Back in the Brazilian's Bed Page 11

  ‘This is it, isn’t it?’ he said, lifting his head to stare into her eyes. ‘This is your problem. Did someone do this to you? No,’ he murmured after she had been silent for a while. ‘It’s worse than that, isn’t it? Has someone intimidated you into silence, Karina?’

  She wasn’t looking for his pity. Everything she’d done in her life she’d done with her eyes wide open. ‘Who’s going to hurt me?’ she scoffed. ‘Have you forgotten I’m armour-plated?’ She hastily pulled the remnants of her shirt back over her shoulders and crossed her arms over her chest to hold the two halves together.

  Letting her go, Dante stood back as if he was disappointed. ‘You will tell me eventually. But for now it’s time we returned to our work.’

  She wouldn’t be so sure of that, Karina thought as he opened the door for her. She’d buried her secrets deep where not even Dante could find them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHEN THEY GOT back to the ranch Dante dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to a waiting groom. She did the same. Unbuckling his leather chaps, Dante handed those over too. Down to snug-fitting jeans and a tight black top that moulded to his powerful body perfectly, he was a riveting sight, but he had become distant with her. She guessed her inability to confide in him had set their tenuous personal relationship back, and it was crucial now to restore communication between them.

  She quickened her step to follow him across the perfectly manicured lawn. Everything inside the house was plain and good. There was no flash, no show. And no children, she discovered when they stepped inside. No staff either, by the look of things. Just the scent of freshly cut flowers and beeswax, contained with a heavy, but not oppressive silence.

  ‘I’ve given everyone the day off,’ Dante explained.

  So they were alone. Had he planned this? She was instantly tense, imagining the interrogation she might face at any minute. ‘What fabulous flower arrangements,’ she commented, for want of something to say.

  ‘It’s the first thing I do each morning,’ he said, turning to give her a look. ‘Right after I muck out the horses.’

  She relaxed into a laugh. Dante had always known how to reach out and touch her when no one else could.

  ‘Coffee?’ he said, heading for the kitchen. They had missed breakfast for the second day in a row.

  They walked past the foot of the grand staircase, an elegant sweep of highly polished mahogany with a scarlet runner down the centre held by gleaming brass rods. There was a grand piano tucked neatly beneath the curve of it.

  ‘You play?’ she asked with surprise. The lid was up and there was music on the stand. ‘Before you arrange the flowers, I’m guessing?’

  Dante’s tension also eased into a smile. ‘I play whenever I get the chance,’ he admitted. ‘I just don’t broadcast it.’

  ‘The team would mock?’ she suggested.

  ‘They’d only do that once,’ he commented dryly. ‘My mother insisted I learn,’ he explained in a rare moment of openness. ‘She said it would relax me.’

  ‘And does it?’ She ran her fingers across the keys.

  ‘It helps,’ he said tersely, as the bell-like sounds faded into silence.

  ‘You’re full of surprises.’

  ‘And you’re not?’ he challenged, flashing her a sharp look.

  Her cheeks blazed red as the man who looked like a barbarian but who now turned out to have all the sensibilities of an aesthete continued to stare at her. Would the surprises never end where this new Dante Baracca was concerned? She was certainly getting to know him all over again.

  ‘Before breakfast I have another idea, Karina.’

  Thrown off balance, she hesitated. ‘What idea?’

  ‘I need to unwind,’ Dante admitted as he rolled his powerful shoulders. ‘You do too.’

  Unwind how? She followed him across the hall and down a corridor into an impressive leisure facility where there were marble floors and glittering fountains, and beyond the fountains an enormous swimming pool. ‘You want to have a swim?’ she queried. The time issue made her frown as she asked the question, along with a far more personal concern.

  ‘I thought we’d both have a swim,’ Dante said, as he stared at her keenly.

  And reveal her body? She froze with horror at the thought.

  ‘You don’t find it cold in here, do you?’ he asked with surprise.

  ‘I hope the water’s warm,’ she said, to excuse her involuntary shiver.

  Dante frowned. ‘You never used to care. You swim too well to feel the cold.’

  She never used to have scars to worry about at the time he was talking about. Her body hadn’t just failed her when it had come to carrying Dante’s baby, it had failed her as a woman, and she had paid a heavy price for that. Seeking comfort in someone else’s arms had seemed a solution, the means of forgetting Dante. Looking back, she realised her behaviour had been so out of character she must have had a breakdown. The doctors had been right. She should have sought professional help, rather than trying to go it alone. They’d warned her that her hormones would be raging for quite some time, but they hadn’t explained how that would affect her. She blamed herself for losing the baby, and blamed herself again for everything that had happened afterwards.

  ‘Take a shower,’ Dante suggested, thankfully oblivious to these thoughts, ‘and then join me in the pool.’

  ‘I can’t swim in jeans and a top.’ She smiled back at him as she shrugged an apology.

  ‘No problem. I keep a stock of swimsuits for my guests.’

