Page 77 of Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride

Hard hands suddenly grasped her shoulders, the slender bones almost snapped under the tension she was placing them under. ‘Caroline—’

‘No!’ she interrupted with a choke that was almost a sob. Her mouth was quivering, she couldn’t seem to stop it, and her throat was hot and tight. ‘Negotiations are over, you told me,’ she reminded him. ‘You wanted my answer. Well, you’ve got it. So now get me out of here!’

His chest heaved on the sigh that shot from him; his fingers increased their grip. ‘You fool!’ he muttered, then, on a complete change of manner, said sardonically to their audience. ‘My apologies, but I seem to have inadvertently embarrassed my companion. Please, go on enjoying yourselves while I take her away and attempt to make my peace before I bring her back again.’

The answering rumble of surprise and consternation flicked at her like the stinging tip of a whip. Luiz was smiling back at them through violently gritted teeth. His hands left her shoulders, an arm returning to clamp around them instead. Then he walked her stiff and quivering frame back through the doors, letting them shut behind them.

He was furious with her for causing that scene. Caroline knew that, but had gone way beyond the point where she could do anything about it. The knowledge of what she had just agreed to was clinging like a tight steel band around her aching chest and stopping her from uttering a single word in her own defence.

With a grimness that made her feel like a child being marched off by a stern parent, Luiz took her across the foyer and along the opposite hallway. At the other end was a door that opened into a large bedroom furnished with the same stylish elegance as the other room, only this room had a king-size bed occupying prominent position instead of a card table.

The door closed them in. Caroline stood just in front of it with her head held high and waited to find out what was to come at her next.

Would he order her to take all her clothes off and climb into the bed? Or was he going to offload whatever it was he was keeping severely damped down inside him before he ordered her out of her clothes?

She couldn’t see his face because he had his back to her, but she could certainly see his tension. And on one level she was rather satisfied to see that she seemed to have managed to rock the unrockable poise of Luiz Vazquez.

He moved at last, breaking the throbbing silence with a short heavy explosion of air before dipping his hand into one of the pockets of his cream tux. It came out again with her evening bag, which he tossed onto a nearby chair. She’d forgotten he even had it. Next came her black silk bra—which she had forgotten about also. But she was now painfully reminded of their passionate interlude in the pool room as she watched that item land on top of the bag.

He removed his jacket next. It landed on the bed. Broad shoulders, tanned neck, bright white dress shirt made of a fine enough linen for her to see the darkness of his skin showing through. Her heart began to stutter. Her throat went dry. The steel band around her chest tightened its grip a little more. He swung around to look at her appraisingly, making her sharply catch her breath.

She couldn’t speak. She was too stressed out to speak. But even if she’d been able to she knew that she wouldn’t. She had played her last card. Whatever was left was for Luiz to play.

‘You have fifteen minutes to do whatever it takes to make you face my guests without the expression of horror.’

The command utterly threw her. She had expected anger, she had expected seduction, she had even expected a heavy mix of both! But she hadn’t expected to feel the slap of his icy contempt.

But her chin tilted even higher, amethyst eyes glinting with a defiance that hid whatever she was feeling inside. ‘But I don’t want to face your guests in any way,’ she stiffly informed him.

‘Nevertheless,’ he drawled, ‘it is what you are going to do.’

‘They have nothing to do with what we are here for!’ she protested, breaking free from her steel casing when all Luiz did was swing away again, to stride across the room towards a long line of floor-to-ceiling cupboards.

‘And it wasn’t your friends that filled me with horror,’ she added as she followed angrily in his footsteps. ‘It was that card table standing there ready and waiting, like a stage prop, for you to play out some hideous act of destruction on my father!’

‘You are still assuming that I am going to win, then,’ he remarked, opening one of the cupboard doors.

Her footsteps stopped. ‘Whether you will or not no longer comes into it!’ Despite the anger, her anxiety was beginning to show in the faint tremor of her voice. ‘We made a deal where if I sleep with you, you don’t play him! You proposed it, Luiz!’ she reminded him. ‘And I just agreed!’

In the process of withdrawing a fresh dinner jacket from inside the cupboard, Luiz glanced at her anxious, defiant face, flicked a similar glance at the waiting bed, then smiled the kind of smile that could freeze a fast-flowing river. ‘I just upped the ante,’ he told her softly. Then calmly shrugged himself into his jacket while Caroline just stood there dumbfounded.

‘I d-don’t understand…’ she stammered. ‘W-what do you m-mean?’

Smoothly, he repeated it for her. ‘I just upped the ante.’ With a deft tug he pulled bright white cuffs with black and gold cufflinks into view. He worded it differently. ‘The deal has just changed.’

‘But—you can’t do that!’ she protested.

He looked at her. ‘How,’ he oh, so tauntingly enquired, ‘are you going to stop me?’

‘But—I’ve already agreed to your sordid little deal,’ she cried out in complete bewilderment. ‘What else can you possibly want from me, Luiz?’

‘That’s it.’ He nodded, as if she’d said something memorably fortuitous. ‘Sordid,’ he explained. ‘I’ve decided that I don’t want sordid.’ He moved briskly to check out his bow tie in the sleek gold-framed mirror hanging on the wall above a rosewood tallboy. ‘In fact sordid doesn’t suit my plans at all, which is why I’ve decided to up the ante.’

‘To what, for goodness’ sake?’ she asked in pure frustration.

His fingers stilled against the bow tie. Via the mirror he looked at her. Via the mirror his cold, dark inscrutable eyes captured hers. And Caroline found herself holding onto her breath in a way that starved her brain of oxygen during a pause that seemed to go on for ever—before he answered her with the silk-voiced simplistic use of a single word that completely blew her mind.

‘Marriage,’ he said.

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