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His eyes were glittering as he began to peel off her yellow dress before carefully draping it over the back of a chair. Beneath it she was wearing some of the new lingerie he’d chosen and she saw his eyes narrow as he ran his gaze over her.
‘Perfecta,’ he said softly.
‘I’m not perfect,’ she said, until she saw the expression on his face. ‘Th-thank you.’
‘
That’s better.’ He gave a small nod of approval as he cupped the embroidered swell of her breast. ‘Because right now, you are completely perfect to me.’
Carly would have defied a marble statue not to have responded to that statement. She tried to play down its significance as he pushed her onto the silken rug and took off her new camiknickers, before putting his head between her thighs. She stiffened at the shock of the sudden warm intimacy of his tongue licking against her moist flesh. Her fingers started tugging at the wayward waves of his hair so that he lifted his head, his dark eyes gleaming as they surveyed her.
‘Luis?’ she said uncertainly.
‘You just have to relax,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
Wasn’t he? She closed her eyes. She suspected he was going to do exactly that. Because there were different kinds of hurt, weren’t there? She’d learnt in biology that the human heart was vulnerable in so many ways.
But her mind emptied as his tongue began to explore her. She clung to him as he whispered soft incitements in Spanish. And after she had sobbed out a powerful orgasm which left her dazed and shaking, she wondered how she was going to live without this kind of pleasure.
Or live without him.
She could taste the unfamiliar flavour of sex on his mouth as he slid up to kiss her.
‘Unzip me,’ he said.
She swallowed. ‘Are you going to corrupt me even more?’
‘I’m going to try.’
He taught her how to suck him. He showed her how to pleasure herself, while he watched. He took her to Monaco and Antibes and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where they ate lunch in a famous restaurant, where paintings by Picasso and Miro hung on the walls. They ate plateau de fruits de mer in Nice and drank champagne in a little place called Plan-du-Var, high up in the mountains. Back at his luxury villa he would strip off her clothes with hungry hands and their sex would have a hot, hard urgency. And when she had gasped out yet another orgasm, he would stroke her skin and murmur that her body was everything a woman’s body should be. By the end of that week, Carly was reeling—her senses so exquisitely stimulated that she could barely eat or sleep.
And all she could think about was Luis.
It was as if he had entered her bloodstream like a powerful drug. Suddenly, she began to understand something about the nature of addiction. You tried something which you knew was bad for you, and suddenly you were hooked. Hooked on a feeling which even a novice could recognise as love.
But none of this was real. That was what she kept bringing it back to. It was a brief fairy tale which was bound to end. Her feelings weren’t real and neither was this situation. Seduced by his skill as a lover, she had found it easy to forget she was also Luis’s employee. But she was. Nothing had really changed and now she was wondering what was going to happen when they left here.
‘You’ve been very quiet,’ he observed late one afternoon as they lay beside the pool and she tried, unsuccessfully, to read.
‘I’m just sleepy.’
‘Don’t be evasive, Carly,’ he said softly. ‘I thought we had agreed to be honest with each other.’
She laid the book down on her stomach, her heart clenching as she looked at him. The growing ache inside her was making her realise she couldn’t carry on like this. She couldn’t keep burying her head in the sand and pretending the future wasn’t out there. She couldn’t keep pretending that she didn’t care for him, because she did. ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘About what?’
‘Well, a couple of things really.’ For a moment the world seemed to hold its breath and everything around her seemed to be green and blue and beautiful. The flickering gleam of sunlight danced on the pool and the sky was as blue as those rain-smashed delphiniums she’d seen in the garden back in England. She didn’t ever want to leave here, but some day soon she was going to have to. Because they were living in a protected bubble and sooner or later the bubble was going to burst. ‘About what’s going to happen when we go back to England.’
Luis tipped his sun hat forward, so that the shadow of the brim fell over his eyes, because somehow it was easier to know that his face was in darkness. He thought about her question and how he was going to answer it. She was only saying what had been on his mind for days, and he knew he couldn’t keep ignoring his commitments elsewhere. He had a doctor’s appointment in London next week and a growing stack of engagements, which he couldn’t put off any longer. He had meetings in Dublin and Buenos Aires and was due to make a visit to Uruguay, to oversee the second stage of his beachside development.
But this wasn’t just about the logistics of his life; it was about how he was going to deal with a situation he had created. How he was going to extricate himself from it, with as little angst as possible.
He sighed. He liked Carly. He liked her a lot, but the longer this went on, the greater the likelihood that she would get hurt, because that was what he did to women. That was his process. And he didn’t want to hurt her. He didn’t want tears or recriminations. He didn’t want her to degrade herself by trying to hold onto what they could never have. He wanted her to go away and be the fantastic doctor he knew she could be.
‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,’ he said.
‘Maybe not. But we still have to face facts, don’t we, Luis? There’s no point pretending that nothing’s happened, is there?’
