A Tempestuous Temptation (16 page)

Luiz could say things that drove her wild, and he drove her wild now as he huskily told her just how she made him feel when they were having sex.

Every graphic description made her wetter and more turned on and when he entered her she was so close to the edge that she had to grit her teeth together to hold herself back.

His movements were deep, his shaft big and powerful, taking her higher and higher until she cried out as she climaxed. Her nails dug into his shoulder blades and she arched back, her head tilted back, her eyes closed, her nostrils slightly flared.

She was the most beautiful creature Luiz had ever laid eyes on. He felt himself explode inside her and by then it was too late. He couldn’t hold it back. He certainly couldn’t retrieve the results of his ferocious orgasm and he collapsed next to her with a groan.

‘I didn’t use protection.’ He was still coming down from a high but his voice was harshly self-admonishing, bitterly angry for his oversight. He looked at her, then sat up, legs over the side of the bed, head in his hands, and cursed silently under his breath.

‘It’s okay,’ Aggie said quickly. Well, if she hadn’t got the message that this was a man who didn’t want to settle down, then she was getting it now loud and clear. Not
only did he not want to settle down, but the mere thought of a pregnancy was enough to turn him white with horror.

‘I’m safe.’

Luiz exhaled with relief and lay back down next to her. ‘Hell, I’ve never made that mistake in my life before. I don’t know what happened.’ But he did. He had lost control. This was not the man he was. He didn’t lose control.

Looking at him, Aggie could see the disgust on his face that he could ever have been stupid enough,
human
enough to make a slip-up.

For all the ways he could get under her skin, she reminded herself that Luiz Montes was not available for anything other than a casual affair. She might love him but she should look for nothing more than unrequited love.

‘W
HAT
’
S
wrong?’ Luiz looked at Aggie across the width of the table in the small chain restaurant where he had just been subjected to a distinctly mediocre pizza and some even more mediocre wine.

‘Nothing’s wrong.’ But Aggie couldn’t meet his eyes. He had a way of looking at her. It made her feel as though he could see down to the bottom of her soul, as though he could dredge up things she wanted to keep to herself.

The past month had been the most amazing time of her life. She had had the last week at school, where the snow had lingered for a few days until finally all that had been left were the remains of two snowmen which the children had built.

Luiz had visited her twice at school. The first time he had just shown up. All the other teachers had been agog. The children had stared. Aggie had felt embarrassed, but embarrassed in a proud way. Everyone, all her friends at the school, would be wondering how she had managed to grab the attention of someone like Luiz, even if they didn’t come right out and say it. And, frankly, Aggie still wondered how she had managed to achieve that. She didn’t think that she could ever fail to get a kick just looking at him and when those dark, fabulous eyes rested on her she didn’t think that she could ever fail to melt.

He had returned to Brazil for a few days over Christmas. Aggie had decided that it would be a good time to get her act together and use his absence to start building a protective shell around her, but the very second she had seen him again she had fallen straight back into the bottomless hole from which she had intended to start climbing out.

She felt as though she was on a rollercoaster. Her whole system was fired up when he was around and there wasn’t a single second when she didn’t want to be in his company, although at the back of her mind she knew that the rollercoaster ride would end and when it did she would be left dazed and shaken and turned inside out.

‘It’s this place!’ Luiz flung his napkin on his half-eaten pizza and sat back in his chair.

‘What?’

‘Why are you too proud to accept my invitations to restaurants where the food is at least edible?’

Aggie looked at him, momentarily distracted by the brooding sulkiness on his dark face. He looked ridiculously out of place here. So tall, striking and exotic, surrounded by families with chattering kids and teenagers. But she hadn’t wanted to go anywhere intimate with him. She had wanted somewhere bright, loud and impersonal.

‘You’ve taken me to loads of expensive restaurants,’ she reminded him. ‘I could start listing them if you’d like.’

Luiz waved his hand dismissively. Something was wrong and he didn’t like it. He had grown accustomed to her effervescence, to her teasing, to the way she made him feel as though the only satisfactory end to his day was when he saw her. Right now she was subdued, her bright-blue eyes clouded, and he didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t reach her.

‘We need to get the bill and clear out of here,’ he growled, signalling to a waitress, who appeared so quickly
that Aggie thought she might have been hanging around waiting for him to call her across. ‘I can think of better things to do than sit here with cold, congealing food on our plates, waiting for our tempers to deteriorate.’

‘No!’

