Hostage of Passion

Piers had been right. He was a crazy man. She took a deep breath, made sure her mind was in full control before she opened her mouth, then snapped out, ‘I don’t operate a marriage bureau, Señor Casals. I suggest you go and look behind a few aristocratic Spanish grilles.’

‘I do not want to look behind anything but your formidable disguise,’ he said fiercely. ‘And no, of course you don’t operate a marriage bureau. You haven’t enough romance in your soul!’

Sarah went white. Struggling to contain the wild emotional upheaval that was taking place inside her, she turned and lurched to the window, clutching the sill, staring out blindly at the back of the office premises, seeing nothing but his extravagantly gorgeous face.

How dared he say she had no romance in her soul? How dared he, when her love for him had filled her soul every moment of every day for the last two weeks? When every time she closed her eyes she saw his face? When, in the midst of her restless dreams, in almost every waking moment, she heard his voice?

She had even, God help her, been drawn closer and closer to the idea of selling the agency, taking the money and slinging her hook, trying to find something interesting to do with the rest of her life. Something absorbing enough, challenging enough to block him out. Her agency, once the centre of her existence, meant less than nothing to her now.

Her hands clenched into fists. He had done that to her! He had made her do what she’d determinedly vowed never to do—let her emotions make a mess of her life. And he had the gall to come here, criticise the way she dressed, taunt her with the fact that, at long last, he had decided it was time he took a wife! What did he expect her to do? Applaud?

‘You’re wasting my time,’ she said thinly. The only positive thing to come out of the wild fantasy of those few days in Spain with him was her new and closer relationship with Piers. Everything else was negative. She had to remember that.

Tears choked her throat as she heard him curse colourfully and violently in his own language. He came to stand beside her and as she turned her face away, unable to look at him, fiercely determined that he wouldn’t see how easily he could make cry, he scoffed, ‘When you live with me, you will not look out on to brick walls and dustbins; you will see the mountains and valleys of the most beautiful, vital country God created.’

He touched her shoulder and she gasped, every atom of her being converging beneath the fire of his fingers. And then the tears really came, pouring down her face, and he put an imperative finger beneath her chin, turning her head, watching the shame of her watery weakness. She gulped, sniffing inelegantly, wishing she could vanish in a puff of smoke because she’d been weak enough, uncontrolled enough, to burst into messy tears and betray herself.

And clearly, from what he had said, he’d decided that he wanted her in his bed after all. For a couple of weeks, as he had so lightly suggested, putting a time limit on her ability to interest him. Which meant that Encarnación wasn’t around to be contaminated by big brother’s dubious moral example.

Well, she wouldn’t oblige! She had insanely believed that the pain would be worth it, for the memories she would be able to store away. She had guessed at, but hadn’t then experienced, the agony of being apart from him. Second time round would be impossible to bear, knowing that when he’d got her out of his system he would go on the prowl for a suitable bride.

‘So you do have a heart, and it can be broken,’ he said cruelly. ‘I am pleased. When you said, in that prim little voice, that you’d already made up your mind about staying on with me, your tone, your manner, and the anguish of my own heart, told me that despite responding to me so gloriously you were far too sensible to do anything so rash. I thought then that you didn’t have a heart. Only a little black book, full of unbreakable rules.’

He had got it so wrong, she thought shakily, leaning her head weakly against his leather-clad shoulder. He had jumped to the wrong conclusion about her decision and she wasn’t going to correct him. And she had no idea why she was doing this, leaning against him, melting into him, allowing him to get away with stealing the pins out of her hair. She should be firmly ordering him out. Threatening to send for the police if he refused to go. Instead…

‘But still I hoped,’ he told her in a voice of monumental suffering, and she permitted herself a wan little smile, hidden in his shirt, because with Francisco Garcia Casals every emotion would be larger than life, every ounce of sensation wrested from it. And pathos was coming in buckets as he sighed, ‘I had promised you a night on your own to think things over. For that I deserve praise, this is true. I could have so easily persuaded your body, but I wanted also to persuade your mind. I forbade myself to come to you. I waited the night out, praying to the saints that you would change your mind about leaving, only to find you in the morning, dressed again as Chairman Mao, so eager to leave you could barely speak to me, except to insult me. You implied I’d been nothing more than an amusing entertainment. You anguished me!’

