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For some reason, those few half seconds had got under his skin.
She had got under his skin.
Her beauty. Her spirit.
And his failure.
Not to get her to take the money. That had never been anything more than bait—a way to get her attention, to get her good and mad so that she wasn’t thinking clearly.
No, it had been his failure to stay detached that had made it impossible for him to concentrate.
His mouth tightened into a line of contempt.
It was the first time he could ever remember his libido overriding his logic and pragmatism.
Last night, with a discipline formed over many years, he had forced himself to fall asleep, but in the early hours he had woken in a panic, his sheets tangled around his body, his muscles straining against memories of those nights in his parents’ house in Macau.
As a child, he had slept badly. ‘Night terrors’, his mother had called it, but the truth was that it had been the days he’d dreaded.
She was beautiful, his mother. Exquisite, his father had used to say, when he’d still been able to bear being in the same room as her.
His shoulders tensed.
Personally, he could think of better words to describe Nuria Rivero—‘unhappy’ being the most apt. Born into a Macanese family whose wealth was shrinking at a breakneck pace, she had felt the pressure to marry swiftly.
Marriage to his father had preserved her status, but as her power over her husband had diminished she had grown ever more frantic and fearful, and her son had borne the brunt of her fears.
His phone felt heavy in his pocket. He should call her—and he would. Just not right now. He wasn’t in the mood.
He felt tense. His body was literally humming with energy—the kind of energy that he rarely felt these days, the sort that came from being thwarted.
Breathing out slowly, he rolled the tile across his knuckles, reaching into himself, trying to find that familiar place of focus and calm.
The first rule of the casino was to leave your emotions at the door. It had been a condition of his joining his father’s business that he learned to master his emotions, and it had taken him a long time but he had done so.
He breathed out slowly.
In comparison, it had taken only one brief meeting with Dora Thorn to rob him utterly of that hard-won ability.
Glancing down at the swift-moving water, he felt his pulse jump. His father used to say, ‘Don’t push the river. It will flow by itself.’ But somehow he got the feeling that wasn’t going to work with Dora. In fact, he’d lay money on it that, wherever she was right now, she would be building as many metaphorical dams as she could.
Dora Thorn.
When he’d first heard her name she had been nothing to him. He’d seen her as more of a nuisance than a serious obstacle in his path. But she was proving surprisingly tenacious—a regular thorn in his flesh, in fact.
The tile slipped from his fingers and, swearing softly, he reached down to pick it up. In the greyish light filtering through the window of the living room the tile looked almost luminous. His fingers twitched as he turned it over, remembering how she had looked at him at the lawyers’ offices.
Dora’s skin was exactly the same colour as the tile. He guessed it would be smooth and warm.
He breathed in sharply as he imagined peeling off her clothes, stripping her bare and splaying her out beneath him. Closing his eyes, the better to picture her, he felt his body harden.
Would that kissable pink mouth part in surrender?
Would her eyes flicker with the same fire as they had yesterday morning in the lawyers’ office?
His eyes snapped open. Pocketing the tile, he leaned forward, resting his forehead against the cool glass, gazing down at the city beneath him.
He hadn’t expected her to accept his offer.
