The Brazilian's Blackmailed Bride

‘This is some kind of joke, yes?’ Gabriel asked curiously, as a set of slender white fingers claimed Cristina’s attention by coiling possessively around Luis’ sleeve.

The fingers belonged to his beautiful blonde companion. Cristina glanced into a pair of gentian-blue eyes and blinked at the amount of ice she met with. Was this the kind of woman Luis preferred these days?

‘No joke,’ the man himself was denying, bringing Cristina’s eyes slewing back to his face. ‘Cristina and I are very old friends—hmm, amante?’

Lover.

Her senses went haywire. She had to fight to pull in some air, unaware of the silence slowly thickening around them, unaware of everything but those eyes and that smile and that word, playing like a silken caress across her skin.

A thumb-pad stroked against the skin of her palm and she looked down at it, staring blankly at the way his long fingers coiled so easily around the fragility of hers.

‘Cristina?’ Gabriel prompted an answer from her, because she was taking too long to speak.

She looked up at him next, not seeing him—not seeing anything. Not even the flash of venom that hit Luis’s companion’s eyes. Her heart had stopped beating. The thick curdling slurry of so many old feelings was churning inside her, leeching the last of the colour from her skin. She couldn’t think. Even as she tried very hard to find the right response that would defuse the tense moment a thick whooshing sound in her head stopped her from being able to think.

His thumb stroked her palm again and she looked back at her hand, still caught in his. She felt a strange lethargy creep over her, and on a shivered gasp tugged her hand free.

‘I—please excuse me,’ she heard herself mumble in stifled constriction. ‘I n-need to—use the bathroom…’

And on that crass, stupid and utterly unsophisticated exit line she turned and fled, leaving a stunning silence in her place.

On legs that felt dangerously like cotton wool she made it into the foyer. A passing waiter had only to take one look at her face to quickly direct her to the nearest private bathroom. Closing the door behind her, she leant back against it. She was shaking all over, locked in the kind of hard shock that turned flesh to ice. Lurching unsteadily across the room, she sank down onto the toilet seat.

Luis was here in Rio. ‘Meu dues,’ she whispered.

Why was he here? Why now, after all of these years? Why should he want to acknowledge her at all?

It came then, that final damning scene they’d had six years ago, swimming up through her mind to send her hands up to cover her face. She saw Luis standing there, stunned and bewildered, staring at her as if she had grown a forked tail and hooves.

‘What’s wrong with you? You love me. Why are you doing this? We lived here together for a year before I had to go back to England to attend my father’s funeral. That year must have meant something to you—told you that I was serious about us!’

‘Things change—’ He’d been too angry to notice her deathly pallor, or the agony etched into her face.

‘In three months? No, they don’t,’ he’d denied harshly. ‘You made me promise to come back for you and here I am as promised, with a rock-solid marriage proposal and plane tickets to a whole new life! For goodness’ sake, Cristina—’ his voice had roughened ‘—I love you. I want you to be my wife, I want to have children with you and grow old with you, watch those children grow into adults and have their own children!’

Cut to death inside by his vision of the future, she’d tossed her head at him. Sitting here in this room lined in glaring white marble, Cristina winced as she remembered the way she’d tossed her head at him that day. ‘I will never marry you, Luis. I will never have your children. There, I have said it. Will you accept it now?’

Oh, yes, he’d accepted it. Cristina had seen it happen as she’d watched the bitter look that overtook his face. ‘Because y

ou don’t want to spoil that perfect body of yours?’

‘That is exactly it,’ she’d agreed. ‘I am selfish and heartless and incurably vain. I am also a Marques, with three centuries of pure Portuguese blood running in my veins. Diluting my blood with your half-English blood would be a sin and a sacrilege that would turn my ancestors in their—’

The brief knock on the door was the only warning she received before it was swinging open. Cristina lifted her face out of her hands, and froze yet again.

CHAPTER THREE

LUIS was not so afflicted. He shut the door and shot home the bolt she had stupidly forgotten when she’d come in here. Then he turned, leant his wide shoulders back against the door, pushed long-fingered hands into the pockets of his well-cut trousers, fixed his steady gaze on her agonised face and simply waited for her to make the next move.

Dressed in a dark lounge suit and white shirt he looked big and hard and absolutely in control. The room was too small, too brightly lit, and he was too close for comfort, the electric charge vibrating from every pore of him so violently sexual it grabbed her attention and refused to let go.

Mouth running dry, she took in every hard, honed inch of him like someone seeing the chance of life restoring water after a six year drought. Nothing about him had changed—nothing. His hair was still short black and silky, his skin still golden and smooth. Eyes the colour of a sensual green ocean glowed at her from between half lowered eyelashes, and the unsmiling shape of his mouth did nothing to spoil the passionate promise it made.

‘When you fled in here like a frightened rabbit I knew you would forget to lock the door, because you always did forget to lock doors, so I thought—why not join her and relive some of the good old times?’ he drawled.

Her insides quivering madly, Cristina lurched unsteadily to her feet, fingers searching for and clutching tensely at the sink behind her for support. ‘W-what do you want?’ she demanded shakily. 37

‘Now, there’s a good question.’ The twist of his mouth was dryly sardonic as he sent his mocking gaze around the room. ‘We could fill the room with hot steam, if you like, strip off our clothes and get down to some really physical reacquainting?’ he suggested. ‘I can see by the way you look at me that you’re up for it, querida, and I’m certainly up for it. So what the hell?’ He gave a shrug of his wide shoulders. ‘We could do it against the bath, in the bath, in the shower, or right where you were sitting just now. Or you could coax me down flat on the cold marble floor like an offering and crawl all over me. You used to like crawling all over me, Cristina, do you remember? You used to love to make me beg, then laugh in my face as you took me inside you. Got you, Luis, you used to purr in that greedily possessive, husky, triumphant voice of yours. Mine, you used to say.’