He kissed her.
The effect of that wide sensual mouth on hers set off a volcanic explosion deep inside her, pulsing the ripples of aftershock right through every nerve and vein in her body. Had her matching his hungry urgency with a driven desperation that shattered her int
o launching herself against his powerful frame, looping her arms around his neck, her avid fingers tangling in the soft midnight darkness of his hair.
He tasted of hot male passion and she couldn’t get enough of him. He was all she’d ever wanted, the only man she’d ever loved. Her body melted into him, her breasts peaking with open invitation, her lips matching his ravaging assault.
Her lips were still tingling, her knees shamefully shaky, when a short time later Diego handed her into the taxi he’d summoned to take her home. Her mind was still sickened by the ease with which he’d held her away from him when her response had threatened to get way out of hand. His coolly delivered, almost uninvolved comment that it was time she went home and a reminder that he’d call for her on Friday morning around seven-thirty was still ringing in ears that burned with shame. All capped off with the flatly delivered threat that he’d find her if she should be misguided enough to flee. It was a timely reminder of the humiliation he would dole out if she ever again was unguarded enough to demonstrate how she hungered for him.
An hour later she fell into bed still in a state of deep shock. Mostly induced by what her own behaviour had revealed about her. Diego Raffacani was a cruel blackmailing louse. So arrogantly sure of himself that he out and out refused to listen to a word she had to say in her own defence. He’d called her a liar and that alone should have put her off him for several lifetimes. But no, oh no! What had she gone and done? Shown him how needy she was, eager and straining against him, possessed by a frantic hunger for him.
She was still in love with him. She sobbed into her pillow. He was the only man she had ever loved. Far from being the promiscuous tramp of his imagining, she was still a virgin. Ben, the only other man she’d ever been involved with, had never inspired this wild yearning.
There had to be something drastically wrong with her if she could be in love with a man who was entirely without scruples or conscience. A man who intended to take her to his bed as an act of revenge, who had convinced himself that the blame for the way she’d insulted his precious pride, when she’d been too young to realise what she was doing, was hers entirely.
The immediate future looked bleaker than the lunar landscape. Lisa had no idea how she would survive it.
His car, a low sporty model, was waiting at the airport, delivered there by his Spanish minions, Lisa deduced grumpily, her spiky mood the legacy of a mostly sleepless night as she’d tried and failed to come to terms with what she was letting herself in for, the alarm clock ringing spitefully just as she had been finally dropping off. Her mood was not lightened by the sight of Diego arriving precisely at seven-thirty.
‘Ready?’ he enquired briskly, looking as if he’d had the benefit of a full eight hours sleep, a revitalising shower and a hearty breakfast.
‘I haven’t finished packing.’ A lie. She hadn’t started. Ever since that evening at his hotel suite she’d been hoping that something would happen to make him call this whole thing off. But he hadn’t miraculously lost his memory and she hadn’t broken a leg!
‘Then I suggest you get on with it. The taxi is waiting. If you are always this disorganised I’m amazed that you held down any sort of job at all, even one manufactured by a doting father.’
Her irritation level rose a thousand-fold. What did he know? ‘Dad doesn’t dote!’ she snapped and stamped into her bedroom to drag things out of drawers and cupboards and stuff them into a small suitcase.
Ever since then he’d been irritating the life out of her. Throughout the ride to the airport, the business of checking in and the flight itself he had been coolly polite and dutifully attentive. As if she were a virtual stranger he had found himself dragooned into escorting, when in harsh reality she was the woman he was callously blackmailing into becoming his temporary mistress.
Sub-mistress, she amended on a spurt of irrational anger. Though why she should object to the irrelevant point of being regarded as too low to be afforded even the slightly denigrating title of mistress only went to show what a muddle her mind was in. Whereas he, drat it, was calm and collected, single-minded, determined on one thing only—to take her to his bed and punish her for damaging his precious pride.
And then get rid of her.
Now, with the airport an hour’s drive behind them, Diego asked, ‘What did you mean when you said your father didn’t dote?’
Lisa dragged her eyes from the alarmingly twisty narrow road that snaked up into the mountains and fastened her gaze on his impressively chiselled profile. It was the first personal remark he’d made since they’d entered the waiting taxi back in London.
Shrugging slightly, she returned her attention to the view. Now and then she caught the glitter of the sea and, unlike London, the air cocooned her in welcome warmth. ‘I meant precisely what I said.’ Her relationship with her father was something she wasn’t prepared to discuss and, turning the subject, she asked, ‘So where are we going? How much further?’
Diego’s shoulders tautened as he handled the tortuous hairpin bends with practised ease. Who the hell did she think she was kidding? She would have been spoiled rotten from birth. What father worth the name wouldn’t slavishly lavish all his attention on such an outwardly bewitching little charmer, even more so after she’d been left motherless at a relatively tender age?
A memory from five years ago, as clear as all the myriad others that had haunted him for so long, assaulted him. The day he found he’d lost his watch. She’d held hers out to him. The thing would have cost a small fortune. And when he’d commented she’d simply shrugged. ‘My father’s birthday gift’, as if it were a mere trinket.
The spoiled brat had been given a responsible job on the magazine staff even though the whole enterprise was going pear-shaped and what had been desperately needed was an experienced editor. The fabulous dress she’d been wearing at her engagement party must have cost another small fortune, the where-withal doubtless supplied by doting daddy.
And that sparked a different train of thought.
‘How did Ben take the broken engagement?’ He’d noticed the absence of the diamond hoop. He noticed every damn thing about her. He remembered his own desperate pain when the spoiled brat had as good as told him to shove off and wondered, guiltily, if Ben Clayton had felt the same, wondered if his initial thought, that he’d actually been doing the poor sucker a favour, still held water.
‘That’s not really any of your business, is it?’ Lisa dismissed edgily. How could she tell him that hers and Ben’s would have been a passionless marriage, based on nothing more exciting than long-standing affection and mutual respect? That Ben had been wise enough to predict that even that kind of marriage couldn’t survive if one partner were still in thrall to a long-ago lost love?
‘And you haven’t answered my question,’ she reminded him snappily. ‘I have a right to know where you’re taking me.’
Fully expecting him to tell her she had no rights at all and to continue prodding about her broken engagement—did the cruel streak in him want to hear that Ben had been devastated, suicidal?—she was stunned when he answered equably, ‘To my favourite hideout. It used to be a monastery. The family rarely uses it these days. The area isn’t frequented by hordes of tourists; its beauty and tranquillity remain intact. Unlike Marbella,’ he added drily. ‘You will find no beautiful people, no glitzy shops, fabulous yachts or smart hotels to claim your attention. You will give it all to pleasing me.’
She should have kept her mouth shut, Lisa recognised sickly. Whatever she said he managed to come back with something designed to put her down.
The next days or weeks promised to be a nightmare of humiliation and pain, she acknowledged, the hauntingly beautiful landscape lost in a sudden blur of stingingly hot tears.