A Spanish Awakening (7 page)

‘No, that is you,’ he countered, watching the play of expressions as they moved across her expressive face. It wasn’t just her hair that had slipped, it was her composed mask too.

‘I’m not obsessed with food.’

Just your mouth and, for that matter, the rest of you!

Switching off the inner commentary, but not before the guilty colour had rushed to her cheeks, Megan dropped her gaze to her hands clasped in her lap.

What was going on? She didn’t have thoughts like this.

‘A person,’ he came back confidently, ‘is only obsessed by what they are deprived of.’

Megan’s head came up. ‘What do you mean by that? I’m not deprived of anything!’ she yelled, her defensive voice bouncing off the high ceiling.

He held up his hands in mock surrender, the sardonic gleam in his dark eyes making her shift uncomfortably in her seat. ‘I’m delighted to hear it, though some people might think the lady protests too much? ‘

Lips pursed, Megan shrugged and did not respond to the gentle taunt. ‘I simply show a bit of self-control where food is concerned.’

Self-control.
Emilio’s sloe-dark eyes drifted towards her mouth. Her lips were bare; he remembered the hint of strawberry in the gloss that he had kissed away. Without adornment they were naturally rose- tinted, and amazingly lush, their softness so inviting he struggled to think past the loud buzz in his head and the stab of desire that sliced through him like a knife.

He lifted his gaze, meeting her eyes through the mesh
of his eyelashes. ‘Self-control has its place.’ Like in an airport.

The ripple of sensation Emilio’s sinfully seductive throaty purr set in motion passed through her entire body from her scalp to her curling toes.

Megan, her eyes melded to his smouldering stare, endured the moment breathing through the nerve-shredding sensation. It passed, but the aching lump lodged like a chunk of broken glass in her throat remained.

‘I …’ Megan was unable to tear her eyes free of his mesmeric stare, and her voice faded. Her lips continued to move, but nothing emerged but a whispery sigh.

When the sexual tension had been in the background she had been able to pretend it wasn’t there. That was no longer possible. In the space of a heartbeat it had become an almost visible presence, humming like a high-voltage charge in the air between them, swallowing up the oxygen so that she struggled to breathe.

‘Though sometimes it is good to let go.’

Megan, hand pressed to her throat, struggled to catch her breath. She compressed her lips, angry with him for playing games and herself for being such a sucker for his not very subtle tactics, and there was no way in the world it was accidental. Was this some sort of game for him?

‘I really wouldn’t know. I don’t …’

‘What? You never let that lovely hair down and throw caution to the wind? Some men could view a statement like that as a challenge.’

‘Certainly I let my hair down, but only with people I trust.’

‘You think I would take advantage?’ Emilio sighed inwardly. She was right.

The predatory gleam in his dark eyes sent a secret shiver down her spine. ‘I’m really not interested in finding out.’

Her declaration of indifference drew a low chuckle from him. The scarily attractive sound made Megan bite the inside of her cheek.

‘You are probably …’ he mused, studying her with an intent expression that made Megan want to cover her face with her hands.

‘Probably what?’ she snapped when the dramatic pause stretched beyond bearable limits.

‘The worst liar of any woman I have ever met.’

Her eyes flew wide. ‘I am a
very
good liar!’ she cried, bouncing to her feet.

Megan gave him the evil eye when her unthinking indignant rebuttal drew another throaty chuckle, of the incredibly sexy variety, from him.

‘What’s that on your mouth?’ Emilio asked, no longer looking amused as he got to his feet and reached out towards her face.

Megan reacted to his hand like a striking snake, her heart beating a furious tattoo as she ducked away from his touch.

He raised an eloquent brow in response to her instinctive action as, feeling foolish, Megan slid her eyes from his.

‘What’s what?’ she said, lifting a hand to the corner of her mouth. Her finger came away smeared red. ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said dismissively as she fished a tissue from her pocket.

His dark brows twitched into a disapproving straight line above his hawkish nose. ‘It looks more like blood to me.’

Megan rolled her eyes. Talk about overreaction. ‘Why are the Spanish so dramatic?’ she asked, clicking her tongue in irritation as she added, ‘It’s a microscopic speck of blood. If you must know, I bit myself,’ she admitted, wishing something would distract his attention from her mouth.
To have his dark-eyed scrutiny trained with unblinking intensity on her lips was sending her nervous system into frantic overdrive.

‘That was not a clever thing to do,’ he mused, leaning in close—too close—and taking the tissue from her hand.

