was familiar with powerful men and their generally fragile egos. Experience had taught her that great men’s egos responded well to a well-chosen word. She had averted many a potential meltdown with a placatory word, a compliment.
This was a situation she was more than capable of coping with, which begged the question—why wasn’t she? Why was she standing there like an idiot?
Powerful, successful men liked to be told they were wonderful as well as the next person—possibly more, because they took it as their due.
She took a deep breath that eased the tightness in her aching chest, opened her mouth and heard herself say, ‘No. No, I don’t like you at all.’ Not the sop to his ego she had intended.
‘You do not know me, although you think you do.’
Megan’s edginess materialised as hostility as she tilted her chin. ‘Very profound, but actually I don’t want to know you,’ she blurted childishly. ‘And if you kiss me again I will—’
Emilio arched a questioning brow and smiled down into her upturned face. ‘You will what?’ he enquired with interest.
Megan inhaled and thought, Good question. ‘Just don’t!’
Not a threat likely to make him gibber in fear, but it was preferable to the more candid response of, Kiss you back!
She watched his eyes glitter in response to the warning, not with anger, not with amusement, but with something else she could not put a name to. Megan struggled to keep her eyes on his face as the nameless something made her stomach dissolve into a liquid, molten mush.
‘That came from the heart.’
Aware that the organ in question was trying to batter its way through her ribs, she glared at him.
Megan heard his name again and began to turn her head towards the sound, but a long brown finger laid against the curve of her jaw prevented her.
The unexpected contact sent a shudder through her body and dragged a shocked breath from her lungs.
She wanted to slap his hand away.
She wanted to tell him she had no desire to know him.
She wanted to tell him to stop looking at her like that.
‘Stop looking—’
As his mouth covered her own for a second time the strength left Megan’s body in one whoosh. If one hand had not curled like a supportive steel band around her ribcage, dragging her body up against his iron-hard thighs, she would have slid to the ground.
When he released her she was breathing hard as she blinked up at him. ‘I told you not to do that.’
‘What can I say? It’s the challenge and also your mouth. It was made for kissing.’
Taking the phone from her grasp, Emilio lifted it to his ear and, still holding her eyes, spoke into the mouthpiece.
‘Rios here.’
Megan slanted an angry glare at his face and held out her hand.
‘Ah, Charles. Yes, she is here with me now,’ Emilio said, ignoring her silent demand, and continued to speak, responding to what her father was saying, his voice oozing almost as much insincerity as his mocking gaze.
‘No, don’t worry, I will take care of her. No need, it is not a problem, Charles.’ A taunting grin in place on his lean face, Emilio turned to evade the hand that tried to snatch the phone from him. He waved an admonishing finger at her face and directed a wolfish smile at her indignant face as he raised his voice and said, ‘It is a total pleasure and no trouble at all. Yes, and Megan sends her love.’
Love was not the emotion stamped on Megan’s face when she attracted the attention of several people within earshot as she yelled, ‘No, I don’t!’
Finally able to grab the phone, Megan snatched it from his hand and lifted it to her own ear, struggling to regain some semblance of control. ‘Dad?’ she said. ‘I don’t need to bother Mr Rios, I’m—I’m … He’s gone,’ she said, directing an accusing look up at Emilio’s dark face.
‘Your father is a busy man.’
‘My father is—’ Megan bit back the unflattering reading of her father’s character and glared up at Emilio.
‘He can relax now he knows you have someone to look after you.’
‘I don’t need anyone to look after me, and my father knows it. He just wants me to be nice to you because you have contacts that he …’ Realising belatedly the extreme indiscretion of her goaded retort, she closed her lips firmly over further tactless disclosures.
Emilio’s lips thinned as his nostrils flared in distaste. Who needed an enemy when you had a father like Charles Armstrong? A man who had never really grasped the fact that a father’s duty to his children was to protect and shield.
Armstrong used anyone, including members of his own family, if it gave him an advantage.
‘Just how nice does he expect you to be to me?’
Megan responded to the comment as if it had been a slap, catching her breath and drawing back. The subsequent blast of fury that sizzled along her nerve endings blinded Megan to the sympathy in Emilio’s dark eyes.
She lifted her chin and glared up at him. ‘My father does not ask me to have sex with men who can be useful to him.’
‘Though he’d not be likely to kick up a fuss if you decided to.’
‘I have sex with men because I want to.’
So far she had not wanted to, but Megan saw no reason to share this information with Emilio Rios; even if she had, she doubted he would have believed her.
Ironic, really—the world thought she was a bit of an iceberg, a reputation she found it comfortable to hide behind, but Emilio Rios thought she was some sort of sex-mad tart.
Two years ago her initial gratitude at being rescued from a situation that had escalated dangerously out of control had changed to wretched misery when he had looked at her with contempt and treated her to a blighting lecture on the dangers of leading men on.
Acting as though she were some sort of sexual predator!
Sexual predator!
At that point Megan hadn’t even had a real boyfriend. The man Emilio had rescued her from had not been her date. He was a lecturer, quite old to her mind, and she had treated his kind offer of a lift home from the graduation party, when the boy who had promised her an early lift home had become drunk and incapable, as just that—kind.
How was she meant to have known that he had been drinking too? She hadn’t had a clue until he had put his foot down through the village, then, after making her extremely uncomfortable with comments loaded with sexual innuendo, instead of taking her to the house where her father was hosting a party for his business partner—all the family were under orders to attend—he’d pulled up on the long tree-lined drive leading up to the house and tried
