The Alcolar Family
Mi belleza. My woman.
Always, to Joaquin, it was what he owned, what he controlled, what he had power over that mattered. He ran his life with a ruthless, almost brutal discipline. Everything was as he wanted it and nothing happened without his approval.
It was what had brought him his success and what kept him right where he was. Always at the top of his game, always on the peak of the mountain.
Always having things on his own terms, and only his terms.
She had come into his life on his terms, lived with him on his terms. And would she be expected to leave on his terms too? To walk out the door when he said it was time, whether she wanted to or not?
Was she only ever going to let him dictate things to her?
‘Querida?’
Joaquin had noticed her sudden silence, the withdrawal that had taken her away from him, mentally if not physically.
‘What is it?’
Cassie opened her mouth to reply, found that her throat was too dry and tight to form any words, and had to clear it harshly before she could manage to speak.
‘I thought you came home to work. And I really need that coffee.’
At least her voice was croaky and raw enough to make it believable. She sounded as if she had a ton of sand roughening her throat and she had to lick at her lips nervously to stop them from drying out. The way his eyes followed the betraying movement had a hawklike intensity that made her shiver deep inside.
‘I’m parched.’
His stillness betrayed the way he was feeling, the anger he was holding in check. Joaquin Alcolar wasn’t a man who gave in to rages and blazing tempers. The fury he felt was cold, hard as ice, bitter as a cruel winter wind, but it was no less savage for that.
And it was always preceded by one of these sudden silences. The freezing of his long frame into the total stillness of a hunting predator who had spotted his prey and had every muscle tense and bunched, waiting for just the right moment to pounce.
‘You’re thirsty?’
His tone made it plain how ridiculous he thought it. How impossible it seemed to him that anyone could want to choose the simple practical need for a drink over the sensual banquet he had obviously intended enjoying.
‘Yes.’
It was all she could manage. That and the brief, uncomfortable ducking of her head, carefully avoiding his burning gaze. If she looked into his eyes she would see the anger there that wasn’t in his voice and she knew it would destroy her nerve to go on.
‘I said I was thirsty when I came down. I’m still thirsty now. I was on my way to make a coffee…’
‘You’re joking, sὶ?’
He couldn’t believe it, she realised uncomfortably. He really couldn’t believe that she would reject his seductive advances. That she would turn them down—turn him down.
And even worse, he hadn’t ever thought that she could resist him. He had assumed that she would be putty in his hands, easily distracted from her purpose by what he wanted. That she would do as he wished, without any questions. That she would respond to his whim as swiftly and obediently as a trained dog. And that if he told her to jump then she would simply ask how high.
‘Why should I be joking?’
She tried to assume an airy carelessness that she was very far from feeling. The look in those deep-set eyes was dangerous, and the strong body was still too taut, too unmoving for comfort.
‘Cassie…’
Whatever he had been about to say, he didn’t finish. Even as he spoke her name in that harsh way of his, the edge on the word so rough that it scraped its way over her exposed skin, there was the sound of another key being inserted into the lock behind them.
A moment later the door was pushed open, swinging back on its hinges until it slammed against the wall with an ominous-sounding thud. A man, tall, dark, strong like Joaquin, stood in the doorway framed against the still-burning sunlight outside.
‘Cassie?’
Her name was spoken in a voice so very similar to Joaquin’s, the intonation, the accent an almost exact match for his. But where Joaquin’s tone had been so cold and distant, the warmth and welcome in this one were so evident that she turned to him in instinctive relief, her eyes lighting up, her mouth curving into a ready smile.
‘Ramón! Come in!’
‘Ramón.’
Joaquin’s echoing of his half-brother’s name held none of the warmth and welcome that Cassie had shown.
‘What are you doing here? And where the hell did you get the keys to the house?’
‘I was invited,’ Ramón returned casually. ‘And keys—well, Cassie lent hers to me so that I didn’t have to hang about outside. Here, querida…’
He tossed the keys and a smile in Cassie’s direction and as she caught the clinking bundle she saw the brooding look in Joaquin’s dark eyes and was unable to suppress a faint smile herself.
