‘So you are happy now? It would seem that your niece is not the hopeless romantic you thought, but a pragmatist.’
Nell, who was aware that Lucy did not emerge from this all that well, elevated her chin to a defensive angle. ‘I suppose you think she’s behaved badly.’
‘I have not thought about it. The truth is I have no particular interest in your niece—she was a means to an end.’ The end had not been intended to include a total breakdown in self-control or the most erotic, mind-blowing experience of his entire life.
Nell’s eyes dropped to the ring on her finger. God knew how but somewhere along the way—possibly when she had lain beneath him and begged him to take her—she had lost track of why Luiz was here. He was holding up his end of the bargain.
Of course, she had given a lot more than their contract demanded.
‘You’ll have your money, so you’re not bothered. I don’t suppose you even care that your cousin is heartbroken.’
The ease with which she believed the worst of him brought a steely glint to Luiz’s eyes. ‘Ah, yes, I have my money.’
The peculiar inflection in his voice made her ask again. ‘Don’t you?’
‘As for Felipe,’ he said, well aware that he had given Nell Frost little reason to think the best of him, ‘I’d like to think he has learned something from the experience but I doubt it.’
‘God, you are so callous!’ Nell exclaimed in disgust as her glance swerved towards the door the jilted young man had walked through.
‘And you are so inconsistent. We are speaking of the person you have spent the last twenty-four hours cursing and now—’ Luiz shook his head. It had always baffled him how women were drawn to needy men who needed mothering. ‘Now,’ he drawled, feeling a strong repugnance for the accompanying image that flashed into his head of his young cousin enjoying Nell’s embrace and maybe even returning it, ‘you wish to kiss him better.’
As if they were attached to a string Nell’s eyes were drawn to the sternly sensual outline of Luiz’s mouth. She swallowed and, losing her concentration, allowed her thoughts to drift to a place where his body was hot, heavy and hard on top of her. A place where his tongue made erotic, stabbing incursions into her mouth.
For long moments Nell forgot to breathe. And only remembered she needed to when the sexual fog that clouded her brain began to lift. Struggling frantically to draw air into her tight chest, she made the fatal mistake of allowing her eyes to connect again with Luiz’s.
His smoky stare was as dark as the feelings that broke free inside her when she looked at him and thought about touching him—the two were impossibly linked in her head.
Low in her pelvis things twisted hard, drawing a little gasp from her parted lips as she fought the enervating languor that nailed her to the spot. Heart thudding, she felt the heat rush to her cheeks—she might as well put up a sign, she thought in exasperated dismay: yours for the taking.
For a moment she thought he might be about to take up the invitation.
He took a step forward, then jerkily, without his normal fluid grace, stepped back and looked down at her with all trace of emotion wiped clean off his face. She might have believed the moment had all been a construct of her overheated imagination had it not been for the muscle that clenched and un-clenched like a time bomb in his cheek.
‘I do not go in for indiscriminate kissing.’
‘Imagine how privileged I feel.’
Nell ignored the nasty interjection. ‘Now I’ve seen Felipe I realise that he is—’
‘Pathetic?’
The suggestion drew her wrathful glare. ‘Did you have to speak to him that way?’
‘Yes,’ Luiz said bluntly. ‘I have no objection to Felipe suffering. I’m sure it is character-forming.’ In his opinion his cousin could do with some. He made allowances because he had a fiercely protective mother; however, there were limits. ‘But I would prefer he did so in silence.’
‘Because real men don’t cry?’ Nell shook her head and directed a look of contemptuous disbelief at him. ‘They should be strong and silent much like yourself, possibly. God, I pity your son if you ever have one.’ With each successive accusation her temper rose and Luiz’s seemed to cool in a corresponding degree. By the time she flung a shrill, ‘You have the sensitivity of a brick!’ his face looked as though it were carved in stone.
Nell met his dark gaze and realised with a sudden flash of piercing insight that she wasn’t angry with him because he didn’t appear to care about his cousin, but because he didn’t care about her!