The Balfour Legacy. Кэрол Мортимер

his arrogant face as the rest of the crew burst into relieved laughter and pushed their barely touched plates away.

      The main course was no better. The fish was stone-cold, the potatoes still rock-hard and the overambitious sauce had congealed into a horrible mess around the plate. As Carlos pointed out, it was a waste of a perfectly good fish, and once again Kat ended up scraping most of it into the garbage.

      She felt hot from the heat of the kitchen when she appeared on deck again after crushing amaretto biscuits and cooking some mixed berries which now resembled roadkill. They looked up at her expectantly. Seven faces in all, but Kat could see only one. It swam before her line of vision with cold ebony eyes that mocked her which made her aware that her face must be flushed and her hair falling down.

      ‘Everyone ready for pudding?’

      ‘What kind of pudding?’ questioned Mike.

      ‘I’m calling it “Berry Surprise”,’ said Kat brightly.

      Carlos took a mouthful of wine and put his glass down, a sardonic smile curving the edges of his lips. ‘Please, no more surprises—not tonight—I don’t think I could take it.’ There was an answering peal of laughter from the other men before he fixed her with a cool stare. ‘I don’t really think you’re up to it—at least, not tonight. Perhaps you could bring some cheese and fruit upstairs and I’ll eat there instead.’

      She wanted to tell him to get it himself. That she wasn’t his slave. But in a way, that’s exactly what she was. And if she threw some sort of tantrum about her treatment, wouldn’t that only increase his glaring contempt for her?

      And stupidly, his assessment hurt. Really hurt. I don’t really think you’re up to it. With those few wounding words he had made her feel so…so inferior. And the trouble was that he had been right. Was he a man who enjoyed wounding, she wondered bitterly, and was that why he had been such a success as a bullfighter?

      Determined to salvage something of the evening, Kat put a ridiculous amount of care into arranging a dish for him, washing and drying all the fruit and arranging it in an artful rainbow display. Placing two pieces of cheese at the dish’s centre, she added bread and crackers and took it upstairs, to a deck that was washed with moonlight and empty save for a tall figure which dominated the skyline.

      Carlos was leaning over the rail, looking out to sea—and there was something so silent and imposing about his frozen stance that, for a moment, Kat just stood in the shadows silently watching him. Seemingly lost in thought, she’d never seen anyone looking quite so alone before—nor quite so comfortable with his own sense of solitude.

      And despite his wounding words, she found herself realising that she knew little of the man who was now effectively her employer. Not even how old he was. Midthirties, perhaps—maybe more, for his handsome face was hard and lined with experience and he carried with him a habitual and faint air of cynicism. Why hadn’t he settled down with a wife and a family, she wondered, when women must have been beating a path to his door for most of his adult life? Was it because, as Mike had said, he was a true loner?

      He must have heard her, or sensed her presence, because he turned round and Kat forced herself to stir into life, to step out of the shadows and into his private circle of silver moonlight.

      ‘I’ll…I’ll put this over here,’ she said, holding the platter up, her voice suddenly faltering and she wasn’t sure why. ‘Is that okay?’

      ‘Thanks.’

      He watched as she bent over the table, the dark hair falling in untidy strands around her face and the linen she wore now looking crumpled. And yet she looked…delicious—more womanly than at any other time he’d seen her, and curiously accessible without her ridiculous high-fashion status symbols and dripping with jewels. Her face was flushed with heat and the effects of probably the only honest day’s work she’d ever done.

      How ironic that this sexy creature was as unlike the real Kat Balfour as it was possible to imagine.

      Kat straightened up to find the ebony eyes fixed on her and, as she stared into the shadowed and shuttered features, her heart began a strange, rhythmical pounding. Nervously, her tongue flicked over her lips as she looked up into the impenetrable black eyes. ‘Will…will there be anything else?’

      Oh, what a question, he thought wryly. Innocent or deliberately provocative? Was she doing her best to slip into her role as domestic, or simply acknowledging the silent hunger which was sizzling between them? He felt the thud of his heart. As if sexy Kat Balfour would ever do innocence! ‘No. Nothing else.’ He shook his head as he read the silent yearning on her face—was she mirroring something of his own, he wondered frustratedly.

      She went to walk past him but something made him stop her. Something in the gleam of moonlight which glanced off the thick abundance of her dark hair and arrested his attention as much as the pure lines of her perfect profile and the parted promise of her soft lips.

      He stayed her with a touch of his hand to her bare forearm and she looked down at it and then up at him and he could feel her shiver beneath him. Could feel an answering tremor in his own body—the familiar tightening, like a bow being stretched by the sharp point of the arrow.

      ‘Kat,’ he murmured, barely aware that he had said her name.

      All Kat was aware of was the wild black buccaneer curls which framed the shuttered face. The way that the moonlight cast indigo shadows on the golden-olive skin. The powerful physique and the long, long legs. She swallowed. It was as if he had cast some dark and silken net over her, rendering her incapable of sensible thought and feeling. Making her world telescope down and focus on the vibrant allure of the Spaniard. He had done it unconsciously on the night of the Balfour Ball but now she was certain that he was doing it deliberately. Why? Why? Was he simply playing with her—as a cat played with a foolish mouse before it moved in for the careless kill?

      ‘Stop it,’ she whispered, hardly realising what she was saying.

      ‘Stop what?’ he echoed.

      ‘Making me…’ Embarrassed now, her words tailed off—for how could she possibly admit to him what she didn’t even want to acknowledge to herself?

      Yet it seemed that Carlos had no such similar qualms, for he gave her a mocking smile.

      ‘Stop making you want me?’ he taunted softly. ‘But I’m not. You’re doing that all by yourself. You just can’t help yourself, can you, Kat?’

      She shook her head, rooted to the spot as if he had turned her into a statue. Where was the wisecracking Kat now? The woman who was left cold by members of the opposite sex? ‘Yes, I can,’ she whispered, but even to her own ears the denial sounded phony.

      ‘Liar.’ His voice dipped to become a verbal caress. ‘I can read your desire for me in your eyes—it’s so obvious that you might as well be carrying a banner saying so. And I can see it in your lips too—their beautiful pout forgotten. Everything forgotten, in fact—because there’s only one thing on your mind and we both know what that is.’

      ‘Please!’ Her protest came out like a squeak—and now she even sounded like a mouse. Was that because she couldn’t bring herself to inject the word with any real conviction? Because despite Carlos’s clear disdain for her on so many levels, she stupidly wanted him just as much as she’d always wanted him?

      ‘You’re longing for me to kiss you, aren’t you, Kat?’ he mused. ‘To kiss you—only this time, not to stop. To lie you down and part your silken thighs and to thrust into you long and hard and deep until you cry out your pleasure.’

      Kat’s knees buckled and for a very real moment she was afraid that she might faint, because the graphic words were only increasing her desire. And how shameful was that? Tell him no. Tell him no and then push past him and go back down to the galley. He might be a practised seducer with a cruel tongue which could lash out at her, but she doubted that he would actually pull her into his arms and take her by force. Hating herself for the