Hot Summer Flings: A Spanish Awakening / The Italian Next Door... / Interview with the Daredevil

Which couldn’t, she reasoned darkly, be something that happened very often. The problem with Emilio Rios was that people were willing to cross oceans, let alone roads, to avoid antagonising him, and from where she was standing it was easy to see why.

He had not gained the reputation of being a bad man to get on the wrong side of by accident! And he did look pretty magnificent if you liked your dark and moody with an edge of danger.

And she, it turned out, did!

As Megan watched a shaft of sunlight from an angled skylight hit his face. He had no reason to fear the unforgiving light; there were no flaws or shortcomings to be revealed.

He was perfect.

A furrow of concentration appeared between Megan’s feathery brows as her rapt gaze lingered on the hard angles and hollows of his patrician face, the strong, sculpted contours emphasised by the dusting of dark hair sprinkled already over his clean-shaven jaw. She wondered how it would feel against her skin and shivered, unable to tear her rapt gaze from his face.

He was nothing short of breathtaking to look at!

‘You make a great deal of effort to be rude to me, querida. I wonder why?’ he mused.

‘It’s no effort, believe me, and don’t call me that,’ she snapped, her discomfort increased by the casual endearment.

Privately she conceded he did have a point. Where was the diplomacy she was famed for? Winding Emilio up was a bit like getting into a tiger’s cage and throwing sticks at it.

A person had to expect the tiger to leap so the question remained why? A mental image of Emilio falling across her body flashed into Megan’s head, the erotic fantasy so powerful that she could actually feel the weight of his body, the heat of him bearing down on her.

The effort of expelling the erotic intrusion wrenched a soft grunt from her aching throat that drew a quizzical look from Emilio.

Megan decided to avoid tiger analogies for the foreseeable future and took refuge in hostility—again.

‘What can I say? My job entails being pleasant to men who have to be told at regular intervals how marvellous they are. I’m on my own time.’ Her dad might disagree on that detail, but then nothing she had done so far today was going to make him break out in song. ‘I don’t have to play nice.’

A white line of anger appeared around the sensual outline of his sculpted lips as Emilio drew himself up to his full intimidating height.

‘I am not your father,’ he snarled, totally incensed by the implied comparison she made with a man he despised.

Megan, aware she had been appallingly indiscreet, not to mention unprofessional, began to back-pedal furiously. ‘I didn’t mean Dad, just men in a position of power generally,’ she finished lamely.

Emilio ignored her protestations. ‘And I do not,’ he imparted grimly, ‘need my ego stroked.’

How about other parts?

Shocked, not just by the shameless question that popped into her head, but the accompanying images that followed the thought, Megan dropped her gaze from his as she felt the shamed colour fly to her cheeks. She was not the sort of girl who went around mentally undressing men.

‘It’s the effect you have on me,’ she mumbled, struggling to find a plus side to this situation. He couldn’t read her mind, though sometimes when he looked at her she did get the uncomfortable feeling that she had no secrets from him.

‘It was not my intention to …’ His voice faded as she began to nibble nervously at her full lower lip.

The silence stretched way beyond dramatic pause and into nerve-shredding territory until finally Megan could bear it no longer.

‘Not your intention to what?’

Her voice dragged Emilio from the hot place his thoughts had gone. He blinked and met her eyes, still imagining her lips parting to allow his tongue deep inside.

‘Not my intention to—’ He paused again and exhaled slowly.

He could have said lose the thread … lose the plot. Both, to his intense shock, were true. He could sit in a high-powered meeting that went on into the small hours and when others faded, not miss a beat, stay on top of every detail discussed, some buried in a mass of techno babble, yet he looked at Megan’s mouth and his brain was mush.

Emilio chose to fast-forward the conversation. ‘I find your self-deprecating attitude annoying. You are a beautiful woman and, believe it or not, I was trying to help that night, not judging.’

Megan gave a derisive hoot. ‘Sure you weren’t.’ Beautiful? Her stomach muscles did a shimmy as she directed a wary look at his face, waiting for the punchline and telling herself not to start seeing or hearing things that weren’t there.

‘It was not your clothes that night,’ he said abruptly, ‘though they were enough to—’ He inhaled, turning his hand away sharply, providing Megan with a view of the nerve pulsing in his hollow cheek and the cords of tension standing out in his brown throat.

‘Of course, I can see the sense of power you had discovered must have been intoxicating,’ he conceded, struggling to be fair-minded and failing big time as he thought of Megan enjoying her feminine power in the arms of men like that creep he had dragged from the car.

As he remembered the fear in the said creep’s eyes he smiled thinly, not regretting having put it there—at least he knew there would be one less guy supplying willing arms.

She gave a baffled shake of her head, confused as much by his strained manner as his peculiar choice of words. ‘Intoxicating? ‘

‘You’d pretty much been invisible at home all through your adolescence and, I assume, school.’ Recalling the slights and snubs he had witnessed and imagining the ones he had not, Emilio struggled to keep his voice impassive.

‘Thanks.’ Megan finally saw where he was going with this. It was always good to be told you were a needy and pathetic outsider. ‘So you’re suggesting at some point I morphed into an equally pathetic attention seeker with self-esteem issues.’ She wasn’t sure which was worst.

His lips twisted in a spasm of impatience. ‘Don’t spin my words. I’m saying that the tables were turned. You weren’t the one doing the vying. It was not surprising that, after years of being overlooked, being the focus of male attention should go to your head. You wouldn’t be the first person deprived of parental approval to confuse sex with love. Sex is only ever a short-term fix.’

The expression in his eyes when he drew this bleak conclusion made Megan wonder if this was personal.

Was Emilio thinking of the women he had slept with since his marriage collapsed when he spoke of short-term fixes? Was Rosanna the only woman he had ever loved? It was obvious after the airport debacle that, whatever he said, he was not over her.

‘It is hard to recover your self-respect, Megan, once you have lost it.’

‘Is that a polite way of saying you think I’m a tart?’

‘Do not put words in my mouth,’ he responded irritably.

Megan gave a bemused shrug and stared up at him. For a man with the reputation of infallibility, she reflected grimly, when Emilio got it wrong he got it wrong big time!

‘And you got all that from the colour of my lipstick! Amazing, you’re even smarter than they say.’

The muscles around his jaw tightened at her mock admiration. ‘Oh, so I’m meant to believe you didn’t have the faintest idea what you could do to me … a man, looking that way.’

‘Do to a man?’ Her eyes widened. The expression smouldering in his deep-set eyes made her heart kick up several more uncomfortable notches. ‘Me? Sure,’ she drawled, coating her words with protective cynicism as she batted her eyelashes like crazy and struck a provocative pose, hand on hip. ‘It’s such a burden being irresistible. Ouch,’ she yelled, pulling back as his fingers closed like an iron band around her wrist.

The touch was light and the effect on her nervous system totally disproportionate. ‘This habit you have of putting yourself down before someone else does is one you should try to break.’

‘I don’t—’ Emilio watched the flash of recognition in her eyes before they fell from his.

‘That hurts,’ she lied, wincing not in pain but at the breathy sound of her own voice.

Emilio was breathing hard as he brought her hands together and pressed them, palms sealed, between his.

It was a moment before his gaze lifted from their entwined fingers. The blaze of hunger in his eyes as they connected with her own made Megan’s insides dissolve.