It was an unfortunate remark. Her jewel-bright eyes raked over him in a tempestuous surge.
‘You may not be very tall…but in your own special way, you’re quite magnificent,’ Antonio remarked, his brilliant gaze welded to her with raw appreciation. He mounted the stairs with the subtle predatory grace of a big game hunter closing in on a target. ‘I missed you.’
‘I don’t care!’ Sophie launched back down at him even though she knew she did care very much and her angry voice echoed round the landing like a crash of feminine thunder. ‘It’s at times like this that I hate you!’
Having flung that declaration, Sophie headed with fast and furious steps for the sanctuary of her bedroom. She wanted to punch something. She really wanted to punch him, but he was off limits because she would not have liked it had he punched her. How dared he remind her that she was his wife in that superior tone of censure? How dared he even refer to her with that label?
Antonio strode into her room only a split second in her wake. ‘You don’t hate me,’ he told her with infuriating confidence.
‘We had an agreement and you made that agreement. You told me that you wanted to hang onto your freedom!’
Antonio lifted and dropped a broad shoulder in fatalistic style. ‘I’m not denying it.’
‘And then out of the blue you show up and you start telling me that I have to behave like a real wife!’
‘But you are a real wife,’ Antonio asserted.
‘Maybe technically speaking…but that angle doesn’t matter,’ Sophie told him heatedly. ‘We need to talk about you practising what you preach.’
Antonio was fascinated by the way she was laying down the law. She employed neither flattery nor feminine guile to state her case. She was not afraid to say exactly what she thought. But no woman had ever utilised such a direct approach on Antonio and he was impressed. ‘Is that a fact?’
‘Yes, it is,’ Sophie confirmed with vehemence, her heart-shaped face flushed with anger. ‘You said you wanted your freedom but that means…that has to mean that you’re not entitled to interfere with mine…right?’
‘Wrong. En realidad…you are very wrong on that score,’ Antonio declared, lean, powerful face taut. ‘Tonight I could not even stand by and watch you dance with another man without feeling that something was wrong.’
Sophie’s eyes opened to their fullest extent. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘You’re my wife. You wear my ring on your finger. You live in my home. You cannot be my wife and independent of me—’
Her hands knotted into fists, Sophie argued, ‘Oh, yes, I can be!’
‘It is a contradiction in terms—’
‘Like husband and free agent?’ Sophie fenced back with saccharine sweetness.
‘A good comparison. But every time you shout at me, I feel married, querida,’ Antonio confided with a glint of raw mockery in his golden gaze.
Incensed by his levity, Sophie treated him to an un-amused appraisal. He need not think that she was about to be swayed by the simple fact that he was an outrageously good-looking guy with a killer smile. ‘Obviously a lot of women have let you away with this sort of nonsense, but I won’t let you away with anything,’ Sophie warned him. ‘There is no way I will ever accept this one-rule-for-you-and-another-rule-for-me attitude—’
‘But that is not what I advocate.’
‘But that’s exactly what you’re advocating…’ She stumbled over that unfamiliar word and in the interim he pronounced it correctly for her. A sense of humiliation stormed through her anger and brought hot tears to her eyes. ‘That’s what I mean about you…you’re impossible. You are Spanish and you’re correcting my English!’
‘That was thoughtless,’ Antonio acknowledged.
‘No, it wasn’t. You think about everything, you always know exactly what you’re doing—’
‘I didn’t know exactly what I was doing when I married you. I didn’t look for the bigger picture. I must have been insane; I was certainly guilty of poor judgement,’ Antonio countered grimly. ‘I did not even foresee the complications that would arise from the consummation of our marriage. But from that night, my desire for freedom was inequitable and unrealistic.’
A pounding silence had fallen. Sophie was listening to his every word and she was trembling. ‘As far as I’m concerned you can forget about what happened on our wedding night. You wanted to keep your freedom and you can still do that!’ she told him boldly. ‘You don’t owe me anything and, if you stay away from me from now on, we can go right back to that agreement we made. All we need to do is be sensible from now on and we’ll soon forget that we ever strayed from the deal.’
