Nobody told Cristina Marques what to do. The moment anyone attempted to lay down the law with her she turned into a she-devil with bite. She got fiery and feisty and sometimes totally, excitingly unmanageable. They’d had rows in their twelve months together that had made Rio shake. She’d slammed doors, spat insults and all but lit up with defiance—while he had remained so laid back and cool about everything it had used to send her wilder still.
He’d used to love her wildness. He’d used to stand back and calmly goad her on, then wait for the moment when she would fly at him with her angry claws drawn. Fielding her with the ease of a man virtually born on an English rugby field had been a delight and a provocation in itself. She would kick, she would bite, she would scratch—or try to, without a hope of wounding him. And he would urge her on with taunts from his eyes and provoking comments while he went looking for the nearest horizontal surface on which to safely drop her.
And himself. Of course himself. A wide naked shoulder gave a shrug as if that was a given. You didn’t catch yourself a wild thing without enjoying all of that fire and passion. You tapped into it. You provoked it further. You let it drive you crazy until that defining moment arrived when—
The phone rang again, vibrating against the smattering of dark hair on his chest. He lifted it to his ear.
‘You will not dictate to me, Luis!’ Her voice came shrill, packed with those sensationally sexy vowel sounds that littered her English. ‘This is business, and in business anyone would be a complete fool to meet with you without their lawyer present also!’
‘Did I say we would be discussing business?’ he questioned. He listened to the sudden silence that clattered down the line at him, then added, ‘Boa noite, amante,’ in husky dark Portuguese. ‘Sonhos doas.’
And he broke the connection.
Cristina stood taut, seething with anger and frustration—and fear. That Goodnight, lover had landed its message. The Sweet dreams had told her exactly what he expected her to go through for the rest of the night.
He was not going to give an inch. He had her hooked and he knew it. Just as he knew that the dreadful kiss in the white marble bathroom had ignited things inside her that were going to haunt her sleep. If she ever slept again, she thought with a shudder, when just thinking about that kiss drenched in her tight, stinging, sensual heat.
She did not want to want Luis again. She did not want to feel so out of control like this!
The knock at the bedroom door was hardly a warning before it swung open—just as she was about to do something stupid like throw herself down on the bed to weep her aching heart out. Gabriel stood there, big and strong, jacket and tie gone, amber eyes still brooding.
‘You were lovers,’ he announced, like an accusation.
She threw herself on Gabriel instead, landing with a sob against his wide, white-shirted front, and just cried her eyes out while he stood, maybe shocked but silently supportive, until it was over. Then he quietly sent her off to the bathroom to wash and change for bed. When she came back he had folded back the bedcovers. Without a single word passing between them he watched her lie down, then curl up like a defenceless child.
The covers were folded over her. Gabriel sat down on the edge of the bed. A gentle set of fingers reached out to brush her loosened hair from her cheek.
Her stupid eyes filled with yet more tears.
‘It was there in the way you called him Luis,’ he explained gently. ‘And in the sexual tension that flashed like static around you both. But I stupidly did not realise it until a few minutes ago. When you ran he followed, like a man with a purpose—a sexual purpose—and earned you an enemy in his lovely companion.’
‘Are they lovers?’ The words shot right out of the sudden burn of acid jealousy clawing at her breast.
‘Well, she certainly wants them to be,’ Gabriel said dryly. ‘And she did not like it when you snatched him literally right out of her grasp.’
‘She can have him with my blessing.’ And she meant it—she did!
‘So tell me about it,’ Gabriel invited.
Cristina closed her eyes and refused to speak—then was almost instantly flicking them open again. ‘What do you think you are doing, Gabriel?’ she demanded as she watched him heeling off his shoes.
‘Getting more comfortable.’ To her further consternation he stretched out on the bed beside her, then reached for her and drew her against him. ‘Be calm,’ he said lazily, when she went to push away. ‘You are as safe here in my arms as you will ever be in a man’s arms, and you know it. But I am not leaving here until you tell me everything. You understand me, Cristina? I want to know it all.’
‘We had an affair six years ago.’ The words left her reluctantly.
‘Ah. Would this be the year of the mysteriously missing Cristina Marques?’
‘I ran away,’ she admitted. ‘My father would not let me go to college, so I went without his permission.’
‘And angered him greatly.’
‘Do you think I cared about that?’ A slender shoulder gave an indifferent shrug to her father’s feelings. ‘He believed a woman’s place was in the home, playing slave to her men.’ She did not add that he had also believed he had the right to marry her off to whoever would pay him a large injection of cash.
‘He was a bullying tyrant.’
‘Sim,’ she agreed. ‘I thought you were going to go out again?’
‘My lover can survive without me for one night,’ he said. ‘This is much more interesting than sex. How many people would love to know what happened to the beautiful Marques heiress during the year she went missing?’
‘Some heiress.’ She laughed bitterly, thinking that the only thing she had inherited was the useless Marques pride, while Gabriel closed his eyes and envisaged his beautiful gold-skinned lover sulkily awaiting his arrival and understanding nothing.
‘Continue, please,’ he said. ‘You ran away from home and went to college…?’
‘No.’ Cristina frowned. ‘I had to earn the money to pay for college first, so I managed to find a job working in a bar on the Copacabana and slept in a little cupboard of a room on the floor above…’
It had been a hot and airless little room, and the hours she’d worked in the bar had been long. She had just begun to wonder if fate at her father’s hands might not be better than what she had landed herself in, when Luis had strolled into the bar.