Their fingers brushed before she could take evasive action and then she didn’t want to. A shiver wafted across the sensitised surface of her skin making all the downy hairs stand on end.

Her nostrils flared in response to the scent of his body: warm, musky male smell overlaid with the clean scent of the spicy soap he used.

Struggling against the tide of enervating heat that washed through her, Megan, who was sure her struggle was written across her face in neon, did not make the mistake of meeting his eyes.

Instead she trained her eyes on his strong jaw, close enough to see the dark rash of stubble and the faint white scar that angled upwards in the direction of his cheekbone.

‘I’m not clever.’ The words came out a husky whisper as she thought, No, I’m insane, as in certifiable.

The flash of insight did nothing to halt the growing fluttering sensation of excitement low in her stomach. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, swallowing hard as her covert glance flickered across the strong angles and planes of his incredible face.

‘But you are a very good cook.’

‘Would you like some more?’

She shook her head. ‘If I ate what I wanted when I wanted I’d be ten pounds heavier,’ she said honestly. ‘And a lot of those pounds would be on my boobs and hips.’

‘And that is a problem?’

The anger sizzled up out of nowhere. Her hands
clenched into tight fists, squeezing the blood from her whitened knuckles. She was suddenly so angry she couldn’t breathe.

‘Yes, as men appear to measure a woman’s availability and her morals by the size of her breasts!’ she yelled, pressing her hands flat on her heaving C-cup bosom, still able to see Emilio’s expression when she had turned to him with tearful gratitude, thanking him for saving her.

T
WO
years had passed, but Megan could recall the entire scene in painful, mortifying, word-perfect detail that time had not dulled—if anything time had intensified the humiliation.

Ironic, really—if Emilio hadn’t arrived when he had, if instead she had been able to extricate herself from the situation with a few of the dirty tricks that her brother had said no girl should be without, the incident might now have faded to a memory. Maybe she’d even have been able to smile at it.

But the memory hadn’t faded. Instead it had grown in her mind out of all proportion. It had lost none of its ability to tie her stomach into nauseous knots because Emilio
had
walked in, or, rather, past the parked car. He had flung open the car door with a force that had almost wrenched it from its hinges.

Megan’s initial relief had rapidly morphed into shock mingled with dismayed confusion as she’d registered the expression on Emilio’s lean face. In Megan’s mind her brother’s handsome Spanish friend with his excitingly different background and charming accent had always epitomised urbane, sophisticated charm.

The golden skin drawn tight across the strong bones of his face, raw, brutal fury etched into every plane and angle
of the hard lines of his patrician visage, the man with the blazing dark eyes had seemed like a stranger.

He had responded to her escort’s drunken slurred protests with a storm of staccato Spanish before he had literally dragged the man from the car and vanished into the trees with him.

Megan never knew what happened during the five minutes Emilio was gone. But next time their paths had crossed at the university her lecturer had forgotten the ultra-cool image he liked to cultivate and run, gown flapping, in the opposite direction like a scared rabbit.

When Emilio had returned she had already got out of the car and had been relieved to see the explosive fury had vanished. He seemed calm, cold even.

She had gathered her courage in both hands and levelled a wary look at his face, still able to remember his anger, still seeing a stranger when she looked at him. But her dignified thank-you had been genuine, even though she had wished it had been anyone else but Emilio who had rescued her from the mortifying situation.

‘Did you
want
saving?’

The response bewildered her until she saw his expression.

The scorn and aristocratic disdain etched on his patrician features made her cringe. She felt crushed by his scorn. It was bad enough that the man she had had a secret crush on since she was a kid had witnessed the grubby sordid scene, but that he could think she had
wanted
… If she could have crawled out of her skin at that moment Megan would have. She stuttered in her eagerness to correct him.

‘No.no, that is, yes, you can’t think that I wanted. Of course I—’

‘You were a fool.’

Unable to deny the scathing denouncement, she shook her head and blinked back tears. Did he think she didn’t know that? Did he think she needed it rubbed in?

As she stood there she silently prayed for the ground to open up and swallow her—maybe even out loud; that part remained a little vague. But it didn’t so she simply had to stand and endure the contemptuous study, nailed to the spot with scorching humiliation, mortified beyond belief as the sweep of his disparaging stare moved from the top of her glossy head to her feet shod in a pair of high-heeled ankle boots.

