A Spanish Awakening. Kim Lawrence

could work something out. I’m not averse to paying for quality,’ he drawled.

      The sexual tension soared as they stared at one another, neither willing to back down. But before this absurd negotiation went any further a voice cut across the seething silence.

      ‘Emilio?’

       CHAPTER THREE

      MEGAN turned her head. The woman standing there was tiny, barely an inch above five feet. The last time she had seen the petite brunette the older woman had been wearing a ring; today her hand was bare, but nothing else, it seemed, had changed.

      Rosanna Rios was still the most beautiful woman she had ever met. Never a hair out of place, she looked like a porcelain ornament with big brown eyes, a rosebud mouth and delicate nose. She had the sort of delicate fragility that aroused the protective instincts in men.

      ‘I did call, but you were.’ she raised a darkened brow and lifted her enquiring gaze to Emilio as she teased ‘… occupied.’

      Megan felt her stomach muscles tighten as she watched Emilio brush the smooth cheek offered him with his lips.

      ‘I had no idea at all.’ Rosanna turned to smile at Megan, adding with a smile tinged with relief as she turned back to Emilio, ‘I’m glad things are finally working out for you.’

      Megan, puzzling over the soft-voiced aside, waited for Emilio to set the record straight. Instead she heard him ask his ex-wife if she was being met.

      ‘I was.’ Rosanna scanned the crowds, a delicate frown furrowing her smooth brow. ‘But he appears to have been held up.’

      ‘Can we offer you a lift? ‘

      Megan, frowning at the we and the misleading message it sent, watched as Rosanna shook her head. ‘I’ll wait.’

      Emilio shrugged and placed a hand lightly between Megan’s shoulder blades, acting as if he hadn’t noticed when she flinched. ‘If you’re sure?’

      Megan flashed him a ‘what the hell are you up to?’ look, which he responded to by dropping his head to whisper softly in her ear, ‘I’ll meet your price.’

      The mortified colour flew to Megan’s cheeks as she blurted loudly, ‘I wasn’t serious and you know it.’

      ‘You really shouldn’t make offers you don’t intend to follow through with,’ he chided, adding, ‘Sorry, Rosanna, we’re being rude.’

      ‘You’re being rude,’ Megan gritted.

      Rude, and extremely manipulative.

      ‘No apologies necessary. Are you two arriving? Or were you planning a romantic trip?’

      ‘We are not together,’ Megan protested in a belated attempt to set the record straight. The breathlessness of her delivery, due in part to the fingers that had begun to massage the tight area at the back of her neck, did not add weight to her claim.

      The casual intimacy of his action sent a quiver of raw sexual awareness through her body.

      Emilio hooked a thumb under her chin. ‘You’re tense, querida.’ He disapproved with a frown that left his dark eyes warm with concern.

      ‘I can’t imagine why,’ she retorted.

      The ironic retort drew a laugh from Emilio, who allowed the hand that lay against her waist to slide lower to the firm curve of her bottom. ‘Megan was planning to fly home, but it looks like I have her here for a little longer.’

      Rosanna gave a sympathetic grimace. ‘Bad luck.’

      ‘Good luck for me.’

      ‘I was lucky. I arrived on an early flight.’

      ‘How long have you two been …?’

      Megan, aware of Emilio’s eyes on her face, struggled to manufacture an amused smile for the other woman. ‘No, we’re not, that is. He’s joking.’

      Emilio came to her rescue. ‘We are just good friends,’ he said with an ‘if you believe that you’ll believe anything’ smile.

      Rosanna smiled. ‘Of course.’

      ‘No, really we’re …’

      Emilio placed a finger to her lips.

      The contact made her pupils dilate.

      ‘Relax, Megan.’ His deep voice, huskily suggestive of unspoken intimacies, shivered across her oversensitive nerve endings. ‘Rosanna understands, and she is not going to report back to anyone,’ he soothed, lifting a stray hank of hair from her cheek.

      A hazy, distracted expression drifted across his face as he rubbed the silky strands between his fingers before tucking them behind her ear.

      Megan swallowed and struggled to maintain a façade of calm while her thudding heart tried to climb its way out of her chest cavity.

      Mesmerised, she stared at him. She did not register the time lapse before he pushed her hair from her face. She was too busy registering unpleasant things like the almost painful clutching of her stomach muscles and the rush of heat that raised her core temperature by several uncomfortable degrees.

      His hand did not fall away. Instead he touched her ear lobe, seeming to notice the amber studs in the gold setting for the first time. His dark, thickly lashed eyes drifted downwards to the hollow of her throat where a pulse fluttered visibly against the tender blue-veined white skin.

      Any residual guilt he might have felt for exploiting the situation had long vanished. It had been a long time coming, but Megan Armstrong was going to be his and he was going to make her forget every man she had ever been with—and, Madre di Dios, he was going to enjoy every second of it!

      His fingertips barely brushed her, but even the suggestion of contact sent a shiver of sensation across the surface of her skin. She was frozen to the spot by a wave of enervating lust that was terrifying in its strength.

      Hating the feeling of being utterly helpless and not in control, Megan hid behind the sweeping half-moon fan of her dark lashes and, like a drowning man clinging to a straw, repeated, You’ll laugh about this later, over and over in her head.

      ‘I like those,’ he said, making her shiver as he touched, not just the earring, but the thin layer of skin behind her ear, and Megan realised it really was an erogenous zone.

      God, I’ve got erogenous zones!

      She met his dark intent gaze and thought, God, I’ve got a problem!

      Her hand came up to push his away—that had been the intention at least. Instead she somehow ended up with her fingers curled over his and stayed there for an awkward heart-thudding moment.

      ‘They were my mum’s.’

      Her eyes dropped from his uncomfortably perceptive gaze a moment before they filled with emotional tears. The earrings were one of a handful of physical reminders she had of her mother, along with her watch and the creased and grainy snapshot of herself as a baby held in her mother’s arms she carried in her wallet.

      ‘They match your eyes. Did your mother have golden eyes too?’ His voice flowed over her like honey.

      She was startled by the question; the eyes in question flew to his. He wasn’t really interested, she told herself. This little byplay was presumably for Rosanna’s benefit—like the kisses.

      ‘Yes, she did. I … I look like her.’

      ‘Then she must have been a very beautiful woman.’

      Megan felt her heart give a traitorous thud and forced herself to look away. He looked genuine but he was about as sincere as a politician running for re-election; she would be a fool if she lost sight of that fact.