‘There is a bathroom through the connecting door,’ she told him, in a cool level tone that just did not reflect what was trying its best to erupt inside her. ‘I will organise something to eat and drink for when you come back downstairs.’
He did not say a single word, just stood inside the room looking around him. Cristina closed the door with a quiet, dignified click and then swung herself back against the nearest wall. Eyes tight shut, heart dipping and diving, breasts heaving beneath her damp and sticky shirt, she refused, absolutely, to look at why she was feeling like this.
Then, right on the back of that refusal, she was pushing away from the wall and running like a crazy woman down the stairs, across the hall and into the kitchen, situated at the rear of the house. She still did not allow herself to think about what she was doing as she snatched up a tray and laid it on the kitchen table. Two minutes later she had added a small freshly baked loaf of crusty bread, fruit conserve, a pitcher of chilled lemonade from the refrigerator, and the plate of sliced fresh fruit she’d spied in there. Then, as a last impulse she flew down into the wine cellar and plucked at random one of her father’s bottles of wine and added it, a bottle opener and two glasses to the tray.
Sad, weak, pathetic, she castigated herself when she eventually picked up the tray and made her way back to the stairs again. ‘Triste, fraco, patético,’ she repeated beneath her breath, just to make sure she got the point.
In th
e bedroom Anton was experiencing a similar overload—of the masculine kind which translated into tight-chested, gut-gripping anger beneath his own sweat-soaked shirt.
This place was like some cracked and crumbling forgotten museum. How long had she been living here on her own, rattling around it like the resident ghost with no life worth speaking of? Where did she get off, preferring this to marriage and a full life with him?
He yanked his shirt off over his head and used it to wipe the sweat from his face, then tossed it angrily to the ground. It landed in a float of expensive silk on top of a worn Persian carpet that must have once cost the earth.
Well, not any more, he thought grimly as the rest of his clothes joined the shirt. The carpet, like the faded satin coverlet on the bed and the matching curtains at the windows, needed a hasty burial—along with the rest of this time-locked place.
Unzipping his bag, he hunted down his toilet bag and headed for the connecting door. Half expecting to find a cast iron tub with a pitcher of water standing beside it, it did not mollify his feelings one iota to discover a fully functional if old-fashioned set of sanitary units waiting for him. He turned on the shower suspended over the white bathtub and grimaced his surprise when it gushed clear water into the bath. Then, with a sigh, he turned his attention to removing the growth from his face.
He did not know what was coming next—hell, he did not want to think about what was coming next if it meant yet another battle to get her to see some damn sense. But his insides were already revving up for it, stinging and tensing and—girding, he thought with yet another tight grimace.
Cristina was functioning on a different level by the time she’d carried the tray upstairs and arrived outside the bedroom door. Balancing the tray on one arm, she grabbed her lower lip between her teeth, then gave a knock on the door before twisting the handle and pushing it open.
Luis was not there. Her tummy muscles twisted with what might have been relief, though she wasn’t sure. As she placed the tray down on a table by the window she could hear the shower running, and that was when she saw his clothes lying in a heap on the floor.
Was she going to do it?
Those muscles twisted again. Her heart did the same nervous trick because—yes, she was going to it. Just this once—just this once she was going to do what she really wanted to do and act out a dream that had haunted her for six long years, which involved Luis, this house and that bed.
Her clothes landed on the top of his clothes. With trembling fingers she released her hair from its topknot, then on impulse bent to snatch up Luis’s bowtie and used it to loop her loosened hair back from her face.
The knock sounded as Anton was drying his face with a threadbare but spotlessly clean towel. He turned to stare as the door opened, then went completely still when a perfectly naked Cristina stepped inside, closed the door again, then turned to look at him.
She just looked. He just looked. Both of them held in tight stasis that knew exactly where to centre itself. Her chin was up and her dark eyes were defensive, her soft, lush, beautiful mouth quivering and as vulnerable as hell.
Now she had come this far Cristina did not know what to do or say next to make something happen. If he rejected her she would die where she stood. Water hissed from behind the plastic curtain drawn across the bath, steam swirled and eddied, to say that the ancient boiler had not let her down as it often did.
He recognised his bowtie holding her hair back and his eyelashes flickered across the darkening green of his eyes.
‘I thought we could share the shower,’ she heard herself say in a breathless little voice. ‘Do you mind?’
Did he mind? Anton mocked. For the first time in six years she had come to him, and it did not need words on his part to tell her how he felt about that. She only had to dip her eyes to the cluster of black curls surrounding his sex to know whether he minded her coming to him like this.
The pink tip of her tongue appeared as she looked at him. The physical response his body gave brought her eyes flickering back to his face. Without uttering a single word he reached out with one hand and swept back the plastic curtain, watched the tight little pull of air she took before she could peel herself away from the door.
Suddenly stupidly shy, Cristina slewed her eyes away from him and turned to put out a hand to test the heat of the water spraying out of the shower head. It was too hot; she adjusted it. His hands arrived on her hips as she did so, the jut of his sex making its bold statement against her while he waited for her to be very practical and get the water temperature just right. For some reason the situation caught her with a compulsive giggle, and from behind her she heard his low, deep, husky laugh.
The tension broke, just like that, and he was lifting her up against him to latch his teeth to her shoulder while he stepped into the bath. Water poured down her front, the curtain was swept shut, steam fogged her vision and Luis fogged up everything else.
He touched, he stroked, he moulded her to him, following the streams of water. She responded by lifting up her arms to curve them around his neck and turned her face so she could claim his mouth. When that was no longer enough she twisted to face him, and that was when the really serious kissing and stroking began.
He filled her hands and she stroked him gently. His hand slipped between her thighs. They made love to each other with their mouths and their fingers until both were barely on the planet, but he was not going to let this be over as quickly as that, because once it was over neither knew what was waiting beyond, and they didn’t want to know.
So he soothed things down by locating the soap, and began washing her all over while she stood gazing up at him with heavy, dark, love-drugged eyes. ‘Luis, Luis,’ she kept on saying. He wondered if she was aware at all that she said his name like a whispered call to a lost lover. I’m here, he wanted to say, but was too afraid of breaking into the spell that was holding them both.
Instead he handed her the soap and then stood and just enjoyed while she washed him, caressed him, until he could stand it no longer and he switched off the shower and stepped out of the bath. He wrapped a towel each around them, then lifted her into his arms to carry her into the bedroom.
His eyes blazed when he saw that the covers had been stripped back from the bed. She’d planned this, had known they were going to end up here. This beautiful, stubborn contrary woman, who was her own worst enemy, pushed him away with one hand and hooked him right back to her with the other.