feeling...good,’ he said indistinctly.
Hastily, Carly wiped her hands on a towel. She had to stop thinking like this. She had to start regarding him with the impartiality she’d always had before now. ‘I think that’s enough for now, don’t you?’ She kept her voice brisk. ‘We can have another session before...er, before you retire for the night. You can get up if you like, Luis.’
But Luis didn’t want to get up. Or rather, he didn’t feel capable of getting up, not in the way that she meant and not without making it very clear that he was having very erotic feelings about her. He could feel the hard throb at his groin and the sharp aching in his balls and found himself in the unthinkable position of being aroused—by Miss Mouse. And he still wasn’t sure how that had happened. Surely it couldn’t just be because she was touching him, because if that was the case then he would have felt something more potent than irritation towards Mary—the physiotherapist he had just sacked.
The aching intensified, but his impatient squirm only made the hardness worse, instead of relieving it. He scowled into the stupid scented doughnut of a pillow. Weeks of doing nothing had driven him close to crazy with no work, no play and no sex. Worse still, his confinement had left him with time to think and he was a man who preferred to do. Stripped of his constant need for action, he was forced into the unwanted position of introspection.
His incarceration in hospital had made him stop and take a look at his life and realise what a circus it had become. He’d thought about his different homes dotted around the world and the swollen entourage who accompanied him everywhere, and it had been like looking at the world of someone he didn’t know. When had he managed to acquire so many hangers-on? He remembered their barely disguised shock when he had sent them to his main base in Buenos Aires, with Diego at the helm. And the strange calm which had descended on the house once they’d gone, leaving him alone with his mousey housekeeper.
He shifted his thigh a fraction as he thought how efficiently Carly had slotted into her new role as temporary masseuse. It seemed she was as proficient at rehabilitation as she was at running his house for him. Minutes before his massage, she had overseen the daily ballet exercises intended to strengthen his damaged pelvis. She hadn’t made any predictable jokes about men doing ballet, but had simply stood beside him, counting the small elevations of his legs, with a look of fierce determination on her face.
‘How about a swim now, Luis?’
Her soft voice ruptured his disturbing thoughts and it was with a sense of relief that he realised that his erection had subsided.
He yawned. ‘Is that a suggestion?’
‘No, it’s an order—since you seem to respond much better to those.’ She pulled up the blind and peered outside. ‘Oh, dear, it’s raining again.’
‘It’s always raining in this damned country.’
‘That’s what makes the fields so green,’ she said sweetly. ‘Never mind. At least we can use the indoor pool.’
‘But I don’t like the indoor pool,’ he growled. ‘You know that. It’s claustrophobic.’
‘And this room isn’t?’
‘I’m not planning to swim in here,’ he snapped. ‘So why don’t we just go outside and use the big pool? Live dangerously for once.’
Carly turned back from the window, her mouth flattening with a disapproval she couldn’t quite hide as she looked at him. She knew that was the kind of crazy thing he did. She’d witnessed people diving into his rain-lashed swimming pool, fully clothed, and she’d come down early the next morning to find glasses full of rain and champagne. Once she had even found a pair of knickers hanging from one of the flagpoles and one of the gardeners had been forced to shin up and get them back down again. What must it be like to live a life as decadent as his? she wondered.
‘Because I don’t like to live dangerously,’ she said repressively. ‘And perhaps if you didn’t, then you wouldn’t have ended up occupying a hospital bed for so long and probably blocking it for someone who really needs it. As it happens, the grass is absolutely sodden and the tiles around the swimming pool will be wet and slippery.’
‘Sca—ry,’ he said sarcastically.
She didn’t react to his taunt, even though he seemed to be spoiling for some kind of fight. What was the matter with him today? He was even more bad-tempered than usual—and that was saying something. She set her lips into a disapproving line. ‘So unless you want to risk falling over and complicating your recovery, then I’d advise playing safe and using the indoor pool, which was designed with rainy days like these in mind.’
‘Don’t you ever get tired of being the sensible voice of reason?’
And don’t you ever get tired of being the perennial bad-boy playboy? It was only with difficulty that she stopped herself from saying it out loud as she turned to face him. ‘I thought that’s what you were paying me for.’
‘That, and your cooking.’ He paused, his thick black lashes half veiling his eyes. ‘So you don’t like living dangerously?’
Emphatically, Carly shook her head. No, she certainly did not. On the contrary, she had always wanted to live safe. She had craved a security and stability which had always eluded her. But Luis didn’t really want to know that, did he? He was asking the question in that throwaway way he sometimes did, like an owner throwing his dog a scrap of food from the table. He wasn’t interested in her as a person; she was just a tiny cog in the giant wheel designed to keep his life running smoothly. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘You do enough danger for both of us.’
He gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Okay, Miss Sensible—you win. The indoor pool it is. Go and find your swimsuit and meet me in there.’
But his mocking was ringing around her head as Carly ran upstairs to change into her costume, because he had touched a nerve. Being sensible wasn’t something most people aspired to but she’d always been that way. At school she had been the reliable first choice if you needed someone to help with your science homework, or to spend a whole playtime looking for a lost charm from somebody’s bracelet. Careful Carly, they had called her and as a nickname she hadn’t particularly liked it. It wasn’t cool to be careful—it was just the way she’d been made.
She reached her room at the top of the house and shut the door behind her, leaning against it to get her breath back. The attic space was large, with sloping ceilings and a dramatic view over the gardens and the fields beyond. Up here she was among the treetops. Up here you could see the most amazing sunrises and sunsets, which filled the room with a rich red light. There was a little desk, on which she did her studying, and on the wall above the small fireplace hung the little watercolour her father had painted, the year before he’d become too ill to hold a brush any more.
Sliding open one of the drawers, she fished around and found her swimming costume, knowing that the last thing she wanted was for Luis to see her in it. She was too fleshy. Too pale. Too everything. And although she knew that comparison was pointless, she couldn’t help thinking about the women who usually shared the pool with him. Leggy supermodels, wearing tiny bits of string which they called bikinis. She shivered as she stripped out of her bra and pants, her skin cold and resistant as she tugged on the one-piece. She thought how faded it looked and how, rather alarmingly, it seemed to have shrunk.
The rain was bashing hard against the window and some of the showier plants in the flower beds had been flattened to the ground. The dark
