innocent, sunny acceptance of what he, personally, had found unacceptable—of the event which, in a strange way, accounted for him sitting right here in this kitchen with a woman the likes of whom he had never known existed.
‘Of course it does. What did you mean when you said that you were getting rid of some of your demons?’
Had anyone else asked him that question, Luiz would have shot them down with a glance, but as he stared into those sympathetic blue eyes, he felt that ache in his gut uncoil again.
He told her: he was just Luiz Gomez, a travelling salesman, allowed, for a brief window in time, to reveal his feelings. It wasn’t easy. He was not a man given to sharing or confiding. When you were the power house, the person shouldering the responsibility and running the show, confiding about anything to anyone was not a desirable thing to do. It was a sign of weakness and, as one of those kings of the concrete jungle, weakness was not allowed.
But she made a damned good listener. He forgot about his leg, the incipient aches all over his body, his wrecked car, and at the end of an hour he had made his mind up.
Holly George was going to be his lover.
CHAPTER TWO
HOLLY LOOKED AT the little wrought-iron table with matching chairs on the stone flagged patio which overlooked the open fields at the back of her cottage and felt a little knot of nervousness and excitement. She had laid everything out neatly. The bottle of wine—from the supply which was permanently re-stocked by Luiz, who was fussy with his alcohol—was chilling in the wine cooler. A dish of crudités was covered over, as were the little homemade savoury cheese biscuits. Midges; flies; they always came out in summer and it was still very warm, even though it was nearly six-thirty in the evening.
Any minute now, Luiz would be arriving in his taxi, and after nearly a year and a half she would still feel that giddy craving that always overwhelmed her the second she laid eyes on him.
This weekend, though, was going to be different. Holly smoothed her hands over her summer dress and hurried inside to hover by the window in the front room.
A wave of dizziness washed over her and she suspected that it was the heat. Recently, she had been prone to such waves of dizziness. It was an extremely and unusually hot summer. All her animals were lethargic. Her chickens, which usually pestered her by the kitchen door in search of scraps, took themselves off to shadier spots. Even her assortment of dogs was less interested in running around than finding a cosy niche underneath the nearest tree where they could lie, tongues lolling, dreaming about running around.
She was lethargic. For the past three weeks, getting out of bed in the mornings had been a struggle. Normally up with the larks, she had found herself yearning to lie in a couple of times and she had had to make a mammoth effort to get going.
Yorkshire, she had told Luiz, wasn’t designed for searing temperatures. It was designed for the cool, bright colours of spring, the chill of autumn russets or the breathtaking cold of a winter wonderland. Luiz had laughed and told her that she should get some air-conditioning installed in her cottage and she wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable in the heat.
She teased him about his practicality. She told him that he needed to cultivate some romance, but in truth their personalities blended beautifully together. She would never have believed that after that initial meeting, when she had first looked at him and concluded that he was just the most spectacular guy she had ever seen, he would come to fill her world, all the corners of it.
They only ever met at weekends. She couldn’t leave her animals and he couldn’t get time away from his job, which she assumed took him travelling all over the country, selling all that computer stuff which made her glaze over whenever she thought too hard about it. But the time they spent together was so intense, so vibrantly, wildly alive, that she couldn’t confess to having a second’s doubt that he was just the best thing that had ever happened to her.
He was her lover, her soul mate. He was the guy she knew she could share everything with, from the small things, bits and pieces of local gossip, to the really big things like when some of the shelters had lost their roofs the year before in a snow storm and the bank had been digging its heels in about lending her the amount she needed to repair them to the standard she wanted. Well, Luiz had sorted it all out for her, and in fact had managed to talk the bank manager into lending her enough to really bring the whole sanctuary up to an incredibly high standard, far better than she could ever have imagined.
Plus, he had looked through all her deeds and papers and found a stash of cash sitting in an unused account dating back to the original sale of the farm. With the accumulated interest over the years, she hadn’t even had to pay for any of the refurbishments. He was her rock.
As they did every time she thought of him, her fingers rested lovingly on the tiny red pendant he had given her the previous Christmas as a present before he had returned to Brazil—for, as he had told her, ten days of agony without the bliss of seeing her for the weekend. Her eyes had welled up at the present, because he had remembered her once telling him that rubies were her favourite stones, but he had waved aside her thanks and vaguely assured her that it was just a great copy, nothing to get all worked up about.
Over time, he had lavished her with a number of such great copies of precious jewellery. He knew a guy who knew a guy who could work magic when it came to terrific reproductions, he had told her. In return, she had given him little things she picked up at the craft fairs she occasionally went to. She had knitted him a sweater because his sweaters were far too thin—London sweaters, she had laughed, only useful for London winters. She had bought him a first edition of a book he had mentioned liking which she had found in an antique-book shop in an out-of-the-way village near Middlesbrough.
She smiled at the memory of how concerned he had been at the extravagance, but in truth, ever since he had set up that website, the finances of the place had never been so good. Donations more than kept them going and there were now a couple of really generous anonymous online donors who almost single-handedly ensured that the sanctuary was in tip-top condition with money to spare.
Lost in her daydreams, she started at the sound of the door knocker and she was already succumbing to the thrill of anticipation as she pulled open the door.
‘I couldn’t get here fast enough…’ Luiz kicked the door shut behind him and pulled her into his arms. En route, he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and his tie was stuffed into his trouser pocket. In weather like this, it would have made sense to have changed into something cooler before boarding his helicopter, but as always the need to see her was so urgent that he just couldn’t bring himself to take time out to return to his apartment and change.
In fact, it was a source of continual gratification that he had use of a helicopter. Had he been obliged to take the train and a taxi, which he knew she assumed he did, he would have gone mad during the journey. Hell, no woman had ever been able to hold his attention for the length of time that she had and now he buried his head in her hair, breathing in her unique, gloriously womanly scent.
‘There’s wine outside.’ Holly’s laughter caught on a breath of intoxicating desire as he pushed her back to the wall and teased open the small buttons at the front of her dress.
‘The wine will have to wait.’ Luiz half-groaned. ‘I’ve been thinking of nothing but this since I got into that taxi. Why the hell have you worn something with a thousand buttons, Holly? Are you trying to drive me crazy?’
‘I’m not wearing a bra, though…’
‘Then it’s a good thing you answered the door to me,’ Luiz growled possessively. ‘Because that’s something for my eyes only…’ He couldn’t get the buttons undone fast enough. His impulse was just to rip the dress open, but he knew that she would fret about the cost and he would be impotent to replace it. Eventually, the buttons were undone to the waist and he peeled the dress aside so that he could feast his eyes on her wondrous breasts.
Breathing unevenly, he flung his head back, nostrils flared, eyes half-closed before cupping those breasts in his big hands and rubbing the pads of his