Page 24 of The Forbidden Cabrera Brother
She was witty, sharp and disrespectful. She should have been desperate to curry favour with him, to get him onside if her plan was to marry his brother and then set herself up in the enviable position of being able to lay claim to the family fortune. Her mission seemed to be the opposite. She was either ostensibly avoiding him or else openly arguing with him.
She fascinated him because she was so different from all the women he went out with and because he just couldn’t work out what was going on with her.
So when he had glanced through that window and spotted her, he hadn’t stopped to think. He’d headed straight to his bedroom, rummaged and found his swimming trunks, stuck on an old tee shirt, grabbed a towel and headed for the pool.
And here he was.
And there she was. Looking up at him, her face still wet, her hair dark from the water and fanning out around her like something from a pre-Raphaelite painting.
He hardened, felt that ache in his groin. He wondered whether coming down here had been the best of ideas. Maybe not.
‘It’s a hot day,’ he muttered roughly, turning away to strip off the tee shirt and then diving with fluid grace into the pool, only to surface and shake his head before raking his fingers through his wet hair.
Caitlin edged back in the water. ‘I wouldn’t normally have come in...but...’
‘Don’t apologise, Caitlin. I’m glad it’s being used. It’s maintained twice weekly and yet so seldom used that I can’t imagine why I had it put in in the first place.’
She could feel her cheeks burning. She was very much aware of him barely clothed, his body so close to hers that she could reach out and touch him with no effort at all.
He was so beautiful.
Seeing him here, bare-chested, she realised that, somewhere deep in her subconscious, she had wondered what he might look like underneath his expensive gear.
He lived up to expectation. Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, his torso the right side of muscular. There was a strength to his physique that made her think that he could pick her up one-handed and not feel the strain.
Plus, he wasn’t asking those questions, those vaguely pointed questions that always made her so uncomfortable and guarded and on the defensive.
He was beingnice.
‘Why did you, in that case?’ she asked, looking at him briefly, eyes locking, before spinning away and swimming towards the shallow end of the pool because all of a sudden she had to escape the stranglehold of his presence.
He followed her. He covered the length of the pool in slow, lazy strokes and somehow ended up by her side without looking as though he’d expended any energy at all.
‘I had the entire place renovated when I bought it years ago.’ He picked up the conversation where he had left off, as though there had been no interruption. ‘The architect and designer at the time both agreed that a swimming pool would be an asset.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s very ornamental.’
‘But as you say, if it’s not used...’
‘Maybe somewhere, at the back of my mind, I had high hopes of using it now and again.’ He smiled ruefully and a tingle of heated awareness shot through her body, making her fidgety and uncomfortable.
‘But then what happened?’
‘Really want to know?’
Caitlin nodded. She was uncomfortable with the conversation because it felt strangely intimate, and yet she wasn’t sure why she should feel uncomfortable because they weren’t sharing secrets and he wasn’t telling her anything he probably hadn’t told lots of people who might have asked the same question she had. And yet...
‘I never seemed to find the time. Alejandro went to London but here, in Madrid—this is the heartbeat of the company, and not just the family business, but all the other networks I have subsequently developed on my own. The heart never stops beating and I am in the centre of it. Finding time to use this pool became an empty wish.’
‘You sound trapped,’ Caitlin mused, looking at him with empathy before turning away to sit on the step. ‘I always got the impression that there was nothing you enjoyed more than working.’
Dante lowered his eyes, his lush, sooty lashes brushing his high cheekbones. He seldom, if ever, had conversations like this with any woman but he was enjoying talking to her, enjoying her calm intelligence, her refusal to kowtow to him and, most of all, the fact that she wasn’t flirting with him, doing her utmost to grab his attention by flaunting her assets.
She wouldn’t be, though, would she? She was engaged to his brother. It was a reminder that was grudgingly acknowledged. She didn’t act like someone who was engaged, but why did he constantly catch himself overlooking it? Was it a Freudian slip? Since when was he the sort of man who suffered from such weaknesses? After that one and only youthful error of judgement, from which lessons had been learnt, he had led a gilded life, where success after success had made him untouchable and given him an unshakeable confidence in his ability to control his destiny, so he was ill at ease with the fact that there were gaps in his armour he had never suspected.
‘I’m far from trapped.’ Was he, though? For one piercing second he envied the freedoms his brother enjoyed. He had an easy show to run, working in an office that was so well oiled he was barely needed at all, free to pursue just the sort of interests that had brought him into contact with the woman sitting next to Dante. He wondered whether there was a low-level, unconscious resentment that had fuelled the distance between himself and Alejandro.
Had he taken time to explore that possibility, was there a chance the chasm between them might have been bridged? And how was it that a stranger had been the one to propel him towards realisations he had barely acknowledged?
Caitlin shrugged and looked away. She was so intensely aware of him and the potency of his masculine appeal that she could scarcely keep her thoughts straight. She didn’t trust herself to have the normal, inoffensive conversation the situation required.
