that this was good and right and absolutely the only thing in the world either of them should be doing.
So they made love all afternoon, slept a little in an intimate tangle of limbs, before rousing to begin making love all over again.
‘Why, Luiz?’ she dared to ask him again, when they’d quietened. ‘Why are we here like this?’
‘You’re always asking me why,’ he complained, nuzzling his mouth against her throat.
‘Only because you keep hitting me with the unexpected,’ she told him.
‘Well, I thought the answer this time should be obvious,’ he said with a grimace. ‘You’re so beautiful you make me ache,’ he murmured deeply. ‘And so damn desirable that I can’t even control myself long enough to get us from one place to another without having to stop off in the middle of the journey to do—this…’
His mouth took hers in the kind of kiss that sent any further words spinning off into oblivion. But she knew that, no matter how good for her ego his answer had been, it wasn’t the real reason why they had ended up here in this bed, making love like this.
She had triggered something back at the lunch table when she had given away the fact that she’d missed him in her bed last night. She only wished she could understand what that something was, because then maybe she could begin to understand Luiz.
Eventually they reluctantly decided that they should be moving if they wanted to reach their destination before dark. Caroline went off to shower in the tiny bathroom they had discovered down the corridor. When she came back it was to find that the sun had left this side of the building and Luiz had opened the shutters and the windows to allow some warm but fresher air to filter into the room.
He was standing over a small breakfast-type table on which, she was surprised to find, rested a wooden tray with what looked like a plate of sandwiches and a tall jug full of iced water.
‘Mmm, the hotelier in action, I see,’ she remarked lightly.
He glanced round, grimaced a smile at her, then turned back to the two tall tumblers he was in the process of filling. ‘We didn’t really do lunch justice,’ he said. ‘And, knowing the Spanish habit of eating late in the evening, I thought we might as well have a snack before we leave.’
The ice chinked as it fell from jug to tumbler, and drew her across the room. She hadn’t realised she was feeling so thirsty until she heard that irresistible sound.
‘Thank you,’ she said, accepting a glass from him.
‘The sandwiches are only cheese and ham, but help yourself,’ he invited—then turned to go and take his turn in the bathroom, leaving Caroline to gulp thirstily at the water as she took another interested look around her.
What had only been quite seductively mystical shadows in the room before had now taken on rather interesting shapes with the light streaming in. The pale green painted walls wore the patina of age, and the polished floor had thick hand-made rugs thrown upon it. The bed was one of those big old heavy things you had to hitch yourself up to sit upon, and the two bedside cabinets had a pair of matching table lamps on them that would probably fetch a tidy sum in today’s post-war collectors’ market.
Which was her professional head talking, she acknowledged with a wry smile as she chose a sandwich then sat down in one of the two leather club chairs that flanked the little table. For she liked the two lamps exactly where they were, so to start thinking of how much they would fetch at auction, only to be carried off elsewhere, was not where she wanted her mind to go right now.
In fact she liked the whole room in general, and was aware, when she thought that, why she did. This room would always stay in her memory as the place where she finally found peace with her own feelings for Luiz. She loved him, she wanted him, she needed to be with him, no matter how he’d used her in the past or was using her now, in the present.
And if Luiz never came to love her back, at least she knew without a single doubt that he wanted her—passionately. She could live with that. She could build on that.
He arrived back in the room freshly showered and dressed again, and her stomach gave a soft curling quiver in recognition of the way she was feeling about him now.
Picking up a sandwich, he took the other chair and folded his long frame into it. ‘Not quite a palace,’ he drawled, glancing round them.
‘Nice, though.’ She smiled. ‘I like little out-of-the way places like this.’
‘As opposed to five-star air conditioned luxury?’ he mocked.
She nodded, still smiling. ‘This place has soul,’ she explained. ‘It has secrets hidden in its darkest closets.’ Not to mention my own secret, she mused ruefully. ‘It has stories to tell of things long ago. These chairs, for instance,’ she said, reaching for her tumbler. ‘Who sat in them first? Who spilled their pot of ink on this wonderful table?’ she pondered, stroking a loving finger over the black stain. ‘Was it a woman? Was she writing a farewell note to her secret lover, so blinded by her own tears that she knocked the pot over? Or was it a man?’ she then suggested, her eyes darkening subtly as she wove stories in a way her father would have recognised, because she had always done it. But for Luiz this was new, and it held him riveted as he watched her softened face and listened to her dreamy voice. ‘Was he so engrossed in writing his one big novel that he spilled the ink in distraction?’
‘Both things could happen just as easily in a five-star hotel,’ Luiz pointed out dryly.
But Caroline shook her head. ‘If this table had had ink spilled on it in one of your hotels it would have been replaced with a nice new one before you had a chance to blink. No soul in that, Luiz,’ she told him sagely. ‘No soul at all.’
‘So you like all things old and preferably flawed.’ He smiled. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I like some things old and sometimes flawed,’ she amended. ‘I also like new, so long as it tells a story. I like interesting,’ she decided that said it best.
‘Well, I think I can probably promise you interesting where we are going,’ he said.
And suddenly the cynicism was back. Impulsively Caroline reached for his hand across the table. ‘Don’t, Luiz,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t spoil it.’
He glanced down to where her hand covered his. His expression remained cast in stone for a while, then he released a small sigh, turning his hand to capture hers, and got to his feet, pulling her up with him.
His mouth was gentle on hers—seeming to be offering an apology. But when she made a move to deepen the kiss he withdrew, and his expression was still closed when he said, ‘We really have to be going.’
The afternoon of near perfect harmony, she realised, was over…
CHAPTER EIGHT
LEAVING Los Aminos behind, they began another twenty miles or so of driving before they would reach their destination. As the car ate up the miles so the scenery changed, from sprawling plains into rolling hills at first, then eventually into a more rugged terrain, where the hills took on the shape of forest-covered mountains.
The quality of the road they were travelling on changed also, narrowing to little more than a single car width as it wound them upwards on a steep climb that hugged a mountain face on one side and left sheer drops into deep ravines exposed on the other.
‘How much further?’ Caroline asked, beginning to feel as if they had been climbing for ever.
‘The next valley,’ Luiz replied. And his tension was back, in the clenched jawbone, the white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel.
He didn’t want to come here, she silently reiterated. He didn’t want to be this person who had to meet with people who were already programmed to hate and resent him.
And there was a hint of ill-omen