Page 80 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

He paused. Took her in with a long stare. Quietly, he said, ‘Buenos dias, Rose. You’re up early.’

Painfully aware that she was wearing night clothes—having failed to chuck night wear in with her beach bag of clothing, a pair of silk shorts pyjamas and mid-thigh-length silk robe had been delivered and laundered for her before she’d gone to bed—and even more painfully aware of Diaz’s even greater lack of clothing, she self-consciously tightened the sash of her robe. ‘I could say the same about you.’

‘I like to swim before the world wakes up and demands my time.’ His gaze narrowed as he studied her face. ‘Did you sleep?’

‘A little.’ She didn’t know where to put her own gaze. The sexual awareness she had for Diaz, born that awful day in Madrid when she’d been seventeen, had all but disappeared since the birth. Being this close to him virtually naked, his tanned, rangy muscular body with its smattering of dark hair across the perfectly defined chest and abdomen only feet from where she stood…

Her awareness must have been blanketed in the same fog as their shared history because she could feel it awakening, and as prickles danced on her skin and her veins thickened, an even stronger charge pulsed, an image forming, of gently encircling his flat, brown nipples with her tongue, and suddenly the memory of his taste was right there in her mouth, as vivid as it had been the night they’d made their babies.

Her heart racing into a burr, she hurriedly fixed her stare on the terracotta flooring beneath her feet and wished for its coolness to seep into her heating bloodstream and freeze the memories into oblivion.

‘And the girls?’ he asked in the same low voice.

God only knew how she was able to speak. ‘They’ve been asleep since eleven.’ It was the first time they’d slept through the night.

‘Spanish air must suit them.’

‘That, or they’re exhausted from the travelling.’

From the periphery of her vision, she saw him raise a non-committal shoulder. ‘Time will tell. So why didn’t you sleep? Keeping one ear open in case they woke up?’

She nodded. She’d agreed to testing out the nannies but cold feet had seen her put her cold foot down about them attending the girls through the night until they’d got used to them. Luckily for Diaz’s perfect nose, he hadn’t argued. ‘I should check on them.’

‘It’s only six o’clock. Let them sleep a little longer.’ Casually, he added, ‘Join me for a swim?’

Taken aback at the offer, Rose’s gaze shot up before she could stop it and locked onto his. Locked fast.

A pulse of electricity shifted the air around them…and pulsed in his eyes.

Powerless to break the hold of their stares, a wave of scalding heat rose inside her from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair.

The pulse in his eyes darkened into a hooded, unmistakably sensuous gleam.

Slowly, he straightened.

Shivers let loose inside her. The scalding heat intensified, the act of breathing suddenly impossible.

His chest and shoulders rose, strong neck extending.

Rose tried to speak but her heart was thrashing so hard the beats were slamming into her throat.

Time stood suspended until, finally, he took a long inhalation and gave a short decisive nod. The smallest smile curled his lips. ‘You know where to find me if you wish to join me.’

And then the air shifted again as his mostly naked body moved past her and disappeared down the stairs.

It was a long while before Rose was capable of moving her own body.

* * *

Diaz swam his usual lengths of the pool. He’d always enjoyed swimming but since becoming master of his own destiny, he’d taken to doing fifty laps daily wherever he happened to be in the world. For years he’d kept the routine, right until he’d moved back to his grandmother’s home after her stroke. It was Rose’s presence that had stopped his daily swims. And it was Rose fully in his mind now as he thrashed through the water. Rose, a year after he’d caught her smoking drugs by his parents’ swimming pool.

The charge of awareness he’d felt that hot day in Madrid had kept him away from Devon for much of the following year. That, and his singular failure to eradicate the image of Rose in a white bikini.

Dios, he’d watched her blossom from a skinny waif into a captivating beauty without even noticing, and he’d been sickened with himself for the way he’d finally noticed. Sickened with the way it had made him feel.

Six visits he’d made home that following year. The first had been for Amelia Gregory’s funeral. He would never, for as long as he lived, forget the white-faced desolation of her only child. Rose’s grief had been so complete that not even Diaz had complained when his grandmother insisted she move into the main house. Not at that point, anyway.

The fourth visit to Devon had been for Rosaria’s nineteenth birthday months later. She’d just completed her first year at university and Rose, recently turned eighteen, had completed her final senior school exam. His intention to take his sister out to celebrate her birthday had been thwarted when she’d announced she would be going to Rose’s school prom as Rose’s plus one, then going to an after-party, overbearing big brothers most definitely not invited.

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