‘You say you didn’t want anything, but appearances suggest otherwise. You look like you’ve been poured into that top, and as for the jeans …’

Megan dragged down at the rounded high neckline of the shirt she wore today under her business suit, closing her eyes as she still recalled the condemnatory glow in his eyes as his sweeping gesture had encompassed the V-necked black T-shirt—black because she’d thought the colour was slimming—before sliding to the dark denim jeans, the brand and style that all her friends had been wearing without being accused of flaunting anything.

‘What reaction did you expect?’ Megan heard him ask as she focused her attention, not on the condemnation in his eyes, but the nerve in his lean cheek that was clenching and unclenching.

He stabbed his long fingers into the dark waves of his thick hair and released a string of expletives in Spanish, sounding and looking nothing like the quietly authoritative man who had always been kind to her and, even more amazingly, appeared interested in what she was doing, possibly because he had lovely manners.

‘As for getting into a car with a boy who had been drinking …’

His sneering disdain made her see red. ‘He’s not a boy, he’s a lecturer.’

‘Do the university authorities look kindly on their lecturing staff dating their students?’

‘It wasn’t a date, he was just—’

‘I saw what he was just doing, and if you choose to have casual sex it might be a good idea to remember that drunks have a very slender grasp of safe sex!’

The accusation horrified Megan. ‘He wasn’t—’

‘Are you saying he had not been drinking?’

‘No, I’m …’ She shook her head, struggling to equate this cold, cruel critic with the person who had always had a kind word of encouragement for her in the past.

Her miserable silence seemed to incense him further.

‘Have you been drinking also?’ he asked, his hooded gaze suspicious as he studied her face.

At that point a small burst of defiance, long overdue it seemed in retrospect, came to Megan’s aid.

Planting her hands on the curve of her hips, she thrust out her chin, tossed back her hair. ‘If I wanted to have a drink, so what?’ she challenged, her voice husky as she forced the words past the aching emotional lump in her throat.

‘It’s not illegal, you know. I’m over eighteen.’

‘This is not about
legality,
it is about self-respect.’

Megan, unable to stand there and take the sheer breathtaking unfairness of the cutting condemnation, choked back a sob and yelled, ‘I wasn’t attending an orgy! It was just a few friends, a university thing. Actually, it’s none of your business. You’re not my father.’

Inexplicably, or so it seemed to Megan, he took her response as a tacit admission of guilt.

‘So you have!’ His eyes closed, he let his head fall back, exposing the long line of his brown muscled throat as he
inhaled deeply, then slid apparently unwittingly into his native tongue, ending the tirade with a biting,
‘Well? ‘

Well, what? she thought. ‘I had one glass of wine,’ she admitted after a fulminating silence. ‘I said I’d get a taxi, but he offered—’

‘How did you expect the man to react when you look like that? It’s an open invitation to … to …’ The rest of the insult was delivered once more in his native tongue, but this time a crushed Megan definitely got the gist!

‘I said no.’

‘Clearly not loudly enough. He said …’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said you were gagging for it.’

Megan, white-faced, pushed away the images crowded into her head and refocused on the present.

‘I prefer to steer clear of the D-cup she’s-gagging-for-it look.’ As she spoke she saw the flash of shocked recognition in his eyes and wished the words unsaid.

Her intention had always been, should he ever refer to the subject—admittedly unlikely—to shrug it away as though she barely recalled it. The last thing she wanted was Emilio to guess what sort of indelible impression the incident had had on her.

‘You are speaking of that night when that little loser made a pass.’

His retrospective take on the evening drew a laugh from Megan. ‘You mean that innocent victim I led on?’ She bit her lip and thought, Could you sound any more bitter, Megan?

A nerve clenched in his lean cheek.

If it had been anyone else she would have interpreted the look that flashed across his face as discomfiture, but this was Emilio Rios, who did not know the meaning of awkward.

He dragged a hand down his jaw and expelled an irritated-sounding sigh. ‘I was angry that night.’ He had been angry that entire weekend, from the moment she had walked into the room the previous evening smelling like summer and looking like warm, inviting sin, looking as if she were made for him.

The forced admission made her laugh. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

Even now the memory of his loss of control shook Emilio. He had never before or since come closer to totally losing it. The red haze had consumed him totally.

‘The situation was …’

She angled an interrogative brow as his voice trailed away to a growl.

‘I did not handle the situation well.’

As apologies went it was pretty feeble. ‘Being my brother’s mate did not make you the guardian of my morals and you had no right to judge me!’

‘I did not judge you. I was trying to protect you, Megan.’

‘You made me feel grubby.’ She saw the flash of shock in his eyes and dropped her gaze.

‘That was not my intention.’

