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She jumped back another two steps. With a shuddering intake of breath, she put her fingertips on her lips as if she could still feel him kissing her. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I work for you.”
He knew she was right. That just made him more angry, more determined to have her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said fiercely.
“Oh, but it does. You have a rule, Mr. Cruz,” she said, lifting her chin. Her beautiful chocolate-colored eyes glittered. “You never seduce your employees. That’s the one line you don’t cross!”
He craved her desperately. She was the one tonic that would make him forget everything he’d lost today. But he could not tell her that. He must never appear vulnerable to anyone—not to any woman on earth, let alone one of his employees!
“It is my rule, not yours,” he said coolly. “I can choose to make an exception.”
But she stepped back, out of his reach.
“I choose differently,” she said. “What happened between us in Paris was a mistake. It will never happen again. I can’t lose my career, my reputation, my life,” she whispered. “Not again!”
He frowned, trying to read her expression.
“What do you mean, again?”
She blinked fast as she looked away. “Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.” He knew little about her past beyond what was spelled out on her rеsumе. She’d always deflected personal questions with cool, dignified reserve.
She turned to him sharply. “Paris,” she muttered. “I meant Paris.”
“You didn’t mean Paris.”
“What else?”
Another deflection. He narrowed his eyes. “There was another man before me,” he guessed.
“You know there wasn’t!”
“You were a virgin. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t another man.” The thought made his shoulders feel tighter still.
She set her jaw stubbornly. “You checked my references. You know all about me.”
Rafael didn’t know half what he wished he knew. He’d been so impressed by her at the interview that he’d done only the barest measure of due diligence above and beyond what the exclusive employment agency had provided. He never liked to rely totally on underlings. He’d spoken to the wife of her last employer, and the woman had raved up and down the moon about Louisa Grey, calling her “amazing” and a “treasure.” It seemed very unlikely that she would have spoken so highly about Louisa if she’d suspected her husband of having an affair with her.
It didn’t make sense.
“What are you hiding?” Rafael said, his eyes searching her face. “You never mention family or friends back home. Why? Why do you never want to go home?”
He saw her eyes widen, heard her intake of breath. Then she smoothed her oversize gray woolen skirt beneath her trembling hands. “It doesn’t matter.” She turned away. “If there will be nothing else, sir, I will leave you now—”
“No, damn it.” He crossed the room in two steps, blocking the doorway so she could not leave. “I won’t let you go. Not until you answer me. I…” I need you, he almost said, but the words caught in his throat as sharply as a razorblade. He hadn’t said them to anyone for years. He’d created his whole life to avoid saying them.
Through the open window, he could see the lights of Istanbul flickering in the dusk. Black silhouettes of minarets plunged like daggers into the dying red sunset. He could hear a muezzin’s broadcasted call to prayers echo across the sea.
His eyes locked with hers in the shadowy room. The tension between them changed. Electrified. Desire for her swept through him, negating all else.
“Get out of my way, Mr. Cruz,” she whispered.
He could hear the quickness of her breath, see the rise and fall of her chest. “No.”
“You can’t keep me here!”
Rafael almost shook with the force of his need for her.
“Can’t I?” he said softly.
He wanted to bury himself in her so deeply that he would forget everything—everything that threatened to break him apart. He heard the quick pant of her breath. He took a deep breath of her, smelling her fragrance, soap and clean cotton and freshly cut roses.
If he were smart, he would let her go. He would find a different woman to fill his bed. The pouting French starlet he’d been flirting with for the last few days. Her. Anyone.
Anyone but Louisa Grey.
His eyes fell to her mouth. Her beautiful bow-shaped lips were pink and bare of makeup. Something about Louisa intrigued him beyond his understanding. He wanted her in a way that almost felt against his will. He craved the mind-numbing pleasure he’d felt making love to her. The best sex of his life.
The pleasure of her body would help him forget his pain. She would be the drug to distract him from his grief and despair. He would ravish her in his bed, hard and fast, until the fire in his blood was sated. Until the pain in his heart was obliterated into ash. Then, and only then, would he let her go…
Rafael looked at her from beneath heavily lidded eyes. He saw the tremble of her body in the shadows.
She wanted to escape him—to deny them both what they both wanted.
But this inexperienced girl was no match for his will. She’d been a virgin when he’d first taken her in Paris. She would not be able to resist him now. He would possess her until he was utterly satiated, until he felt her writhe and shake beneath his body.
Slowly, implacably, Rafael pulled her into his arms.
She tried to resist, but he would not let her go. She trembled, tilting her head back to look up into his face. Tall as she was for a woman, he still towered over her. Her beautiful brown eyes glistened in the faint golden light.
“Please,” she said in a low voice. “Let me go.”
His hands tightened on her. “Are you so afraid?” he said quietly.
She drew a shuddering breath. “Yes.”
He cupped her face. “Of me?”
“No,” she said in a low voice. “If you kiss me again, if you take me to your bed, I’m afraid…”
“Afraid of what?”
She blinked fast, her full lashes black against her pale skin.
“Afraid I’ll die of wanting you,” she whispered.
He nearly gasped.
Reaching up, Louisa put her hand on his rough cheek. “I’ve missed you,” she said in a voice full of anguish. “I’ve missed you so…”
He shook beneath her touch. Taking her hand in his own, he fervently kissed the palm, then pulled her into his arms. Lowering his mouth to hers, he kissed her. Deeply. Hungrily.
He kissed her with all the repressed desire of the month they’d been apart—and of all the wasted years before that.
Louisa trembled.
Rafael’s touch burned her. It frightened her. Seduced her.
