He came down beside her, stretching out along her slender length, then sliding an arm beneath her shoulders and lifting her towards him. He held her like that, with her hair rippling behind her and her passionate mouth parted, ready for the hungry onslaught of his.
Eyes like glowing emeralds looked deep into her eyes. He didn’t speak. She didn’t want him to. If he did they would fight, and all she wanted to do was make love. Would he know, afterwards, that he had been her only lover ever? Could men tell these things?
He moved then, claiming her mouth with a hot, deep, probing assault that pressed her back against the pillows so he could cover her with his warm naked weight. After that it was a voyage of rediscovery, hot and intense and achingly poignant. Neither bothered to look for restraint.
And six years was a long time to starve a fever. It was hungry and it wanted feeding. They fed it. Oh, yes, they fed it. The rest of the world might have come to an end and they would not have noticed or cared.
Neither heard the quiet footsteps making their way across the living room. Neither recalled that they’d left the doors to the conference room and bedroom hanging wide open. Kinsella Lane stood in the bedroom doorway. She had been there for a long time, watching like a voyeur and listening to everything they said, with the cold blue eyes of hate.
She wanted Anton. She had always wanted him, from the moment she’d first seen him when she was only a very junior secretary at the Scott-Lee Bank, much too low in the ranks for him to notice her. She’d worked long and hard to gain entry into his select circle. She’d made a careful study of all the different women who’d floated in and out of his life. He liked blondes. She’d become a blonde. He liked them slender and neat, supremely elegant and sophisticated. She’d learnt how to achieve that elegance and sophistication. She’d honed and pruned and sculpted herself to meet the specifics of his sexual criteria. And he had begun to notice her. She’d seen the warmth grow in his eyes when he looked at her—felt the telling sting of his attraction towards her begin to catch light.
When he’d brought her along on this trip to Rio she’d thought it was because he was ready to deepen their relationship. His rejection of her in the lift the other day had hurt. But then two other employees had been present, so she’d understood and learnt yet another lesson—get your timing right. Or so she’d thought.
Now look at him, locked in the arms of the complete opposite from everything he had ever been attracted to. She was dark, she was small; she wore ugly clothes. Her hair was a mass of wild black twists and her breasts were too big. And there was no sophistication in the way she kissed him or touched him or taunted him or even spoke to him. Yet he was mad for her!
It was there in the way he shuddered when she caressed him. No finesse. No smooth, slick seduction. Just animal hunger and hard, hot sexual feast. Even the way he was covering her now and reaching round to wrap her legs around him showed an animal with no grace.
His lean golden flanks rippled as he made that first lunging thrust into her body. Her cry of pleasure echoed round the room.
Turning away in disgust, Kinsella left as silently as she had entered, stepping over discarded clothes and touching nothing, not even bothering to close those doors.
As soon as she gained the privacy of her office she opened the safe and took out the file Anton had placed there that morning, after his private meeting with a man called Sanchiz. Ten minutes later and she was replacing the folder in the safe, then picking up the telephone and dialling London.
‘Mrs Scott-Lee?’ she said. ‘I think you should know that your son is intending to marry a Brazilian woman. A young widow—Cristina Ordoniz.’
There was a long silence, then a faint, slightly tremulous question. ‘Ordoniz, you say? Are you sure of that name?’
‘Yes,’ Kinsella confirmed.
‘And young, you said? How young?’
‘About my own age, Mrs Scott-Lee,’ Kinsella answered. ‘I understand that her husband was an old man when she married him for his fortune. Not quite the person you’d want as a wife for your son, I would think.’
Anton’s mother made no response to that. And there was another one of those silences before she said, ‘I will be catching the next flight to Rio. Thank you for helping me with this, Miss Lane…’
He’d forgotten what it was like to have her breathe his name all over him. Forgotten too much, Anton realised as she blew six years of other women to absolute Hades and rolled him up, tied him up and packaged him with a label—Belonging to Cristina Marques.
Did he care? The hell he cared, he thought as he made that first driving thrust inside her, then stopped, watching in dark eyed fascination as she tensed, then cried out in an echoing response to their first time together, when she’d given him her virginity without bothering to warn him that it was there.
‘Long time, querida?’ he questioned huskily.
‘Sim,’ came the gasping reply.
Her fingernails were scoring deep grooves into his shoulders, and the slender arch of her body was an instinctive attempt to fight off his invasion. For a short, frowning second he thought of withdrawing, but she opened her eyes and looked directly into his.
Her mouth shook, but she said, ‘Don’t you dare, Luis.’
He smiled then, amused by how well she too was remembering that first time, when he had tried to withdraw only to have her stop him. And, like that first time, he reached up to brush her hair from her face, then lowered his mouth to gently soothe her with soft kisses while he waited for the tension to ease.
Familiarity should breed contempt, but not in this case. Familiarity was everything when she lifted up her hands to cup his face, then began whispering soft words of love against his lips. In one way he did not want to hear them spoken; in another way he lapped them up with true macho arrogance as she told him everything she was feeling, everything she wanted to feel, and eventually, as the tension eased from her body, everything she demanded he give.
And he gave it all. He gave everything. They matched. They’d always matched—in hunger, in passion, in what they wanted and demanded and made sure they received. They kissed, they touched, they rolled, they built it. It was hot and it was fevered. Each surging thrust overpowered the previous one; each coiled-spring meeting of their bodies drove them closer to the edge. He kissed her mouth, her breasts, her fingers when they came back to his face. When he felt the first ripples of her growing climax he lost it completely and quickened the pace. She came as she’d always come—wildly, noisily, gasping and shuddering and tugging him with her over the edge.