“Fair enough.”
“Furthermore,” she said, pressing her palms flat on the table and standing, “I do not want your money. Not in the generic sense. You know about my father’s estate. You have ownership of the horses. You are the clearest path to having my family assets restored. I have a very specific need of you, not just some generic billionaire.”
“Careful,” he said. “I’m likely to fall in love with you. As that was a very specific bit of praise.”
“I imagine you’ll do just fine.”
He stood then, closing the distance between them and reaching out, grasping hold of her fingers, lacing his through them and pulling her forward. He had been correct in his assessment of her. She was strong. But he had caught her off guard. Her dark eyes widened, her full lips dropping into a rounded oh.
Heat flared in his gut, an intense, visceral need to draw her in to his body. To close all the space between them. “Perhaps not,” he said, gripping her chin and tilting her face upward. He could see her pulse throbbing at the base of her throat, watched as her eyes grew even darker. As the slender brown rings around her pupils slimmed. He wanted to see if her mouth tasted as ripe and sweet as it looked like it might. Dios, how he wanted to sample that surprise that shaped her lips just so.
But he would not.
This was about the rancho, not about his own selfish desires. He did not use women. He never had. And he wouldn’t start with her.
He straightened, bringing her into a close hold. “We shall see how the dance lesson goes.”
CAMILLA HAD BEEN hoping for a nice slice of cake after the paella. Instead, she was ushered into the ballroom with the assurance that coffee would follow. She hoped there would be chocolate. For certain, there was going to be a dance, and she was not sure how she felt about that.
Her whole body still burned from when Matías had grabbed hold of her in the dining room.
He was teasing her. She knew that. He was not going to fall in love with her, and he was not so compelled to touch her that he had no choice but to take hold of her back there.
She had no idea what he thought about her. What he assumed in terms of her level of experience. Likely, he hadn’t thought about it at all.
As he had said, the bride in this equation was completely interchangeable with the one that had been scheduled to appear before. So why would he give a single thought to whether or not she had ever been held in a man’s arms before? Why would he care that she had never danced with a man, had never been held close, had never been kissed?
She felt restless and edgy, and she kept catching sight of herself in random mirrors and various reflective surfaces and getting a shock.
She didn’t recognize the woman she saw there.
It was like she was inhabiting a stranger’s body. Strange, because it had felt less like that when she had been masquerading as the stable boy. Plain. Nondescript. She was much more comfortable that way. Identified much more closely with those adjectives than bright or fiery or any of the other words that might be used to describe her as she looked now.
“Are you ready?” Matías asked, turning toward her and holding his hand out. She knew from experience that it was strong, hot and rough. That even though he was wearing a suit, looking every inch the businessman, he had the hands of a working man.
She admired that about him. Because for all that he might seem mercenary, for all that he was a hard taskmaster, he was not above doing the work himself. He held himself to the exact same standards that he held everyone around him to.
Her father had been like that. A man who had valued hard work and had also expected that he would partake in it, no matter how wealthy he became.
“There is no music,” she said.
“It’s all right. You won’t need music. You’re going to follow my lead, not a song.”
She sniffed. “I think dancing without music would be quite boring. Whenever we dance at the rancho somebody plays guitar, and someone plays tambourine. And we all just...move. The way that it feels good to move.”
“Yes. Because you are using dance as an expression of joy.” He began to step toward her, his face that of a predator. “At a gala like this, dance will not be used in a similar fashion. It will be used to gauge relationships. Used as an opportunity to assess someone’s upbringing. Their importance. Everyone will be watching. And they will wonder why your hands did or didn’t linger when they touched my shoulder. Why I did not steal a kiss when the music slowed and I had ample opportunity. Why my hand was positioned just a bit too high at the center of your back, rather than taking the opportunity to flirt with impropriety by drawing it down just a bit lower.”
Her face flushed, her entire body growing warm. “I don’t think anyone will be watching us that closely.”
“You mock me for saying that women fall in love with me, but I am a man of status, and I have recently been abandoned by my fiancée. No doubt my brother will arrange for there to be headlines about his recent nuptials as early as tomorrow. With plenty of time for rumors to be swirling by the evening of the gala. People will be watching to see—is our relationship real or are you simply a stand-in? Are you nothing more than a Band-Aid that I have put over my wound? A trick, a salve for my pride.”
She looked away from him. “Well,” she said, “aren’t I?”
“I refuse to allow you to appear to be such. I refuse to allow Diego to control this, or for my grandfather to have his way in manipulating us.”
“He is rather succeeding in manipulating you into marriage.” That last word ended on a squeak as she found herself pulled back into his arms, his iron fingers wrapped around her own, his arm curved around her waist. Her breasts were pressed up against the hard wall of his chest, and she tried so hard to keep her breathing regulated. To keep herself from panicking and taking in air so deeply that it forced those vulnerable parts of her into contact with him.
But she failed. Sensitive, aching breasts brushing against him helplessly. She looked up at him, and their eyes clashed. Then she looked away, and regretted it immediately, because he must know she was only reacting that way because of the effect that he had on her. And she didn’t want him to know that he affected her at all.
If she could only find a way to resemble the woman that she saw in the mirror. If she could only find a way to play the part of glorious sophisticate. Of course, it was probably difficult to convince anyone that you were a glorious sophisticate when they had originally seen you as a teenage boy.
Still. She wanted to try.
Because Matías Navarro was a whole lot more man than she had ever encountered in her life, and she was only just barely a woman by anyone’s standards.
She had been cosseted in many ways. She would never have described herself as such before now. But though she hadn’t been kept in an ivory tower, though she hadn’t been pampered or treated like a princess, she had been held apart from the rest of the world.
