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Luiz didn’t care about the label, he just cared about the result.
‘I have a proposition to put to you.’
Nell regarded him with an expression of baffled frustration. He had not even attempted to defend himself. She wasn’t even sure if he had heard a word she had said.
‘I know where they are.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Lucy and your cousin?’
He nodded.
‘So where…?’
He pushed aside the poignant image of the cottage by the sea where he and Rosa had lived and held up a hand to stop her. Fulfilling his side of the bargain he was proposing would mean him going there for the first time in many years. The first time since Rosa died.
‘First you need to do something for me.’
He saw the alarm flare in her eyes and sketched a cynical grin. ‘Relax, not that something. You’re really not my type.’
As if to challenge his careless contention the image that formed in his head of one perfect breast fitting perfectly into his hand momentarily vaporised every other thought.
‘Imagine my devastation,’ she snarled, irrationally deflated. ‘Forget the dramatic pause and get to the point—what do I have to do?’
‘Come and meet my grandmother.’
Nell’s face fell. ‘That’s it?’ Obviously there was a catch.
‘And go along with whatever I say.’
‘But I don’t understand why—?’
He cut across her with an autocratic shake of his dark head. There was no time for a question and answer session. If he paused long enough to think about this he strongly suspected that he’d bail.
‘I do not require you to understand. As I said, I simply require you to go along with anything I say—no matter what it is.’
‘But why?’
‘Do you want to find the lovers?’
Nell’s expression reflected her dilemma. ‘Oh, all right, then.’ What choice did she have? ‘And afterwards you’ll tell me where they are.’
‘Querida,’ he promised with a grin, ‘I’ll take you to them. Shake on it.’
Nell dragged her eyes away from the magnetic pull of his deep-set dark eyes and regarded the hand he held towards her for a long moment before finally extending her own.
As his cool fingers closed around hers Nell tried to ignore the warning voice in her head that told her she was making a big mistake.
It was a lot more difficult to ignore the prickle under her skin that had nothing to do with sunburn and a lot to do with their brief physical contact.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE castle was a maze. Nell followed Luiz for what felt like miles along stone-floored corridors before he finally halted.
‘This is my grandmother’s room.’ Luiz reached for the door and stopped. ‘Wait here. I will be back presently.’
Left with little choice but to obey his terse instruction, Nell began to study the large tapestry of brilliant colours on the wall opposite.
The battle scene it portrayed was nothing compared to the one being waged in her head. Just what are you doing, Nell? This is crazy, totally crazy. You don’t know this man—you don’t even know what you’ve agreed to and who’s to say he will keep his word?
Before she could totally lose her nerve Luiz Santoro returned. Without a word he took her left hand and slid a ring onto her finger.
‘What are you doing? What…w-what is that?’ she stammered, staring at her finger. The gold band felt heavy, a rose-coloured diamond surrounded by what she assumed were rubies in an antique setting.
She was no expert but it didn’t look like the sort of thing you found in a Christmas cracker.
He lifted his brows. ‘A ring.’
‘I can see that,’ she retorted crankily. ‘What is it doing on my finger?’
‘Window dressing.’
‘For what?’
‘That is not relevant.’
Nell shook her head and dug in her heels literally. ‘I’m not taking another step until you explain this thing.’ She waved the offending jewellery him.
Luiz studied her mutinous face for a moment, then gave a philosophical shake of his head. ‘My grandmother—’
‘The one who owns this house?’
His dark brows twitched into a straight line of disapproval at the interruption. ‘The one who own this house and the estancia it stands upon. She is ill…maybe…’
He paused, unwilling to voice the possibility, as if saying the thing made it more likely to happen. He was impatient with the lack of logic in his thought processes, but then when you cared for a person it was hard to always be logical.
He glanced down at the young woman who was staring up at him, suspicion and wariness reflected in her clear eyes, and thought, Logic does not feature in that glossy head at any level…just neat emotion.
It made her a frustrating person to negotiate with.
‘Maybe?’ Nell prompted.
‘Maybe even dying.’
Nell’s face dropped. ‘I’m sorry.’ It was hard to tell from his stony expression if her sympathy was either required or desired.
Not that the lack of emotion in his features meant he didn’t have any, she reminded herself. Give the man the benefit of the doubt—she had not cried at her father’s funeral or, for that matter, since. Pushing aside the thought, Nell focused on his dark face—too much focus because she immediately started to feel dizzy.
‘We all die, and my grandmother is eighty-five.’
Nell found the clinical pronouncement chilling, but not as chilling as the total lack of feeling in his voice or manner. She suspected he didn’t deserve the benefit of any doubt—the man was just plain cold.
‘I’m sorry your grandmother is ill, but that still doesn’t explain the ring—’ she waved her hand in an expansive gesture ‘—or any of this.’
‘It is her wish that I marry and provide an heir.’
Nell, her eyes wide—she was clearly dealing with someone who was delusional and possibly dangerous—started to shake her head and back away.
‘I care about Lucy, but if you think I’m going to…m-m…’ She shook her head again. ‘Some sacrifices I’m not willing to make. Let her leave the place to this other Luiz Felipe—he seems more than willing to marry.’ And for all she knew provide heirs! ‘God, I really need to find Lucy.’
For a split second he looked perplexed by her response. ‘Sacrifice? You think…?’ He threw back his dark head and laughed, a deep attractive sound. ‘I am not asking you to marry me, and Felipe would not make a suitable custodian for the estancia.’
Nell pursed her lips, perversely irritated that he appeared to find the idea so hilarious. ‘So you don’t want a wife.’
