Nicola Marsh - Hot Summer Flings - A Spanish Awakening / The Italian Next Door... / Interview with the Daredevil

The golden skin drawn tight across the strong bones of his face, raw, brutal fury etched into every plane and angle of the hard lines of his patrician visage, the man with the blazing dark eyes had seemed like a stranger.

He had responded to her escort’s drunken slurred protests with a storm of staccato Spanish before he had literally dragged the man from the car and vanished into the trees with him.

Megan never knew what happened during the five minutes Emilio was gone. But next time their paths had crossed at the university her lecturer had forgotten the ultra-cool image he liked to cultivate and run, gown flapping, in the opposite direction like a scared rabbit.

When Emilio had returned she had already got out of the car and had been relieved to see the explosive fury had vanished. He seemed calm, cold even.

She had gathered her courage in both hands and levelled a wary look at his face, still able to remember his anger, still seeing a stranger when she looked at him. But her dignified thank-you had been genuine, even though she had wished it had been anyone else but Emilio who had rescued her from the mortifying situation.

‘Did you want saving?’

The response bewildered her until she saw his expression.

The scorn and aristocratic disdain etched on his patrician features made her cringe. She felt crushed by his scorn. It was bad enough that the man she had had a secret crush on since she was a kid had witnessed the grubby sordid scene, but that he could think she had wanted … If she could have crawled out of her skin at that moment Megan would have. She stuttered in her eagerness to correct him.

‘No.no, that is, yes, you can’t think that I wanted. Of course I—’

‘You were a fool.’

Unable to deny the scathing denouncement, she shook her head and blinked back tears. Did he think she didn’t know that? Did he think she needed it rubbed in?

As she stood there she silently prayed for the ground to open up and swallow her—maybe even out loud; that part remained a little vague. But it didn’t so she simply had to stand and endure the contemptuous study, nailed to the spot with scorching humiliation, mortified beyond belief as the sweep of his disparaging stare moved from the top of her glossy head to her feet shod in a pair of high-heeled ankle boots.

‘You say you didn’t want anything, but appearances suggest otherwise. You look like you’ve been poured into that top, and as for the jeans …’

Megan dragged down at the rounded high neckline of the shirt she wore today under her business suit, closing her eyes as she still recalled the condemnatory glow in his eyes as his sweeping gesture had encompassed the V-necked black T-shirt—black because she’d thought the colour was slimming—before sliding to the dark denim jeans, the brand and style that all her friends had been wearing without being accused of flaunting anything.

‘What reaction did you expect?’ Megan heard him ask as she focused her attention, not on the condemnation in his eyes, but the nerve in his lean cheek that was clenching and unclenching.

He stabbed his long fingers into the dark waves of his thick hair and released a string of expletives in Spanish, sounding and looking nothing like the quietly authoritative man who had always been kind to her and, even more amazingly, appeared interested in what she was doing, possibly because he had lovely manners.

‘As for getting into a car with a boy who had been drinking …’

His sneering disdain made her see red. ‘He’s not a boy, he’s a lecturer.’

‘Do the university authorities look kindly on their lecturing staff dating their students?’

‘It wasn’t a date, he was just—’

‘I saw what he was just doing, and if you choose to have casual sex it might be a good idea to remember that drunks have a very slender grasp of safe sex!’

The accusation horrified Megan. ‘He wasn’t—’

‘Are you saying he had not been drinking?’

‘No, I’m …’ She shook her head, struggling to equate this cold, cruel critic with the person who had always had a kind word of encouragement for her in the past.

Her miserable silence seemed to incense him further.

‘Have you been drinking also?’ he asked, his hooded gaze suspicious as he studied her face.

At that point a small burst of defiance, long overdue it seemed in retrospect, came to Megan’s aid.

Planting her hands on the curve of her hips, she thrust out her chin, tossed back her hair. ‘If I wanted to have a drink, so what?’ she challenged, her voice husky as she forced the words past the aching emotional lump in her throat.

‘It’s not illegal, you know. I’m over eighteen.’

‘This is not about legality, it is about self-respect.’

Megan, unable to stand there and take the sheer breathtaking unfairness of the cutting condemnation, choked back a sob and yelled, ‘I wasn’t attending an orgy! It was just a few friends, a university thing. Actually, it’s none of your business. You’re not my father.’

Inexplicably, or so it seemed to Megan, he took her response as a tacit admission of guilt.

‘So you have!’ His eyes closed, he let his head fall back, exposing the long line of his brown muscled throat as he inhaled deeply, then slid apparently unwittingly into his native tongue, ending the tirade with a biting, ‘Well? ‘

Well, what? she thought. ‘I had one glass of wine,’ she admitted after a fulminating silence. ‘I said I’d get a taxi, but he offered—’

‘How did you expect the man to react when you look like that? It’s an open invitation to … to …’ The rest of the insult was delivered once more in his native tongue, but this time a crushed Megan definitely got the gist!

‘I said no.’

‘Clearly not loudly enough. He said …’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said you were gagging for it.’

Megan, white-faced, pushed away the images crowded into her head and refocused on the present.

‘I prefer to steer clear of the D-cup she’s-gagging-for-it look.’ As she spoke she saw the flash of shocked recognition in his eyes and wished the words unsaid.

Her intention had always been, should he ever refer to the subject—admittedly unlikely—to shrug it away as though she barely recalled it. The last thing she wanted was Emilio to guess what sort of indelible impression the incident had had on her.

‘You are speaking of that night when that little loser made a pass.’

His retrospective take on the evening drew a laugh from Megan. ‘You mean that innocent victim I led on?’ She bit her lip and thought, Could you sound any more bitter, Megan?

A nerve clenched in his lean cheek.

If it had been anyone else she would have interpreted the look that flashed across his face as discomfiture, but this was Emilio Rios, who did not know the meaning of awkward.

He dragged a hand down his jaw and expelled an irritated-sounding sigh. ‘I was angry that night.’ He had been angry that entire weekend, from the moment she had walked into the room the previous evening smelling like summer and looking like warm, inviting sin, looking as if she were made for him.

The forced admission made her laugh. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

Even now the memory of his loss of control shook Emilio. He had never before or since come closer to totally losing it. The red haze had consumed him totally.

‘The situation was …’

She angled an interrogative brow as his voice trailed away to a growl.

‘I did not handle the situation well.’

As apologies went it was pretty feeble. ‘Being my brother’s mate did not make you the guardian of my morals and you had no right to judge me!’

‘I did not judge you. I was trying to protect you, Megan.’