He kissed her, his powerful lips moving over hers. Guiding her. Giving her such explosive pleasure, causing electricity to sizzle down her limbs beneath her gray woolen suit until she thought she might die of this ache like fire.
Too many years of repressed desire could no longer be contained. It was all she could do not to blurt out the two devastating secrets that would destroy everything.
She was completely, irrevocably in love with a man who never wanted to be either husband or father. And she might be pregnant with his child…
Rafael’s hand on the back of her head, stroking through her hair and the bare skin of her neck, created a spark that seared up and down her body. Her breasts became heavy, her nipples tight. She tingled with painful awareness all over her body. She wanted him so much it drove her to despair.
“Forget I’m your boss,” he murmured against her skin. She felt the warmth of his breath, the roughness of his jawline against her cheek. “Stay with me tonight.”
She was overwhelmed by the sensuality of his hands on her body, his fingers stroking her back down to her hips.
He pulled back from her and golden light flickered in his dark eyes like the hot flames in hell. “Stay with me,” he commanded.
Her gaze fell to his lips. She could barely breathe. She wanted to say yes. Wanted it so badly she thought she’d die. But…
“I can’t,” she gasped, even as her fingers tightened on his black shirt. She licked her lips. “If the rest of the staff ever found out I’d been your mistress…they’d lose all respect for me.”
“It’s no business of theirs—”
“I’d lose all respect for myself!”
For answer, he touched her hair. Pulling out the pins that held her hair in a tight bun, he let it tumble down her shoulders. “So beautiful,” he whispered, moving his fingers through the long chestnut waves. He looked into her eyes. “Why don’t you ever let it down?”
Her hair? Or her guard?
His fingers felt so deliciously light moving through her hair. She held her breath. Her scalp tingled as he stroked whisper-light touches against her earlobes and neck then cradled the back of her head in both of his hands. He looked down at her.
“You work miracles.” He looked around the newly remodeled bedroom with wonder. “No one could ever feel anything for you…but respect.”
She exhaled. His words were balm to her.
But she knew how the world truly worked. Her spine snapped straight.
“Reputations are destroyed by affairs like this. No one would ever hire me for a respectable job again.”
“Why would you ever leave me?” He lifted a dark eyebrow. “No woman ever wants to leave.”
He spoke the words as a joke, but Louisa knew they were true. She also knew that she couldn’t possibly remain his housekeeper as his discarded mistress. That she’d already given him her body once was bad enough—it had forced her to flee to Istanbul.
She was still able to work for him, barely. But she did have some pride. If she gave herself to him completely, if she admitted that she was in love with him, she knew she’d never recover from his scorn. She’d never survive loving him, working for him—and seeing him move on to another woman.
Especially if she was pregnant…
I’m not pregnant, she repeated to herself, but the words had become hollow and metallic. She gritted her teeth. All right, fine. She would take the test. Tonight. As soon as she was alone. Then she would know for sure that she had nothing to fear. Or else she’d have some shocking news for Rafael Cruz—the heartless, ruthless, charming playboy—and she’d have to tell him she was going to make him a father against his will.
He would never forgive her. He would never believe something had gone wrong with the Pill, that her cycle must have been thrown off by those two days of bad flu she’d had a week or two before their affair. She’d given him her word of honor she couldn’t get pregnant. He’d be furious. He’d think she’d lied.
Or worse: that she’d gotten pregnant on purpose to trap him. Louisa had overheard more than one of his cast-off mistresses plotting cold-bloodedly to get pregnant in a stupid, selfish attempt to marry him. He’d evaded their plots easily. So how would he feel being unintentionally trapped by his own housekeeper?
“You’re shivering,” Rafael murmured. He pulled her closer into his arms. “Are you cold?”
Unable to answer, she shook her head.
He stroked her cheek.
“Let me warm you,” he whispered.
His head lowered toward hers.
“No!” She pushed away from Rafael with strength she hadn’t known she had. From across the room, they stared at each other, not touching, in the shadows. The only sound was the ragged pant of her breath. She turned away.
“I need you, Louisa,” he said behind her. “Don’t go.”
Not turning around, she closed her eyes. “You don’t need me,” she replied hoarsely. “There are women aplenty to fill your bed. You have your pick of them. You don’t need me.”
“I found him,” she heard Rafael say behind her. “My father.”
She froze in the doorway. With a gasp, she whirled around.
Across the large bedroom, Rafael stood like a statue chiseled in ice. His handsome face was stark and strange, half-illuminated by the window’s slanted beam of moonlight.
“You found your father?” she choked out, clasping her hands. “Oh, Rafael, I’m so glad! You’ve been looking for him for so long!”
“Yes.”
His voice was harsh and jagged as a rusty knife. Louisa frowned at him in bewilderment. Why did he not look pleased? Why did he still look so frozen and strange?
Rafael had been looking for his father for twenty years, ever since the Argentinian man who’d raised him had revealed on his deathbed that Rafael wasn’t truly his son. His stepfather had told him before he’d died that, the week before he’d married her, Rafael’s mother had returned from Istanbul—pregnant.
“Is your father here?” Louisa breathed. “In Istanbul? Have you talked to him?”
“His name was Uzay ?elik,” Rafael cut her off. He looked toward the window. “And he died two days ago.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, her heart in her throat. Against her will, she walked back across the bedroom toward him as he stared into the flickering lights across the dark waters of the Bosphorus. “Your investigators found him too late.”
Slowly he turned to her.
“They never found him at all. My mother is the one who finally told me. After twenty years of silence, she overnighted a letter to Paris that I received this morning. After he was dead.”
