A Tempestuous Temptation (14 page)

‘I want to take you again, but first …’ Luiz felt an urgent need to set a few facts straight, to reassure himself that this feeling of being out of control, carried away by a current against which he seemed to be powerless, was just a temporary situation. ‘You know this isn’t going to go anywhere, don’t you?’ He brushed her hair away from her face so that he could look her directly in the eye. So this might be the wrong time and the wrong place to say this, but it had to be said. He had to clear the air. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think …’

‘Shh. I don’t think anything.’ Aggie smiled bravely while a series of pathways began connecting in her brain. This man she loathed, to whom she was desperately attracted, was a man who could make her laugh even though she had found him overbearing and arrogant, the same man who had slowly filled her head and her heart. It was why she was here now. In bed with him. She hadn’t suddenly become a woman with no morals who thought it was fine to jump into bed on the basis of sexual attraction. No. That had been a little piece of fiction she had sold herself because the truth staring her in the face had been unacceptable.

‘I’m not about to start making demands. You and I, we’re not suited and we never will be. But we’re attracted to one another. That’s all. So, why don’t we just have some fun? Because we both know that tomorrow it all comes to an end.’

A
GGIE
spent the night in her own bedroom. Drunk with love-making, she had made sure to tiptoe along the corridor at a little after two in the morning. It was important to remind herself that this was not a normal relationship. It had boundaries and Luiz had made sure to remind her of that the night before. She wasn’t about to over step any of them.

She heard the beeping of her phone the following morning and woke to find a series of messages from her brother, all asking her to give him a call.

Panicked, Aggie sat up and dialled his mobile with shaking fingers. She was ashamed to admit that her brother had barely registered on her radar over the past few hours. In fact, she guiltily realised that she had been too focused on herself for longer than that to spare much thought for Mark.

She got through to him almost immediately. The conversation, on her end, barely covered a sentence or two. Down the other end of the line, Mark did all the talking and at the end of ten minutes Aggie ended the call, shell-shocked.

Everything was about to change now, and for a few seconds she resented her brother’s intrusion into the little bubble she had built for herself. She checked the time on
her phone. Luiz had tried to pull her back into bed with him before she had left in the early hours of the morning, but Aggie had resisted. Luiz was a man who always got what he wanted and rarely paused to consider the costs. He wanted her and would see nothing wrong in having her, whenever and wherever. He was good when it came to detaching and, once their time together was over, he would instantly break off and walk away. Aggie knew that she would not be able to, so putting some distance between them, if not sharing a room for the night could be termed putting distance between them, was essential.

So they had agreed to meet for breakfast at nine. Plenty of time to check the weather and for Luiz to catch up with emails. It was now a little after eight, and Aggie was glad for the time in which she could have a bath and think about what her brother had told her.

Luiz was waiting for her in the dining room, where a pot of coffee was already on the table and two menus, one of which he was scanning, although he put it down as she hovered for a few seconds in the doorway.

She was in a pair of faded jeans and a blue jumper, her hair tied back. She looked like a very sexy schoolgirl, and all at once he felt himself stir into lusty arousal. He hadn’t been able to get enough of her the night before. In fact, he recalled asking her at one point whether she was too sore for him to touch her again down there. He leaned back in the chair and shot her a sexy half-smile as she walked towards him.

‘You should have stayed with me,’ were his first words of greeting. ‘You would have made an unbeatable wake-up call.’

Aggie slipped into the chair opposite and helped herself to some coffee. Mark and his news were at the top of her mind but it was something she would lead up to carefully.

‘You said you wanted to get some work done before you came down to breakfast. I wouldn’t have wanted to interrupt you.’

‘I’m good at multi-tasking. You’d be surprised how much work I can get through when there’s someone between my legs paying attention to …’

‘Shh!’ She went bright red and Luiz laughed, entertained at her prurience.

‘You get my drift, though?’

‘Is that the kind of wake-up call you’re accustomed to?’ She held the cup between her hands and looked at him over the rim. She had kept her voice light but underneath she could feel jealousy swirling through her veins, unwelcome and inappropriate.

‘The only wake-up calls I’m accustomed to are the ones that come from alarm clocks.’ He hadn’t thought about it, but women sleeping in his bed didn’t happen.

‘You mean you’ve never had a night with a woman in your bed? What about holidays?’

‘I don’t do holidays with women.’

Aggie gazed at him in surprise.

