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

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.

      ‘So does wanting a woman so much you can’t think of anything else, so much that you can’t function!’ he growled, jerking her roughly towards him until they stood thigh to thigh.

      They were so close now that Megan could hear his heartbeat, or was that her own? His hands had moved to the small of her back, leaving her own trapped between their bodies. She might have struggled to work out where he ended and she started, except he was harder … much harder. The muscular thighs she was pressed against had as much give as oak-tree trunks.

      Shaking her head to clear the dreamy, light-headed sensation, she forced herself to recognise the abrupt rise in her core temperature for what it was: a hormone rush—God, a hormone avalanche!

      She struggled hard to inject a note of humour into her response. ‘Your concern for your fellow man does you credit, but I promise to behave and never wear pink lipstick again.’

      ‘I have no concern for them.’ Emilio dismissed the mental well-being of one half of the population with an expressive sneer. ‘And,’