Sarah dragged her lower lip between her teeth. How on earth could he make her want to laugh hysterically when her heart was almost audibly breaking? He was utterly impossible, and his dented ego was making his English quite peculiar.

He had removed all her hairpins, tossing them disdainfully away to the four corners of her office, arranging the loosened, glitteringly pale mass over her shoulders, and now he turned his attention to her face, cupping his hands on either side of her head, forcing her away from the refuge of his now damp shirt.

He said growlingly, ‘You make me insane. I had not a thought in my head of taking you hostage until your proper little personage glared at me over this desk. An exquisite beauty dressed as a battleaxe, behaving like a robot. I longed to tear off the disguise and find the real woman. So I did crazy, foolhardy things—’

‘Wicked things,’ she elaborated sternly, wanted to negate the way he made her feel—weak with love, awash with submissive femininity, hopelessly at sea in an ocean of yearning.

‘Of course.’ His black eyes glittered. ‘With you I will always do wicked things. How can I resist, when you make me do them? The way you schemed to get the better of me amused and intrigued me, made me respond and leap one stride ahead, then wait to see what you would do next to overtake me. And all the time, every second, I was growing more enthralled, hardly able to keep my hands off you, lost in admiration of your body and your brain. And you said things that made me think, examine myself, and no other person has been able to do that.

‘So I did the correct thing. I gave you your freedom,’ he concluded with dignified simplicity. ‘And, because I suddenly found I couldn’t bear the thought of your leaving, I asked you to stay. I was wrong.’

His thumbs stroked her damp eyelids, brushing away the tears that spiked her lashes. ‘So many tears,’ he breathed, ‘give me much hope.’

Her brows peaked, her soft mouth quivering. She wasn’t following his line of thought. She whispered shakily, ‘What are you saying?’

‘I should have known you wouldn’t so easily give way to the fires of passion. You had spent all your life pretending they didn’t exist. I should have thought of that and given you a little black book full of rules and opt-out clauses and contracts signed with blood, along with my invitation. It was only when I watched you walk away that I knew I wanted nothing to do with opt-out clauses, that I wanted you with me until the end of my life, that I had been falling in love with you.’

Shock rippled through her, making her giddy. She clung to him feverishly, her voice shaky as she demanded, ‘Say that again.’

‘What, all of it?’ His voice was growly with laughter. ‘Or just that I love you more than life, want you to be my wife, make you big with my babies?’

‘Oh, Francisco,’ she breathed deliriously, further speech impossible as his arms closed around her, bringing her up against the demanding thrust of his body, and his mouth covered hers, his lips forcing hers apart with gentle determination. She responded wildly, dazed by

the fantasy that had become glorious fact, melting, whimpering with ecstasy as his hands impatiently removed her navy blue structured suit jacket and began undoing the buttons down the front of her neat white blouse.

Only then did the serpent of common sense slide through her frenzied, passionate responses. She took his hands and made them go still, her voice raw with hunger as she reminded him, ‘This is my office. Any one of half a dozen people could walk right in!’

‘Not so.’ Soft black eyes invited her to drown in them. ‘I locked the door behind me and dared Jenny to put a call through on pain of her life. And this is not your office,’ he denied softly as she reached up to twine her loving fingers through his soft dark hair. ‘It is your prison.’ He swept a raking, disparaging glance around. ‘And it doesn’t even have a sofa.’ Quick fingers slotted the buttons of her blouse back into their holes. ‘I do not make love to my future wife on an office floor.’

He retrieved the jacket he’d tossed aside and gently eased her arms into the sleeves and she bit down on her swollen mouth, trembling now between laughter and passion, as he dictated, ‘You will walk out of your prison with me, into the splendid freedom of our future. And you will get rid of it—the agency—everything. It is thriving— I made enquiries—so you will have no difficulty selling it, and none of your employees will need fear for their jobs. Es verdad?’