The Complete Red-Hot And Historical Collection. Kelly Hunter

that Mari was not going to give him the benefit of any doubt.

       CHAPTER NINE

      IN MARI’S DREAM someone was knocking on the door and calling...not her...not her name...and they were speaking a foreign language. It was fluid and nice to listen to but growing louder. Mari pushed free of layers of sleep and lay there smiling, feeling good, feeling... She stretched and muscles complained.

      ‘Ouch!’ She lifted a hand to smother a yawn and as the sheet, which was the only thing covering her, slid down she realised that she was naked... Naked, and where was she? The rush of recollection coincided with the door swinging inwards and then a woman’s voice, the voice in her dreams, calling.

      ‘Sebastian! Sebastian!’

      Mari, now fully awake, responded to the emergency in the time-honoured fashion. She buried her head in the literal sense by sliding down to the bottom of the bed and heaving the covers that lay there in a tangled mess up over her unruly curls, tucking in her feet, her knees, her elbows...in an effort to disappear.

      And that was it. Too late now to reconsider her actions—she was committed and also very uncomfortable.

      In her concealment she held her breath, her heart thudding even faster at the thought of humiliating discovery. The muffled sound of heels on the floorboards got closer and the imperative tapping sound louder and louder. She held her breath in anticipation.

      Totally convinced she was about to be discovered, Mari waited with the resignation of a condemned woman, wondering if it would be any less humiliating to reveal herself before her undoubted exposure. Should she test the theory and find out if a person really could die of humiliation, always supposing she didn’t suffocate in the meantime?

      Her oxygen-starved brain conjured up several versions of the headlines before she decided there probably wouldn’t be any. Sebastian would hush it up to spare further embarrassment to the family name.

      She was fast approaching the point where she had to breathe properly, even if that meant she was discovered. Just as her autonomic nervous system kicked in and she opened her mouth to gulp in air, the sound was muffled by the creak of a door opening.

      ‘Mamina!’

      She huddled down, knees drawn up to her chest, trying to make herself as small as possible, into what she hoped would be mistaken for a bundle of bedclothes by anyone who glanced that way. So long as she didn’t do anything like... Do not think about coughing, Mari, she told herself sternly.

      It was hot. Sweat broke out over her skin, making her situation even more miserably uncomfortable, and still they carried on talking... Didn’t he appreciate her predicament? Her teeth clenched, she focused on breathing shallowly while, the longer the conversation went on between Sebastian and the woman he had called Mamina, the worse the skin-crawlingly awful prospect of discovery became.

      How humiliating would that be?

      Just when she thought it couldn’t get worse, the muscles in her calf bunched, and she had to bite down hard on her lip to stop herself crying out. The torture of the cramp became so intense that she was on the point of revealing herself when the pain in her calf that extended all the way to the arch of her foot began to diminish at the same time she realised the flow of Spanish had stopped and the tapping sound was moving towards the door.

      A final word from the strong-sounding female voice and the door closed.

      ‘You can come out now.’

      The pile of bedclothes moved, the sardonic smile on Seb’s face deepening into a broad grin as her head emerged, her hair gloriously tousled, her face deeply flushed a clashing shade of pink. She looked a long way from the sleeping angel with the cut-glass features and perfect profile he had reluctantly left to sleep, and even more touchable.

      Indignation aside, Mari felt a lurch in her chest. If he smiled more often she’d be in serious trouble... What was she thinking? She was in serious trouble. She managed to keep her scowl in place as he levered his broad shoulders from the wall.

      ‘My grandmother.’ Keeping his eyes on her, he nodded towards the door.

      ‘I figured that part out. What I couldn’t work out was why you kept her talking for hours. You had to know that I was...’

      He arched a sardonic brow. ‘Hiding under the covers?’

      When he put it like that...

      ‘What was I meant to do?’ she fired back. Struggling to retain a modicum of dignity, she held the sheet at shoulder height and eased herself up carefully into a sitting position, keeping her legs tucked underneath. She flexed her toes to ease the discomfort in the leg that had suffered the cramp attack.

      ‘Well, let me see...how about introduce yourself?’ he drawled.

      ‘Oh, yes, that would have been fun! I’m your grandson’s wife. I didn’t know if she knew, or what story you’d told her!’ she flung back.

      Mari’s bitter thoughts mingled with lustful ones as her wilful gaze roamed over him. He’d obviously stepped straight from the shower; presumably that was why he had not heard the knocking from the adjoining bathroom.

      He had paused to pull on a towelling robe. His skin, still dusted here and there with moisture, looked vibrantly gold against the black fabric. Loosely belted around his middle, the robe ended midthigh, and Mari’s glance lingered a fraction of a second too long on the hard, hair-dusted columns of his heavily muscled thighs, triggering a tactile memory that pressed down on her as heavily and as hotly as his thighs had pressed her down into the mattress last night.

      His dry voice cut into her carnal recollections. ‘I thought you had a head-on approach towards most situations.’

      Mari shook her head, the physical action helping to free her of the last clinging strands of the mind-numbing sensual fog. Adopting a cool expression, she lifted her chin and admitted, ‘What seems a good idea at the time can seem a major mistake in the cold, clear light of day.’

      An ice age could not have been more unexpected or as total as the frigid hauteur in his regard.

      ‘So you have decided to draw a line under last night and call it a...mistake?’ He sketched mocking inverted commas around the word as he bit it out through teeth bared in a hard, contemptuous smile.

      Mistake? Wasn’t that a pretty good analysis of the emotions that he’d been struggling not to analyse—his own ‘head under the blanket’ moment—as he’d stood accepting the sharp arrows of an icy-cold shower that had washed the scent of her off his flesh but not the memory of the sex, which seemed to have penetrated to a cellular level?

      The light was not cold, but it was clear as it shone on her upturned features.

      The fact that calling it a mistake was exactly what he’d been doing did not lessen the sense of outrage he recognised as totally irrational.

      The confusion on Mari’s face lifted. ‘No...last night...’ Did she regret it? ‘I’m not talking about last night. I meant the wedding crashing. Last night was...’ Her voice trailed away. She couldn’t say special to a man who had enjoyed God knew how many last nights... Just sex? For her it had felt like making love. She gulped past a ridiculous desire to weep. She should be glad that her first time had been so special. She knew a lot of people who hadn’t been so lucky, and some of the stories had not made her regret her abstinence.

      But then, she hadn’t known what she was missing; now she did. Oh, God, what had she done? She had no answer, just a total aching certainty that if she had the opportunity to do it again she would.

      ‘One would not have happened without the other.’

      Unsure what to read into this statement, she nodded cautiously and eased one leg out from under her.

      ‘And you’d still be a virgin.’ Just saying it gave Seb the