Not his intention, but the result nonetheless. ‘It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.’

‘Not so long ago and it clearly does matter,’ he said, feeling intense guilt as he studied her face.

‘Look, let the subject drop. Like I said, it was a long time ago.’

‘My actions were … not acceptable.’

He had been more out of control than he had ever been at any other time in his life.

When the guy had bleated out the clichéd defence and even tried to suggest Megan had not meant no, Emilio
had come closer than he even liked to admit to himself to choking the life out of the sleaze.

It had not occurred to him until now that he had vented his frustration on Megan. Frustration that had been building the entire weekend. When he had come back and seen her standing there, the tears on her cheeks, her hair tangled and her mouth bruised from another man’s kisses, all that frustrated sexual hunger and guilt he had been keeping under tight control for the entire weekend had exploded.

‘And then some.’ His remorse seemed genuine, but Megan was not prepared to let him off the hook just yet. ‘I think, Megan, that you—’

She held up her hand. ‘Don’t bother, I know what you think about me. You made yourself quite clear at the time, practically telling me I was a little tart who was a danger to the moral well-being of the entire male population for a hundred-mile radius.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t say anything like that.’ Their eyes connected and he shrugged, admitting, ‘All right, I might have given that impression, but that was only because …’

‘Because you were disgusted by my
slutty
clothes. Well, as a matter of fact, they weren’t. They were perfectly ordinary things for—’

‘Jeans, very tight, and the clingy black top. It kept slipping off your shoulder—your bra strap was pink,’ he recited. His dark eyes drifted towards her mouth as he continued to catalogue. ‘Your lipstick was pink too. It was smeared.’ He swallowed convulsively before adding in the same flat, colourless tone, ‘And your lip was bleeding.’

Until he’d seen the blood he had been holding it together quite well. All right, not
well
as such, but he had been keeping his more primitive instincts in check. But those
tiny beads of red on her skin had made something snap inside him.

Megan’s jaw dropped. ‘You still remember.’ And in detail. Even she didn’t remember what colour her lipstick had been that night. Her ensemble appeared to have been so truly awful that it had imprinted itself on the memory of a man who had perfect taste.

Actually he had perfect everything, she thought, concentrating on her resentment that rose in direct proportion to the perfection, rather than the liquid rush of excitement low in her belly.

Her legs were jelly, inside her bra her breasts chafed painfully against the lace. Stop acting like you don’t have a choice, she told herself. There’s always a choice.

Her moment of rebellion lasted as long as it took for her gaze to wander back to his mouth.

She struggled against a wave of lust. It was insane, she thought, running the tip of her tongue across the curve of her dry lips, but when it came to being a total pushover that theoretical choice was just that—theoretical.

The way Emilio made her feel was one thing in her life that she had no choice about!

She was stuck with loving the way he looked. Loving the way he sounded, the way he smelt, the way he moved … Actually love was perhaps the wrong word to accurately convey the visceral intensity and power of the effect he had on her.

On the other hand, maybe
love
was exactly the right word.

Megan’s pupils dilated with shocked rejection as she pushed away the dangerous thought and narrowed her wandering focus to one little triangle of olive-toned tanned skin at the base of his throat. Even that tiny section of skin set in motion a stream of erotic conjecture.

This was so unfair. What chance did she have? Linen didn’t dare crease on him. In a fair world it ought to be illegal for any man to be this good-looking.

Conscious that the silence had lengthened, she dragged her thoughts away from the steamy place they were in danger of returning to and angled a hostile stare up at his face.

‘Have you got a photographic memory or something?’ Was the embarrassing moment never going to be allowed to die?

‘No, I do not, but I have excellent recall for some things.’ The weekend he had realised that he had been a blind fool had lingered in his mind.

‘I didn’t look
that
bad. Did I?’ She bit her lip, hating the fact she sounded as if she was asking for his approval.

And you’re not?

The question made him blink.
‘Bad …?’
Emilio ejaculated hoarsely.

He shook his head. The rest of the world looked at Megan and saw an incredibly beautiful woman, but what, he wondered grimly, did she see when she looked in the mirror?

Had that boyfriend of hers been too busy admiring himself in the mirror to make her see she was stunning? His opinion of the man, never high, now zoomed to below zero. As for that family of hers, he brooded darkly, they had a hell of a lot to answer for!

On his visits to the Armstrong household over the span of several years, Emilio had been forced on numerous occasions to remind himself it was not his business as he watched the attempts of Philip’s little sister, not to win approval or praise from her family, but simply to be noticed.