Diego disposed of the hovering staff and looked across at Portia Lanchester.
She was as white as a ghost.
His mouth tightened.
‘Go and lie down before you pass out.’
His voice sounded brusquer than he’d meant it to.
She seemed to flicker slightly, like a candle guttering before it went out, then, recovering, she looked around, clearly wondering which direction to go in.
‘Take the second room. Get some sleep.’
He saw her tense visibly, and the movement irritated him. As she moved past him towards the door he indicated he caught her arm. She stilled utterly, going rigid. He stepped up to her.
‘Don’t start, Portia, what you aren’t prepared to finish,’ he said softly.
Then he let her go.
He watched her go into the second room. Then, abruptly, he turned and headed for the terrace.
As he stepped out from the air-conditioned interior of the room the heat enveloped him like a hot, sultry blanket. His breath caught. His hands closed over the warm surface of the balustrade. He stared out into the tropical night.
Memory drenched through him.
The thickness of the air, the instant sweating of the body, the enveloping, encompassing heat. But here, at least, in this clean, hygienic city on the equator, there was no stench—no foetid reek of drains and sewage and contaminated water, of rubbish rotting in the heat, infested with vermin, picked over by the human detritus searching for anything to keep them going in the hell in which they lived out their lives.
His knuckles whitened as they pressed the top of the railings, his shoulders tensing.
Why the hell was he thinking of that stinking cesspool of a slum in San Cristo? He never allowed himself to remember. Never.
But these days the memories intruded more and more. He knew why. He gave a tight, savage smile.
Portia Lanchester. Portia Lanchester with her white skin and her fine bones and her wide, cool grey eyes.
She was opening that gate to the past that he had thought locked for ever.
Portia.
He didn’t want to think about her.
The smile vanished, replaced by a closed, forbidding expression.
What the hell had gone wrong?
His stared out into the hot, jewelled night, oblivious to the noise of traffic coming up to him over the tops of the ornamental trees in the hotel grounds.
Portia Lanchester had thought she could offer up her pale, soft body and then get up from his bed without a hair out of place in her chignon!
He had showed her otherwise. Por Dios, but he had shown her!
He had wanted her pleading for him—and he’d got what he’d wanted. She’d lain beneath him, hair loosened and tangled on the pillow, eyes wide, dilated, giving those low, moaning gasps in her throat, her straining body arching up to him.
He felt his body tightening even as memory swarmed in his head.
And when she’d come—
Cristos—it had been her first time! It had to have been The shock on her face had been absolute. She had stared up at him incredulous, disbelieving, for one brief second, before orgasm had convulsed through her. She had cried out—a high-pitched sound of anguish and ecstasy—and in that instant, that fraction of a second, it had all gone totally, terrifyingly wrong.