  ‘Maybe it isn’t such a good idea.’ Her alarm rose to fever pitch. ‘I’ve got so much work to do—’

  ‘And a swim first will allow you to clear your head.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Give yourself a break, Karina,’ Dante insisted. ‘Work is important to both of us, but we also need to take some downtime.’

  She stared at him in silence for a moment, knowing there was no getting out of this.

  From the selection of brand-new costumes still in their packets, which had obviously been chosen for women with far more style than she had, she selected a sports costume that covered up a lot more of her body than the flimsy bikinis on offer. There had been a time when she had raced Dante across the lake in freezing water, and had never cared about fashion, so he wouldn’t be surprised to see her in such a modest costume. She might just get away with this if she was lucky.

  Dante was slicing through the water by the time she came out of the changing room. His powerful body, so bronzed and muscular, was fully extended, and for a moment it was enough to stand and watch him swim. He had such an easy grace he barely made a ripple in the water. Her heart speeded up when, sensing her arrival, he stopped swimming and looked up. She stepped to the water’s edge, in a hurry to dive in. The sooner her body was fully submerged, the sooner she could relax.

  He felt rather than saw Karina enter the pool area. Her choice of costume surprised him when there were so many more attractive options to choose from, but he shrugged it off. He stopped at the far end of the pool and turned to see her framed in light. It was as if the rays of the sun were attracted to her and had fired blue sparks into her ebony hair.

  It reminded him of the dozens of times when they’d gone swimming in the lake, when he’d thought her wild black hair looked like a thundercloud with lightning running through it. But then she set about taming it with remorseless resolve. He wanted to tell her not to tie it back, but to let it cascade around her shoulders like a water nymph. She should also take off that regulation costume so she was completely naked. He doubted water nymphs wore anything.

  Feeling his stare, she stepped back into the shadows, but not before he had seen the flush of awareness on her cheeks. His body responded instantly. He wanted the wild Karina he had made love to, the Karina who wou
ld have chosen the most outrageous bikini in the brightest colour, and would have flaunted it to taunt him. Instead, a wounded woman was hiding in the shadows, having picked out what she had obviously decided was the drabbest choice of costume and the one least likely to entice him.

  He raised a hand in greeting, only for her to pull her hair into an even tighter knot on top of her head. As subliminal messages went, that one was clear enough. He could look, but this water nymph wasn’t for touching.

  He swam towards her underwater. He wasn’t a saint, and the sight of Karina in a tight-fitting swimsuit, even one as severe she had chosen, made full immersion of his aroused body a practical necessity. The costume showed off her voluptuous figure to perfection. He would have to be unconscious not to notice how good she looked.

  He surfaced halfway down the pool to find her still fiddling with her hair. He didn’t need any reminders of how glorious that hair had felt beneath his hands when he’d laced his fingers through its silky thickness. It pleased him to see that, in spite of her best efforts to achieve a severe look, soft tendrils were still escaping. He dipped his head beneath the water so she couldn’t see him smile, and when he surfaced he was in time to watch her perform a perfect swallow dive. She swam to reach him, and it was a relief to see her face was almost free from tension by the time she reached him.

  ‘Oh, that feels good!’ she exclaimed.

  He was tempted to catch her close, but he wanted to be sure she’d loosened up and was ready for that first.

  ‘Race?’ she challenged, to his surprise.

  ‘Why not?’ he agreed. ‘Want a head start?’

  She huffed with mock contempt and took off without him.

  Catching up easily, he swam alongside her until the last couple of yards when he pulled ahead.

  ‘You are so unfair,’ she complained. ‘You always do that.’

  ‘And you always fall for it.’

  She lifted herself clear of the water in a cloud of silver bubbles, and then, scooping water, she splashed it in his face.

  ‘Like that, is it?’ he threatened.

  She laughed. Dipping her arm into the pool again, she thrashed it across the water, dousing him completely. He couldn’t let a challenge like that go unopposed, and launching himself across the pool he brought her down beneath the surface with him.

  She escaped like a seal, wriggling free from his arms with no difficulty at all—but not before he had felt a tantalising brush of her breasts against his arm and her heat all over him.

  ‘You’ll pay for that,’ she threatened as they faced each other.

  ‘I’d like to see you try!’

  Diving down beneath the surface, she grabbed hold of his legs and tried to bring him under. He resisted her easily, and diving down with her he brought her to the surface, struggling furiously in his arms. If there was a more erotic experience than having a hot, wet Karina fighting him off, he had yet to experience it. When he finally subdued her, she was laughing. ‘You have to let me go,’ she protested.

  ‘Why, when this is much more fun?’

  ‘For you.’

  ‘For both of us.’

  She saw the change in his expression and grew still. Winding his fist through her hair, he drew her head back slowly and then, taking his time so he could savour every moment of it, he brought his lips down on hers.

  Hot and cold, wet and warm, the dark secrets of her body were yielding themselves up to him. He plundered her mouth with his tongue, mimicking the sex act he craved—the act that had gone on all night the first time. He could never forget how wild she’d been, how responsive, how abandoned. He could still remember her screams of pleasure and the way she had called out his name at the moment of release.