So Joaquin was none too pleased with his brother’s sudden appearance. Perhaps even a little jealous?
Surely that was a hopeful sign? Perhaps even something she could play on to find out the real state of her lover’s feelings?
Taking a couple of quick steps forward, she enfolded Ramón in a warm hug, pressing her cheek to the lean, hard planes of his.
‘Come in, Ramón. Would you like a drink? We were just about to have coffee.’
And the look on Joaquin’s face as she led the way down the hall towards the kitchen gave her a sudden lift to her spirits that made it almost worth the risks she had taken by provoking him in this way.
CHAPTER TWO
DAMN Ramón!
‘Damn, damn, damn him!’
Joaquin slammed his fist hard against the side of the window frame as he stared across at the terraced expanse of his garden, to where the clear water of the curved swimming pool glinted in the last of the afternoon sun.
Damn him for appearing at just the wrong moment! For walking into the house as if he owned it, flashing that smile at Cassandra and interrupting…
Interrupting what?
The question froze him suddenly, hand still clenched tight into a brutal fist, the knuckles of his fingers showing through white under his tanned skin.
This time, the muttered curses in his native Spanish were harsher, more savage—and aimed at himself instead of his brother and his ill-timed visit.
Interrupting what? That was the real problem. The uncomfortable, nagging worry at the bottom of his mind, that corrupted and distorted everything until he wasn’t sure what to think.
He had thought that he’d succeeded in what he’d planned for his early arrival at the finca. That he’d enticed Cassandra out of her difficult mood, charmed away the uncharacteristic coolness and distance in her attitude—seduced it out of her. And he had believed that she was ready, as she had always been in the past, to put their differences behind them, and do their making up where they always did it so well—in bed.
But Ramón’s arrival had interrupted all that. Broken the mood totally and left him fuming with frustration while his woman and his half-brother made coffee and chatted affably.
It seemed that Ramón had a habit of turning up unexpectedly, just when he was least wanted. After all, hadn’t he arrived on their father’s doorstep, unannounced, nothing known of him until then, just at the moment when Juan Alcolar and his son by marriage had been at the lowest point of their relationship together? And now here was Ramón, the illegitimate son—one of the illegitimate sons, Joaquin corrected, because there was Alex too. But Ramón was the son who was everything that his father would have wanted—who had everything going for him—except that he was not Juan’s legitimate heir.
‘No!’
He muttered it aloud to emphasise the word, driving it home to himself.
It wasn’t Ramón’s fault that he was who he was. Not Ramón’s fault that their father was a philandering womaniser who couldn’t keep his trousers on when he was with another female. He was their father’s son after all; no one could have any doubt about that. You only had to look at the three of them together and it was as plain as could be.
And it wasn’t Ramón’s fault that he had wandered in on the awkward, uncomfortable confrontation between his brother and Cassandra.
The sort of awkward, uncomfortable, uneasy confrontation that was becoming more and more common between them. So much so that the nagging unease was the norm rather than the rare occurrence it had been at the beginning of their relationship.
At the beginning…
Joaquin’s hard features softened from the taut, harsh lines into which they had been drawn, and a smile of memory played over his sensual mouth.
At the beginning— Oh, their relationship had been amazing then. Amazing, fantastic—mind-blowingly sensual. They had been caught up in a whirlwind of sexual desire and passion, unable to keep their hands off each other, not daring even to kiss in public for fear of the blazing, hungry desire such a small caress might spark off. If they had been in the house, then they had been in bed. It seemed that they had never left the bedroom, except occasionally to eat, for almost all of the first six months.
But that had changed so much lately.
The frown was back, creasing his forehead harshly.
The sex was still great—the best, for him at least. Cassandra turned him on as no other woman had done in his life before. But out of bed, so often he had the uneasy feeling that her mind was somewhere else. And…
But at that moment his thoughts stopped dead, his rational process arrested by the sight beyond the window.
‘Cassandra!’
