Michelle Reid Collection. Michelle ReidЧитать онлайн книгу.
reminded herself. Because as soon as he’d delivered her back to his villa Luiz had shot off again with his security chief, and she hadn’t set eyes on him until he’d come to collect her for this journey this morning.
And he had arrived dressed for travelling, in a lightweight black linen suit and white shirt, looking almost as uptight as he did right now!
‘Are you ready? Is that your case? Do you think we can go, then?’ Terse to the point of rudeness, he had barely given her chance to reply. And other than for a quick down and away glance at the dusky mauve skinny top and cream tailored skirt she had chosen to wear for the journey, not once had he allowed himself to make full eye contact with her.
Because he’d known that to do so would give her an invitation to start speaking her mind again. Something Luiz obviously didn’t want. Something Luiz obviously still didn’t want, since he’d maintained that barrier throughout the whole time they had been travelling.
Maybe he was afraid she was going to start demanding to know where he had spent last night, she mused with an acidity that stung in her blood. Because he certainly hadn’t spent it with her, in his own bed. And he might be refusing to look at her, but she had certainly looked at him enough to notice the signs of a man who hadn’t got much sleep!
She had, she recalled smugly. She’d slept like a baby and hadn’t even missed him until she’d woken up this morning to find the place beside her was still as smooth as it had been when she’d fallen asleep!
Liar, a tiny voice in her head said. You woke several times and worried because he wasn’t there. You missed him too! Which makes the lie all that more pathetic!
‘Damn,’ Luiz muttered, bringing the car to a sudden stop. ‘I think we just missed the turning…’
Slamming the car into reverse gear, he began driving them back the way they had just come, past a junction sporting a road sign indicating that a place called Los Aminos was off to the left.
He stopped the car again, uttered an irritated sigh and reached for the glove compartment to extract a road map, which he then spread out across the steering wheel and began to frown at.
Caroline frowned too. ‘Don’t you know where we’re going?’
‘No,’ he replied.
Blunt and gruff, it didn’t really encourage more questioning. But she was confused. It didn’t seem likely, knowing his gift of near photo-perfect memory, that he could have actually got them lost!
‘How often have you made this journey?’ she asked, condescension feathering her tone.
A long index finger was following the wavy red line that cut a path through from Marbella to Cordoba. A sudden vision of that same finger tracing circles around her navel sent an injection of heat directly to her thighs. It was shameful. She despised herself.
‘I haven’t,’ Luiz said.
It took a moment for her to take that answer in. Then she noticed that the finger had stopped at a road junction. This road junction, Caroline supposed, glancing up at the sign, then back at the map to see that indeed the finger was touching this precise point on the map.
‘You mean you haven’t done it from Marbella before?’ she finally decided.
The finger began moving again, mesmerising her when she knew she shouldn’t let it, as it traced a line off to the left that went skirting around Cordoba.
‘I meant I have not been there—period,’ he clarified, bringing the finger to a stop at a tiny dot on the map that bore the name Valle de los Angeles.
The remark came as such a surprise that it had her turning in her seat to stare at his grimly taut profile. ‘Why not?’ she demanded.
He didn’t answer. Instead he began neatly folding up the map again, and just let the silence fill with the same tension they had been travelling with before he’d lost his sense of direction.
‘Luiz?’ she prompted.
‘Because I knew I wouldn’t be welcome, okay?’ he launched at her tightly.
‘But it belongs to you!’ she exclaimed.
‘What does that have to do with being made welcome?’ Leaning across her, he put the map back into the glove compartment.
Sudden enlightenment hit. ‘The one who might poison you,’ she murmured softly. ‘The resident wicked witch—your father’s widow?’
‘You bet,’ he replied, shifting the car into gear.
‘And she—resents you?’ She tried to put it kindly, but still Luiz released a scornful laugh.
‘Wouldn’t you resent the man who has usurped your own son’s position in the family?’
His father had another son? Luiz had a half-brother? While she sat there absorbing this latest piece of news, Luiz spun the steering wheel and set them moving into the left-hand fork in the road. A long and dusty winding road lay ahead of them. With a surge of power Luiz accelerated along it. Top-of-the-range plush as the car was, custom-built for quality performance with optimum comfort as it was, the BMW could do nothing about the kind of atmosphere its occupants created for themselves. It proceeded to throb with a hundred questions one of them wanted to ask, mingling with answers the other was clearly reluctant to provide.
In the end Caroline plumped for the most pressing question. ‘Why you instead of him?’ she queried.
‘Because I am the bastard and he is not?’ Luiz mockingly questioned the question.
Caroline flushed slightly at his blunt candour. Luiz might be possessive of his privacy now, but he had not been seven years ago. He had been very open then about his life as a fatherless child, living in a run-down tenement in the backstreets of New York with a mother who had struggled to make ends meet. She knew his mother had died when he was only nine years old and that Luiz had lived out the rest of his childhood in a state institution.
‘I was chosen because I possess a lot of individual wealth and the family itself is practically bankrupt.’
In other words, his father had named Luiz as his successor out of expediency rather than desire, she realised. It was no wonder Luiz sounded so bitter and cynical about the whole thing.
‘And your half-brother and his mother?’ she asked. ‘Where does it leave them in all of this?’
If it was at all possible, his expression turned even harder. ‘Out in the cold, as far as I am concerned. As they have kept me out in the cold for most of my life.’
No wonder he had left it so long without bothering to go and meet his inheritance face on, she grimly concluded. For Luiz was not a fool; he knew what he was going to find waiting for him. Which left begging just one more question she couldn’t leave unasked.
‘Our marriage?’ she prompted. ‘What has it to do with all of this?’
For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. His mouth was tight, his eyes shot through with a hard glitter as they followed the snaking line of the road ahead. Then, ‘Our marriage is the means by which I put them in the cold,’ he replied. ‘For by my father’s decree they may continue to live in the castle only until I marry.’
His ruthless streak was showing again. And Caroline was beginning to feel sorry for Luiz’s new-found family. She had a horrible feeling they had no idea what kind of man it was who was coming to meet them today, or they would have packed their bags and got out before he arrived.
‘Ever heard of the word forgiveness?’ she advanced huskily.
‘Forgiveness is usually only given to those that want it,’ he replied.
Slick and shrewd though his reply was, it still made her shiver. She fell silent after that. And they didn’t speak again throughout the miles they ate up until they entered the sleepy little village of Los Aminos.
‘We’ll