  Karina had been insatiable and so had he. Bringing a premature end to that glorious encounter had been torture for both of them. They had discovered a capacity for pleasure he guessed neither of them had previously suspected. She was sucking his tongue now as she had sucked him that night...and now she was biting his bottom lip, just as she had teased and tormented him. She’d rubbed her warm breasts against him in open invitation as she’d wrapped her limbs around his, making him her captive, as he had gladly been that night—until he’d turned her beneath him to show her the meaning of deep, thrusting, rhythmical pleasure. She had responded by pressing her legs as far apart as far as she could, in order to isolate that most sensitive place for his attention. She’d cried and groaned and panted out her need, and as he pressed his erection into her now, he could feel the soft swollen warmth of her core yielding against him, just as it had that night. Her lips were wet, her mouth was hot, and he was as sure as he had ever been that Karina in her confining swimsuit was ready for him to take, to pleasure, to satisfy—

  ‘No!’

  She reeled away from him in the water as he began to ease her swimsuit down and quickly backpedalled in the water as if her life depended on putting distance between them.

  ‘You stay in,’ she insisted, reaching for a towel before she had even climbed out of the pool.

  He sprang out to join her, shocked by her sudden change of mood—perplexed as she backed away, as if he were a threat in some way.

  ‘What now?’ she asked him warily, still backing away.

  He shrugged in an attempt to ease the rigid tension between them.

  ‘Now we get a massage,’ he said casually, looping a towel around his waist.

  She gave a nervous laugh, clearly unsure of his motive. ‘You have masseurs on tap?’

  ‘I have a phone. I’ll take a shower and meet you by the massage tables.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You have massage tables?’

  ‘I have a gym with tables at the far end,’ he said a trifle wearily, but she’d become so tense and serious he had to try and lighten things up. ‘What type of place do you think I run here?’

  ‘I... I don’t know. If I believed your press—’

  ‘Don’t believe my press,’ he warned.

  ‘Y-you seem to forget I’ve got a b-brother,’ she stammered.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And until Luc got married I wouldn’t have put anything past him.’

  He huffed a dry laugh. ‘Getting married certainly slows a man down.’

  She took a moment and then visibly recovered. Drawing herself up, she said, ‘I don’t expect that’s anything you have to worry about.’

  He shrugged, ‘Your brother’s a greatly changed man—and for the better, in my opinion.’

  She had to agree with that. Luc had made a good choice of wife, and Emma had no trouble putting up with him, by all accounts.

  ‘I’ve never seen my brother so happy,’ Karina confirmed. ‘Emma’s been good for him, but the two of you are so similar I don’t know how she puts up with him.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Use your imagination,’ she suggested.

  That was a very dangerous idea where Karina was concerned.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KARINA WAS SHOWERING, feeling tense, tracing her scars as she thought about Dante naked in the shower stall next to her. Every part of her was tingling and aware, but her emotions were in turmoil. She couldn’t let him touch her again. It had raised the ghosts of the past and stirred them up into a shrieking frenzy. She should never have agreed to this.

  What made it even more poignant, more painful was that on the night of her eighteenth birthday it hadn’t been all about sex. There had been quiet times when they had lain naked on the bed, staring into each other’s eyes, when she had believed they had never been closer. She’d been so naïve, imagining that making love with Dante meant they’d stay together for ever, and now here she was, blundering into another emotion-fuelled mistake.

  She stilled as he turned off the shower.

&nbs
p; ‘I’ll be waiting for you outside, Karina.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Turning off the water, she reached for a towel. Confident he’d left the changing room, she stepped out of her own shower stall to find Dante just a few feet away. In the split second it took her to realise that he had his back turned and couldn’t see her scars, ice shot through her.

  Her heart lurched a second time. There weren’t many men with a back view as good as their front, but Dante was one of them. He had a towel slung around his waist and was dripping water everywhere as he eased his powerful shoulder muscles in a gesture she was all too familiar with.

  She stiffened as he turned to look at her.

  Without losing eye contact, she reached blindly for another towel. He frowned as she wrapped it tightly around her. ‘No need for that, Karina. The masseur’s waiting for you.’

  No point?

  She made a disappointed face. ‘I’m afraid I really have to take a rain check—not that I don’t appreciate the offer of a massage, but by the time I dry my hair—’

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ he said firmly.

  Dante took hold of her arm to guide her out of the changing rooms, but she pulled back.

  ‘What are you frightened of, Karina?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He stared at her for a moment. ‘Five more minutes to dry your hair and then I’m coming back for you.’

  When he’d gone she stared in the mirror at her rabbit-in-the-headlights face. She couldn’t keep running like this for ever.

  ‘Where do I go for this massage?’ she asked, when she came out of the changing room.

  Barefoot, but dressed in jeans and a black top that emphasised his powerful physique, Dante led the way to the far end of the gym, where a luxurious sunken area had been designed to induce peace and relaxation. There were comfortable sofas and massage beds arranged around a decorative fountain; the scent of essential oils fragranced the air.

  ‘Shall I lie down here and wait? You don’t need to stay with me...’