The Housekeeper's Awakening

‘You’ve got a tan,’ he said.

Following the direction of his gaze, she glanced down to see the glimpse of white where her shoulder strap had shifted. ‘A bit.’ She smiled, trying for a little levity to lighten the heavy atmosphere which had suddenly descended on them. ‘That is what tends to happen when you expose your skin to the sun, Luis.’

‘And you’ve lost weight.’

‘Have I?’

Their eyes met. ‘You know you have.’

‘If I have, it wasn’t intentional.’ She shrugged. ‘This climate doesn’t...well, it doesn’t give me much of an appetite, and Simone’s been serving those delicious salads. And I’ve been swimming every morning—in this weather it seems criminal not to. All that helps.’

There was another factor, of course. One which she wouldn’t be confiding in him any time soon—and the main reason why her normally healthy appetite seemed to have deserted her.

She wondered what he would say if he knew. If he’d be shocked to learn that these days she had grown to dread and long for their massage sessions, in equal measure. That just the thought of going anywhere near his warm skin started a terrible aching deep inside her. And it was getting worse. She found her hands wanting to linger on his flesh. She wanted to bend her head to the base of his neck and kiss the dark tendrils which curled there. She wondered how her attitude towards men and sex could have changed so radically. Was it possible that all her hard-wired fears of intimacy had been melted by daily exposure to Luis Martinez and his magnificent body?

‘Don’t you own a bikini?’

His impatient question startled her and Carly looked at him. ‘A bikini?’

‘You know, the garment of choice for most women your age rather than something your grandmother might be seen wearing.’

Her cheeks grew hot as she looked down to where her thighs were outlined against the cushions of the sunlounger. ‘I’m the wrong sort of shape for a bikini.’

‘And what sort of shape is that?’

She lifted her gaze to his. ‘Too fat.’

‘You are not too fat,’ he said impatiently. ‘You’re curvy, yes—but in all the right places. And men like curves. Actually, they like to see them, instead of them being hidden away behind shapeless clothes which are deeply unflattering.’ His mouth hardened. ‘You ought to give it a try some time. Stop moaning about the way you look and try doing something to change it, if it makes you unhappy.’

‘You do say the nicest things, Luis.’

‘Maybe it was something you needed to hear,’ he said, unrepentantly.

She snapped her book shut. ‘What time is it?’

‘Ten after four.’

‘Then we’d better go for your massage.’

‘If you say so, Carly.’

‘I do say so.’

But Luis didn’t move. He couldn’t. Because massage was the last thing he was thinking about right then. From here all he could see were her legs. Legs which had turned a shade of the dulce de leche he used to eat as a child. A paler shade than the syrupy sweet which used to seep out from the facturas pastries his mother used to make—back in the days before betrayal had slipped its lethal knife into his world and changed it for ever.

He felt that familiar little stab of pain but it was overridden by the infinitely sharper spiralling of lust. He dragged his gaze away from her legs but today she was like a beacon who seemed to glow golden just about everywhere. Even her hair had caught the sun and there were pale licks of colour nestling in amid the sedate brown, making it look as if she’d spent hours at an expensive hairdresser’s. He shifted his position a little, but it had little effect on the heavy aching at his groin.

‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said tersely. ‘I need to make a phone call first.’

‘Fifteen minutes it is.’ She scrambled up from the lounger as if she couldn’t wait to get away from him. ‘I’ll see you in the massage room.’

He watched her go and the sway of her hips made him harder still. Her swimsuit was riding up and revealing more of her bottom than she probably would have liked, if only she’d been aware of it. He suspected she would be appalled if she knew just how much of her creamy buttocks he could see, because she was a prude, no question. She dressed like a prude and she acted like one, too.

Yet he knew enough about women to realise that she was as jumpy as a box of newly lit fireworks whenever he was around. And then some. Did she think he was blind to the way her cheeks went pink whenever he walked unexpectedly into the room? Her newly acquired tan wasn’t deep enough to conceal that. Did she think he hadn’t noticed that her breasts were diamond-nubbed and straining, whenever they were in the pool together? Or that during his massage sessions her hands had gone back to that same trembling she’d had at the beginning.

It was a powerful kind of chemistry, and if it had been anyone other than Carly she would have made a pass at him by now. And in truth, that probably would have been enough to deflate his interest—or certainly to cut it short. The easy lay had never been a problem; it was the potentially unobtainable which had always intrigued him. He realised that he’d never met anyone who had actively fought her attraction to him before. It was incredibly...arousing.

Propping his walking stick against the lounger, he pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his robe and called his office in Argentina. For a while he allowed his mind to be taken over with the practical considerations of his business empire, while his assistant read out the list of bullet points she had prepared for him. Most concerned his global building projects: the luxury apartments being constructed on Uruguay’s most beautiful beach and the new hospital in Santiago del Estero. As he listened to her neat summary, he realised that everything was going according to plan. The conservation measures he was instigating in the south of his country had been so successful that he’d been asked to chair a Pan-European convention in the fall.