Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride (18 page)

It was a concern that took her into her suite and immediately across to her father’s bedroom door with the grim intention of finding out. But, having knocked sharply and then pushed open the door, she knew she was going to be unlucky, when it became immediately apparent that he had already been here and gone again.

And the way his clothes had been discarded on the floor told her he had changed in one heck of a hurry.

So as to avoid her? Oh, yes, Caroline conceded heavily. He was trying to avoid her—which could only mean one thing.

He had fallen off the rails again.

In a fit of angry frustration she bent down to snatch up the pair of trousers he had dropped on the floor and was about to toss them onto the bed when something dropped out of one of the pockets. It landed with a paper-like thud on the toe of her shoe. Bending to pick it up, she discovered that she was holding what appeared to be a set of receipts, and with her fingers actually tingling with dread, she slowly unfurled them.

After that she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t even think a coherent thought for long, long seconds. Then, with a calmness that bore no resemblance to what was actually taking place inside her, she began to check with the methodical intent of one well-practised at doing it, every pocket in every item of clothing he had brought with him to Marbella.

Ten minutes later and she was standing there in the middle
of her father’s room, staring into space like someone turned to stone. They had been here in Marbella for less than twenty-four hours and, going by the tally on the receipts, in that time her father had managed to gamble and lose the best part of one hundred thousand pounds…

Standing by the window of his hi-tech control room, Luiz Vazquez looked down on the casino floor of this, the latest acquisition in his growing string of deluxe hotels.

He could not be seen from down on the floor. The window allowed him to look out but did not let anyone look in. And behind him the really serious viewing was going on, via closed circuit television screens watched over by his eagle-eyed security staff. The window was merely a secondary source by which the casino floor as a whole could be observed.

Luiz preferred to check out the floor with his own eyes like this. It came from once being a serious gambler and trusting nothing he could not see for himself. Now things were different. Now he didn’t need to gamble to earn enough money to live. He had wealth and he had power and a kind of deeply satisfying sense of self-respect that had taken a whole lot of earning and yet…

A frown brought the two dark silk strips of his brows together across the bridge of his long nose. Possessing respect in oneself did not automatically win you the respect of others. A salutary lesson he had learned the hard way, and one he intended to rectify very soon.

It was, in fact, his next major project.

Vito Martinez, the hotel’s Head of Security, came to stand beside him. ‘She’s gone back to her room,’ he said. ‘He’s just arrived in the casino bar.’

‘Tense?’ Luiz asked.

‘Yeah,’ Vito replied, ‘humming with it. Ripe, I’d say,’

he added, the evidence of his on-the-street New York upbringing more pronounced in the dry-edged judgement.

A single nod in acknowledgement and Luiz Vazquez was turning away from the window, his expression, as always, a tightly closed book—not surprising for a man who’d used to play poker as lethally as he had.

‘Buzz me when he comes to the tables,’ was all he said. Then he was walking out of the control room, his long, lean level stride taking him across the elegant cream and black marbled floor of this tightly secured inner sanctum, then in through another door, which he closed behind him.

Silence suddenly prevailed.

Where the other room had been alive with a busy hum of activity, this room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop on the thick cream carpet covering its huge expanse. It was a luxuriously furnished room, plain but dramatic, with its modern black lacquered and leather furnishings enhanced by the simplicity of cream-painted walls.

Like the man himself, the room revealed nothing of his true personality. Except, maybe, for the black-framed picture hanging on the wall behind a large black-lacquered desk.

In its own way the picture was as dramatically plain as everything else in here—nothing more than the faint gold outline of a scorpion clinging to a white background with its lethal-looking tail curving upwards and over its scaly body in preparation to strike.

But it made the blood run cold just to look at it. For, although it was Luiz Vazquez’s chair that was situated directly beneath that lethal claw, it was not him the scorpion seemed to threaten—but whoever was unlucky enough to sit in the chair placed on the other side of the desk.

Its message was clear. Mess with me and I strike.