Where he had opted for a shower to wash away the heat of the day and freshen up, Cassie had decided to go for a swim. So now he stood transfixed, his ebony gaze caught and held by the tall, slender figure making her way down the path towards the cool, inviting water of the pool. Her long blonde hair was caught up in a high pony-tail at the back of her head, and she wore a hot pink bikini, fastened at the back and the sides by shoestring laces.
‘Bella!’
It was a fervent, almost reverent exclamation, expelled on a low, sighing breath. He had thought that after their twelve months together the effect her beauty had on him might have lessened, not hitting home quite so hard. But now he found himself caught and held unmoving by just the sight of her, and the sensation deep in the pit of his stomach felt as if someone had just punched him there, very hard.
The hot pink bikini might not be as microscopic as some things he had seen her wear in the privacy of their bedroom, but to a man who knew her body intimately the way that the tight Lycra clung to the smooth curves of her breasts and hips, even before it was wet, was pure torment. The brilliant colour of the material was in sharp contrast to the smoothness of her slender limbs, only just touched with the faintest hint of a pale gold tan after her year here.
Joaquin’s mouth dried, his lower body tightening sharply at just the thought of sliding his hands over the heated satin of her flesh, over the long, lean lines of her legs, trailing along the waistband of the bottom half of the swimming costume. His touch would follow the indentation of her waist, skim over the delicate ribcage, and up, towards the soft swell of her swaying breasts.
‘Hell-fire!’
This time the kick of need was sharper than before, making his head swim, his breath catch. He was hard already. Hard and hot and hungry. So much so that watching Cassie move to the edge of the pool and lift her arms above her head, bringing those luscious breasts into even sharper prominence, was like some form of delicious torment, one he wanted desperately to end and yet also longed to prolong as much as he possibly could.
He wanted this woman. Wanted her with a need that was more than words could describe. With a hunger that all the many, many times they had made love over the past twelve months could do nothing to assuage. If anything, he wanted her more now than that day when he had first set eyes on her and felt that he might die if he didn’t get her into his bed—and fast!
But then she lifted herself on her toes, gave a little spring and dived neatly into the pool, disappearing under the cool water in a couple of seconds.
And before those seconds had ended, before she had a chance to fully submerge herself, Joaquin found that he was moving. The towel he had been drying his hair on was discarded somewhere, he didn’t give a damn where, and he was thundering down the stairs, leaping the last section all in one jump, and dashing out, on bare feet, towards the terrace and the pool.
Her blonde head had barely just broken the surface as he arrived at the spot from which she had dived, the golden hair sleeked and darkened by the water, the long pony-tail floating on the surface beside her. And as he checked briefly at the edge of the pool she shook the water from her face, kicked her legs and set out at a steady breaststroke for the far side, away from him.
She hadn’t seen him, didn’t know that he was there. But she would do soon. He had no intention of hanging around here, waiting. He wanted her in his arms, her body tight against his. And he wanted that now.
Barely pausing for breath, he executed a perfect racing dive, plunging into the water and setting off after her in a fast, powerful crawl.
The first indication Cassie had of Joaquin’s presence in the pool was the sudden splash, the sound of his powerful body entering the water in a clean dive. The next moment he had surfaced and was coming after her, strong arms cleaving through the waves he’d created in forceful strokes.
A shattering range of feelings assailed her, whirling through her mind in quick succession, battering her with swift, violent changes of mood.
Shock was first. Simple, startled, physical shock at the unexpectedness of his arrival, the suddenness of the splash and swirling waves at his appearance.
Apprehension followed. Uncertainty at not knowing why he was here, what he wanted, just what his mood might be this time.
But then, suddenly, old habits reasserted themselves. Old habits of thought and actions as she recalled the number of times in the past that he had come after her in just this way. Knowing she was a strong swimmer, he had thrown out an unspoken challenge, encouraging her to race him to the far end of the pool.
‘Okay, then…’
Reacting instinctively she turned, ducked under the water, kicked hard and, surfacing fast, struck out for the blue-painted edge.