‘What do you mean,
no
?’ Luiz narrowed his eyes on her flushed face. Her gaze skittered away and she licked her lips nervously. The thought of her not wanting to head back to his place as fast as they could suddenly filled him with a sense of cold dread.

‘I mean, it’s still early.’ Aggie dragged the sentence out while she frantically tried to think of how she would say what she had to say. ‘Plus it’s a Saturday. Everyone’s out having fun.’

‘Well, let’s go have some fun somewhere else.’ He leaned towards her and shot her a wolfish grin. ‘Making love doesn’t have to be confined to a bedroom. A change of scenery would work for me too …’

‘A change of scenery?’ Aggie asked faintly. She giddily lost herself in his persuasive, sexy, slow smile. He had come directly to her house, straight from the office, and he was still in his work clothes: a dark grey, hand-tailored suit. The tie would be bunched up in the pocket of his jacket, which he had slung over the back of the chair along with his coat, and he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He looked every inch the billionaire businessman and once again she was swept away on an incredulous wave of not knowing how he could possibly be attracted to her.

And yet there were times, and lots of them, when they seemed like two halves of the same coin. Aggie had grown fond of recalling those times. Half of her knew that it was just wishful thinking on her part, a burning desire to see him relating to her in more than just an insatiably sexual capacity, but there was no harm in dreaming, was there?

‘I’m losing you again.’ Luiz ran his fingers through his hair and looked at her with an impatient shake of his head. ‘Come on. We’re getting out of here. I’ve had enough of this cheap and cheerful family eaterie. There’s more to a Saturday night than this.’

He stood up and waited as she scrambled to her feet. It was still cold outside, but without the bite of before Christmas, when it had hurt just being outdoors. Aggie knew she should have stayed put inside the warm, noisy, crowded restaurant but coward that she was, she wanted to leave as much as he did.

Once she would have been more than satisfied with a meal out at the local pizzeria but now she could see that it could hardly be called a dining experience. It was a place to grab something or to bring kids where they could make as much mess as they wanted without staff getting annoyed.

‘We could go back to my house,’ Aggie said reluctantly as Luiz swung his arm over her shoulders and reached out to hail a cab with the other.

He touched her as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It was just something else she had relegated to her wishful-thinking cupboard.
If he can be so relaxed with me, surely there’s more to what we have than sex … ?

Except not once had he ever hinted at what that something else might be. He never spoke of a future and she knew that he was careful not to give her any ideas. He had warned her at the beginning of their relationship that he wasn’t into permanence and he had assumed that the warning held good.

He didn’t love her. She was a temporary part of his life and he enjoyed her and she had given him no indication that it was any different for her.

‘And where’s your brother?’

‘He might be there with Maria. I don’t know. As you
know, he leaves for America on Monday. I think he was planning on cooking something special for them.’

‘So your suggestion is we return to that dump where we’ll be fighting for space alongside your brother and my niece, interrupting their final, presumably romantic meal together. Unless, of course, we hurry up to your unheated bedroom where we can squash into your tiny bed and make love as noiselessly as possible.’

Luiz loathed her house but he had given up trying to persuade her to move out to something bigger, more comfortable and paid for by him. She had dug her heels in and refused to budge, but the upshot was that they spent very little time there. In fact, the more Aggie saw her house through his eyes, the more dissatisfied she was with it.

‘There’s no need to be difficult!’ Aggie snapped, pulling away to stare up at him. ‘Why do you always have to get your own way?’

‘If I always got my own way then explain why we’ve just spent an hour and a half in a place where the food is average and the noise levels are high enough to give people migraines. What the hell is going on, Aggie? I didn’t meet you so that I could battle my way through a bad mood!’

‘I can’t always be sunshine and light, Luiz!’

They stared at each other. Aggie was hardly aware of the approach of a black cab until she was being hustled into it. She heard Luiz curtly give his address and sighed with frustration, because the last place she wanted to be with him was at his apartment.

‘Now …’ He turned to face her and extended his arm along the back of the seat. ‘Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.’ His eyes drifted to the mutinous set of her mouth and he wanted to do nothing more than kiss it back into smiling submission. He wasn’t normally given to issuing invitations to women to talk. He was a man of action and
his preferred choice, when faced with a woman who clearly
wanted to talk
, was to bury all chat between the sheets. But Aggie, he had to concede, was different. If he suggested burying the chat between the sheets, she would probably round on him with the full force of her feisty, outspoken, brazenly argumentative personality.

‘We do need to talk,’ she admitted quietly, and she felt him go still next to her.

‘Well, I’m all ears.’

‘Not here. We might as well wait till we get to your place, although I would have preferred to have this conversation in the restaurant.’