‘It’s not that unusual,’ Luiz muttered, shooting her a brooding look from under his lashes. ‘I’m a busy man. I don’t have time for the demands of a woman on holiday.’

‘How on earth do you ever relax?’

‘I return to Brazil. My holidays are there.’ He shrugged. ‘I used to go on holidays with a couple of my pals. The occasional weekend. Usually skiing. Those have dried up over the past few years.’

‘Your holidays were with your guy friends?’

‘How did we end up having this conversation?’ He raked his fingers through his dark hair in a gesture that she had come to recognise as one of frustration.

If this was about sex and nothing more—and he had
made it clear that for him it was—then Aggie knew she should steer clear of in-depth conversations. He wouldn’t welcome them. She fancied that it had always been his way of avoiding the commitment of a full-blown relationship, his way of keeping women at a safe distance. If you didn’t have any kind of revealing conversation with someone, then it was unlikely that anyone would ever get close to you. Her curiosity felt like a treacherous step in dangerous waters.

‘There’s nothing wrong with talking to one another.’ She glanced down at the menu and made noises about scrambled eggs and toast.

‘Guys don’t need attention to be lavished on them,’ Luiz said abruptly. ‘We’re all experienced skiers. We do the black runs, relax for a couple of hours in the evening. Good exercise. No one complaining about not being entertained.’

‘I can’t imagine anyone having the nerve to complain to you,’ Aggie remarked, and Luiz relaxed.

‘You’d be surprised, although women complaining fades into insignificance when set alongside your remarkable talent for arguing with me. Not that I don’t like it. It’s your passionate nature. Your
extremely
passionate nature.’

‘Plus those chalet girls can be very attractive if you decide you miss the entertainment of females …’

Luiz laughed, his dark eyes roaming appreciatively over her face. ‘When I go skiing, I ski. The last thing I’ve ever wanted is any kind of involvement in those brief windows of leisure time I get round to snatching for myself.’

‘And those brief windows have dried up?’

‘My father hasn’t been well,’ Luiz heard himself say. It was a surprising admission and not one he could remember making to anyone. Only he and his mother knew the real state of his father’s health. Like him, his father didn’t appreciate fuss and he knew that his daughters would fuss
around him. He was also the primary figurehead for the family’s vast empire. Many of the older clients would react badly to any hint that Alfredo Montes was not in the prime of good health. Whilst for years Luiz had concentrated on his own business concerns, he had been obliged to take a much more active role in his father’s various companies over the past few years, slowly building confidence for the day when his father could fully retire.

‘I’m sorry.’ She reached out and covered his hand with hers. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Forget I said anything.’

‘Why? Is it … terminal?’

Luiz hesitated. ‘He had a stroke a few years ago and never made a full recovery. He can still function, but not in the way he used to. His memory isn’t what it used to be, nor are his levels of concentration. He’s been forced into semi-retirement. No one is aware of his health issues aside from me and my mother.’

‘So … you’ve been overseeing his affairs so that he can slow down?’

‘It’s not a big deal.’ He beckoned across a waitress, closing down the conversation while Aggie fitted that background information about him into the bigger picture she was unconsciously building.

Luiz Montes was a workaholic who had found himself in a situation where he couldn’t afford to stand still. He had no time for holidays and even less for the clutter of a relationship. But, even into that relentless lifestyle, he had managed to fit in this tortuous trip on behalf of his sister. It proclaimed family loyalty and a generosity of spirit that she had not given him credit for.

‘There’s something you need to know,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘Mark finally got through to me this morning. In fact, last night. I left my phone in the bedroom
and didn’t check it before I went to sleep. I woke up this morning to find missed calls and text messages for me to call him.’

‘And?’

‘They’re not in the Lake District after all. They’re in Las Vegas.’

‘So they did it. They tied the knot, the bloody fools.’ Luiz didn’t feel the rage he had expected. He was still dwelling on the uncustomary lapse in judgement that had allowed him to confide in her. He had never felt the need to pour his heart and soul out to anyone. Indeed, he had always viewed such tendencies as weaknesses, but strangely sharing that secret had had a liberating effect. Enough to smooth over any anger he knew he should have been feeling at his niece doing something as stupid as getting married when she was still a child herself.

‘I never said that.’ Aggie grinned and he raised his eyebrows enquiringly.

‘Share the joke? Because I’m not seeing anything funny from where I’m sitting.’ But he could feel himself just going through the motions.

‘Well, for a start, they haven’t got married.’

Luiz looked at her in silence. ‘Come again?’