His dark golden eyes flared bright as sunlight at that frank proposition. He held her strained gaze levelly. ‘That’s a very generous offer in the circumstances. But there’s a problem—’
‘Nothing’s perfect, Antonio!’ Sophie riposted fiercely, because her heart felt as if it were breaking inside her. It had cost her a lot to make that generous offer. In truth she could have happily chained him to her bed.
‘I know, but I can’t forget our wedding night and I can’t stay away from you either. I suspect that being “sensible” might well be beyond my power at present.’
Utterly unprepared for that statement and thrown into a loop by it, Sophie stared at him in confusion. ‘Sorry?’
‘You’re incredibly tempting. I’m very attracted to you. I fought it every minute of the day the whole time I was away from you, querida,’ Antonio heard himself admit harshly, for the knowledge that he had lost that battle still rankled like salt in a wound. ‘That attraction is not sensible and it’s not the deal we agreed either. But, right now, I don’t want to be with any other woman; I want to be with you.’
‘But…but that’s not how it’s supposed to be,’ Sophie mumbled in shock.
‘That is how it has to be,’ Antonio affirmed, his strong jaw line squaring. ‘We should forget how it was supposed to be. I can’t stand back and watch you enjoy the same freedom that I once intended to take for myself. For now, let’s enjoy being married.’
Sophie was no fool. There was a big smile trying to break out across her lips, for he was offering her a life-line but she had picked up on his every qualification as well. Right now…I want to be with you. He was already accepting that there would be a time when he no longer wanted her. For now, let’s enjoy being married. Again, a suggestion rooted very much in the present without any reference to the future. He was not suggesting that their marriage become a proper marriage, not really he wasn’t, she reasoned painfully. What Antonio was really proposing was that they treat their marriage as if it were an affair. Basically, if she stripped everything he had said bare and got down to the basics, all he was offering her was fidelity in the short term and sex.
‘Tonight, I would have liked you to meet me at the airport,’ Antonio admitted so that she would know the next time. ‘When you weren’t there, I was determined not to come back here without you. Perhaps only then was I allowing myself to admit how much I had been looking forward to seeing you.’
As though drawn by an invisible magnet, Sophie was moving closer to him with slow, tentative steps. To the conditions of fidelity and sex, she was adding in airport meetings and thinking
that that latter request was rather sweet and unexpected. ‘I’ve hardly even spoken to you since you went away—’
‘You avoided my calls—’
She coloured because it was true. ‘Yeah…but you were very cold on the phone—’
‘I was at war with myself, querida. I’m not now and I will never be again,’ Antonio promised huskily.
Sophie felt light-headed with relief. She reckoned that she could probably drown and die happy in his gorgeous eyes. Nothing lasted for ever, she reminded herself dizzily. Life offered no certainties. But she loved Antonio and she was ready to take what she could have rather than hang out for what she could not. He was never going to ask her to stay married to him for good. He wasn’t in love with her. He was in lust with her.
But then they could never have had a future together anyway, she reflected with a stab of pained regret. He didn’t know it and she saw no reason why she should ever tell him, but she was all too wretchedly aware that she was unlikely to ever be able to have a baby. And there he was with his title, his ancestral castle and centuries of family history. He might not be that keen to tie himself down for ever yet, but some day Antonio would be very keen to hand on that title and that rich and ancient heritage to a child of his own. Understandably he would want a wife who could give him children in his future. A future in which she could not and would not feature.
Far from impervious to the distanced look that had darkened her gaze, Antonio eased her up against his lean, powerful frame with the sure hands of a male to whom sensuality was an art. ‘You look unhappy,’ he murmured.
‘I’m not…I’m not,’ Sophie insisted, stretching up to tug loose his tie and unbutton his collar.
Refusing to be distracted, he caught her active fingers up in his, turned up her palm and pressed his mouth there for a moment. He glanced back up at her heart-shaped face to see if her eyes still held that same poignant look of sorrow. ‘Why are you sad?’
‘It’s a secret…nothing you’d be interested in—’
‘Try me,’ Antonio urged, for the instant she mentioned that fatal word, the instant she admitted that she was holding back something from him, he was on fire with the need to know what the secret encompassed.