perhaps AWAVMOT!
Thank you all!
Contents
CRUZ DE CARRILLO SURVEYED the thronged reception room in his London home, filled with a veritable who’s who of London’s most powerful players and beautiful people, all there to celebrate his return to Europe.
He felt no sense of accomplishment, though, to be riding high on the crest of his stratospheric success in North America, having tripled his eponymous bank’s fortunes in less than a year, because he knew his zealous focus on work had more to do with avoiding this than the burning ambition he’d harboured for years to turn his family bank’s fortune and reputation around.
And it killed him to admit it.
This was standing just feet away from him now—tall and slender, yet with generous curves. Pale skin. Too much pale skin. Exposed in a dress that left far too little to the imagination. Cruz’s mouth compressed with distaste even as his blood ran hot, mocking him for the desire which time hadn’t diminished—much to his intense irritation. It was unwelcome and completely inappropriate. Now more than ever. She was his sister-in-law.
Her blonde hair was up in a sleek chignon and a chain of glittering gold trailed tantalisingly down her naked back, bared in a daring royal blue backless dress. She turned slightly in Cruz’s direction and he had to tense every muscle to stave off the surge of fresh desire when he saw the provocative curves of her high full breasts, barely disguised by the thin draped satin.
She looked almost vulnerable, set apart from the crowd slightly, but he knew that was just a mirage.
He cursed her. And he cursed himself. If he hadn’t been so weak he wouldn’t know how incendiary it felt to have those curves pressed against his body. He wouldn’t remember the way her eyes had turned a stormy dark blue as he’d plundered the sweetness she’d offered up to him that fateful night almost eighteen months ago, in this very house, when she’d worked for him as a housemaid.
He wouldn’t still hear her soft, breathy moans in his dreams, forcing him awake, sweating, with his hand wrapped around himself and every part of him straining for release...aching to know the intimate clasp of her body, milking him into sweet oblivion.
Sweet. That was just it. There was nothing sweet about this woman. He might have thought so at one time—she’d used to blush if he so much as glanced at her—but it had all been an elaborate artifice. Because his younger half-brother, Rio, had told him the truth about what she really was, and she was no innocent.
Her seduction of Cruz had obviously been far more calculated than he’d believed, and when that hadn’t worked she’d diverted her sights onto Rio, his illegitimate half-brother, with whom Cruz had a complicated relationship—to put it mildly.
A chasm had been forged between the brothers when they were children—when Cruz had been afforded every privilege as the legitimate heir to the De Carrillo fortune, and Rio, who had been born to a housemaid of the family castillo, had been afforded nothing. Not even the De Carrillo name.
But Cruz had never felt that Rio should be punished for their charismatic and far too handsome father’s inability to control his base appetites. So he had done everything in his power after their father had died some ten years previously to make amends—going against their father’s will, which had left Rio nothing, by becoming his guardian, giving him his rightful paternalistic name and paying for him to complete his education.
Then, when he had come of age, Cruz had given him a fair share of his inheritance and a job—first in the De Carrillo bank in Madrid, and now in London, much to the conservative board’s displeasure.
At the age of twenty-one Rio had become one of Europe’s newest millionaires, the centre of feverish media attention with his dark good looks and mysterious past. And he had lapped it up, displaying an appetite for the kind of playboy lifestyle Cruz had never indulged in, quickly marrying one of the world’s top supermodels in a lavish wedding that had gone on for days—only for it to end in tragedy nearly a year later, when she’d died in an accident shortly after giving birth to twin boys.
And yet, much as Rio’s full-throttle existence had unnerved Cruz, could he begrudge him that after being denied his heritage?
Cruz’s
