Her gaze never wavered from his throat as she worked, almost as if she feared what she might see if she looked up at him. Sí, be afraid of me, amor. I intend to possess you, to ruin you. For Anya. For me. You are finished and don’t even know it.
“Did you miss me?” he teased, his sensual tone at odds with his dark thoughts.
Her brows shot up, her expression a strange mixture of disbelief and… was it guilt? Interesting. He filed it away for future contemplation.
“You’re kidding, right?” Her voice broke at the last. She refocused on his tie, twisting and tugging.
Alejandro pressed his advantage. “Perhaps I am not. Did you not enjoy our time together in the pool, bella?”
She yanked the tie too tight, nearly choking him, then jerked it loose and swore before trying again. “I’ve forgotten all about it. It didn’t mean a thing.”
Her red face and clumsy fingers told him differently.
“I wanted to taste you,” he said, just to see what she would do. “To lay you back and dip my tongue into your sweetness. Are you still sweet, Rebecca?”
Her chest heaved, once. She bent her head lower, her lip undergoing punishment from her teeth as she concentrated. He wanted to suck that lip between his own, make love to it until she was pliant, begging him to move on to another delicious part of her.
How could he want this woman he hated? He didn’t know, but maldito sea, since he’d freed himself to do so, he could think of almost nothing else.
She tugged the tie and stepped back with a triumphant expression. “There. All done.”
He touched the knot, tested it for tightness. “Gracias.” Then he closed the distance between them, giving her no quarter. It was not in his nature to prevaricate once he’d decided he wanted something. “Would you like that, querida? Would you like me to taste you?”
She made a choked sound, slipped past him and fiddled with the briefcase she’d left open on the table. “Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Are you certain? Imagine it. Imagine the ecstasy.”
Her eyes closed. “No.”
“Do you remember the first time?”
He thought she wouldn’t respond, but she nodded—just a quick dip of her chin.
“It could be like that again.” Dios, he wanted it. Right now, this second, he wanted it to be that way just once more. To forget why he had to hate her, why he had to destroy her. To just feel the good things again.
She snapped her laptop closed and stuffed it into her briefcase before glaring at him with fiery blue eyes. “That’s impossible, Alejandro. The first time we were together, I didn’t know you had a fiancée. Stupidly, I thought I was the only woman in your life. You let me find out in the most humiliating way possible that I wasn’t the only—or even the primary—one.”
He recognized that she needed to cloak herself in her mantle of righteous anger so she wouldn’t feel the pull of desire between them. But he did not intend to allow her that comfort. “Anyone can hire a wedding planner, Rebecca. That particular one was hired by my father with the express purpose of chasing you away and pushing me into a marriage I had not agreed to.”
She looked a bit shocked—and very doubtful. “Why should I believe you? And why, if that’s the case, didn’t you tell me five years ago?”
His laugh was bitter. He snapped it off mid-stream and pinned her with a hard stare. “Because you were a coward. You ran away like a petulant child. What was I to do, chase you back to New York and force you to listen to me?”
12
Rebecca’s heart skipped a beat. This was not what she’d expected tonight. She’d been working with her chief financial officer on some projections for the Kai Lani chain of resorts and fielding calls from her human resources director about Ramirez Enterprise’s plans and how it would affect jobs. Except she didn’t yet know what Alejandro had in mind, so she’d had to put the woman off with vague platitudes about the future. Which angered and frustrated her. It also reminded her how precarious her position was.
She hadn’t expected Alejandro to return in the midst of it all, and she certainly hadn’t expected this. A discussion of their painful past was the last thing she’d have thought possible tonight. Yet here he was, telling her it was his father who’d sent the wedding planner and that it was deliberate.
She could hardly wrap her mind around it. Worse, she feared he was right in at least one respect. She’d run away because she couldn’t take it, because she’d already shown poor judgment once before. She hadn’t trusted herself to make a sound decision. She’d needed distance, time, and space to think.
She’d gotten her time, and plenty of it. “You should have made me understand,” she forced from her dry throat. Could it possibly be true that his family had wanted to manipulate him into a wedding? That his father would do such a thing?
Why not?
Her own father had gone to extraordinary lengths hiring Parker to insinuate himself into her life. All to prove a point to her. A painful point about her own vulnerability and neediness. Rebecca shivered as she stared at Alejandro. He was fully capable of lying to her in order to make her feel worse than she already did about what had happened between them.
He stood before her, devilishly dark and deliciously handsome in his custom fit tuxedo. His skin had darkened beneath the hot Arabian sun over the last few days, setting off the lightning-silver of his eyes. Eyes that speared her with scorn.
“Perhaps you should have trusted me,” he bit out. A second later, he raked a hand through his dark hair and swore in Spanish. “As if it would have mattered. No, your plan was always to ruin
