CATHY WILLIAMS - The Ultimate Persuasion - A Tempestuous Temptation / The Notorious Gabriel Diaz / The Truth Behind his Touch

She inched her way towards the bed and laughed when he sat forward and yanked her towards him. Her laughter felt like an unspoken release of all her defences. She was letting go of her resentment in the face of something bigger.

‘What do you mean?’ Heart beating a mile a minute, she collapsed next to him and felt the warmth of his body next to her. It generated a series of intensely physical reactions that left her breathless and gasping.

‘So you’re not impressed by money. But a free spirit would have taken what I offered—the computer, the extensive wardrobe; would have factored them in as gifts to be appreciated and moved on. You rejected the computer out of hand and agonised over the wardrobe. The only reason you accepted was because you had no more clothes and I had to talk you into seeing the sense behind the offer. And you still tell me you’re going to return them all to me when we get back to London. You criticise me for wanting control but you fall victim to the very same tendency.’

‘We’re not alike at all.’ They were both on their sides, fully clothed, staring at one another. There was something very erotic about the experience, because underneath the excitement of discovery lurked like a thrilling present concealed with wrapping paper.

‘Money separates us,’ Luiz said wryly. ‘But in some areas I’ve discovered that we’re remarkably similar. Would this conversation benefit from us being naked, do you think?’

Aggie released a small, treacherous moan and he delivered a rampantly satisfied smile in response. Then he stood up and held out one hand. ‘I’m going to run a bath,’ he murmured. ‘Your room’s next to mine. Why don’t you go and get some clothes…?’

‘It feels weird,’ Aggie confided. ‘I’ve never approached an intimate situation like this.’

‘But then this is an intimate situation neither of us expected,’ Luiz murmured. ‘And that in itself is a first for me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It never fails to surprise me just how turned on I get for you.’

‘Because I’m nothing like the women you’ve gone out with?’

‘Because you’re nothing like the women I’ve gone out with,’ Luiz agreed.

Aggie knew that she should be offended by that, but then who would she be kidding? He was nothing like the guys she had gone out with. Mutual physical attraction had barrelled through everything and changed the parameters. Maybe that was why it felt so dangerously exciting.

‘You’re a lot more independent and I find that a turn on.’ He softly ran his fingers along her side. He couldn’t wait for her to be naked but this leisurely approach was intoxicating. ‘You’re not a slave to fashion and you’re fond of arguing.’

Aggie conceded privately that all three of those things represented a change for him, but a change that he would rapidly tire of. Since she wasn’t in it for the long haul, since she too was stepping outside the box, there was no harm in that, although she was uneasily aware of a barely acknowledged disappointment floating aimlessly inside her.

‘You like your women submissive,’ she said with a little laugh.

‘Generally speaking, it’s worked in the past.’

‘And I like my guys to be creative, not to be ruled by money.’

‘And yet, mysteriously, your creative paupers have all bitten the dust.’ Luiz found, to his bemusement, that he didn’t care for the thought of any other man in her life. It was puzzling, because he had never been the possessive type. In fact, in the past women who had tried to stir up a non-existent jealousy gene by referring to past lovers had succeeded in doing the opposite.

‘They haven’t been paupers,’ Aggie laughed. ‘Neither of them. They’ve just been indifferent to money.’

‘And in the end they bored you.’

‘I’m beginning to wish I’d never mentioned that,’ Aggie said, though only half-joking. ‘And if they bored me,’ she felt obliged to elaborate, ‘it was because they turned out to be boring people, not because they were indifferent to money.’ She wriggled off the bed and stood up. ‘Perhaps I’ll have a bath in my own bathroom…’

Luiz frowned, propping himself up on one elbow. ‘Second thoughts?’ His voice was neutral but his eyes had cooled.

‘No.’ Aggie tilted her chin to look at him. ‘I don’t play games like that.’

‘Good.’ He felt himself relax. To have been rejected once bordered on the unthinkable. To be rejected twice would have been beyond the pale. ‘Then what games do you play? Because I think I can help you out there…’

The promise behind those softly spoken words sent a shiver up her spine and it was still there when she returned to his bedroom a few minutes later. She had not been lying when she had confessed that she had never approached sex like this before. Stripped of all romantic mystique and airy-fairy expectations that it would lead somewhere, this was physical contact reduced to its most concentrated form.

The bath had been run. Aggie could smell the fragrance of jasmine bath oil. The steam in the enormous bathroom did nothing whatsoever to diminish the impact of Luiz, who had stripped out of his clothes and was wearing a towel around his waist.

Outside, the snow continued to fall. In her room, she had taken a few seconds to stare out of the window and absorb the fact that Mark and Maria, and the mission upon which they had embarked only a few days previously, couldn’t have been further from her mind. When exactly had she lost track of the reason why she was here in the first place? It was as though she had opened the wardrobe door to find herself stepping into Narnia, reality left behind for a brief window in time.

She could barely remember the routine of her day-to-day existence. The school, the staff room, the kids getting ready for their Nativity play.

Was Luiz right? She had always fancied herself as a free-spirited person and yet she felt as though this was the first impulsive thing she had ever done in her life. She had thought him freakishly controlled, a power-hungry tycoon addicted to mastering everything and everyone around him, while she—well, she was completely different. Maybe the only difference really was the fact that he was rich and she wasn’t, that he had grown up with privilege while she had had to fight her way out of her background, burying herself in studies that could provide her with opportunities.

‘Now, what I’d like…’ Luiz drawled, and Aggie blinked herself back to the present, ‘is to do what I was fantasising about when you did your little catwalk in that shop for me. Instead of showing me how you look with clothes on, show me how you look with them off.’

He sauntered out of the bathroom and lay back down on the bed, just as he had before.

Aggie realised in some part of her that, whilst this should not feel right, it did. She would never have believed it possible for either of them to set aside their personal differences and meet on this plane. Certainly, she would never have believed it of herself, but before she could begin nurturing any doubts about the radical decision she had made she told herself that everyone deserves some time out, and this was her time out. In a day or two, it would be nothing more than a wicked memory of the one and only time she had truly strayed from the path she had laid out for herself.

She watched, fascinated and tingling all over, shocked as he drew back the towel which had been modestly covering him, and revealed his arousal. She nearly fainted when he gently held it in one hand.

Luiz grinned at her. ‘So easy to make you blush,’ he murmured. Then he fell silent and watched as she began removing her clothes, at first with self-conscious, fumbling fingers, then with more confidence as she revelled in the sight of his darkened, openly appreciative gaze.