Her temperature fluctuated from a furnace’s to a freezer’s. “So what do you want? Me, as your secret lover again?”
His smile had her heart thundering with arousal…and dread.
Then he whispered, soft and annihilating, “Nothing so simple. Until I decide to accept the succession or not, I’m staying in my ancestral home in El Jamida on the western shores of Castaldini. My condition is that you live with me there.”
Five
“L ive with you?”
Phoebe was stunned to realize that squeak had issued from her. Her speech center was still functioning. Incredible.
Leandro was moving away. He stopped at a waist-high round quartz table sporting another buried-in-ice bottle.
He filled two flutes and flowed back to hand her one. “You object to the condition? Or is it only to the term ‘live’? If so, I wonder why. We’d both ‘live’ while we’re staying there. What would you rather call it? Exist with me? Survive with me? Occupy the same space-time continuum with me?”
“Okay. I’ll call on you when I’m brainstorming my stand-up comedy routine…” She stopped, exclaimed, “Live with you…openly?”
The mockery in his eyes leapt a few notches higher. “You’d rather be my secret lover?”
“That was a question, not an offer.”
He pressed the flute into her hand, engulfed the other in his and swept her to the table, where he hoisted her up on the gleaming metal and red-satin stool, had her feeling he’d perched her at the edge of a skyscraper. He dragged his own stool to touch hers, seared her left side with his body heat as he mounted it. She stared at him with the same fascination that people watched catastrophes in progress.
He gestured to someone, and lazy, sense-soaking music flowed over them. He took her hand, tilted his head at her. “How about being my guest and guide? I’m seeing no more than necessary of those who exiled me. You understand that I don’t harbor nostalgic feelings toward them. But I am out of touch with Castaldini, and I’ll need updates on its current situation. You know, the pulse of the street, the daily worries, the existing public opinions on everything from sports to politics. You are the perfect liaison to reconnect me with it all.”
This was what he meant? What he wanted from her?
She wouldn’t examine the jumble of relief and letdown.
Lobbing this ball back in his court was her only way out of dissecting her stupidity. “Why am I the perfect liaison? I can give you a list off the top of my head of a dozen people who’d be far better at it, born and bred Castaldinians who’d be only too eager to provide you with whatever you need.”
“I want you.”
She choked. On her heart. On his intensity. On longing for what had never and would never be. He’d always wanted her for the wrong reasons. She’d bet he still did.
Instead of arguing against the far deeper wrongness of his reasons now, all that came out was a stifled, “Why?”
“Because most people think nothing of embellishing or outright lying to steer me to the decision they want me to make. Your bluntness proves you’re the only one who’ll give me unbiased reports, that you’ll tell me only the truth. And I need that to come to a decision.”
That didn’t sound like a wrong reason. It sounded very good. Too good to be the truth? At least, the only truth?
Only one way to find out. Only one way to be with this man from now on. Head-on, full-blown confrontation.
“And besides needing my insights and whacks of candor upside your head, do you also want to pick up where we left off?”
“Yes.” The word disrupted her nerves wholesale with its force. Then he made it worse. “Si.” Then even worse. “Aiwa.”
She spilled half of her flute. “I…got it…in one language.”
He took the flute from her, took her wet fingers to his mouth, sucked them to a cinder. “It wasn’t enough to tell you how much I want you in one language. It never was. I doubt anything will ever be. And if I had any doubt that you want me as much, those…fireworks put it to rest. The desire between us is not only as explosive as before, it has intensified. We’re more complex people now, with far more extensive knowledge of ourselves and the world, and it has only deepened our attraction.”
He let go of her hand after he’d decimated whatever reason or resistance she had. As he dried the puddle she’d made, she wanted to tell him to get something bigger. For the puddle she’d become.
He went on, intensity now morphed into matter-of-factness. “But I’m only declaring my intent. This time I’m not sweeping you away to bed. It’s up to you when you decide to come to me.”
So über-businessman was back, huh? With the need for driving his bid home over and said bid certain to be soon begged for?
“When, not if, huh?” He gave her a serene look. Wanna contest that? it said. And oh, how she wished she could. She couldn’t. Not when the truth was I wanna come to you…right now.
She groped for something to say that wouldn’t be a lie or made her a self-destructive fool. “And what about the storm of speculation this will kick up? You don’t care what your possible future subjects think of your actions?”
“Of course not.” He made it sound as if he’d care about the opinion of the island’s population of monk seals first. “You will have an official job of the highest order. Whatever else we choose to be involved in is our business. We are both free agents and too grown-up to care what people think or say.”
“That wasn’t your position in the past, when you were obsessively secretive about our…liaison.”
Something harsh flared in his eyes. Or maybe she’d imagined it. Her powers of observation weren’t the epitome of reliability right now. “My reasons for secrecy no longer apply now.”
Yeah, tell her about it. Worrying that their liaison would threaten his chances of capturing the crown wasn’t a consideration now. They’d give it to him this time even if he kept a harem.
“And with the changes in circumstances and in ourselves, we owe it to what we have raging between us to explore it to the fullest, without the shackles our old situation imposed on it.”
“So this is all about ‘what we have raging between us’? It has nothing to do with having your way after all these years? Not that I know if your offer then was to ‘live’ with you, mind you.”
His eyes turned unfathomable. “It was something along those…lines. And you think this has an element of payback?”