It was his mark—his logo. Or one of them, at least. But
once upon a time the sign of the golden scorpion had used to adorn everything Luiz Vazquez was involved in. He had since learned to be much more subtle. And he just kept this one picture around him for personal reasons now—and as a warning to anyone who was unfortunate enough to find themselves summoned to these private rooms, that the cool-headed, soft-talking Luiz Vazquez still had a vicious sting in his tail.

But these days he was known better for his new logo. The one which gave his string of exclusive, internationally renowned hotels their name and had earned him quite a reputation for quality service and comfort during the last ten years.

For this was an Angel Hotel. Angel as in Luiz
Angeles
de Vazquez. Angel as in good, honest and true.

The sublime to the ridiculous. And an example of what good marketing could do because all of his hotels possessed in-house casinos which were the real draw. The luxury his admittedly well-heeled guests enjoyed while they played was just an added bonus.

The scorpion was probably a far more honest representation of what Luiz Vazquez really was.

Luiz went to sit beneath that scorpion now, sliding his perfectly contoured frame into a thickly padded swivel desk chair before reaching down to unlock and open one of the drawers in the desk.

His fingers, so long and lean and beautifully coordinated that they revealed even more about the man’s extraordinary powers of self-control in the way they did everything with such neat precision, took out the only item in the drawer and placed it on the desktop.

It was a leather-bound dossier, expensive but nothing particularly ominous about it. Yet he didn’t immediately open it. Instead he leant back in the chair and began swinging
it lightly while one set of neatly filed fingernails tapped an absent tattoo against the desk. His expression revealed nothing, as usual. Whatever was going on in that shrewd, sharp mind of his was being kept hidden beneath the curling black lashes that usually shrouded his eyes.

Beautiful eyes. Eyes of a rich, dark fathomless brown colour that sat in the sleepy hollows of an arrestingly handsome face. A full Spaniard by birth, though raised in America, he undoubtedly had the warm golden skin of his Spanish forebears, the high cheekbones, the nose, the rock-solid, firmly chiselled jaw-line, and the shadowy outline of a beautifully moulded mouth.

But, for all of its good points, it was still the face of a cool operator. Of a man reputed to possess no heart—or, to be less fanciful, to possess the heart of an athlete, able to maintain the calm, steady pace necessary to keep the oxygen pumping into his clever brain no matter what pressure he put it under.

The fingers suddenly stopped tapping and moved, sliding over the desk and across smooth leather until they could curl and flick open the dossier cover to reveal a thick wad of documents stacked inside. With a supple dexterity that had been trained into his fingers years ago, he began sifting through the papers until he found the one he was looking for. Removing it from the stack, he set it neatly back down upon the top, then simply went still, his eyes glowing with a sudden burn as he sat there looking at a seven-by-nine colour photograph of—Caroline.

She was without doubt extraordinarily beautiful. No one with eyes would ever say she was not. Hair the colour of ripening wheat framed the most delicately perfect face even Luiz Vazquez, for all his thirty-five years of worldly experience, had ever set eyes upon. She had the flawless white skin of a pale English rose and eyes the colour of
amethyst. Her small straight nose was classically drawn, like the finely defined curve of her delicate jaw-line. But it was her mouth that held Luiz’s attention. Soft, warm, pink and full—it was a mouth made to drive a man wild with pleasure.

And he should know, Luiz mused cynically. For he’d had plenty of experience of just what that mouth could do—and he meant to have some more very soon.

It was a prospect that had the burn in his eyes changing back to their normal inscrutable cool as he utilised yet another facet of his strong character. Patience. The man was blessed with unending patience when it came to goals he had set himself.

That next goal was Caroline. And he was so sure of success that in his mind Caroline already belonged to him. It was this kind of belief in himself which gave him the power to put her photograph aside and basically forget it was there while he set about reading through the rest of the papers in the bulky dossier.

They were mostly bills. Final demand notes, warnings of foreclosure on bank loans, property mortgages, and, most sinister of all, the long list of unpaid gambling debts—both the old and the very new. He read each one in turn, consigning every detail to his photographic memory before setting it aside and doing the same with the next one.

