It had been so long since he’d touched her. So long since she’d felt the intimate slide of his body into hers. The mental images crashing through her mind made her legs tremble so badly that she was forced to drop into the closest chair. Teresa took a deep breath and let it out slowly, hoping for calm. Calm, though, was impossible to find.
She looked around his bedroom, noting that the space was done in shades of soothing white, from cream to ivory and every shade in between. There were splashes of color in the paintings on the walls and the jewel-toned pillows stacked on the bed wide enough to qualify as a soccer field. The bamboo floor gleamed like old honey in the soft lighting. The chair she sat in was one of two drawn up before a now cold fireplace of river stone. A table between the chairs held a carafe of lemon water, left there by one of Rico’s efficient yet nearly invisible staff.
She poured herself a glass of water and drank half of it down, hoping to ease her dry throat. But there was no help there, either. She wasn’t thirsty, she was needy.
Oh, she hated to even let that thought race through her mind. Hated knowing that her body and heart were still vulnerable to Rico even after five years.
When she’d first met him, he had been open, warm. He’d drawn her in so easily, sweeping her into an affair and a romance and into marriage before she’d even had time to notice how quickly things were moving between them. Even if she had noticed, she wouldn’t have cared. It had all felt so right. As if they’d somehow been fated to find each other. She had loved completely, for the first time in her life, and she had hoped it was forever.
Now his warmth was gone, covered by a veneer of ice that put a hard glint in his pale blue eyes, and Teresa knew that she was to blame for the change in him. She set her water glass aside and scrubbed her hands up and down her arms, as if she could chase away the chills dancing along her skin. Despite the sexual heat simmering inside her, the cold sensation of impending disaster just wouldn’t dissipate.
“Where is he?” she muttered aloud, more to hear a sound in the stillness than for anything else. “What’s he waiting for?”
Why wasn’t he storming into the bedroom and finding a way to make her beg for him?
Another rush of heat swamped her and she pushed up from the chair. Her knees were weak, but her will was strong. Whatever game Rico was playing, she wasn’t going to cooperate. She refused to sit still and worry herself into what her mother used to call a state. Rico expected her to just sit here in this lush cell and await his arrival. No doubt he knew exactly what she was going through and was enjoying it.
“But what choice do you have?” she murmured. “Where could you go, even if you were willing to run away again? You’re on an island, for heaven’s sake.”
Even if she could, she wouldn’t have run. Not again. Everyone made mistakes, she assured herself, but only really foolish people made the same ones over and over again.
Muttering, grumbling and trying to get a grip on her own skittering hormones, Teresa stepped out of the bedroom onto the flagstone terrace.
Instantly, the flower-scented breeze wrapped itself around her as it rattled the leaves on the surrounding trees, sounding like hushed whispers in the dark. At the edge of Rico’s property, the ocean sighed into shore, moonlight shimmering on the surface of the water. It was perfect. Dreamlike. She only wished she wasn’t too tense to enjoy it.
“Planning to run again?” Rico asked from behind her.
As she whirled around to face him, he continued, “There’s nowhere to go this time, Teresa. You can’t get off the island until I let you go.”
He was backlit by the room behind him and in his black clothes, with his black hair and his face in darkness…he looked like a shadow of doom. He wasn’t, though. Because ghosts or shades or whatever you wanted to call them didn’t give off heat as Rico did. Even from across the patio, she was dazzled by it.
“I wasn’t running,” she managed to say. “I was waiting.”
“For?” He stepped out of the bedroom and walked across the patio toward her. Moonlight shone in his eyes, but his luscious mouth was a grim line and his body language was anything but relaxed.
“I was waiting for you, Rico, and you know it,” she said. “I’ve been here. Alone. For two hours. Is making me wait part of the thrill for you?”
“Thrill?” He moved in so close, she instinctively took a step back. But the metal railing around the patio stopped her retreat and dug into the small of her back. “You think I’m enjoying this?”
“I think you’re loving it,” she told him as nerves gave way to the Italian temper her parents had gifted her with. “You had to wait five years, but you’re finally getting back at me.”
“Did you expect anything less?”
Had she? On those rare occasions when she’d allowed herself to imagine meeting Rico again, she’d never wondered what he’d say to her. What she could possibly say to him. Her imaginings had been more rich fantasies of desire and the passion that still haunted her. In her dreams, she and Rico hadn’t wasted a lot of time talking. But she was rapidly discovering that reality was much harder to live with than fantasies.
Teresa stared up into his eyes and knew she was in no position to be angry at him. Though temper still simmered inside her, it was slowly draining away. After all, this was her fault. She was the one who’d lied to him so long ago and those lies had eventually brought them here. To this moment.
“No,” she said. “I suppose not.”
“Why did you come to Tesoro, Teresa?”
She pushed her hair back from her face with one hand, then let it fall to her side again. “When I realized my father and Paulo had come here, I tried to get them away before you found them. That’s all.”
“I don’t think so.” He moved in closer and she leaned back because she couldn’t move with the railing pressing against her spine. He slapped both hands down on the iron on either side of her, effectively caging her between his arms, and then bent his head until his eyes were boring into hers. She looked into those so familiar and yet so different eyes and saw nothing soft or tender or loving. All that shone back at her was temper and ice.
“I think you came because you wanted me to catch you at last. Because you couldn’t stay away.”
“You’re wrong.” She shook her head, determined to deny his words. If he was right, then she was a monumental fool.