Is that shorthand for you fancy yourself as king of the castle?’ He certainly had the regal manner. ‘So you don’t mind if your cousin gets the girl but not the money.’
‘There is no money.’
Nell rolled her eyes. ‘Sure there isn’t.’ She folded her arms across her chest and challenged, ‘So, if you don’t have an avaricious bone in your body—’ gorgeous body ‘—why this silliness?’ she finished, thinking she might well ask herself the same question. Stop drooling, Nell!
‘My grandmother raised me, she has taught me everything I know, I owe her everything and I wish her to die a happy woman.’
‘But…’
His eyes flashed as he frowned in exasperation and mimed a zipping motion across his mouth. ‘Will you be silent and let me finish?’
Nell’s chin went up as she viewed him, eyes narrowed in dislike. ‘If you get to the point.’
‘My grandmother is a redoubtable woman. She has carried the burden of running the estancia alone for many years. She was a young woman when her husband died. She does not want that for me. She wants me to be happy and she believes that for that I need a…’ he paused, his lips twisting into a cynical smile before he completed ‘…soul mate, a wife.’
‘Me? No way!’
‘My thought exactly.’
‘And I’m not lying for you.’
‘I’m not asking you to. I’m hoping that the ring will do the trick.’
‘But what if she doesn’t…?’ Nell gave an awkward grimace.
‘Die,’ he inserted, turning his head so that Nell could not see the muscle he could feel clenching in his cheek. ‘It is possible,’ he conceded. ‘She is tough and she has been ill before. If that happens…’ nothing in Luiz’s demeanour suggested how desperately he clung to that hope as he calmly outlined his hastily formed fall-back strategy ‘…I will simply explain that you have been forced to return to England. Long-distance love affairs are notoriously difficult and ours will die a natural death, possibly due, I think, to your infidelity.’
Nell stared. She almost believed it herself! ‘You seem to have thought of everything.’
He took her comment as a compliment and bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘I have that reputation.’ And whether it was deserved or not it made him feared by his competitors.
That was not entirely a bad thing in the cutthroat world he operated in. A man used every advantage he had, and one advantage Luiz no longer had was the element of surprise that had enabled him as an unknown twenty-year-old to make his first million before the competition had become aware of his existence.
Now they knew he was there, but he enjoyed a challenge.
‘Maybe you’ve actually convinced yourself that you’re doing this to make her happy because you’re ashamed to admit how far you’d go to make sure you inherit this place?’
Luiz Santoro looked almost as shocked as Nell felt to hear her private speculation voiced out loud.
She took an involuntary step back as eyes that housed sheer molten rage connected with her own. Before she had a chance to be defensive or even sensibly scared it was gone, leaving her wondering if it had ever been there at all.
Luiz, on the point of ramming his financial success down her superior, self-righteous little throat, stopped himself. Why justify his actions to this girl, when he never justified himself to anyone?
Her opinion of him was of no consequence but defending himself would force him to question this.
‘You need not trouble yourself with my motivation or my self-delusion, just look sweet and in love,’ he mocked, placing a finger under her chin.
Nell, her pulse racing and no longer just from fear, held herself rigid while he studied her upturned features. ‘You don’t look in love.’ He sounded irritated by the discovery.
She pushed his hand away and directed her darting glance at some point behind him. Don’t panic, Nell—you can leave at any time you like. He can’t stop you.
All you have to do is walk away.
‘That’s because I’m not.’ She ran her tongue nervously across her dry lips and said, ‘This is all too weird. I need time. I’ve changed my mind. I think—’
‘Not an option.’
Without any warning at all he bent his head and pressed his mouth to hers.
The hot, hungry kiss did not start slow and build; it was hard, demanding, and began at a mind-blowing level of intimacy that nothing could have prepared her for. As his mouth moved with innate sensuality across her own the heat flared inside her and her senses were flooded with the texture and taste of him.
At the first erotic stabbing incursion of his tongue her insides dissolved and something inside her snapped. Suddenly she was kissing him back, her fingers spread out across his hard chest as she groaned into his mouth and pressed her body into his, responding to a frantic need to be closer.
When Luiz lifted his head he looked as dazed as she felt, but maybe she had imagined it because a second later he was removing her hands from his chest and pushing her through the door ahead of him.
‘And don’t think,’ he said in her ear.
Nell, her mind still numb with shock, thought, Walk away! But her will seemed to have deserted her, her body was nailed to the spot with shock.
Struggling to prove she still had a mind of her own…God, I kissed him back…she flashed him a killer look. ‘If you do that again I will make you regret it!’ she snapped.
Luiz, who was already regretting the impulsive action, did not respond. He looked at her lush lips and thought about the way she had tasted. Then he pushed the thought away. For a man who prided himself on his iron control it should have been a simple matter.
It wasn’t.
A man could not excel at everything and it was clear that he was not good at spontaneity…especially spontaneity that involved this woman.
Resentment and humiliation swirled through Nell’s veins. Calculatingly, he’d done that to shut her up and get her through the door and the worst part was it had worked!
And while she was reduced to a shell-shocked wreck by a simple kiss—just a kiss, what was wrong with her?—he was acting, it seemed to a mortified Nell, as if nothing had happened! I kissed him back!
Nell stumbled a little and his hand shot out to steady her and stayed at her elbow. She did not mistake the gesture for concern. He’s probably getting ready to rugby tackle me to the ground if I try and run, she thought.
A rugby tackle would have been infinitely preferable to a kiss…although rolling on the ground with him did present some worrying opportunities for making a fool of herself.
The room they entered was in shadow. Nell could make out the general outline of furniture and a frail figure propped up in a big carved bed. She spoke in Spanish but Luiz replied in English.
‘Surprise? I doubt it. Don’t tell me the jungle drums have not already told you I had arrived.’
Nell tried to slow her laboured breathing as she watched Luiz walk towards the bed and bend over it.
Seeing the walking frame beside the bed brought back a rush of memories and to her horror Nell felt her eyelids prickle with tears. Eight weeks and I cry now. Please, no, not now. Inch by inch she fought her way back to control, dabbing angrily at the moisture at the corners of her eyes.
‘I’ve brought you a visitor and she doesn’t speak Spanish.’
The contrast between his callous attitude to her moments earlier and the tenderness in his manner as he kissed the sunken cheek of the tiny figure