KIM LAWRENCE - Santiago's Love-Child

By the time exhaustion forced her to flip over onto her back and get her breath back Lily had reached the comfortable mental position of concluding she had handled the evening pretty well, under the circumstances.

The circumstances being she had hardly been capable of stringing two words together in the man’s presence, but there was no need to dwell on that! As for that frisson when their eyes had met and the tug, the feeling of connection, she had felt, such things did not happen between total strangers except in her feverish imagination.

Sensual fantasies aside, their brief encounter had actually been pretty much a non-event.

Lying on her back in the water, she couldn’t help her thoughts drifting back to the moment she had seen him. Lily involuntarily inhaled as the tall figure with a dark, classically featured face crystallised in her head.

He had achingly perfect, chiselled cheekbones, a proud nose, a strong jaw, dark, smouldering eyes and a sternly sexy mouth that just had to have fuelled countless female fantasies.

She had been lending half an ear to the elderly couple who had invited her to share their table at dinner when she had seen him framed in the doorway.

A tall, dark figure, dressed in a pale linen suit and open-necked shirt that revealed a tantalising section of olive-toned skin and undoubtedly had a designer name hand-stitched into the lining.

It hadn’t just been her, lots of people had looked, but Lily had carried on looking a lot longer than most others. She hadn’t been able to help herself. The stranger had been quite simply spectacular!

He’d been deliciously dark in a typically Spanish way, but nothing else about him had been typical! For a start he’d been much taller than the average Spanish male; she’d estimated that he had to be six four or five. Even the way he’d moved, with a fluid animal grace that had made her tummy muscles quiver, had been rivetingly different. His features had been classical, but strong. Her fascinated glance had lingered on his sensually moulded mouth.

It had felt like a long time, but it had probably only been a few seconds, before she’d managed to drag her hungry eyes clear, but in the process she’d connected briefly with his eyes. For a split second the rest of the room had faded away, and something that had felt like a mild electric shock had travelled through her body.

Lily had been utterly overwhelmed by emotions that she hadn’t recognised or understood. Rachel would no doubt have identified what she’d been suffering from as lust, but Lily knew it hadn’t been that simple.

White and shaking with reaction, she’d examined the pattern in the marble floor. Her heart had continued to race while some inner instinct had told her of his approach. By the time he’d reached her side every nerve ending in her body had been taut with anticipation.

She couldn’t even think about it now with a clear head, in the cold light of day without her pulses racing. She hadn’t been able to breathe; excitement had lodged itself like a tight fist behind her breastbone. Of course, when he’d walked straight past her as though she were invisible and clasped the elderly man beside her on the shoulder she’d felt every kind of fool.

AFTER exchanging a few polite words with the couple, who were apparently frequent visitors to the hotel, the handsome stranger had walked away. It had only been later in the evening that Lily had found out his identity—his name was Santiago Morais, and he owned the hotel, and, so it appeared, a whole lot else.

He had barely even acknowledged she was there.

Except for a kind of stiff inclination of his head in her general direction, no eye contact—even the most generous of judges would have to conclude that it had been pretty thin material for a night’s steamy fantasies. The eyes across a crowded room, soul-mate stuff had been a product of her overactive imagination.

She was shaking her head over her own pathetic self-delusion as she heaved herself out of the pool and sat, knees up to her chin, eyes closed and head tilted back to catch the warmth of the early-morning rays.

When she opened them the cause of her sleepless night, Santiago Morais, was standing there looking down at her.

‘Good morning. I trust you slept well?’ In contrast to his formal enquiry there was nothing vaguely formal about the restless febrile glitter she saw in his deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes before he slid a pair of designer shades on.

Lily didn’t say anything, partly because the sight of him casually peeling off his shirt had paralysed her vocal cords.

She watched, too shocked to guard her expression as he dragged a hand through his dark hair and set off a sequence of distracting muscle-rippling. He really didn’t have an ounce of surplus flesh on his athletically lean frame.

‘I didn’t sleep well at all,’ he revealed without waiting for Lily to answer his question.

‘Sorry,’ she croaked, thinking he didn’t look as if he’d had a disturbed night. He was oozing an indecent degree of vitality, or was that testosterone? Things deep in her pelvis tightened and ached as she focused hazily on his criminally sexy mouth. Bad idea!

Don’t drool, be objective, Lily, she warned herself severely.

‘Did you have a good swim?’ he asked, unzipping his jeans to reveal a flat stomach with perfect muscle definition and a light dusting of dark hair.

‘I was just leaving.’

He had been watching her…? The thought caused a secret shiver to pass through Lily’s body. She lifted her arm in a concealing arc over her tingling nipples, and pulled herself up onto her knees just as the worn denim of his jeans slid down his narrow hips.

As she took in his muscular thighs complete with a light dusting of body hair her breath quickened to the point where she was not so much breathing as noisily gasping for air.

If only for the sake of her own traumatised heart, she knew she ought to avert her eyes. Heaven knew, she tried, but she couldn’t; her eyes were glued to his body. He was so beautiful. She could remember feeling awkward, clumsy and overweight in comparison to his sleek hardness.

‘I meant to lose some weight for this summer,’ she explained, feeling the sudden need to apologise for her appearance.

Above his designer shades Santiago’s sable brows lifted. Behind the dark lenses it was hard to see what he was thinking, but she could guess—Crazy woman, where is security when I need it?

She smiled to show she was actually sane. ‘But you know how it is.’ Stupid, of course he doesn’t.

Her attention was irresistibly drawn back to his body. By this point he had stripped down to a pair of black swimming shorts that left enough to the imagination to send her temperature soaring several degrees.

The sensation she experienced when she looked at his streamlined golden body was a lot as she imagined drowning might be. The inability to breathe; the heavy pounding of her heart…only drowning would feel cold and she was hot…very hot! She took a deep, shaky breath as she struggled to get her breathing back on track and averted her eyes from the arrow of dark hair that dived below the waistband of his shorts.

‘Why would you want to lose any pounds?’

Lily didn’t take Santiago’s bewilderment seriously. ‘You’ve got very nice manners, but I know I’m fat,’ she explained matter-of-factly. ‘I can’t even blame it on my genes; apparently my mother was slim.’ Her grandmother, who like many people equated extra pounds with laziness, had been fond of regretfully observing that Lily had missed out on her mother’s good looks.

‘Fat…!’ His incredulity gave way to laughter, deep, warm laughter. Through the smoky lenses of his sunglasses she was aware of his eyes moving in a broad, caressing sweep down the length of her body. When he reached her toes he released a long, appreciative sigh. ‘You are not fat!’ He dismissed the claim with a contemptuous motion of his hand.