A Spanish Awakening (8 page)

Doomed attempts, obviously it went without saying.
The Armstrongs were a loud, egocentric bunch too busy with their own lives to show any interest in anything else, especially the new and painfully unsure member of the family.

‘There’s no need to yell,’ Megan bellowed, then looked shocked. She was not in the habit of raising her voice, as much as the last hour belied that fact.

From the expression on his dark face she had the strong feeling that Emilio was equally unaccustomed to being yelled at.

On another occasion his astounded expression might have amused her, but at that moment she felt as though she might never laugh again.

Emilio swore under his breath, the muscles along his strong jaw tightening as his scorching dark gaze swept across the features turned up to him. Being furious with her was not reducing the level of his painful arousal. If anything it was feeding the desire that licked through his veins like a forest fire, out of control—did he want to control it?

Emilio shifted his weight in a futile effort to ease the pain in his groin. This was not a moment for deep analysis. He could barely string a sequence of intelligible words together, let alone indulge in self-analysis of the complex mixture of emotions that he was struggling with.

Megan, her head tilted to one side, watched through the veil of her lashes as he dragged a shapely brown hand through the ebony strands of his gleaming dark head. Her level of fascination with his fingers, the size, elegance, strength and shape of his hands, was beginning to escape her control.

What control? asked the ironic inner voice in her head.

‘Por Dios,
there is every need to shout,’ he contended,
studying her flushed face with an air of scowling disbelief as he fought to subdue the protective feelings that surfaced when he saw the reflection of whatever inner battle she was fighting shining in her eyes.

It was easier to focus on his anger.

He
knew
she was feeling the erotic charge that hung heavily in the air between them. How could she not? It almost had a physical presence.

Why was she fighting it? Why couldn’t she just relax and let it happen? His jaw clenched in frustration. It was as if she couldn’t get past the fact he’d been the one to rescue her from an unpleasant and potentially dangerous situation.

Was it because he’d seen her vulnerable? Did that not mesh with the cool, controlled image she obviously wanted to project?

He dragged a hand down his jaw and decided it was useless to try and figure out her reasoning because, quite clearly, there was none.

‘W
AS
I drunk?’

The simmering hostility in Emilio’s manner as much as the abrupt question made Megan blink. ‘What? ‘

His dark eyes flashed. ‘Was I forcing myself on you?
Por Dios,
no, I was not! ‘

‘I never—’

‘So at what point did I become the bad guy?’ he demanded, cutting across her.

‘I never—’

‘The fact is you were lucky I was there, but you’re too stubborn to admit it! You are just as stupid now as you were then!’

Megan’s chin went up at the insult. Eyes narrowed, she threw back her head, glaring up at him with simmering hostility. ‘And you are just as arrogant and judgemental.’

A hissing sound of irritation escaped his clenched teeth. ‘Also, do you know,’ he drawled, ‘how incredibly boring this ugly-duckling routine of yours is?’

Megan’s amber eyes lit up like beacons with anger. ‘Oh, I’m
so
sorry to bore you.’ If she’d been some long-legged lissom beauty with plastic boobs attached to a skeletal clothes-hanger frame he would no doubt make allowances for an IQ in single figures.

Emilio’s teeth audibly ground in response to her sarcastic insincerity.

‘Of course, if I had known I was expected to
entertain
you, I’d have made more of an effort—worn a funny nose, perhaps?’ she suggested, pressing the tip of her finger to her small, classically perfect nose.

He gave a hard laugh and watched as her hand fell, revealing the delicate purity of her features only spoiled from being textbook classical by the generosity of her lips. Emilio, his eyes glued to the full, lush curve, did not think it spoiled anything.

It took every ounce of his strength not to grab her and crush her mouth under his. He inhaled sharply through flared nostrils and snarled.

‘Do not be absurd! ‘

His dismissive, plain nasty attitude fed her anger and sense of growing resentment. ‘So I’m assuming for “absurd” read anyone who says anything you don’t like?’

Which couldn’t, she reasoned darkly, be something that happened very often. The problem with Emilio Rios was that people were willing to cross oceans, let alone roads, to avoid antagonising him, and from where she was standing it was easy to see why.

He had not gained the reputation of being a bad man to get on the wrong side of by accident! And he did look pretty magnificent if you liked your dark and moody with an edge of danger.

And she, it turned out, did!

As Megan watched a shaft of sunlight from an angled skylight hit his face. He had no reason to fear the unforgiving light; there were no flaws or shortcomings to be revealed.

He was perfect.

A furrow of concentration appeared between Megan’s
feathery brows as her rapt gaze lingered on the hard angles and hollows of his patrician face, the strong, sculpted contours emphasised by the dusting of dark hair sprinkled already over his clean-shaven jaw. She wondered how it would feel against her skin and shivered, unable to tear her rapt gaze from his face.

