they were sleeping tablets. You were very young—a naïve, gullible fool. And Rob—ah, poor Rob! He was very, very drunk—and he had fancied you for months. It was the easiest thing in the world to persuade him that you had told me you fancied him too—to suggest that he might join you in your hotel room. After all, you had made it plain to anyone who would listen that you and Luis had rowed. All I had to do was to make him promise to lock the door…’
Her words rolled on, but they broke over Isabelle’s head, not penetrating her thoughts. Instead, her mind was preoccupied with only one thing. A comment that Catalina had made earlier and that now was fretting at her brain, telling her something important.
‘He didn’t want any explanations,’ she exclaimed suddenly, stopping Catalina dead. ‘You said that Luis didn’t want you to tell him anything. Just said he knew.’
‘I assumed you had told him.’
Isabelle’s head came up, a brilliant glow lighting in the emerald depths of her eyes. Her heart was singing, soaring in delight, and she couldn’t stop smiling.
‘No, I’d told him nothing. Nothing at all.’
Nothing at all. But he had believed in her enough to track down Catalina and bring her back.
He had believed in her!
Whirling round, she picked up her silk skirts and ran. Out of the library. Along the corridor, calling his name as she went.
‘Luis! Luis! Where are you?’
Hot tears of joy were blurring her eyes so that she didn’t see him coming and ran head first into the hard strength of his body, reeling backwards awkwardly, almost falling to the ground. But powerful hands came out to support her, long fingers closed around her arms, holding her up.
‘Isabella, enamorada, what has she done to you? I will kill—’
‘No, Luis, no!’
When he would have moved away, furiously intent on finding Catalina, she caught at his arm and held him back.
‘No, Luis.’
Half laughing, half sobbing, totally ecstatic, she caught her breath and looked deep into the blazing golden eyes.
‘No, Luis, enamorado. There’s no need for that.’
His own language got through to him where her English had not. She could feel the jolt of shock that ran through his powerful body, followed by an instant second of relaxation. But then almost immediately he tensed again.
‘What did you say?’
Laughter bubbled up into her throat at the sight of his wonderful face looking so stunned, the dazed look in his eyes.
‘I said, “Luis, enamorado,”’ she repeated. ‘What do you think I said?’
‘But—do you know what that means?’
‘Of course I know what it means! My Spanish isn’t that bad! But if you’d prefer it in English, so that you know I know what I’m talking about, and that I mean what I say…’
She laid a gentle hand against the lean plane of his cheek, looked deep into the burning pools of his eyes.
‘Luis, my beloved, my dearest, my darling husband. I love you and—’
But the rest of her sentence was stopped in its tracks, kissed away by the passionate assault of Luis’s mouth, the pressure of his lips on hers. It was a kiss that scorched through every cell in her body, searing along every nerve, snatching the soul from her body and taking it captive for ever. It drove all thought, all hesitation from her mind so that she kissed him back willingly and happily and gave herself up to the force of his caress, her slender arms up around his broad shoulders, clinging on for much-needed support.
‘I love you!’ Luis gasped when at last he lifted his head to draw air into his raw lungs. ‘I love you—I adore you.’
He punctuated each phrase with another kiss, drugging, mind-numbing, setting her head spinning all over again.
‘You are my life, my whole reason for being. I can’t believe how totally crazy I was to come so close to losing you.’
He shook his dark head in bitter despair at his own actions.