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An otherwise naked Luis. A man making a statement—a You are here to please me or else kind of statement.
Would he be that obvious, that crass, that—?
The doors began to move. Suddenly she lost the ability to breathe. Then her chin was lifting in the automatic response of a woman who’d learnt to meet trouble with defiance. If Luis was thinking he could march her into the nearest bed then he was going to have a—
A woman stood there. The same blonde woman Luis had been with the night before.
‘ Ordoniz?’ she enquired in coldly cultured English, giving no hint whatsoever that she had so much as set eyes on Cristina before in her life. ‘I am Kinsella Lane
, Scott-Lee’s personal secretary. If you will follow me, please, I will take you to him…’
No Luis to greet her personally—dressed or undressed. No threatening intimacy of a hotel suite with a bed very much on show. Just a private foyer, with several closed doors leading from it, and a woman who called herself Luis’s personal secretary—but only a fool would believe that. Why else would she be here, in Luis’s private suite? Did she share the accommodation with him? Did they share his bed as well as his suite?
Anger rose, fizzing on the edge of jealousy as she followed in Kinsella Lane
’s blue-suited wake. She knocked briefly on a door, then swung it inwards and was gliding forward on her long model’s legs.
‘ Ordoniz to see you, Anton,’ she announced in a low, intimate voice.
Several things struck Cristina hard at the same moment, the name Anton being the hardest strike, tugging her to a stop as the man himself came into view. He was leaning against the edge of a long conference table that spanned almost the full width of a room made up almost entirely of pale wood.
Two other men were with him. Cristina didn’t see them. She only saw Luis, but not Luis, wearing a steel-grey business suit with a waistcoat that hugged his front like a piece of finely tooled armour worn over a bright white shirt and silver tie. His neat black hair, his golden features, even the long-fingered hands he used to add expression to whatever he was saying placed an aura around him that trapped the breath in her chest. And he was speaking in English, laying out instructions in clean, crisp, deep-bodied tones laced with authority that held his audience captive and mute.
This man was not the magical warm dark Luis she’d used to know. He was Anton, the ruthless banker, a gladiator of business, wearing the suit of armour of a man used to and comfortable with power in a way he had not been six years ago.
He turned his head to look at her then, and with the light coming in from a window behind him his eyes appeared even darker than hers. Two disturbingly black spaces set between slumbrous eyelashes that began lowering as he made a slow study of her from the neatly contained hair and conservative black suit to the unremarkable style of her low-heeled shoes.
She looked as if she’d come here to attend a funeral, Anton was thinking, and felt a wave of anger shoot through him, followed by a twinge of something else that he did not want to analyse.
He’d spent long enough analysing the grim state of Cristina’s finances to know she owned hundreds of square miles of top-quality grazing land, thousands of heads of pedigree beef. She owned a whole mountain and a lush, fertile valley between it and a strip of rainforest that stood between the developers and a prime stretch of Atlantic coastline. But she’d had to borrow the money to make the flight to Rio.
It was no wonder she’d come here wearing unflattering black. The last time she’d worn that terrible suit had probably been to her wastrel of a father’s funeral, and before that the funeral of her lousy gambler of a husband. Today had to feel like yet another funeral to her.
The death of the Marques pride.
That twinge tightened its grip on him. Pity? his mind suggested anyway. But what was there to pity about Cristina? She’d turned her back on him to marry for money. For the thoroughbred continuance of the Marques bloodline. You didn’t pity that, you derided it.
And where was the brood of pure-blood child stock?
Nowhere. Vaasco Ordoniz had died childless, and if anyone knew why then it had to be himself. So, no, he did not pity Cristina, he informed that uncomfortable twinge across his chest.
B
ut he did still desire her—more so when she dared to lift that chin to him, as if to say To hell with what you think of me. I am what I am and you will not change that.
Well, that remained to be seen.
Kinsella demanded his attention then, by touching his arm and saying something softly to him. Forced to drag his eye away from Cristina, Anton found that his secretary was standing a bit too close. He said something curt—he didn’t know what. Then he took a moment to dismiss all three employees while his attention fixed itself back on Cristina’s defiant stance.
What he did not notice until the three shifted into motion was that the electric current running through the room was so strong it had removed the ability to breathe. His two young executives were curious. They’d never seen him this distracted by anything—especially by a woman they believed he was about to indulge in a perfectly ordinary business meeting with. Kinsella, on the other hand, had picked up on the sex sparking through the tension, and he noticed the hostile flash her blue eyes gave Cristina. That look alone told him that she was piqued.
If she did not watch out, his super-efficient secretary was going to have to take a move sideways, out of his orbit, he decided.
Then forgot all about Kinsella as the door closed behind her.
They were alone.
Silence fell.
