of power, raw and elemental. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes and her smile faded as, minus the direct dazzle, the man’s face became more than a dark blur.
There was definitely nothing blurred about features that looked as though they had been freshly carved in bronze by the hand of an artist more interested in conveying a masculine ideal than reality. The rider’s face, bisected by an aquiline, masterful nose, was long with a broad, intelligent forehead, strong square jaw and high, dramatically chiselled cheekbones. Her gaze drifted to his mouth and paused. It was wide and sculpted, the upper lip firm, the lower sensually full.
It was all jaw-dropping and deep-intake-of-breath stuff. Aware she had been staring and without the faintest clue of how long she had been standing there with her mouth unattractively open, she closed it with a snap and felt an embarrassed flush wash over her skin, struggling to maintain eye contact with the deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes that returned her gaze.
She was an expert at hiding her feelings, but this man took impenetrable to another level entirely. His obsidian stare was totally unreadable. His eyes were incredible; framed by thick ebony lashes that were long and spiky, they were densely dark and flecked with silver. They made her think of a starlit night sky.
Starlit skies …? She resisted the temptation to roll her eyes and thought, Lucy, girl you need a sugar hit. Sugar was not what her best friend, Sally—never afraid to call a spade a spade—had said she needed when she had told her she was off to Spain.
‘The fact is, Lucy, principles are great and true love is nice and all—but in fairy tales! How about a compromise while you’re waiting for your prince to climb your ivory tower? Enjoy a bit of head-banging sex with a sexy Spaniard. Let’s face it, you won’t be short of offers … God, if I looked like you …’
Lucy, who knew nothing about head-banging sex except that it wasn’t for her, pushed away the memory of the conversation, but not before her glance slid to the sensual contours of the stranger’s mouth. She found herself almost envying her friend’s pragmatic approach to sex as heat flashed through her in a warm squirmy mess. She cleared her throat but it didn’t stop her voice sounding husky and breathless as she said the first thing that came into her head.
‘How did you know I was English?’
The last time she’d experienced this knee-sagging, heart-thudding sensation the cause had been an earthquake that had made the hotel rock and brought a nearby chandelier crashing to the floor! Was this what people called animal magnetism? Well, whatever it was he had it! And the earthy aura of maleness was not something she would choose to be this close to.
The stranger soothed his horse with a casual pat of his hand on the glossy flank and raised a satiric brow as he allowed his gaze to sweep down her tumbling waist-length hair in an unrealistic but eye-catching pale silvery blonde.
In all the pictures Santiago had seen she had worn her hair in a puritanical elegant chignon that had exposed the swanlike curve of her pale throat and the determined angle of her delicate jaw. Her hairstyle changed, he presumed, depending on what part she was playing, and he could see the tumbling pre-Raphaelite curls appealing to his brother … actually appealing to any man.
‘Your colouring is not exactly local …’
His glance moved over the delicate contours of her face. Up close her pale creamy skin had an almost opalescent sheen, the glow of roses on her smooth cheeks not the result of make-up; astonishingly she wore none. Despite her fair colouring her long curling lashes and arched feathery brows were dark. A purist might say her lush, sensuous lips were too full for her delicate features, but even the harshest critic could have found no room for criticism with her eyes. Wide spaced and slightly slanted, they were an astonishing shade of dramatic blue, the electric colour emphasised by the black rim surrounding the iris.
‘Oh …’ Lucy lifted a hand to her head, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as she gave a rueful smile, receiving in response a midnight stare. His expression was still shuttered but she was conscious of inexplicable hostility in his body language.
Was it personal or was he like this with everyone? Feeling increasingly antagonistic—the man’s people skills could definitely do with some work—Lucy forced a smile as she admitted lightly, ‘I suppose I do stick out a little.’
His dark eyes slid the length of her body.
The studied insolence in his stare brought an angry sparkle to her eyes. She fought the impulse to cover herself with her hands. Forget poor people skills—the man’s horse had better manners than him.
‘And you try so hard to fade into the background.’
A choking sound left her throat. ‘Just what is your problem? I’m not trespassing, you know … but you probably are.’ He had the look of someone who did not recognise boundaries.
‘I am trespassing?’ He looked amused by the suggestion. ‘I am Santiago Silva.’
‘Should I curtsy or bow?’ So this was the man who was literally lord of all he surveyed, including the property that Harriet rented. From what her friend had told her, he was ‘a great guy’. Odd—Harriet was normally a pretty good judge of character.
Placing a hand on a hip, oblivious to the sexually provocative style of her pose, she watched as his firm sensual mouth lifted at the corners in a smile that did not touch his hard eyes—they held the warmth of a diamond chip as he returned her stare.
‘I had no idea we had such a famous—or should that be infamous?—visitor to the area, Miss Fitzgerald.’ He saw her flinch and felt a stab of savage satisfaction as he thought, Gotcha!
A FAMILIAR cold, clammy fist tightened in the pit of Lucy’s stomach as she felt her expression freeze over. She cursed herself for being surprised that anyone would recognise her here in Spain; like they said, it was a small world and, with the advent of social networking, even smaller.
It didn’t matter how many times she told herself that what total strangers chose to think about her was their problem, not hers, it still hurt, and it made her angry that the stares and contemptuous comments had the power to make her want to crawl away into a corner and hide, which according to some was exactly what she had been doing for four years.
Pride enabled her to lift her chin and train her level stare at his face. She was not going to hide any more; she had done nothing wrong. The gagging injunction was long gone; there was no longer anything stopping her telling her side. Nothing but the stubborn conviction that as the innocent victim she shouldn’t have to explain to anyone; after all, the people that mattered had never believed any of the lies that had been printed about her.
‘If I’d known how warm, charming and welcoming the natives were I would have made it here sooner,’ she said, flashing him a smile of saccharine-sweet insincerity and having the satisfaction of seeing his jaw tighten in annoyance.
‘And how long are you thinking of staying?’
‘Why? Are you planning on running me out of town, sheriff?’ she mocked, adopting a mock-Western drawl.
He responded to her levity with another stony stare. On the receiving end, Lucy found the level of his relentless hostility frankly bewildering.
God, does this man need to get a life!
Her story was old news and even if he believed she was as bad as they had painted her, which in truth was pretty bad, it hardly explained an antipathy that seemed … personal?
‘I shouldn’t joke—you probably can.’
She had the impression that all this man had to do was snap his fingers and the locals would be lining up to be part of a run-her-out-of-town posse, less a form of mob mentality and more mass hypnotism.
She wasn’t seeing much evidence of it but it was clear the man exerted some sort of weird charismatic control