How ironic that this sexy creature was as unlike the real Kat Balfour as it was possible to imagine.
Kat straightened up to find the ebony eyes fixed on her and, as she stared into the shadowed and shuttered features, her heart began a strange, rhythmical pounding. Nervously, her tongue flicked over her lips as she looked up into the impenetrable black eyes. ‘Will…will there be anything else?’
Oh, what a question, he thought wryly. Innocent or deliberately provocative? Was she doing her best to slip into her role as domestic, or simply acknowledging the silent hunger which was sizzling between them? He felt the thud of his heart. As if sexy Kat Balfour would ever do innocence! ‘No. Nothing else.’ He shook his head as he read the silent yearning on her face—was she mirroring something of his own, he wondered frustratedly.
She went to walk past him but something made him stop her. Something in the gleam of moonlight which glanced off the thick abundance of her dark hair and arrested his attention as much as the pure lines of her perfect profile and the parted promise of her soft lips.
He stayed her with a touch of his hand to her bare forearm and she looked down at it and then up at him and he could feel her shiver beneath him. Could feel an answering tremor in his own body—the familiar tightening, like a bow being stretched by the sharp point of the arrow.
‘Kat,’ he murmured, barely aware that he had said her name.
All Kat was aware of was the wild black buccaneer curls which framed the shuttered face. The way that the moonlight cast indigo shadows on the golden-olive skin. The powerful physique and the long, long legs. She swallowed. It was as if he had cast some dark and silken net over her, rendering her incapable of sensible thought and feeling. Making her world telescope down and focus on the vibrant allure of the Spaniard. He had done it unconsciously on the night of the Balfour Ball but now she was certain that he was doing it deliberately. Why? Why? Was he simply playing with her—as a cat played with a foolish mouse before it moved in for the careless kill?
‘Stop it,’ she whispered, hardly realising what she was saying.
‘Stop what?’ he echoed.
‘Making me…’ Embarrassed now, her words tailed off—for how could she possibly admit to him what she didn’t even want to acknowledge to herself?
Yet it seemed that Carlos had no such similar qualms, for he gave her a mocking smile.
‘Stop making you want me?’ he taunted softly. ‘But I’m not. You’re doing that all by yourself. You just can’t help yourself, can you, Kat?’
She shook her head, rooted to the spot as if he had turned her into a statue. Where was the wisecracking Kat now? The woman who was left cold by members of the opposite sex? ‘Yes, I can,’ she whispered, but even to her own ears the denial sounded phony.
‘Liar.’ His voice dipped to become a verbal caress. ‘I can read your desire for me in your eyes—it’s so obvious that you might as well be carrying a banner saying so. And I can see it in your lips too—their beautiful pout forgotten. Everything forgotten, in fact—because there’s only one thing on your mind and we both know what that is.’
‘Please!’ Her protest came out like a squeak—and now she even sounded like a mouse. Was that because she couldn’t bring herself to inject the word with any real conviction? Because despite Carlos’s clear disdain for her on so many levels, she stupidly wanted him just as much as she’d always wanted him?
‘You’re longing for me to kiss you, aren’t you, Kat?’ he mused. ‘To kiss you—only this time, not to stop. To lie you down and part your silken thighs and to thrust into you long and hard and deep until you cry out your pleasure.’
Kat’s knees buckled and for a very real moment she was afraid that she might faint, because the graphic words were only increasing her desire. And how shameful was that? Tell him no. Tell him no and then push past him and go back down to the galley. He might be a practised seducer with a cruel tongue which could lash out at her, but she doubted that he would actually pull her into his arms and take her by force. Hating herself for the shiver of longing which accompanied this dark fantasy, Kat stayed mute.
‘Aren’t you?’ he prompted silkily.
Her desire became intolerable. Unbearable. She fought and fought it but in the end it was no good. ‘Yes!’ she burst out at last. ‘Yes, I am!’
Carlos nodded, recognising what it must have cost her to admit it. ‘Well, that makes two of us,’ he said unsteadily, and leaned forward to kiss her unprotesting lips.
She had expected urgency. A rapid escalation into full-blown desire. An unashamed seduction. But Kat was wrong. Instead, he slowly pushed the fallen strands of hair away from her face as if he had all the time in the world, studying it like a scientist looking through a microscope for some rogue cell. He let his gaze drift from her brow to her eyes, then slowly down until it focused entirely upon her lips, and she felt them automatically part beneath his scrutiny.
‘Flawless,’ he said slowly, shaking his head a little. ‘Absolutely flawless.’
The kiss, when it came, was nothing like she expected. More of a graze than a kiss—a quicksilver brush of his lips against hers. And then again. Back and forth his mouth teased her, light as a butterfly and as tantalising as the first warmth of the morning sun. His breath was warm and she could smell his own particular raw, clean scent. It was a kiss which managed to be both innocent and sensual all at the same time. Nothing more than that, but enough to make Kat sway and weaken.
‘Oh!’ she breathed, and hungrily she reached for him.
But, using an expertise which he’d employed more than most men—often to literally save his own skin in the bullring—Carlos neatly sidestepped the movement. Putting out his hand he caught and steadied her, though he kept his body at an
untouchable distance from hers, his face tight with tension. Because this was, in a way, the ultimate demonstration of his formidable control over his body.
‘No. No.’ There was a moment while he steadied his breath, and when he spoke he seemed to be speaking to himself as much as to her. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said flatly.
Incredulity made her voice falter even while her body screamed out for the closeness of his. ‘C-can’t?’
Carlos narrowed his eyes. Did the little witch think he was incapable of giving her what she wanted? ‘Forgive me if I have not made myself clear, Princesa. Sometimes when I speak in English, the subtleties of your language escape me. What I should have said is that I won’t make love to you.’ Her bright blue eyes continued to stare at him in puzzled query. Maldición, but she was persistent. And shameless, he reminded himself. For a woman like this was used to getting exactly what she wanted—and she wanted him. Too bad. ‘It would be an abuse of my role as your employer,’ he finished softly.
The rejection hurt more than it should have done and the telltale pricking of her eyes warned her that she might be about to do something intolerable, like burst into tears. And that Mr Ego might think she was crying over him. As if she would ever shed a tear over a man as unfeeling as Carlos Guerrero!