Mistress: Pregnant by The Spanish Billionaire

He brushed a hand along his jaw that was already showing a visible shadow of dark stubble. ‘It was,’ he admitted, flashing a grin, ‘something that was touched upon in several of my school reports. That and my problem with authority figures.’

‘So your schooldays were not the best of your life.’

‘Thank you for your concern, querida, but I have for the most part overcome my childhood traumas.’

‘I wasn’t concerned,’ she countered, studiously ignoring the mental image in her head of the lonely, misunderstood little boy with the rebellious streak. ‘I reserve my sympathy for your teachers, if you were half as annoying then as you are now.’

His low rumbling chuckle was uncomfortably sexy.

‘It is true that the English public school system and I were not a marriage made in heaven.’

Her eyes widening, Nell put out a hand to steady herself as she leaned against a nearby boulder closer to the fire. ‘You went to school in England?’

‘It’s a family tradition.’

‘So your cousin went there too.’

Luiz shook his head. ‘No, my uncle is in the diplomatic service. He was based in the States for many years. Felipe was educated there.’ He turned away from her to throw another log on the fire and sparks flew into the air. As a billow of woody smoke blew into her eyes Nell coughed.

‘What do you expect standing downwind? Come over here.’

The scent that made his nostrils flare was more subtle than smoke—the light warm female flowery scent of her body. Somehow his olfactory senses isolated it from the more pungent scents of acrid smoke, warm soil, wet leaves and green growing things.

Luiz’s lashes brushed his razor-sharp cheekbones, highlighted by a dull flush as his glittering obsidian gaze slid over the pale oval of her delicately featured face and downwards over her slim body and smooth, slender limbs. She made him think of a bright fragile flower blooming in a dark corner.

Did her skin feel as soft and silky as it looked?

Why was he looking? Why was he wanting—Dios, but want was a weak, watery term for what he was feeling—to do more than look?

Relax, Luiz, he urged himself, clenching his jaw as he forced air into his lungs through flared nostrils. It was not exactly one of life’s mysteries. This was lust, nothing more complex than a chemical reaction—a strong reaction.

Luiz liked to keep his sex life, like the rest of his life, simple and uncluttered. It did not involve internal debates on the texture of a woman’s skin. He laid his cards on the table, no forced sentiment or misunderstandings.

He enjoyed relationships with women who had a male attitude to sex. Women could be as logical as men, but this woman was a stranger to logic.

He knew that liking and common ground were not prerequisites for sexual attraction, or even great sex—but in his experience without them the aftermath, when passion was spent, could become awkward and sometimes even acrimonious.

Not that he was even considering… His glance strayed to the suggestion of a firm cleavage hinted at by the modest neckline of the simple dress and he felt his temperature rise… All right, he was considering, but only hypothetically.

Nell wiped her watering eyes and made no attempt to follow his suggestion. ‘Next you’ll be asking me to make a bow and arrow and kill small furry things.’ The discordant sound of her own shrill laugh drew a wince from Nell, but to her immense relief broke the scary spell that had been growing in the air between them.

She planted her hands on her hips, unwittingly drawing his attention to her feminine outline, and adopted an air of defiance, feeling relieved to realise that the moment had been a by-product of an overactive imagination and exhaustion. Sure, he was a sexually attractive man, if you went for the dark brooding thing, and he could kiss, but, heavens, she didn’t even like him!

‘Are you going to make us clothes from their skins? Or spear fish…?’ The sarcastic remark reminded Nell of how hungry she was.

Luiz looked amused rather than offended by her snarly rant. ‘I take it the back-to-nature thing does not appeal to you,’ he observed, feeding the first flickering orange tongue of fire with another piece of wood. ‘And there are not just cute furry things in these woods. We have wild boar. They can be dangerous.’

Nell glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘Wild boar!’ Was he joking?

‘Some estancias rear them commercially. Ours are wild.’

‘We’re still on your grandmother’s estate?’

He nodded. ‘For most of the time we have been driving across area owned by the family.’

Nell was startled. It had to be vast. No wonder he was willing to go to such extreme lengths to inherit.