KIM LAWRENCE: Santiago's Love-Child

Lily was so startled when, without warning, he dropped down onto his heels until his eyes were almost level with hers that it didn’t even occur to her to protest when he reached across and took her chin in his hand.

He looked into her round, startled eyes. His slow smile made her stomach flip. In this enlightened age Lily wasn’t sure if predatory should be turning her on.

‘What you are is soft…’ His voice was deep and dark and textured like deepest velvet. She trembled violently as his thumb moved in a circular motion over the apple of her smooth cheek and she experienced another debilitating rush of heat. ‘And lush.’ His glance settled on her slightly parted lips. ‘And very, very feminine. An hourglass figure is something that men will always admire.’

Gordon hadn’t thought so, and Lily felt qualified to disagree. ‘Not all men,’ she contended huskily.

He dismissed this unappreciative minority with a contemptuous shrug. ‘Why do you constantly run yourself down?’ he wondered, letting his hand fall from her face and frowning.

‘I don’t,’ she protested, placing the back of her hand against the place his fingers had touched her skin and feeling ridiculously bereft.

He looked amused. ‘It is obviously an ingrained pattern of behaviour.’

‘That’s me, a hopeless case. Look, it’s been very nice talking to you…’ Surreal was much nearer the mark. There was no mystery about why she was hopelessly attracted to him, the mystery was why he should even pretend to feel similarly about her. ‘But I really must be—’ His deep voice cut smoothly across her.

‘Not hopeless, querida. An appreciative lover, someone who could teach you to enjoy your own body, could cure you.’

Having begun to get to her feet, Lily sank back down as her legs literally folded beneath her. ‘Are you offering?’ In her head it sounded ironic, the sort of slick comeback that invited laughter. Unfortunately it actually emerged sounding humiliatingly hopeful.

‘And if I was would you be interested?’

Lily didn’t smile; she was too busy panicking. To take him seriously would obviously be a major mistake and a direct route to total humiliation. ‘I suppose that’s your idea of a joke,’ she snapped.

‘I am not laughing,’ he pointed out tautly.

Lily, who had noticed this, swallowed. There was a driven intensity in his manner that she didn’t understand, but it excited her anyway. As she stared he lifted a hand and again dragged it through his hair. His brown fingers were long and elegant…sensitive, but strong. He had the sort of hands you would like to look at against the bare flesh of your stomach…other places too.

‘You did not know your mother?’

She looked at him startled by his sudden change of direction and she stopped thinking about his fingers on her bare skin.

‘You said “apparently” your mother was slim,’ he reminded her.

‘Did I?’ Lily frowned. Her ability to carry on any sort of conversation was severely hampered by the fact that every time she looked at him she experienced a fresh jolt of mind-mushing sexual longing.

‘You did.’

‘Will you stop doing that?’ She snapped, adjusting her towel.

‘What?’

‘Checking out my cleavage.’ Last night he had blanked her, this morning he was mentally undressing her and not trying to hide it. What was going on?

A laugh was drawn from his throat. ‘Don’t worry. I can discuss your family and admire your body at the same time.’

‘That’s an original slant on multi-tasking,’ she replied faintly. Inside her chest her heart was fluttering like a trapped animal. ‘But I have no desire to discuss my family with you…’

A white wolfish grin split his dark, lean face. ‘Then I will settle for admiring your body.’

Lily gave a frustrated little groan and felt a trickle of sweat pool in the valley between her breasts. What I need is a cold shower, she thought, picturing cold arrows of water hitting her overheated flesh.

Think cold water… Unfortunately the mental cooling-down process was hampered by the addition of a slickly wet male body in the imaginary shower with her.

‘I don’t want you to do that either,’ she replied hotly.

‘Don’t you…?’

Working on the basis that it was better to avoid outright lies whenever possible, Lily didn’t respond to this husky question. ‘Do you always hassle hotel guests this way?’ she demanded huskily.

Slowly he shook his head and the twisted smile he gave her was hard to read. ‘No, this is actually a unique experience for me.’

The hell of it was she wanted to believe him. She had always despised women who believed slick chat-up lines and here she was wanting to believe that a man who could have any woman he wanted thought she was unique and irresistible. Delusions didn’t get any grander than that!

‘Just for the record, my mother gave birth to me, and then dumped me with my grandmother, who brought me up. I haven’t seen her…ever…and as for my father I don’t know who he was, but the odds are she didn’t either.’ Now why did I tell him that?

Lily began to get angrily to her feet. This had to be some sort of game. ‘I’m not playing,’ she muttered from between clenched teeth.

To her way of thinking there was no way a man who possessed a perfect, hard, streamlined, muscular body like Santiago could possibly find anything to admire in her own over-generous curves.

She gave a startled yelp when halfway to her feet the towel she was clutching was unceremoniously wrenched from her fingers.

‘Give that back!’ she pleaded huskily.

He shook his head, slung the towel carelessly in the pool and removed his shades. His extravagant lashes lifted from the razor-edged curve of his cheekbones to reveal stunning eyes, so dark as to be almost black and flecked by pinpricks of silver. Lily gasped and shivered uncontrollably; the message glimmering in those mesmerising depths was inescapably sensual.

‘You didn’t ask me why I didn’t sleep last night…?’

Raw and driven, his voice drew a low moan from her throat. Lily pressed a hand to the base of her throat where a pulse was hammering away. ‘I find hot milk works a treat.’

This sterling advice caused his mouth to spasm slightly, but didn’t alter the hot, hungry expression in his eyes. His voice dropped to a low, sexy rasp as he explained. ‘I didn’t sleep last night because I was thinking about you, and this morning I come out to cool down and here you are. Do you believe in fate…?’

Lily discovered she believed in everything he said in that sinfully sexy voice of his—which probably made her certifiable. ‘I really should be going…’ This is pure physical attraction and not a good thing to act on, she told herself firmly. ‘It takes simply ages to dry my hair; it’s so thick—’

His authoritative voice cut slickly through her garbled flow of inanity. ‘Your hair is rich and lustrous.’ He let the damp strands fall through his fingers.

‘You think…?’ she echoed weakly.

‘I do.’

Lily fought to inject a sliver of sanity into the proceedings and shook her head. ‘No, it’s mousy.’ His incredibly long ebony lashes had golden tips and the fine lines that radiated from around his eyes were incredibly attractive.

‘We really are going to have to work on that self-esteem issue.’

‘We? There is no we. We can’t have this conversation. It isn’t…I don’t know you!’ Her voice rose in weak protest as her defences went into meltdown.

‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘Everything,’ she replied, staring helplessly up into his incredible eyes.

He shook his head. ‘It is totally irrelevant. Can you deny this feels amazingly right?’ he challenged as he took her by the shoulders. ‘I can’t look at you without wanting to sink into your sweet satiny softness and lose myself.’