The Morning After

‘I need something.’

Reluctantly he let go. Instantly she stepped closer, her fingers sliding over his muscled shoulder and around his strong neck, searching for, finding and curling around his tail of hair, then she buried her face in his warm throat and sighed as if she’d just been saved from drowning.

He muttered something and gathered her possessively in. ‘

What made you suddenly do that?’ he asked tensely.

‘Do what you like with the pictures,’ she whispered into his taut throat. ‘Give them to Todd—don’t give them to Todd.’ Her lips slid a sensual caress across his skin. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘You’re Adamas. Invincible. My rock. I’m marooning myself.’

‘Ah,’ he said, relaxing as he caught on. ‘So you are relinquishing all responsibility to me?’

‘That’s right.’ Her lips moved on to taste his chin. He needed a shave, so she stopped caressing and bit sensuously instead. ‘You say you don’t care what they throw at you, so—prove it. Publish and be damned, Mr Adamas,’ she challenged. ‘Let them throw the lot at you—you can take it.

‘I can just see the world headlines—SUPERMODEL ANNIE LACEY LANDS VENEZUELAN OIL BARON IN GRENADINE LOVE COUP!’ she quoted. ‘“The price for exclusive rights to her body, a five-million-dollar sapphire and diamond-encrusted necklace from the Adamas collection, no less!”’

‘Oh, please,’ he drawled, the sound deep and sensually amused. ‘GREAT GENIUS ADAMAS! I will not be upstaged by your supermodel status.’

She grinned, then stopped grinning to look seriously into his warmly laughing eyes. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ she asked softly. ‘That they’re going to have a field-day with all of this?’

‘Do I look as though I mind?’ he murmured lazily.

‘No,’ she pouted. ‘You look—’

She didn’t manage to finish that sentence because the look was transformed into action—an action that had them tumbling onto the bed and into a wild, hot, passionate morass of sensual rediscovery.

* * *

‘You were very rough on him,’ Annie remarked a few days later as they stood together on the lower veranda, watching the helicopter that had brought Todd to the island that morning take him away again.

Todd had arrived in a belligerent mood, still unforgiving of Susie and determined to get the exclusive on Annie’s marriage to César—without having Susie wearing the Adamas collection included in the deal.

He’d gone away conceding everything to a tough-talking, utterly immovable César—still belligerent, still feeling as if he had been manipulated by both César and Susie, but with his good business-sense winning over bruised ego in the end.

And the only consolation that he had gained from the whole episode was a total reassurance that Annie was exactly where she wanted to be.

‘This whole business has been rough on everybody,’ was César’s unsympathetic reply to her now. ‘I don’t see why your half-brother should come out of it any less battle-scarred than the rest of us. Susie looked like a whipped dog that day he announced you were going to front his launch into Europe,’ he added grimly. ‘I don’t know how I kept my hands off his cruel throat.’

‘Poor Susie,’ Annie sighed, turning to watch the helicopter fly out of sight. ‘Do you think they’ll manage to sort out their personal problems after this?’ she asked worriedly.

‘We have given them the means by which to keep communications open with the Adamas deal. The rest,’ he said grimly, ‘is up to them. But, you know, with a bit of trust on his side, Angelica, things need not have become as bad as they did for him and Susie.’

He was right, and she didn’t argue with him. In fact, she had always tried to get Todd to tell Susie the truth about their own relationship, because she had known that it was causing unnecessary problems for both of them. If he had done, then maybe none of this would have happened.

Which was a bit of a double-edged sword, really, she mused wryly, because then she would not have been standing where she was standing right now—in the arms of the man she loved!

‘And anyway,’ César concluded with a shrug, ‘I have no wish to dwell on their love-life any more than I have done already. My own love-life is complicated enough without taking on board their problems as well.’

‘I am not complicated at all!’ she denied, turning in the crook of his arm to glare at him. ‘In fact—’ she pouted ‘—I bet you’ve never had such an easy conquest as me! How long did it take?’ she demanded. ‘Twenty-four hours from meeting to getting me into your bed?’

He smiled with his mouth, but his eyes didn’t; they darkened into a breathtaking seriousness. ‘Four years,’ he corrected. ‘I spent four years aching for you. You tormented my mind, my heart, my empty soul…’

Sighing, he pulled her closer. ‘I don’t think I will ever come to terms with what one urgent phone call did to the next four years of my life,’ he murmured heavily. ‘I had it all set up—the party at my London apartment, the contact who would bring you to it. Then there was the teeth-gritting, electric anticipation of actually getting to meet you in the flesh at last. Then the call that forced me away that night.’ His mouth tightened. ‘And everything just seemed to fall apart around me. I hated Alvarez for doing that to me.’

‘And hated me for letting him come near me,’ she added hollowly.

‘No!’ He denied that. ‘I hated you for ruining any hope I had of ever approaching you. Anyone else, Angelica,’ he muttered painfully. ‘Anyone else and it wouldn’t have mattered. I am no prude! But my own sister’s husband?’ His sigh was tense. ‘It left me with nothing—nothing to cling on to, you understand?’

‘Don’t,’ she whispered, settling her trembling fingers against the grim tension of his mouth.