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But right now he could feel his insides contracting, as if to ward off a blow. Instinctively he wanted to move back, but he didn’t. ‘What are you talking about?’
Her eyes were like two blue bruises.
‘Rio set me up way before he needed to use me to blame for his money problems.’ She felt her face grow hot as she admitted, ‘He offered me the job because he saw an opportunity to distract you, to make you jealous. He told me when we had the row that he’d hated you for as long as he could remember, but that he’d managed to make you believe he was grateful for the hand-outs he said you gave him.’
Cruz forced himself to say, ‘Go on.’
‘His ultimate ambition was to take you over—to use the marriage and his sons as evidence that he was the more stable heir. That he could be trusted. He wanted to see you humiliated, punished for being the legitimate heir. He never got over his resentment of you, Cruz.’
He realised dimly that he should be feeling hurt, exactly as Trinity had said. But it wasn’t hurt he was feeling. It was a sense of loss—the loss of something he’d never had. And that realisation was stark and painful.
Trinity was looking at him and he couldn’t breathe. He took his hand off her thigh and moved back, standing up. A sense of inarticulate anger rushed up...that awful futility.
Trinity stood too, and she was pale, and it made his anger snap even more. An irrational urge to lash out gripped him. A need to push her back to a safe distance, where it wouldn’t feel as if her eyes could see right down to the depths of his very soul.
‘You have to admit,’ he said now, ‘things worked out for you remarkably well, considering. You still managed to elevate yourself from humble maid to nanny to wife. You may have proved your physical innocence, but can I really trust that you weren’t the one who saw your opportunity that night when you spoke to Rio? Maybe you followed him into the garden?’
‘No!’
She shook her head, and now there was fire in her eyes as well as something far more disturbing. Something that twisted Cruz’s guts.
‘No. I was hurt, and I was naive enough to let him see it...and he took advantage of that.’
All Cruz could see was her. Beautiful. Injured. His fault. The desire to push her back faded as quickly as it had come on.
Acting on instinct, he went over to her, chest tight. The desk was behind her—she couldn’t move. Cruz took her face in his hands, lifting it up. ‘Who are you, Trinity Adams? Is it really possible that you’re that wide-eyed naive girl who turned up in my office looking for a chance? Full of zeal and a kind of innocence I’ve never seen before?’
Cruz’s character assessment of her chafed unbearably, and Trinity balled her hands into fists at her sides.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a low voice throbbing with pain. ‘I was that stupidly naive girl who was so starved for a sense of belonging that at the first sign of it she toppled right over the edge.’
She hated it that his proximity was making her melt even as hurt and anger twisted and roiled in her gut.
She took his hands down off her face. ‘Just let me go, Cruz... There’s nothing more to discuss. There’s nothing between us.’
She felt his body go rigid and saw his eyes burn.
‘You’re wrong. There isn’t nothing—there’s this.’
His mouth was over hers before she could take another breath and Trinity went up in flames. Panic surged. She couldn’t let this happen.
She tore her mouth away. ‘Stop, Cruz, this isn’t enough.’
‘It’s more than enough, querida, and it’s enough for now.’
He started undoing the buttons of her shirt-dress, exposing her breasts in her lacy bra, dragging one cup down and thumbing her nipple. She wanted to tell him to stop again, but it was too late. She was tipping over the edge of not caring and into wanting this more. Anything to assuage the ache in her heart.
He lifted her with awesome ease onto the side of his desk. She heard something fall to the floor and smash, but it was lost in the inferno consuming them. He was yanking open her dress completely now...buttons were popping and landing on the floor.
He captured her mouth again as he pushed the dress off her shoulders and down her arms, pulling her bra down completely so her breasts were upthrust by the wire and exposed. The be
lt was still around her waist—the only thing keeping her dress attached to her body.
He palmed her breast as he stroked his tongue along hers, thrusting, mimicking a more intimate form of penetration. Trinity groaned into his mouth, instinctively arching her back to push her breast into his palm more fully, gasping when he trapped a hard nipple between his fingers before squeezing tightly.
She blindly felt for his T-shirt, pushing it up until they had to break apart so he could lift it off. He dropped it to the floor and Trinity reached for his jeans, snapping open the top button, aware of the bulge pressing against the zip. Heat flooded her—and urgency.
She was hampered when Cruz bent down and tongued a nipple, his hand going between her legs, spreading her thighs and pushing aside her panties to explore along her cleft. He pulled her forward slightly, so that she was on the edge of the desk, feet just touching the ground.