His expression sobered and she glimpsed something that wasn’t cold calculation flicker at the back of his eyes. It was stark, shocking pain.
‘I had a wife. I require no one to fill her place in my life or heart.’
Did that mean the ex-wife had walked…? The image of him as broken-hearted, discarded husband was one Nell’s imagination just wouldn’t expand to accommodate. Actually she felt a lot more comfortable believing he didn’t have a heart at all, let alone a bruised one, so she changed the subject.
‘So you think you’d be a…suitable custodian? Is that shorthand for you fancy yourself as king of the castle?’ He certainly had the regal manner. ‘So you don’t mind if your cousin gets the girl but not the money.’
‘There is no money.’
Nell rolled her eyes. ‘Sure there isn’t.’ She folded her arms across her chest and challenged, ‘So, if you don’t have an avaricious bone in your body—’ gorgeous body ‘—why this silliness?’ she finished, thinking she might well ask herself the same question. Stop drooling, Nell!
‘My grandmother raised me, she has taught me everything I know, I owe her everything and I wish her to die a happy woman.’
‘But…’
His eyes flashed as he frowned in exasperation and mimed a zipping motion across his mouth. ‘Will you be silent and let me finish?’
Nell’s chin went up as she viewed him, eyes narrowed in dislike. ‘If you get to the point.’
‘My grandmother is a redoubtable woman. She has carried the burden of running the estancia alone for many years. She was a young woman when her husband died. She does not want that for me. She wants me to be happy and she believes that for that I need a…’ he paused, his lips twisting into a cynical smile before he completed ‘…soul mate, a wife.’
‘Me? No way!’
‘My thought exactly.’
‘And I’m not lying for you.’
‘I’m not asking you to. I’m hoping that the ring will do the trick.’
‘But what if she doesn’t…?’ Nell gave an awkward grimace.
‘Die,’ he inserted, turning his head so that Nell could not see the muscle he could feel clenching in his cheek. ‘It is possible,’ he conceded. ‘She is tough and she has been ill before. If that happens…’ nothing in Luiz’s demeanour suggested how desperately he clung to that hope as he calmly outlined his hastily formed fall-back strategy ‘…I will simply explain that you have been forced to return to England. Long-distance love affairs are notoriously difficult and ours will die a natural death, possibly due, I think, to your infidelity.’
Nell stared. She almost believed it herself! ‘You seem to have thought of everything.’
He took her comment as a compliment and bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘I have that reputation.’ And whether it was deserved or not it made him feared by his competitors.
That was not entirely a bad thing in the cutthroat world he operated in. A man used every advantage he had, and one advantage Luiz no longer had was the element of surprise that had enabled him as an unknown twenty-year-old to make his first million before the competition had become aware of his existence.
Now they knew he was there, but he enjoyed a challenge.
‘Maybe you’ve actually convinced yourself that you’re doing this to make her happy because you’re ashamed to admit how far you’d go to make sure you inherit this place?’
Luiz Santoro looked almost as shocked as Nell felt to hear her private speculation voiced out loud.
She took an involuntary step back as eyes that housed sheer molten rage connected with her own. Before she had a chance to be defensive or even sensibly scared it was gone, leaving her wondering if it had ever been there at all.
Luiz, on the point of ramming his financial success down her superior, self-righteous little throat, stopped himself. Why justify his actions to this girl, when he never justified himself to anyone?
Her opinion of him was of no consequence but defending himself would force him to question this.
‘You need not trouble yourself with my motivation or my self-delusion, just look sweet and in love,’ he mocked, placing a finger under her chin.
Nell, her pulse racing and no longer just from fear, held herself rigid while he studied her upturned features. ‘You don’t look in love.’ He sounded irritated by the discovery.
She pushed his hand away and directed her darting glance at some point behind him. Don’t panic, Nell—you can leave at any time you like. He can’t stop you.
All you have to do is walk away.
‘That’s because I’m not.’ She ran her tongue nervously across her dry lips and said, ‘This is all too weird. I need time. I’ve changed my mind. I think—’
‘Not an option.’
Without any warning at all he bent his head and pressed his mouth to hers.
The hot, hungry kiss did not start slow and build; it was hard, demanding, and began at a mind-blowing level of intimacy that nothing could have prepared her for. As his mouth moved with innate sensuality across her own the heat flared inside her and her senses were flooded with the texture and taste of him.
At the first erotic stabbing incursion of his tongue her insides dissolved and something inside her snapped. Suddenly she was kissing him back, her fingers spread out across his hard chest as she groaned into his mouth and pressed her body into his, responding to a frantic need to be closer.
When Luiz lifted his head he looked as dazed as she felt, but maybe she had imagined it because a second later he was removing her hands from his chest and pushing her through the door ahead of him.
‘And don’t think,’ he said in her ear.
Nell, her mind still numb with shock, thought, Walk away! But her will seemed to have deserted her, her body was nailed to the spot with shock.
Struggling to prove she still had a mind of her own…God, I kissed him back…she flashed him a killer look. ‘If you do that again I will make you regret it!’ she snapped.
Luiz, who was already regretting the impulsive action, did not respond. He looked at her lush lips and thought about the way she had tasted. Then he pushed the thought away. For a man who prided himself on his iron control it should have been a simple matter.
It wasn’t.
A man could not excel at everything and it was clear that he was not good at spontaneity…especially spontaneity that involved this woman.
Resentment and humiliation swirled through Nell’s veins. Calculatingly, he’d done that to shut her up and get her through the door and the worst part was it had worked!
