‘Did I say we would be discussing business?’ he questioned. He listened to the sudden silence that clattered down the line at him, then added, ‘Boa noite, amante,’ in husky dark Portuguese. ‘Sonhos doas.’
And he broke the connection.
Cristina stood taut, seething with anger and frustration—and fear. That Goodnight, lover had landed its message. The Sweet dreams had told her exactly what he expected her to go through for the rest of the night.
He was not going to give an inch. He had her hooked and he knew it. Just as he knew that the dreadful kiss in the white marble bathroom had ignited things inside her that were going to haunt her sleep. If she ever slept again, she thought with a shudder, when just thinking about that kiss drenched in her tight, stinging, sensual heat.
She did not want to want Luis again. She did not want to feel so out of control like this!
The knock at the bedroom door was hardly a warning before it swung open—just as she was about to do something stupid like throw herself down on the bed to weep her aching heart out. Gabriel stood there, big and strong, jacket and tie gone, amber eyes still brooding.
‘You were lovers,’ he announced, like an accusation.
She threw herself on Gabriel instead, landing with a sob against his wide, white-shirted front, and just cried her eyes out while he stood, maybe shocked but silently supportive, until it was over. Then he quietly sent her off to the bathroom to wash and change for bed. When she came back he had folded back the bedcovers. Without a single word passing between them he watched her lie down, then curl up like a defenceless child.
The covers were folded over her. Gabriel sat down on the edge of the bed. A gentle set of fingers reached out to brush her loosened hair from her cheek.
Her stupid eyes filled with yet more tears.
‘It was there in the way you called him Luis,’ he explained gently. ‘And in the sexual tension that flashed like static around you both. But I stupidly did not realise it until a few minutes ago. When you ran he followed, like a man with a purpose—a sexual purpose—and earned you an enemy in his lovely companion.’
‘Are they lovers?’ The words shot right out of the sudden burn of acid jealousy clawing at her breast.
‘Well, she certainly wants them to be,’ Gabriel said dryly. ‘And she did not like it when you snatched him literally right out of her grasp.’
‘She can have him with my blessing.’ And she meant it—she did!
‘So tell me about it,’ Gabriel invited.
Cristina closed her eyes and refused to speak—then was almost instantly flicking them open again. ‘What do you think you are doing, Gabriel?’ she demanded as she watched him heeling off his shoes.
‘Getting more comfortable.’ To her further consternation he stretched out on the bed beside her, then reached for her and drew her against him. ‘Be calm,’ he said lazily, when she went to push away. ‘You are as safe here in my arms as you will ever be in a man’s arms, and you know it. But I am not leaving here until you tell me everything. You understand me, Cristina? I want to know it all.’
‘We had an affair six years ago.’ The words left her reluctantly.
‘Ah. Would this be the year of the mysteriously missing Cristina Marques?’
‘I ran away,’ she admitted. ‘My father would not let me go to college, so I went without his permission.’
‘And angered him greatly.’
‘Do you think I cared about that?’ A slender shoulder gave an indifferent shrug to her father’s feelings. ‘He believed a woman’s place was in
the home, playing slave to her men.’ She did not add that he had also believed he had the right to marry her off to whoever would pay him a large injection of cash.
‘He was a bullying tyrant.’
‘Sim,’ she agreed. ‘I thought you were going to go out again?’
‘My lover can survive without me for one night,’ he said. ‘This is much more interesting than sex. How many people would love to know what happened to the beautiful Marques heiress during the year she went missing?’
‘Some heiress.’ She laughed bitterly, thinking that the only thing she had inherited was the useless Marques pride, while Gabriel closed his eyes and envisaged his beautiful gold-skinned lover sulkily awaiting his arrival and understanding nothing.
‘Continue, please,’ he said. ‘You ran away from home and went to college…?’
‘No.’ Cristina frowned. ‘I had to earn the money to pay for college first, so I managed to find a job working in a bar on the Copacabana and slept in a little cupboard of a room on the floor above…’
It had been a hot and airless little room, and the hours she’d worked in the bar had been long. She had just begun to wonder if fate at her father’s hands might not be better than what she had landed herself in, when Luis had strolled into the bar.