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

Rude, and extremely manipulative.

‘No apologies necessary. Are you two arriving? Or were you planning a romantic trip?’

‘We are not together,’ Megan protested in a belated attempt to set the record straight. The breathlessness of her delivery, due in part to the fingers that had begun to massage the tight area at the back of her neck, did not add weight to her claim.

The casual intimacy of his action sent a quiver of raw sexual awareness through her body.

Emilio hooked a thumb under her chin. ‘You’re tense, querida.’ He disapproved with a frown that left his dark eyes warm with concern.

‘I can’t imagine why,’ she retorted.

The ironic retort drew a laugh from Emilio, who allowed the hand that lay against her waist to slide lower to the firm curve of her bottom. ‘Megan was planning to fly home, but it looks like I have her here for a little longer.’

Rosanna gave a sympathetic grimace. ‘Bad luck.’

‘Good luck for me.’

‘I was lucky. I arrived on an early flight.’

‘How long have you two been …?’

Megan, aware of Emilio’s eyes on her face, struggled to manufacture an amused smile for the other woman. ‘No, we’re not, that is. He’s joking.’

Emilio came to her rescue. ‘We are just good friends,’ he said with an ‘if you believe that you’ll believe anything’ smile.

Rosanna smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘No, really we’re …’

Emilio placed a finger to her lips.

The contact made her pupils dilate.

‘Relax, Megan.’ His deep voice, huskily suggestive of unspoken intimacies, shivered across her oversensitive nerve endings. ‘Rosanna understands, and she is not going to report back to anyone,’ he soothed, lifting a stray hank of hair from her cheek.

A hazy, distracted expression drifted across his face as he rubbed the silky strands between his fingers before tucking them behind her ear.

Megan swallowed and struggled to maintain a façade of calm while her thudding heart tried to climb its way out of her chest cavity.

Mesmerised, she stared at him. She did not register the time lapse before he pushed her hair from her face. She was too busy registering unpleasant things like the almost painful clutching of her stomach muscles and the rush of heat that raised her core temperature by several uncomfortable degrees.

His hand did not fall away. Instead he touched her ear lobe, seeming to notice the amber studs in the gold setting for the first time. His dark, thickly lashed eyes drifted downwards to the hollow of her throat where a pulse fluttered visibly against the tender blue-veined white skin.

Any residual guilt he might have felt for exploiting the situation had long vanished. It had been a long time coming, but Megan Armstrong was going to be his and he was going to make her forget every man she had ever been with—and, Madre di Dios, he was going to enjoy every second of it!

His fingertips barely brushed her, but even the suggestion of contact sent a shiver of sensation across the surface of her skin. She was frozen to the spot by a wave of enervating lust that was terrifying in its strength.

Hating the feeling of being utterly helpless and not in control, Megan hid behind the sweeping half-moon fan of her dark lashes and, like a drowning man clinging to a straw, repeated, You’ll laugh about this later, over and over in her head.

‘I like those,’ he said, making her shiver as he touched, not just the earring, but the thin layer of skin behind her ear, and Megan realised it really was an erogenous zone.

God, I’ve got erogenous zones!

She met his dark intent gaze and thought, God, I’ve got a problem!

Her hand came up to push his away—that had been the intention at least. Instead she somehow ended up with her fingers curled over his and stayed there for an awkward heart-thudding moment.

‘They were my mum’s.’

Her eyes dropped from his uncomfortably perceptive gaze a moment before they filled with emotional tears. The earrings were one of a handful of physical reminders she had of her mother, along with her watch and the creased and grainy snapshot of herself as a baby held in her mother’s arms she carried in her wallet.

‘They match your eyes. Did your mother have golden eyes too?’ His voice flowed over her like honey.

She was startled by the question; the eyes in question flew to his. He wasn’t really interested, she told herself. This little byplay was presumably for Rosanna’s benefit—like the kisses.

‘Yes, she did. I … I look like her.’

‘Then she must have been a very beautiful woman.’

Megan felt her heart give a traitorous thud and forced herself to look away. He looked genuine but he was about as sincere as a politician running for re-election; she would be a fool if she lost sight of that fact.

Twisting her earring, she turned to the older woman. ‘Look, it was nice to see you again but I’m running late.’

‘Of course, and it was very nice to see you too, Megan,’ she said warmly. ‘Philip often speaks of you.’

‘You speak to Philip? ‘

A look of consternation crossed the older woman’s face. ‘I, well—’

Emilio cut across her. ‘I hate to interrupt, ladies, but—’ he tapped the face of the watch on his wrist and angled a significant look at Megan ‘—this is why we are running late. You talk too much.’ Grabbing her arm, he dropped a kiss on Rosanna’s cheek and headed for the exit, virtually dragging Megan along with him.

She angled an angry look up at his lean face. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘I am rescuing you from an awkward situation.’

Megan loosed an incredulous hoot as they emerged in the fresh air. She pulled away from him and stood, hands on hips, glaring at him.

‘An awkward situation of your making.’

He flashed a grin and held out an arm towards her. ‘The car is this way.’

Megan didn’t move. ‘Goodbye.’

He studied her face for a moment before sighing. ‘Look, we can—’

‘Do this the hard way or the easy way,’ she slotted in.

‘Tempting, but no, I was going to say we can stand here debating this, but in the end you will accept a lift because the alternative is a very long wait.’ He nodded towards the long queues beside the empty taxi ranks. ‘And you are, I am led to believe, a practical woman not given to cutting off her very pretty nose to spite her beautiful face.