‘Your sister was obviously worried for no good reason. Okay, maybe Maria confided that she loved my brother. Maybe she indulged in a bit of girlish wishful thinking, but that was as far as it went. There was never any plan to run away and get married in the dead of night.’

‘So we’ve spent the past few days on a fool’s errand? What the hell are they doing in
Las Vegas
?’ Less than a week ago, he would have made a sarcastic comment about the funding for such a trip, but then less than a week ago he hadn’t been marooned with this woman in the middle of nowhere. Right at this moment in time, he really
couldn’t give a damn who had paid for what or who was ripping whom off.

He found himself thinking of that foster home—the atmosphere of cheeriness despite the old furnishings and the obvious lack of luxuries. He thought of Aggie’s dingy rented house. Both those things should have hit him as evidence of people not out to take what they could get.

‘Mark’s over the moon.’ Aggie rested her chin in the palm of her hand and looked at Luiz with shining eyes. ‘He got a call when they’d only just left London. He said that he was going to call me but then he knew that he wasn’t expected back for a few days and he didn’t want to say anything just in case nothing came of it. But through a friend of a friend of a friend, a record producer got to hear one of his demos and flew them both over so that they could hear some more. He’s got a recording contract!’

‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

‘So …’ Aggie sat back to allow a plate of eggs and toast to be put in front of her. ‘There’s no point carrying on any further.’

‘No, there isn’t.’

‘You’ll be relieved, I bet. You can get back to your work, although I’m going to preach at you now and tell you that it’s not healthy to work the hours you do, even if you feel you have no choice.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘I mean, you need to be able to enjoy leisure time as much as you enjoy working time. Sorry? What did you say?’

Luiz shrugged. ‘When we get back to London.’ He hadn’t intended on having any kind of relationship with her, but after last night he couldn’t foresee relinquishing it just yet. ‘A slight reduction in the workload wouldn’t
hurt. It’s the Christmas season. People are kicking back. It’s not as frenetic in the business world as it usually is.’

‘So you’re going to take a holiday?’ Aggie’s heart did a sudden, painful flip. ‘Will you be going to Brazil, then?’

‘I can’t leave the country just yet.’

‘I thought you said that you were going to have a break.’

‘Which isn’t to say that I’m suddenly going to drop out of sight. There are a couple of deals that need work, meetings I can’t get out of.’ He pushed his plate away and sat back to look at her steadily. ‘We need to talk about … us. This.’

‘I know. It wasn’t the wisest move in the world. Neither of us anticipated that … that …’

‘That we wouldn’t be able to keep our hands off one another?’

How easy it was for him to think about it purely in terms of sex, Aggie thought. While
she
could only think of it in terms of falling in love. She wondered how many women before her had made the same mistake of bucking the guidelines he set and falling in love with him. Had his last girlfriend been guilty of that sin?

‘The circumstances were peculiar,’ Aggie said, keen to be as light-hearted about what happened between them as he was. ‘It’s a fact that people can behave out of character when they’re thrown into a situation they’re not accustomed to. I mean, none of this would have happened if we hadn’t … found ourselves snowbound on this trip.’

‘Wouldn’t it?’ His dark eyes swept thoughtfully over her flushed face.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I like to think I’m honest enough not to underestimate this attraction I feel for you. I noticed you the first time I saw you and it wasn’t just as a potential gold-digger. I think I was sexually attracted to you from the beginning.
Maybe I would never have done anything about it but I wouldn’t bet on that.’

‘
I
didn’t notice you!’

‘Liar.’

‘I didn’t,’ Aggie insisted with a touch of desperation. ‘I mean, I just thought you were Maria’s arrogant uncle who had only appeared on the scene to warn us off. I didn’t even like you!’

‘Who’s talking about like or dislike? That’s quite different from sexual attraction. Which brings me back to my starting point. We’ll head back down to London as soon as we’ve finished breakfast, and when we get to London I want to know what your plans are. Because I’m not ready to give this up just yet. In fact, I would say that I’m just getting started …’

Just yet
. Didn’t that say it all? But at least he wasn’t trying to disguise the full extent of his interest in her; at least he wasn’t pretending that they were anything but two ships passing in the night, dropping anchor for a while before moving on their separate journeys.

When Aggie thought of her last boyfriend, he had been fond of planning ahead, discussing where they would go on holiday in five years’ time. She had fancied herself in love, but like an illness it had passed quickly and soon after she had realised that what she had really loved was the feeling of permanence that had been promised.