He wasn’t striding at his usual powerful pace, but his walking stick didn’t seem to deter the attentions of a group of women who converged on him, looking like beautiful clones with their sun-kissed hair and frayed denim shorts. Instantly, they began to thrust pieces of paper in front of his face.
‘Sign for me, Luis?’
‘Want to come to a party later, Luis?’ asked one, boldly trying to shove a card into the top pocket of his denim shirt.
But despite his waving them away with an impatient hand, the girls simply took out their camera phones and started clicking frantically instead.
‘Does that happen very often?’ asked Carly as they climbed into the powerful car which was waiting for them outside the terminal.
‘Walking through an arrivals lounge when you get off a plane?’
‘There’s no need for sarcasm,’ she said tightly. ‘I meant, that kind of fan girl attention.’
He shrugged. ‘Everywhere I go.’
‘And does it get too much?’
He shot her a sardonic look. ‘What do you think?’
She hesitated. ‘I think that your life is...strange. That it manages to be both very public and very isolated at the same time.’
‘Ten out of ten for perception,’ he said mockingly.
She clipped her seat belt closed as the car began to pull away. ‘Yet you didn’t take any of those women up on their offers,’ she observed, ‘when many men in your position might have done.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘You don’t think that I’ve grown jaded with that kind of liaison? That those kinds of women are as interchangeable as the tyres I used to get through during a race?’
‘That’s a mean thing to say.’
‘But it’s true.’
The words came out more hotly than she had intended. ‘Funny how it’s never stopped you before.’
‘Why would it stop me?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘If a man is thirsty, he would be a fool not to drink. You think I should turn down some beautiful, beddable blonde because we have nothing in common other than the fact that our raging hormones seem hell-bent on collision?’
Carly shook her head. ‘You are outrageous.’
His lips curved into a smile and his dark eyes gleamed. ‘But you knew that already, Carly—I’m just answering your questions as honestly as I know how.’
Yes, he was, thought Carly. And didn’t she admire his honesty, even if it made her feel uncomfortable at times? He wasn’t pretending to be someone he wasn’t, was he? Maybe the emptiness in his eyes was an inevitable consequence of having your appetite jaded by being offered too much, too young.
‘So do you like being famous?’ she asked suddenly.
‘You make it sound as if I had choice in the matter, but I didn’t.’ He rested his palms on his denim-covered thighs and flexed his fingers. ‘I didn’t seek fame. All I wanted was to race and to be the best in the world— the acclamation was just an inevitable spin-off of that.’
But as he met her amber eyes he remembered that there had been other spin-offs, too. Success on the scale he’d known meant that you could write your own rules as you went along and he’d done exactly that, hadn’t he? Big time. He had turned his back on responsibility. He had taken from women but had never given anything back. He hadn’t needed to. He had known unbelievable wealth and adulation but nothing had ever filled the dark space deep inside him. Maybe that was the price you paid for fame.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have taken on as much advertising as I did,’ he said slowly. ‘But I was young and the success went to my head and it seemed crazy to turn down that kind of money. And my sponsors were keen for me to do it. Actually, that’s an understatement. They wanted someone to sex up the sport as much as possible and I was considered perfect for the role.’
And motor-racing was as sexy as it got, Carly realised. Even she could see that. All that power and testosterone and money—and Luis had exemplified it all with those show-stopping good looks and hard, sexy body. No wonder beautiful strangers thrust their phone numbers at him at airports with innuendo in their voices and hunger in their eyes. No wonder that even women like her weren’t immune to his charm.
‘And once you’re famous, you can’t undo it,’ she said slowly. ‘You can’t go back to the person you were before.’
‘No. You can’t. The world has an image of you and there isn’t a thing you can do to change it.’
‘Well, that’s not quite true. You could...’ The words were out before she had time to think about them.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Could what?’