A light on the desk console suddenly began flashing. Reaching out, he stabbed at the console with a finger. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘She’s on her way down,’ Vito Martinez informed him. ‘He’s playing for big money.’

‘Right,’ was all Luiz replied, and another stab at the console brought silence back to the room again.

Turning his attention back to the papers in front of him,
he picked them all up—including the photograph—deftly re-stacked the pile, then shut the dossier and locked it away in its drawer before getting smoothly to his feet. Then, with a deft tug which brought white shirt-cuffs into line with the edge of his creamy white dinner jacket, Luiz Vazquez rounded his desk and strode out of the room.

Back in the control room, Vito Martinez was still standing by the window. Luiz went to join him, saw Vito’s nod and followed its direction to one of the roulette tables.

Tall, lean, quite good-looking for his age, and, as always, impeccably presented, Sir Edward Newbury was playing big chips—and the expression on his face was a mere hair’s breadth away from fever-pitch.

Luiz recognised the look for exactly what it was—a man in the last throes of civility. Sir Edward was hooked—overdosing, in fact, and ready to sell his soul to the very devil.

Ripe, as Vito had said.

Grimly unsurprised by what he was seeing, Luiz then shifted his attention away from Sir Edward Newbury as, with his usual faultless timing, he looked towards the casino entrance just as Caroline appeared.

And everything inside him went perfectly still.

Seven long years had gone by since he had last physically laid eyes on her—yet she had barely changed. The hair, the eyes, the wonderful skin, the gorgeous mouth with the vulnerable upper lip and cushion-soft lower one he knew tasted as delicious as it looked. Even the long and slender line of her figure, so perfectly outlined by the exquisite styling of her black dress, had not lost any of its youthful firmness—as his own body was in the process of informing him, growing hot around the loins in a way only this woman had ever managed to kindle.

‘His weakness’, he labelled the sensation. The Spanish
bastard’s desire to possess the forbidden in this woman, who was an icon to class and breeding. Even her name was something special. Miss Caroline Aurora Celandine Newbury… Luiz tasted the name on his silent tongue. She had a family tree that read like a history book, a background education fashioned exclusively for the élite, and a stately home any king would envy.

These were the credentials that gave the Newburys the right to consider themselves noble, Luiz judged cynically. To be good enough to be accepted by them you had to be someone at least as special. Even now, he predicted, when metaphorically they were down on their knees and could not afford to be too choosy, quality of breeding would be the yardstick by which they would measure whether or not you were worthy of their notice.

Caroline looked very pale, he saw as he watched her anxiously scanning the casino in search of her wayward father. She also looked tense and severely uncomfortable with her surroundings. But then she never had liked places like this.

She caught sight of Sir Edward as the roulette wheel began to spin. Luiz watched her body stiffen, watched the strain etch itself onto her lovely face and her small white teeth come pressing down into that exquisitely shaped bottom lip as she made herself walk forwards. He felt his own teeth set hard behind the flat line of his lips as he watched her pause a couple of steps behind her father, then knot her fingers together across the flatness of her stomach as if she wasn’t quite sure just what to do next.

Really, what Caroline would have liked to do was get hold of her father by the scruff of his neck and drag him by it out of there. It was the breeding that stopped her; Luiz knew that. In the laws of polite society one did not make ugly scenes in public, no matter how bad the situation.

Even when you knew that your finances were already in Queer Street and that what your father was doing was nothing short of criminal.

Black. Even. Sir Edward lost, as he had been doing steadily since they’d arrived here in Marbella late yesterday.

As the old man made a gesture of frustration, Caroline visibly wilted.

‘Daddy…’

Luiz could actually feel her wariness as she placed a hand on the sleeve of her father’s tux in an attempt to make him listen to reason.

No chance, Luiz judged. The man was half crazed with gambling fever. Once it hit there was no quick cure. Sir Edward could not give up now, even if he lost the very shirt from his back, and more.