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The lift arrived then. Maybe it was fortunate. Any more of this and she would be dragging him back into the suite.
The lift carried them downwards. Cristina stood in front of him, with their clasped hands now pressed to the tiny pulse beating in the flat of her stomach. His mouth arrived to brush a featherlight caress across her throat where it met her shoulder. With a sinuous stretch of fragile muscle she gave him greater access and lost herself in a cloud of sumptuous desire. There wasn’t a part of her that had not quickened, not a single inch that did not want to feel the warm brush of his mouth. She moved against him, felt his inner pulse like a living entity.
‘Luis.’ She breathed his name in the wispy voice of an aroused woman.
That was how their waiting party saw them when the lift doors opened to reveal a tantalisingly beautiful creature dressed in red, lost to the sensual desires of her tall, dark, handsome lover.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CRISTINA, took in the gathered assembly staring at them and felt an icy barb of shock hit her chest. Kinsella was there, dressed in a tube of pale blue fabric that showed off every perfectly neat curve of her long slender shape. Her creamy face was cold, her blue eyes split by a fury she could not contain.
‘How could you?’ Cristina gasped out accusingly, and tried to stiffen away from him.
He kept her right where she was. ‘Listen,’ he murmured in what must have looked like a lover’s whisper. ‘That lady you see standing next to Kinsella is my mother. She is the most important person in the world to me so you will behave like the totally besotted bride-to-be. Understand me?’
Understand? Pulling her gaze away from the angry Kinsella, Cristina looked at the woman who had once been betrothed to Vaasco, and understood so much more than Luis could ever appreciate that the consequences of that understanding were already threatening to squeeze the life out of her sinking, sickly dipping heart.
Maria Ferreira was a beautiful woman of indefinable years, dressed in a beautiful smoky blue silk evening suit that made her look as delicately structured as a fragile rose yet contrarily regal, though she was unable to hide her shocked dismay.
Cristina had not expected this. In the last mad forty-eight hours her mind and her body had been so engrossed in Luis that she just had not once considered the possibility of coming face to face with the one person Vaasco had hated above anyone.
And Vaasco had hated.
Swallowing tensely, she tried to turn within Luis’s embrace, needing to stop this before it exploded in their faces. But he was not in the mood to listen.
‘Behave,’ he repeated, kissed her pale cheek, then straightened, releasing only one of her hands as he moved to her side so they could exit the lift.
And it was not by accident that he retained her left hand, bringing two pairs of eyes dipping down to stare at the diamond clustered ruby adorning her finger. It was making a huge statement, Cristina realized, with a growing awareness of the disaster about to descend on their heads.
Recovering her poise first, his mother took a couple of steps forward.
Did she know? Cristina wondered anxiously.
‘Querida,’ Anton greeted her warmly, lowering his dark head to brush his mother’s smooth cheek with his lips.
‘Querido—’ his mother responded, returning his embrace.
‘You look tired,’ he observed as he straightened again. ‘Perhaps we should have left this until tomorrow, to give you time to sleep off your jet-lag.’
‘I am fine; do not fuss,’ his mother said with quiet impatience. ‘Although I did assume you and I would be sharing a private dinner, Anton,’ she scolded. ‘I needed urgently to talk to you, but—’
‘You will contain your impatience for another time?’ her son suggested with a gentle amusement that made his mamma’s eyes flutter—because, like Cristina, she had heard the censure threading through his tone.
‘Meu querida…’ His hand tightened its grip on Cristina’s hand to draw her closer. ‘Let me introduce you to my mother, Maria Ferreira Scott-Lee—Mother…this beautiful creature is Cristina Vitória de Santa Rosa…Marques…’
The pause, staged for effect, certainly had its reward, Anton noted as he watched his mother’s spine rack up in shock.
‘You are the daughter of Lorenco Marques?’ Maria asked Cristina sharply.
‘Y-you knew my father?’ Cristina returned, her voice small and very wary.
‘We met once—many years ago,’ Maria replied in a slightly dazed way. Then her lovely liquid brown eyes narrowed. ‘But I was led to believe—’
‘You knew Cristina’s father?’ Anton smoothly took back control. ‘Well, this unexpected surprise makes what I have to say next all the more special.’ He smiled. ‘Mother, you can be the first to congratulate us because the astonishingly beautiful daughter of Lorenco Marques is about to become my wife…’
It was like living in a kind of nightmare after that, one in which people talked and behaved in one way when their body language said entirely something else.
‘Well, this is a—surprise.’ Luis’s mother used dignity to hide behind as she tried not to go pale. ‘Congratulations, my dear.’ And she even managed to kiss Cristina on both cheeks, when surely she would rather be demanding answers to all the questions that must be whirling around in her head.
