Yet it was very strange. She was not falling. Instead she seemed to be sort of held motionless, as if suspended. She could feel nothing. There was nothing to feel. Diego Saez was there. He was looking at her. The way he always looked at her.
Up to now she had always felt oppressed whenever he looked at her. Felt haunted, hunted. She had wanted to get away, to escape from that gaze that rested on her, dark, assessing, knowing.
Wanting her.
Yet now, when she was here, standing in front of him, knowing that she had fled from in vain, it was as if a fine film of ice had formed all over her.
With part of her mind she realised it was a form of self-protection. She thought back to the first time she had seen Diego Saez’s dark, knowing eyes resting on her. Making her aware, as she had never been so aware in her life, of her own body.
Yet now she felt as if she were almost a ghost. Or an inanimate statue. As if her blood were suspended in her veins.
The reality of what she was doing opened up around her. She had come to Diego Saez—now he would take the clothes from her body, take her to his bed, make her his own.
She knew it, but she could not believe it. It was so unreal, surreal.
Her eyes went to the huge formal arrangement of flowers on a gilded pier table across the wide reception room of the suite in which she now stood so motionless. The exotic scented blooms were like those he had sent her—a million years ago, it seemed—that morning after the bankers’ dinner.
Did I think then it would come to this?
No—how could she have?
And yet—
Deep inside her there came a sense of inevitability about what was happening. It went through every fibre of her being. It was as if, right from that first moment when her gaze had intersected his, this moment had been waiting for her.
Dispassionately she stood still, let herself be looked at.
Suspended, immobile. And quite, quite passive.
When he finally spoke she turned her face slightly to look at him.
And as she did so she felt a shaft of emotion pierce her.
She could not name it, only feel it.
It was powerful, overwhelmingly powerful. It knifed through her, slicing through the blankness, making it suddenly, instantly non-existent.
Her eyes met his. Out of his poured something that was almost tangible, as if it were streaming over her, touching every pore of her body.
It possessed her, possessed her utterly.
The knifing, overwhelming emotion came again, and for a long, endless moment it occupied her totally, as if there was nothing else inside her.
Except the touch of his eyes.
‘So, tell me, Portia—what is it you want?’
His voice was low, with the deep, accented timbre that seemed to resonate through her body.
Want? The word seemed to mock her.
She dragged her eyes from him as if she were caught in a force field, a vortex, and hauled them back to the vase of flowers in their ornate vase. Safe from that sucking, knifing emotion that had possessed her when she experienced the touch of his eyes.
She took a breath. The air seemed cold in her lungs. Chill.
‘I want Salton to be safe.’
Again her eyes met his, but this time she was better prepared. The knifing sensation came again, but she was expecting it. She let it pass through her body and then empty out again.