At first she had a noticeable lead, but a quick glance over her shoulder showed that Joaquin was coming up fast behind her. Exhilaration and excitement flooded her veins, pushing her into even stronger movement, putting all her heart and energy into it.
She was holding her own. The finishing line was almost within reach. But Joaquin’s tanned arms, his dark head, were drawing level, matching her stroke for stroke.
She saw him turn his head. Caught the swift, brilliant flash of white teeth against the dark olive of his skin as he grinned in wicked triumph. Another forceful kick from his muscular legs, an extra spurt of speed, and he had passed her, tanned fingers reaching out and touching the edge of the pool just bare seconds before her own paler ones.
‘Okay, you win!’
Somehow all the uneasiness of earlier that afternoon had evaporated, leaving her with a rush along with her gasps for air as she regained her breath. Letting her feet sink slowly to the base of the pool, she stood upright in the shallower water, wiping her hands across her skin and back over her hair in order to brush away the lingering water, clearing it from her face and her eyes.
Joaquin lounged just feet away, half in, half out of the water, his back against the tiled edge of the pool, his hair, jet-black and slicked back, clinging to the fine shape of his skull. Once more those white teeth flashed in a wicked, triumphant grin.
‘Show-off!’
But of course he had every right to show off, she admitted inwardly. Unlike herself, he was hardly even breathing faster; the broad, muscled chest rose and fell as easily as if he had just had a short, casual stroll along the side of the pool and not powerhoused his way through the water after her.
Glinting in the sunlight, tiny drops of water slid over the bronzed skin and came together in a tiny rivulet that trailed its way through the black body hair and down over the flat plane of his stomach. Cassie found that her mouth had dried suddenly, her throat tightening on a wave of response, and she tried to swallow as inconspicuously as possible in order to ease the constricting sensation.
Joaquin treated her to another wide grin, eyes gleaming knowingly.
‘Maybe, but I still won! So now you owe me.’
Something tightened deep in Cassie’s stomach, twisting sharply on a touch of nerves.
It was no good trying to pretend that she didn’t know what he meant. From the very first time when he had discovered how much she liked to swim, and how fast she was in the water, he had issued a challenge, tempting her to race him.
‘And to make it interesting,’ he’d said, ‘we’ll compete for a prize. Whoever loses owes the winner a forfeit—whatever they demand.’
So now, seeing that taunting smile, hearing the words ‘you owe me,’ Cassie knew just what was going through his mind.
‘It wasn’t a proper challenge!’ she hedged warily.
‘Which it wasn’t the last time—when you won,’ Joaquin reminded her. ‘But as I recall you still claimed your prize.’
That gleam in his eyes brightened vividly, reminding her without words just what the prize she’d claimed had been, and letting her know that he remembered only too well. She felt as if her whole body must be blushing, her skin suffused with rich colour as she recalled the passionate way he had responded to her begging him to make love to her right here, in the pool, under cover of the darkness of late evening.
But that had been over a month ago. It was five weeks since they’d last raced in this way. Five weeks since they had even swum together. Five weeks in which Joaquin had had little time for relaxation, little time for leisure, little time, it seemed, for her. So that now things seemed so very different. The unspoken split that had opened between them had turned into a gap and from a gap into a chasm, until she was beginning to wonder if it was possible to bridge it at all.
And the worst thing was that she knew she was partly responsible. That her own inability to hide her feelings, her constrained, preoccupied mood, had driven a wedge between them and she hadn’t been able to stop it.
This time she did slick her tongue over her painfully dry lips. She just couldn’t stop herself.
‘So what is it that you want?’
Watching that gleam flare into flame, blazing suddenly in the darkness of his gaze, she knew just what was in his mind. But a second later, to her bewilderment, he closed down on the heat in his eyes, and instead let his stare fall to her mouth.
‘A kiss,’ he said softly. ‘Just a kiss. Is that too much to ask?’
But would it stop at just a kiss? She doubted it.
A kiss that would lead to an open mouth? A kiss that would lead to a caress, the smoothing, stroking of his hands all over her body? A kiss that would lead to lovemaking?
