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But it was clear that Cristiano did not feel the same. It was obvious in every line of him.
This man had used her, hurt her, and no matter that he’d said their night together had been because he’d wanted her, she couldn’t forget her anger at him and what he’d done.
Yet that didn’t stop the pulse of shock that went through her, or the wave of sympathy that followed hard on its heels.
There was self-loathing in his voice, a bitterness he couldn’t hide, and she knew what that meant: he blamed himself for his parents’ death.
No wonder he hated this place. No wonder he thought it was a tomb. For him, it was.
‘You blame yourself,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
He gave another of those bitter laughs. ‘Of course I blame myself. Who else is there? No one else started a fire because he couldn’t handle his anger.’
Her heart tightened. Although their stations in life were so far removed from each other that the gulf between them might have been the distance from the earth to the sun, they were in fact far closer than she’d realised.
He’d lost people the same as she had.
‘For years after Mamá left I blamed myself,’ she said. ‘I thought that maybe it was something I’d done that had made her leave. Perhaps I’d asked too many questions, disobeyed her too many times. Nagged her for something once too often.’ Her throat closed unexpectedly, but she forced herself to go on. ‘Or...been a girl instead of a boy.’
The bitter twist to his mouth vanished. ‘Leonie—’ he began.
But she shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t finished. What I’m trying to say is that in the end I didn’t know why she’d left. I’ll never know, probably. And I could have chosen to let myself get all eaten up about what I did or didn’t do, or I could accept that it was her choice to leave.’ Leonie stared at him. ‘She didn’t have to leave. I didn’t make her. She choose that. Just like your father chose to return here.’
Cristiano’s expression hardened. ‘Of course he had to return. His son had just set fire to the—’
‘No, he didn’t,’ she interrupted. ‘He could have got a staff member to handle it. He could have decided he wasn’t fit to drive and had your mother drive instead. He could have called you. But he didn’t do any of those things. He chose to drive himself.’
Cristiano said nothing. He was standing on the step below her but still he was taller than she was, all broad shoulders and hard muscle encased in the dark grey wool of his suit. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and the neck of his black shirt was open, exposing the smooth olive skin of his throat and the steady pulse that beat there.
She didn’t know why she wanted to help him so badly—not after he’d hurt her the way he had. But she couldn’t help it. She knew loneliness and grief, and she knew anger, too, and so much of what had happened to him had also happened to her.
‘You are very wise,gatita,’ he said at last, roughly. ‘Where did you learn such wisdom?’
‘There’s not much to do on the streets but think.’
‘In between all the surviving you had to do?’ A thread of faint, wry amusement wound through his beautiful voice.
You deserved more than that...
A shiver chased over her skin. He’d said it as if he meant it, as if he truly believed that she had. But why would she trust what he said about anything?
‘Yes,’ she said blankly, her gaze caught and drawn relentlessly to the pulse at the base of his throat once again. ‘In between all that.’
She’d put her mouth over that pulse the night before. She’d tasted his skin and the beat of his heart, had run her hands over all that hard muscle and raw male power.
A throb of hunger went through her.
She’d spent most of the day trying to ignore his physical presence. She’d thought it would be easy enough to do since he’d ignored her, spending all his time on the phone. She’d been fascinated by all the new sights and sounds as they’d left Paris and flown to Spain, so that had made it easier.
But despite that—despite how she should have been concentrating on her return to her long-forgotten homeland—all she’d been conscious of was him. Of his deep, authoritative voice on the plane as he’d talked on his phone. Of his hard-muscled thigh next to hers in the car. Of the spice of his aftershave and the heat in his long, powerful body.
And she’d realised that she might ignore him all she liked, but that didn’t change her hunger for him, or her innate female awareness of him as a man. It couldn’t be switched off. It pulsed inside her like a giant heartbeat, making her horribly conscious that her declaration of how she wasn’t going to let him touch her again had maybe been a little shortsighted.
That was another thing she hadn’t understood before, yet did now. Sexual hunger hadn’t ever affected her, so she’d imagined that refusing him would be easy. But it wasn’t, and she felt it acutely now as he stood there staring at her, his jungle-green eyes holding her captive. As if he knew exactly what she was thinking.
Her heartbeat accelerated, the ache of desire pulsed between her thighs, and she knew her awareness of him was expanding, deepening.
He wasn’t just a powerful and physically attractive man. He was also a man who seemed not to care about very much at all on the surface, yet who burned on the inside with a terrible all-consuming rage. And a rage like that only came from deep caring, from a man with a wounded heart who’d suffered a terrible loss.
