, angry tears spiked her lashes and coursed unheeded down her cheeks as she struggled with the awkward clasp, her soft mouth compressing into a hard straight line as if that would somehow ease the problem.
‘Allow me.’ Diego shifted lazily to his feet and came to stand behind her. Lisa stiffened as his deft fingers removed the choker. Every last one of her senses were unbearably sharpened when he was this close. She was achingly aware of the warmth of his body, of every breath she took, of every quickened heartbeat. A faint trembling invaded her body and she choked back a sob as, his task finished, the necklace tossed on the table, his hands cupped her shoulders as he turned her to face him, the look of male superiority swiftly turning to a slashing frown.
‘I didn’t mean to make you cry.’
Lisa saw his broad chest expand as he sucked in a hollow breath. She bit down hard on her quivering bottom lip as he stroked the tears away with his fingers. Gentle fingers. Too gentle. She could feel a fresh deluge of shaming tears building up behind her eyes.
She was angry with him, furious, for bunching her in with a whole load of greedy gold-diggers, wasn’t she? So why did she want to bury her head in that broad chest and sob her heart out?
‘Please don’t,’ Diego muttered thickly as he ran a finger over her tightly compressed lips. A driven groan was wrenched from him as her mouth instinctively softened in unstoppable response, parting on a breathless loss of sanity as her glimmering eyes lifted to meld with the melting darkness of his and absorbed the messages he was sending out.
‘Kiss me!’
Had that husky entreaty come from her or from him? Lisa didn’t know or care as his dark head lowered, his long sensual mouth covering hers with a sweetness that made her dizzy, made her knees buckle beneath her with the wonder of it. Clinging to him, she ran her hands over the wide span of his shoulders as she pressed herself into the lithe length of him.
This was what she’d been wanting, aching for. The release from the tension of these last days came swiftly, with a cocooning sense of safety, of coming home to where she belonged after long sterile years of exile.
And then he deepened the kiss, his body taut and demanding, drugging her with an erotic expertise that harmonised with the sultry warmth of the night. Beneath her questing hands she felt his body shake and, even as his lips still ravaged the willing moistness of her mouth, his long hands swept the narrow straps of her dress off her shoulders then slid with shaky, barely contained impatience, to cup her naked breasts.
Desire, naked and unashamed, swept through her on a hot, wild tide. ‘Kiss me!’
This time she knew the honeyed command had come from her, knew the intoxication of pure incandescent joy as his dark head bent to take one straining nipple between his lips and then the other. Her back arched in ecstasy, her head falling back on her neck, her fingers digging into his skull, through the thick dark softness of his hair as she held him to her.
With hot, muttered words in his own language, Diego found the delicate zipper at the back of her dress, heard the slither of silky chiffon as it pooled at her feet. With his hands on either side of her tiny waist he raised his head and held her minutely away from him, drinking in the loveliness of her.
Tiny white briefs hid her sex. Her skin gleamed like mother-of-pearl in the moonlight. Her eyes, darkened by the desire that thrummed between them, glowed for him.
Only for him…
He had to believe that…
With a smothered groan he lifted her slender pale arms from around his neck, scooped her up, holding her tightly against his racing heartbeat and carried her to his bed, where she belonged.
CHAPTER EIGHT
