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.
It was the ‘more’ Luiz wanted.
After an initial start of surprise, then a guilty glance over his shoulder, Sir Edward Newbury turned petulant, and, with a tersely uttered sentence, shrugged off his daughter’s hand so he could place another stack of chips on the table. All Caroline could do was stand and watch as five thousand pounds sterling hovered in the balance between a ball landing on black or on red.
Black. Sir Edward lost again.
Again Caroline attempted to stop him. Again her pleas were petulantly thrust aside. Only this time Luiz found his hands clenching into tight fists at his sides when he caught the briefest glint of telling moisture touching lovely eyes. It was sheer hopelessness that sent them on a hunting scan of the crowded casino, as if searching for help where none would ever be found.
Then, without any warning, she suddenly glanced up at the control room, those incredible eyes homing directly in on him with such unerring accuracy that he caught his breath.
So did Vito. ‘Jeez,’ he breathed.
Luiz did not so much as move a single muscle. He knew she couldn’t see him; he knew the glass did not allow her to. Yet…
His skin began to prickle, a fine tremor of response rippling through his whole body on a moment’s complete loss of himself as he stared straight into those beautiful, bright tear-washed eyes. His throat had locked; his heart was straining against a sudden fierce tightening across his breastplate. Then her soft mouth gave a tremulous quiver in a wretched display of absolute despair—and his whole body was suddenly bathed in a fine layer of static electricity.
That mouth. That small, lush, sensual mouth—‘He won,’ Vito murmured quietly beside him.
From the corner of his eye Luiz caught Sir Edward Newbury’s response as he punched the air with a triumphant fist. But his attention remained fixed on Caroline, who was just standing
