Joaquin slammed his fist hard against the side of the window frame as he stared across at the terraced expanse of his garden, to where the clear water of the curved swimming pool glinted in the last of the afternoon sun.
Damn him for appearing at just the wrong moment! For walking into the house as if he owned it, flashing that smile at Cassandra and interrupting…
Interrupting what?
The question froze him suddenly, hand still clenched tight into a brutal fist, the knuckles of his fingers showing through white under his tanned skin.
This time, the muttered curses in his native Spanish were harsher, more savage—and aimed at himself instead of his brother and his ill-timed visit.
Interrupting what? That was the real problem. The uncomfortable, nagging worry at the bottom of his mind, that corrupted and distorted everything until he wasn’t sure what to think.
He had thought that he’d succeeded in what he’d planned for his early arrival at the finca. That he’d enticed Cassandra out of her difficult mood, charmed away the uncharacteristic coolness and distance in her attitude—seduced it out of her. And he had believed that she was ready, as she had always been in the past, to put their differences behind them, and do their making up where they always did it so well—in bed.
But Ramón’s arrival had interrupted all that. Broken the mood totally and left him fuming with frustration while his woman and his half-brother made coffee and chatted affably.
It seemed that Ramón had a habit of turning up unexpectedly, just when he was least wanted. After all, hadn’t he arrived on their father’s doorstep, unannounced, nothing known of him until then, just at the moment when Juan Alcolar and his son by marriage had been at the lowest point of their relationship together? And now here was Ramón, the illegitimate son—one of the illegitimate sons, Joaquin corrected, because there was Alex too. But Ramón was the son who was everything that his father would have wanted—who had everything going for him—except that he was not Juan’s legitimate heir.
‘No!’
He muttered it aloud to emphasise the word, driving it home to himself.
It wasn’t Ramón’s fault that he was who he was. Not Ramón’s fault that their father was a philandering womaniser who couldn’t keep his trousers on when he was with another female. He was their father’s son after all; no one could have any doubt about that. You only had to look at the three of them together and it was as plain as could be.
And it wasn’t Ramón’s fault that he had wandered in on the awkward, uncomfortable confrontation between his brother and Cassandra.
The sort of awkward, uncomfortable, uneasy confrontation that was becoming more and more common between them. So much so that the nagging unease was the norm rather than the rare occurrence it had been at the beginning of their relationship.
At the beginning…
Joaquin’s hard features softened from the taut, harsh lines into which they had been drawn, and a smile of memory played over his sensual mouth.
At the beginning— Oh, their relationship had been amazing then. Amazing, fantastic—mind-blowingly sensual. They had been caught up in a whirlwind of sexual desire and passion, unable to keep their hands off each other, not daring even to kiss in public for fear of the blazing, hungry desire such a small caress might spark off. If they had been in the house, then they had been in bed. It seemed that they had never left the bedroom, except occasionally to eat, for almost all of the first six months.
But that had changed so much lately.
The frown was back, creasing his forehead harshly.
The sex was still great—the best, for him at least. Cassandra turned him on as no other woman had done in his life before. But out of bed, so often he had the uneasy feeling that her mind was somewhere else. And…
But at that moment his thoughts stopped dead, his rational process arrested by the sight beyond the window.
‘Cassandra!’
Where he had opted for a shower to wash away the heat of the day and freshen up, Cassie had decided to go for a swim. So now he stood transfixed, his ebony gaze caught and held by the tall, slender figure making her way down the path towards the cool, inviting water of the pool. Her long blonde hair was caught up in a high pony-tail at the back of her head, and she wore a hot pink bikini, fastened at the back and the sides by shoestring laces.
‘Bella!’
It was a fervent, almost reverent exclamation, expelled on a low, sighing breath. He had thought that after their twelve months together the effect her beauty had on him might have lessened, not hitting home quite so hard. But now he found himself caught and held unmoving by just the sight of her, and the sensation deep in the pit of his stomach felt as if someone had just punched him there, very hard.
The hot pink bikini might not be as microscopic as some things he had seen her wear in the privacy of their bedroom, but to a man who knew her body intimately the way that the tight Lycra clung to the smooth curves of her breasts and hips, even before it was wet, was pure torment. The brilliant colour of the material was in sharp contrast to the smoothness of her slender limbs, only just touched with the faintest hint of a pale gold tan after her year here.
Joaquin’s mouth dried, his lower body tightening sharply at just the thought of sliding his hands over the heated satin of her flesh, over the long, lean lines of her legs, trailing along the waistband of the bottom half of the swimming costume. His touch would follow the indentation of her waist, skim over the delicate ribcage, and up, towards the soft swell of her swaying breasts.
‘Hell-fire!’
This time the kick of need was sharper than before, making his head swim, his breath catch. He was hard already. Hard and hot and hungry. So much so that watching Cassie move to the edge of the pool and lift her arms above her head, bringing those luscious breasts into even sharper prominence, was like some form of delicious torment, one he wanted desperately to end and yet also longed to prolong as much as he possibly could.
He wanted this woman. Wanted her with a need that was more than words could describe. With a hunger that all the many, many times they had made love over the past twelve months could do nothing to assuage. If anything, he wanted her more now than that day when he had first set eyes on her and felt that he might die if he didn’t get her into his bed—and fast!
But then she lifted herself on her toes, gave a little spring and dived neatly into the pool, disappearing under the cool water in a couple of seconds.
And before those seconds had ended, before she had a chance to fully submerge herself, Joaquin found that he was moving. The towel he had been drying his hair on was discarded somewhere, he didn’t give a damn where, and he was thundering down the stairs, leaping the last section all in one jump, and dashing out, on bare feet, towards the terrace and the pool.
Her blonde head had barely just broken the surface as he arrived at the spot from which she had dived, the golden hair sleeked and darkened by the water, the long pony-tail floating on the surface beside her. And as he checked briefly at the edge of the pool she shook the water from her face, kicked her legs and set out at a steady breaststroke for the far side, away from him.
She hadn’t seen him, didn’t know that he was there. But she would do soon. He had no intention of hanging around here, waiting. He wanted her in his arms, her body tight against his. And he wanted that now.
Barely pausing for breath, he executed a perfect racing dive, plunging into the water and setting off after her in a fast, powerful crawl.
The first indication Cassie had of Joaquin’s presence in the pool was the sudden splash, the sound of his powerful body entering the water in a clean dive. The next moment he had surfaced and was coming after her, strong arms cleaving through the waves he’d created in forceful strokes.
A shattering range of