She bit her lip and lowered her eyes; she had no illusions left. Loss of pride and humiliation lived inside her like a cancer, eating away at her self-respect, when she thought of how eager, how willingly she had fallen into his arms, her body warm and pliant to his every desire. Well, never again. She gritted her teeth and pushed the self-destructive feelings to the back of her mind. It had been a fleeting desire at best on his part, and it crossed her mind to wonder just how far the swine was prepared to go to achieve his own ends.
With that thought uppermost in her mind, Liza lifted her head and responded with an elegantly arched brow, cynicism evident. ‘Never slept with your fiancée?’
‘That was years ago!’ Nick exclaimed with incredulously long-suffering masculine outrage at the vagrancy of the female. Any sane man would have concluded she was talking about last night. He could not do right for doing wrong in Liza’s eyes, and he was getting mighty fed up with it.
‘Last night for old time’s sake, was it?’ she prompted icily.
‘There was no last night,’ Nick snapped; as he knew to his cost, his rampant arousal had kept him up all night in both senses and it was this blue-eyed vixen’s fault. He had spent the
whole night seated on a chair by the connecting door to her room, keeping guard.
‘Your bed wasn’t slept in.’ Liza realised with a sickening jolt she was in danger of revealing more than she wanted him to know. ‘I happened to notice on my way out this morning.’ She lifted a slight shoulder and dropped it again, feigning indifference.
Nick closed his eyes and breathed in deep and slow. She had turned his perfectly ordered life upside-down in a matter of days. He was furious with himself and furious with her, and lack of control was not a sensation he was accustomed to around women. But on the plus side he realised Liza was obviously jealous, which was something, and when he opened his eyes none of his emotions showed on his hard, handsome face.
‘Why, Liza, I do believe you’re jealous,’ he drawled mockingly.
Liza went red then white and in a voice laced with pain she snarled, ‘Of you, never,’ her control suddenly breaking at his mocking assessment. ‘Sophia is welcome to you.’ Her voice cracked. ‘You took up with me, made love…no, had sex with me simply to make her jealous. You probably dragged me up here because you’re afraid I would tell her what a two-timing rat you are. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘Dios! You have some opinion of me if you think I would make love to two women in the same day,’ Nick said grimly, and when he took a step forward into the light she could see faint lines of what looked like strain etched into his skin.
‘My opinion does not matter, but God help Sophia when she marries you. I can almost feel sorry for her.’
‘Married to Sophia, are you nuts?’ Nick exclaimed and crossed the floor swiftly, grasping her chin before she could turn away, his breath warm against her skin, his eyes dark and shocked as he forced her to meet them. Of all the things he thought she might accuse him of when she discovered where they were…marrying Sophia was not one of them. He surveyed her with dark, impenetrable eyes, his tall, strong body tense, he saw the hurt she was trying valiantly to hide, and he felt like pond life. ‘I don’t know who has been filling your head with wild stories about Sophia, and me, but they are not true.’
‘Don’t give me that,’ Liza said angrily. ‘I always suspected you had an ulterior motive for bringing me to Spain, and the party.’ She had tried living in a fool’s paradise but it didn’t work and now she decided to tell him the truth, she had nothing to lose…
‘Marco told me everything. Apparently it’s common knowledge you have been…’ she couldn’t say in love ‘…hankering after Sophia ever since she broke the engagement, and went to work in Brussels. And it was also common knowledge she was back in Spain for the first time in years and was attending the party. You used me to make her jealous and I will never forgive you for it. Now get me out of here.’
‘No,’ Nick said evenly. ‘You have got it all wrong.’ In this at least he could tell her the truth. ‘Please, Liza, listen to me.’
‘I have listened to you too damn much, which is why I am stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere instead of the cabin of a plane,’ she declared hotly.
She was the most beautiful, infuriating, crazy, mixed-up lady he had ever known, and he couldn’t help it—he laughed.
Incensed, Liza raised her hand and would have slapped his face but he caught her wrist. ‘Calm down, Liza, and let me tell you the truth about my so-called engagement to Sophia. It was an engagement of convenience, nothing more.’
‘Pull the other one,’ Liza mocked, and frowned ferociously, determined not to listen to him.
Seeing her frown, Nick made a wry face. ‘I am not proud of the fact, but at the time I got engaged you might remember my father had been diagnosed with cancer. His one wish was to see me settled with the firm and with a wife.’
She did remember her mother telling her that Señor Menendez was ill one Christmas, and the next summer Nick had been engaged.
‘Work was no problem—I joined the firm, and I got engaged to Sophia to keep him happy. Sophia agreed because she wanted to go to university, and the engagement stopped her father grumbling about her wasting her time studying, when she should be finding a husband. I helped her out financially. It was a business agreement, nothing more, and it ended two months after my father died.’
‘You expect me to believe that after last night?’ Liza said flatly. But her own innate honesty forced her to admit if Marco had not told her the rumour about Nick and his unrequited love she probably would have believed him, because it had been a sudden engagement yet it had dragged on for three years, ending after the death of his father. The facts fitted. She was no longer sure what to believe, or who.
Nick stepped back and spread his hands wide. ‘Why else would I tell you?’ His mouth was sardonic. ‘Think about it. If what you thought was true, and I was afraid you were going to speak to Sophia about us, it would make more sense to put you on the first plane out of Malaga.’
He always had an answer for everything, but he was right, damn him! Liza collapsed down on the sofa. ‘Then why…’ she demanded, shaking her head and looking confusedly around the small cabin ‘…why here?’
‘Enough, let’s stop this pointless argument,’ Nick growled, his frustration getting the better of him, and, bending down, he flung a strong arm around her waist, lifted her bodily off the sofa and held her hard against him. ‘All I am trying to do is protect your reputation.’ And it was as near the truth as he dared tell her.
‘By dragging me off to a cabin when I was on my way back to some sun in Lanzarote? Some protection!’ Liza shot back derisively, and looked into his dark eyes, her own shooting sparks. Who the hell did he think he was? Hauling her around the countryside as if he was some mediaeval slave master, apparently for sex, without his precious family finding out. He wasn’t protecting her, he was protecting himself…
‘I wanted to be alone with you, and I had hoped you felt the same,’ Nick seethed and, swinging her up in his arms, he strode across the room and elbowed open a door. ‘I am looking after you and that is the end of it.’
Imprisoned in his arms, Liza quailed at the barely leashed violence in his black eyes, and, looking away, her eyes collided with a massive white quilt-covered bed, and her temper soared. ‘Forcibly carrying me into a bedroom…’ she cried. ‘You call that looking after—’