‘It floods.’
‘So what do they intend to do with the flood when they build their road?’
Not if but when, Cristina noted with a shiver. ‘They plan to run their road along either side of it, above the flood line.’
Her eyes scanned the area of forest that would have to be demolished to achieve such an aim. Beside her she could feel Luis doing the same thing.
‘The banker in me says what a goldmine you’re sitting on. The human in me says what a sick, criminal waste,’ was his only comment.
Cristina said nothing. And that was how it remained between them as they made the journey back the way they had come. They landed back in the paddock behind the house, but not before Anton had circled the two-storeyed plaster-walled mansion house. He said nothing about its poor state of repair, but his mouth maintained a flat line as he settled them back down to earth again.
The heat of the afternoon was intense, and the silence between them all the more so—growing as they walked towards the house, passing the collection of ageing barns and paddocks as they did. The house itself was surrounded by a low whitewashed wall which sectioned it off from the rest of Santa Rosa. An open archway took them into gardens that would once have been beautiful but had, like the house itself, fallen into decay.
They hadn’t seen a single living soul since they landed. ‘It’s very quiet,’ he remarked.
‘Siesta time,’ Cristina murmured.
Now, there’s an idea, Anton mused, but kept the thought to himself.
The tension between them grew even stronger when they entered the coolness of the house itself. Without another word passing between them Cristina led the way across a high-ceilinged hallway and up a wide, gracefully curving flight of stairs. Anton looked around him at the once elegant but now scuffed and chipped tiled floor, and the walls hung with heavy-framed oils that looked as if they’d seen much better days.
Mentally crossing her fingers that Orraca had instructed Pablo to place Luis’s bag in the only useable guest bedroom out of twelve, Cristina pushed open the door.
His bag sat, on the heavily carved ottoman, she saw with relief and stepped aside to allow him to precede her inside.
‘There is a bathroom through the connecting door,’ she told him, in a cool level tone that just did not reflect what was trying its best to erupt inside her. ‘I will organise something to eat and drink for when you come back downstairs.’
He did not say a single word, just stood inside the room looking around him. Cristina closed the door with a quiet, dignified click and then swung herself back against the nearest wall. Eyes tight shut, heart dipping and diving, breasts heaving beneath her damp and sticky shirt, she refused, absolutely, to look at why she was feeling like this.
Then, right on the back of that refusal, she was pushing away from the wall and running like a crazy woman down the stairs, across the hall and into the kitchen, situated at the rear of the house. She still did not allow herself to think about what she was doing as she snatched up a tray and laid it on the kitchen table. Two minutes later she had added a small freshly baked loaf of crusty bread, fruit conserve, a pitcher of chilled lemonade from the refrigerator, and the plate of sliced fresh fruit she’d spied in there. Then, as a last impulse she flew down into the wine cellar and plucked at random one of her father’s bottles of wine and added it, a bottle opener and two glasses to the tray.
Sad, weak, pathetic, she castigated herself when she eventually picked up the tray and made her way back to the stairs again. ‘Triste, fraco, patético,’ she repeated beneath her breath, just to make sure she got the point.
In the bedroom Anton was experiencing a similar overload—of the masculine kind which translated into tight-chested, gut-gripping anger beneath his own sweat-soaked shirt.
This place was like some cracked and crumbling forgotten museum. How long had she been living here on her own, rattling around it like the resident ghost with no life worth speaking of? Where did she get off, preferring this to marriage and a full life with him?
He yanked his shirt off over his head and used it to wipe the sweat from his face, then tossed it angrily to the ground. It landed in a float of expensive silk on top of a worn Persian carpet that must have once cost the earth.
Well, not any more, he thought grimly as the rest of his clothes joined the shirt. The carpet, like the faded satin coverlet on the bed and the matching curtains at the windows, needed a hasty burial—along with the rest of this time-locked place.
Unzipping his bag, he hunted down his toilet bag and headed for the connecting door. Half expecting to find a cast iron tub with a pitcher of water standing beside it, it did not mollify his feelings one iota to discover a fully functional if old-fashioned set of sanitary units waiting for him. He turned on the shower suspended over the white bathtub and grimaced his surprise when it gushed clear water into the bath. Then, with a sigh, he turned his attention to removing the growth from his face.
He did not know what was coming next—hell, he did not want to think about what was coming next if it meant yet another battle to get her to see some damn sense. But his insides were already revving up for it, stinging and tensing and—girding, he thought with yet another tight grimace.
Cristina was functioning on a different level by the time she’d carried the tray upstairs and arrived outside the bedroom door. Balancing the tray on one arm, she grabbed her lower lip between her teeth, then gave a knock on the door before twisting the handle and pushing it open.
Luis was not there. Her tummy muscles twisted with what might have been relief, though she wasn’t sure. As she placed the tray down on a table by the window she could hear the shower running, and that was when she saw his clothes lying in a heap on the floor.
Was she going to do it?
Those muscles twisted again. Her heart did the same nervous trick because—yes, she was going to it. Just this once—just this once she was going to do what she really wanted to do and act out a dream that had haunted her for six long years, which involved Luis, this house and that bed.
Her clothes landed on the top of his clothes. With trembling fingers she released her hair from its topknot, then on impulse bent to snatch up Luis’s bowtie and used it to loop her loosened hair back from her face.
The knock sounded as Anton was drying his face with a threadbare but spotlessly clean towel. He turned to stare as the door opened, then went completely still when a perfectly naked Cristina stepped inside, closed the door again, then turned to look at him.