Was that what she wanted?
But did she care?
There was no room inside her head for the memory of the uncertainty of earlier that day. And other thoughts were crowding into her mind, making it spin even more wildly.
The exhilaration sparked by the race was still fizzing through her veins, buzzing inside her head so that she couldn’t think clearly. The sheer sensual pleasure of standing here, with the sun warm on her head and shoulders, the cool water lapping around her waist, was enough to make her forget any colder, calmer, common sense. And there were other feelings too. Feelings sparked by the sight of Joaquin’s lean brown body, the tight lines of his muscles still glistening with traces of moisture. The stunningly carved face was turned towards her, gilded by the sun, black eyes brilliant as jet, the high, slanting cheekbones sharp as blades under the bronze skin.
She felt dizzy with excitement, tension, admiration.
Need surfaced, caught and held.
And need she gave into, reaching out a hand that shook faintly to smooth it over the broad, straight lines of his shoulders, the strength of his arms and then along the ridges of muscle that lined his powerful chest, tracing tiny, erotic circles in the dark body hair that hazed his flesh.
‘Cassandra…’
Joaquin stirred convulsively under her touch, his voice husky and soft.
‘So do I get my kiss?’
Like someone in a trance she leaned forward, pressed her lips softly against the hard plane of his lean cheek, feeling the faint roughness of male skin beneath her mouth, tasting the intensely personal flavour of him. On a sigh she inhaled the equally intimate scent of his body.
And knew that she was lost.
And that she didn’t give a damn.
‘That, querida,’ Joaquin complained as she withdrew slightly, ‘was not a kiss. It does not pay the forfeit you owe me.’
With an effort Cassie forced herself to look up, into the sensually darkened pools of his eyes, knowing from his smile that he saw his answer in her own gaze.
‘Oh, doesn’t it?’ she managed huskily. ‘Then I shall have to do better.’
‘Much better.’
‘Then what about this?’
She had barely finished speaking before she took his mouth, teasing and tantalising him with her own lips, letting her tongue run along the warm cleft that separated the finely carved upper lip from the fuller, more sensual lower one. And she knew his reaction when she heard him catch in a breath on a faint gasp, his mouth opening under hers, his tongue meeting the tentative exploration with an erotic enticement, drawing her in deeper and closer.
‘That’s more like it,’ he muttered, rough and urgent against her mouth. ‘That is a kiss. The sort of kiss I wanted.’
And as his kiss encouraged her, so his arms drew her closer too, fastening tight around her slim waist and pulling her sharply towards him. So sharply that her feet left the bottom of the pool and she floated towards him on the gentle eddies of the cool water.
But there was nothing gentle, or cool, about the part of his body that she connected with as she came tight up against him, her stomach cradled in the hard arc of his pelvis, her hips crushed against his.
And what she felt was hard and hot and intensely male. The forceful power of his arousal, reaching through the thin and ineffective barrier of her clinging costume, sent a shudder of response rushing through her. And that tiny movement only added to the stunned sense of intimacy as she was crushed closer.
‘Señor Alcolar!’ she managed on a choking gasp, turning shock into a teasing provocation. ‘You—you have no clothes on!’
Joaquin’s grin in response was totally unrepentant.
‘Nothing at all,’ he returned smoothly, lowering his dark head to press a hot, hungry kiss on her shoulder, one that stirred the potent heat of his lower body, pressing even more intimately against her.
Joaquin adjusted his position, opening his legs so that she was drawn into the space between them, then closing them again around her, imprisoning her tightly, his hands on her hips, warm fingers brushing against her skin.
‘You’re naked. And—and aroused…’
‘Absolutely,’ he nodded smilingly. ‘But then…’
His grin widened, there was a faint tug between her legs, and the next moment he raised his hand from under the water to reveal the bright pink material of the bottom half of her bikini crushed in his large male hand.
‘So are you.’
While his eyes had held hers, keeping her attention transfixed, his fingers had been busy under water, pulling loose the bow-tied strings that had fastened her bikini bottom over both hips, and sliding it away from her body.