He was nothing short of breathtaking to look at!

‘You make a great deal of effort to be rude to me,
querida.
I wonder why?’ he mused.

‘It’s no effort, believe me, and don’t call me that,’ she snapped, her discomfort increased by the casual endearment.

Privately she conceded he did have a point. Where was the diplomacy she was famed for? Winding Emilio up was a bit like getting into a tiger’s cage and throwing sticks at it.

A person had to expect the tiger to leap so the question remained why? A mental image of Emilio falling across her body flashed into Megan’s head, the erotic fantasy so powerful that she could actually feel the weight of his body, the heat of him bearing down on her.

The effort of expelling the erotic intrusion wrenched a soft grunt from her aching throat that drew a quizzical look from Emilio.

Megan decided to avoid tiger analogies for the foreseeable future and took refuge in hostility
—again.

‘What can I say? My job entails being pleasant to men who have to be told at regular intervals how marvellous they are. I’m on my own time.’ Her dad might disagree on that detail, but then nothing she had done so far today was going to make him break out in song. ‘I don’t have to play nice.’

A white line of anger appeared around the sensual outline
of his sculpted lips as Emilio drew himself up to his full intimidating height.

‘I am not your father,’ he snarled, totally incensed by the implied comparison she made with a man he despised.

Megan, aware she had been appallingly indiscreet, not to mention unprofessional, began to back-pedal furiously. ‘I didn’t mean Dad, just men in a position of power generally,’ she finished lamely.

Emilio ignored her protestations. ‘And I do not,’ he imparted grimly, ‘need my ego stroked.’

How about other parts?

Shocked, not just by the shameless question that popped into her head, but the accompanying images that followed the thought, Megan dropped her gaze from his as she felt the shamed colour fly to her cheeks. She was not the sort of girl who went around mentally undressing men.

‘It’s the effect you have on me,’ she mumbled, struggling to find a plus side to this situation. He couldn’t read her mind, though sometimes when he looked at her she did get the uncomfortable feeling that she had no secrets from him.

‘It was not my intention to …’ His voice faded as she began to nibble nervously at her full lower lip.

The silence stretched way beyond dramatic pause and into nerve-shredding territory until finally Megan could bear it no longer.

‘Not your intention to what?’

Her voice dragged Emilio from the hot place his thoughts had gone. He blinked and met her eyes, still imagining her lips parting to allow his tongue deep inside.

‘Not my intention to—’ He paused again and exhaled slowly.

He could have said lose the thread … lose the plot. Both, to his intense shock, were true. He could sit in a
high-powered meeting that went on into the small hours and when others faded, not miss a beat, stay on top of every detail discussed, some buried in a mass of techno babble, yet he looked at Megan’s mouth and his brain was mush.

Emilio chose to fast-forward the conversation. ‘I find your self-deprecating attitude annoying. You are a beautiful woman and, believe it or not, I was trying to help that night, not judging.’

Megan gave a derisive hoot. ‘Sure you weren’t.’
Beautiful?
Her stomach muscles did a shimmy as she directed a wary look at his face, waiting for the punchline and telling herself not to start seeing or hearing things that weren’t there.

‘It was not your clothes that night,’ he said abruptly, ‘though they were enough to—’ He inhaled, turning his hand away sharply, providing Megan with a view of the nerve pulsing in his hollow cheek and the cords of tension standing out in his brown throat.

‘Of course, I can see the sense of power you had discovered must have been intoxicating,’ he conceded, struggling to be fair-minded and failing big time as he thought of Megan enjoying her feminine power in the arms of men like that creep he had dragged from the car.

As he remembered the fear in the said creep’s eyes he smiled thinly, not regretting having put it there—at least he knew there would be one less guy supplying willing arms.

She gave a baffled shake of her head, confused as much by his strained manner as his peculiar choice of words.
‘Intoxicating? ‘

‘You’d pretty much been invisible at home all through your adolescence and, I assume, school.’ Recalling the slights and snubs he had witnessed and imagining the ones he had not, Emilio struggled to keep his voice impassive.

‘Thanks.’ Megan finally saw where he was going with this. It was always good to be told you were a needy and pathetic outsider. ‘So you’re suggesting at some point I morphed into an equally pathetic attention seeker with self-esteem issues.’ She wasn’t sure which was worst.

His lips twisted in a spasm of impatience. ‘Don’t spin my words. I’m
saying
that the tables were turned. You weren’t the one doing the vying. It was not surprising that, after years of being overlooked, being the focus of male attention should go to your head. You wouldn’t be the first person deprived of parental approval to confuse sex with love. Sex is only ever a short-term fix.’