‘You mean where we would hardly have been able to hear one another?’

‘What I have to say … people around would have made it easier.’

Luiz was getting a nasty, unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach. She had turned him down once. It was something he hadn’t forgotten. This sounded very much like a second let-down and he wasn’t about to let that happen. Pride slammed into him with the force of a sledgehammer.

‘I’m getting the message that this
talk
of yours has to do with us?’

Aggie nodded miserably. This
talk
was something she had rehearsed in her head for the past four hours and yet she was no closer to knowing where she would begin.

‘What’s there to talk about?’ Luiz drawled grimly. ‘We’ve already covered this subject. I’m not looking for commitment. Nor, you told me, were you. We understand one another. We’re on the same page.’

‘Sometimes things change.’

‘Are you telling me that you’re no longer satisfied with what we’ve got? That after a handful of weeks you’re looking for something more?’ Luiz refused to contemplate having
his wings clipped. He especially didn’t care for the thought of having anyone try to clip them on his behalf. Was she about to issue him with some kind of ultimatum? Promise more if he wanted to carry on seeing her, sleeping with her? Just thinking about it outraged him. Other women might have dropped hints—grown misty-eyed in front of jewellers, introduced him to friends with babies—but none of them had ever actually given him a stark choice and he was getting the feeling that that was precisely what Aggie was thinking of doing.

Aggie clenched her fists on her lap. The tone of his voice was like a slap in the face. Did he really think that she had been stupid enough to misunderstand his very clear ground rules?

‘What if I were?’ she asked, curious to see where this conversation would take them, already predicting its final, painful destination and willing it masochistically on herself.

‘Then I’d question whether you weren’t wondering if being married to a rich man might be more financially lucrative than dating him!’

Every muscle in Aggie’s body tensed and she looked at him astounded, hurt and horrified.

‘How could you
say
that?’

Luiz scowled and looked away. He fully deserved that reprimand. He could scarcely credit that he had actually accused her of having a financial agenda. She had proved to be one of the least materialistic women he had ever met. But, hell, the thought of her walking out on him had sparked something in him he could barely understand.

‘I apologise,’ he said roughly. ‘That was below the belt.’

‘But do you honestly believe it?’ Aggie was driven to know whether this man she loved so much could think so
little of her that he actually thought she might try and con him into commitment.

‘No. I don’t.’

She breathed a sigh of relief because she would never have been able to live with that.

‘Then why did you say it?’

‘Look, I don’t know what this is about, but I’m not interested in playing games. And I won’t have my hand forced. Not by you. Not by anybody.’

‘Because you don’t need anyone? The great Luiz Montes doesn’t need anything or anyone!’

‘And tell me, what’s wrong with that?’ He was baffled by her. Why the hell was she spoiling for a fight? And why had she suddenly decided that she wanted more than what they had? Things had been pretty damn good between them. Better than good. He fought down the temptation to explode.

‘I don’t want to have this argument with you,’ Aggie said, glancing towards the taxi driver who was maintaining a discreet disinterest. He probably heard this kind of thing all the time.

‘And I don’t want to argue with you,’ Luiz confirmed smoothly. ‘So why don’t we pretend none of it happened?’ There was one way of stalling any further confrontation. He pulled her towards him and curled his hands into her soft hair.

Aggie’s protesting hands against his chest curved into an aching caress. As his tongue delved to explore her mouth, she felt her body come alive. Her nipples tightened in the lace bra, pushing forward in a painful need to be suckled and touched. Her skin burned and the wetness between her legs was an agonising reminder of how this man could get to her. No matter that there was talking
to be done. No matter that making love was not what she wanted to do.

‘Now, isn’t that better?’ he murmured with satisfaction. ‘I’d carry on, my darling, but I wouldn’t want to shock our cab driver.’

As if to undermine that statement, he curved his hand over one full breast and slowly massaged it until she had to stop herself from crying out.

Ever since they had begun seeing one another, her wardrobe had undergone a subtle transformation. The uninspiring clothes she had worn had been replaced by a selection of brighter, more figure-hugging outfits.

‘You’re wearing a bra,’ he chided softly into her ear. ‘You know I hate that.’

‘You can’t always get what you want, Luiz.’

‘But it’s what we
both
want, isn’t it? I get to touch you without the boring business of having to get rid of a bra and you get to be touched without the boring business of having to get rid of a bra. It’s a win-win situation. Still, I guess sometimes it adds a little spice to the mix if I have to work my way through layers of clothes …’