Nina Harrington - Revenge In The Boardroom

She cried out in surprise at the shock of how excruciating it was.

Luca was asking urgently, ‘Where is it? Where’s the pain?’

Struggling, because it was more intense than anything she’d ever experienced, Serena got out thickly, ‘My arm...my leg.’

She was barely aware of Luca inspecting her arm, her hands, and then undoing her trousers to pull them down roughly, inspecting her thigh where it was burning. He was brushing something off her and cursing again.

She struggled to recall what she’d seen. Ants. They’d just been ants. It wasn’t a snake or a spider.

Luca was doing a thorough inspection of both legs and then moving back up to her arms. In spite of the pain she struggled to get out, ‘I’m fine—it’s nothing, really.’

But she was feeling nauseous now, with a white-hot sensation blooming outwards from both limbs. She was also starting to shake. Luca pulled her trousers back up. She wasn’t even registering embarrassment that he’d all but stripped her.

She tried to take a step, but the pain when she moved almost blinded her. And suddenly she was being lifted into the air against a hard surface. She wanted to tell Luca to put her down but she couldn’t seem to formulate the words.

And then the pain took over. There was a sense of time being suspended, loud voices. And then it all went black.

* * *

‘Serena?’

The voice penetrated the thick warm blanket of darkness that surrounded her. And there was something about the voice that irritated her. She tried to burrow away from it.

‘ Serena .’

‘What?’ She struggled to open her eyes and winced at the light. Her surroundings registered slowly. A rudimentary hut of some kind. She was lying down on something deliciously soft. And one other thing registered: mercifully...the awful, excruciating pain was gone.

‘Welcome back.’

That voice. Deep and infinitely memorable. And not in a good way.

It all came back.

She turned her head to see Luca looking at her with a small smile on his face. A smile . He was sitting down near the bed she lay on.

She croaked out, ‘What happened?’

His smile faded, and it must have been a trick of the light but she could have sworn he paled slightly. ‘You got stung. Badly.’

Serena recalled the ground moving under her hands and shuddered delicately. ‘But they were just ants. How could ants do that?’

Luca’s mouth twisted. ‘They were bullet ants.’

Serena frowned. ‘Should that mean anything to me?’

He shook his head. ‘Not really, but they deliver a sting that is widely believed to be the most painful on record of any biting insect—like the pain of a bullet. I’ve been bitten once or twice; I know exactly what it’s like.’

Serena felt embarrassed. ‘But I passed out like some kind of wimp.’

Luca had a funny look on his face.

‘The fact that you were semi-conscious till we reached the village and kept fighting to walk was a testament to your obviously high pain threshold.’

She lifted her arm and looked at it. There was only a very faint redness where she’d been bitten. All that pain and not even a scratch left behind? She almost felt cheated. And then she thought of what he’d said and her arm dropped.

‘Wait a second—you carried me all the way here?’

He nodded. There was a scuffling sound from nearby and thankfully Luca’s intense focus moved off her. She looked past him to see some small curious faces peeping around the door. He said something to them and they disappeared, giggling and chattering.

Luca turned back. ‘They’re fascinated by the golden-haired gringa who arrived unconscious into their village a few hours ago.’

Serena was very disorientated by this far less antagonistic Luca. Feeling self-conscious, she struggled to sit up, moving back the covers on the bed.

But Luca rapped out, ‘Stay there! You’re weak and dehydrated. You’re not going anywhere today, or this evening. The women have prepared some food and you need to drink lots of water.’

Luca stood up, and his sheer size made Serena feel dizzy enough to lie down again. As if by magic some smiling women appeared in the doorway, holding various things. Luca ushered them in and said to Serena over their heads, ‘I have to go to the mines. I’ll be back later. You’ll be looked after.’

Weakly, Serena protested, ‘But I’m supposed to be taking notes...’

Something flashed in Luca’s eyes but he just said, ‘Don’t worry about that. There’ll be time tomorrow, before we have to leave.’

‘Before we have to leave.’ She felt a lurch in her belly and an awful betraying tingle of anticipation as to what might happen once they did leave this place.

* * *

The following morning, early, Luca was trying not to keep staring at Serena, who sat at the end of a long table in the communal eating hut. She was wearing a traditional smock dress, presumably given to her by one of the women to replace her own clothes, and the simple design might have been haute couture, the way she wore it with such effortless grace.

A small toddler, a girl, was sitting on Serena’s lap and staring up at her with huge, besotted brown eyes. She’d been crying minutes before, and Serena had bent down to her level and cajoled her to stop crying, lifting her up and settling her as easily as if she was her mother.

Now she was eating her breakfast—a manioc-based broth—for all the world acting as if it was the finest caviar, giving the little girl morsels in between her own mouthfuls. She couldn’t have looked more innocent and pure if she’d tried, tugging remorselessly on his conscience.

A mixture of rage and sexual frustration made Luca’s whole body tight. The remnants of the panic he’d felt the previous day when she’d been so limp in his arms after being stung still clung to him. She’d been brave. Even though he knew he was being completely irrational, he couldn’t stop lambasting her inwardly for not behaving as he expected her to.

Their eyes met and caught at that moment and he saw her cheeks flush. With desire? Or anger? Or a mixture of both like him? Suddenly her significance wasn’t important any more—who she was, what she’d done. Or not done. He wanted her, and she would pay for throwing his life out of whack not once but twice.

Resolve filling his body, he stood up and said curtly, ‘We’re leaving for the mines in ten minutes.’

He didn’t like the way he noticed how her arm tightened around the small girl almost protectively, or how seeing a child on her lap made him feel. All sorts of things he’d never imagined feeling in his life—ever.

Her chin tipped up. ‘I’ll be ready.’

Luca left before he did something stupid, like take up his phone and ask for the helicopter to come early so that he could haul her back to Rio and douse this fire in his blood as soon as possible.

CHAPTER SIX

A FEW HOURS later Serena was back in her own clothes, now clean, and sitting cross-legged beside Luca in the hut of the tribal elders. She was still smarting from the intensity of his regard that morning at breakfast. As if he’d been accusing her of something. Her suspicions had been reinforced when he’d said, with a definitely accusatory tone, on their journey to the mines, ‘You were good with that little girl earlier.’

Serena had swallowed back the tart urge to apologise and explained, ‘I have a nephew just a little bit older. We’re very close.’

She hadn’t liked being reminded of that vulnerability—that from the moment she’d held Siena’s son, Spiro, he and Serena had forged an indelible bond and her biological clock had started ticking loudly.

For someone who had never seen the remotest possibility of such a domestic idyll in her life, she was still surprised at how much she craved it.