The expression in his eyes when he drew this bleak conclusion made Megan wonder if this was personal.

Was Emilio thinking of the women he had slept with since his marriage collapsed when he spoke of short-term fixes? Was Rosanna the only woman he had ever loved? It was obvious after the airport debacle that, whatever he said, he was not over her.

‘It is hard to recover your self-respect, Megan, once you have lost it.’

‘Is that a polite way of saying you think I’m a tart?’

‘Do not put words in my mouth,’ he responded irritably.

Megan gave a bemused shrug and stared up at him. For a man with the reputation of infallibility, she reflected grimly, when Emilio got it wrong he got it wrong big time!

‘And you got all that from the colour of my lipstick! Amazing, you’re even smarter than they say.’

The muscles around his jaw tightened at her mock admiration. ‘Oh, so I’m meant to believe you didn’t have the
faintest
idea what you could do to me … a man, looking that way.’

‘Do to a man?’ Her eyes widened. The expression
smouldering in his deep-set eyes made her heart kick up several more uncomfortable notches. ‘Me? Sure,’ she drawled, coating her words with protective cynicism as she batted her eyelashes like crazy and struck a provocative pose, hand on hip. ‘It’s such a burden being irresistible. Ouch,’ she yelled, pulling back as his fingers closed like an iron band around her wrist.

The touch was light and the effect on her nervous system totally disproportionate. ‘This habit you have of putting yourself down before someone else does is one you should try to break.’

‘I don’t—’ Emilio watched the flash of recognition in her eyes before they fell from his.

‘That hurts,’ she lied, wincing not in pain but at the breathy sound of her own voice.

Emilio was breathing hard as he brought her hands together and pressed them, palms sealed, between his.

It was a moment before his gaze lifted from their entwined fingers. The blaze of hunger in his eyes as they connected with her own made Megan’s insides dissolve.

‘So does wanting a woman so much you can’t think of anything else, so much that you can’t function!’ he growled, jerking her roughly towards him until they stood thigh to thigh.

They were so close now that Megan could hear his heartbeat, or was that her own? His hands had moved to the small of her back, leaving her own trapped between their bodies. She might have struggled to work out where he ended and she started, except he was harder … much harder. The muscular thighs she was pressed against had as much give as oak-tree trunks.

Shaking her head to clear the dreamy, light-headed sensation, she forced herself to recognise the abrupt rise in her
core temperature for what it was: a hormone rush—God, a hormone avalanche!

She struggled hard to inject a note of humour into her response. ‘Your concern for your fellow man does you credit, but I promise to behave and never wear pink lipstick again.’

‘I have no concern for them.’ Emilio dismissed the mental well-being of one half of the population with an expressive sneer. ‘And,’ he added, gritting out the words with force, ‘I don’t want you to behave.’

‘You don’t?’ she whispered.

His glittering eyes held hers. ‘Not at all,’ he confirmed in a deep smoky voice that sent shivers of anticipation down her spine.

Emilio wanted her to misbehave—with him.

She said it twice in her head and it still didn’t seem real. Did she even know how to misbehave in the way he clearly expected? Her eyes drifted to his gorgeous, incredibly sexy mouth and suddenly her lack of experience felt less important as need swelled inside her, tightening into a hard fist of hot desire in her belly.

Emilio was the one man whom she had always been prepared to sacrifice her principles for. She had frequently told herself she was lucky he had never asked her to. That way, she had reasoned, she had no regrets—what she also did not have, but had not previously acknowledged, were no memories.

Now he was standing there, not asking directly but sending some pretty explicit messages, unless she had disastrously misinterpreted his thinly veiled comments and the gleam of sexual intent in his eyes was a figment of her overheated imagination.

She checked. That gleam looked real. It felt real, she
thought as a fresh shiver rippled through her body. At that moment it hit her that it
was
real; she wasn’t dreaming.

What am I doing?

Belatedly Megan’s self-protective instincts kicked in and her head dropped forward, causing her hair to fall in a silky screen around her face.

Space, she told herself. I need space and I need
not
to say, Take me!

Do not say it, Megan!

She bit down on the shameless words. She remained dumb but couldn’t put the space plan into action as her feet remained nailed to the floor.

She felt the sweat trickle down her back and realised with horror that if anything she was leaning into him, not pulling away. Her body just wasn’t listening to what her head was telling it.

Her body had its own agenda!

And to make the situation even more unbearable her brain might have closed down but her senses were painfully alert. Being this close to him, being able to smell him, feel the heat coming off his body, was physically painful.

She started shaking like someone with a fever. The intensity of the need pounding through her terrified her. It was utterly and totally outside her experience.

Had he noticed? Of course he had. The knowledge that she was trembling with sheer lust would presumably confirm his conviction she was a bed-hopping tart.