A Price Worth Paying(5)

‘My grandfather is dying, Señor Esquivel,’ she said before he cut the connection. ‘Do you really think I care what you are wearing?’ And the hesitant mouse with the husky drawl sounded as if she’d found a backbone, and suddenly his interest was piqued. Why not humour his neighbour’s granddaughter with five minutes of his time? It wasn’t as if it was going to cost him anything and it would give him a chance to see if the rest of her lived up to that husky voice.

‘In that case,’ he said, smiling to himself as he pressed the lift release, ‘you’d better come right up.’

Simone’s heart lurched as the lift door opened to the small lobby that marked the entrance to the top floor apartment, her mind still reeling with the unexpected success of making it this far, her senses still reeling from the sound of Alesander’s voice. Her research might have turned up his address and told her that Alesander Esquivel was San Sebastian’s most eligible bachelor, but it hadn’t warned her about his richly accented voice, or the way it could curl down the phone line and bury itself deep into her senses.

Yet even with that potent distraction, she’d somehow managed to keep her nerve and win an audience with the only man who could help her right now.

Alesander Esquivel, good-looking heir to the Esquivel fortune, according to her research, but then how he looked or how big his fortune was irrelevant. She was far more interested in the fact he was unmarried.

Thirty-two years old, with no wife and no fiancée, and he’d agreed to see her.

She dragged in air. It was a good start. Now all she had to do was get him to listen long enough to consider her plan.

‘Piece of cake,’ she whispered to herself, in blatant denial of the dampness of her palms as she swiped them on her skirt. And then there was nothing else for it but to press on the apartment’s buzzer and try to smile.

A smile that was whisked away, along with the door, somewhere between two snowy towels, one hooked around his neck, stark white against his black hair and golden skin, the other one lashed low over his hips.

Dangerously low.

She swallowed.

Thought about leaving.

Thought about staying.

Thought about that towel and whether he was wearing anything underneath it and immediately wished she hadn’t.

‘Simone Hamilton, I presume,’ he said, and his delicious Spanish accent turned her name into a caress. She blinked and forced her eyes higher, up past that tightly ridged belly and sculpted chest, forcing them not to linger when it was all they craved to do. ‘It is a pleasure to meet you.’

His dark eyes were smiling down at her, the lips on his wide mouth turned up at the corners, while the full force of the accent that had curled so evocatively down the telephone line to her now seemed to stroke the very skin under her clothes. She shivered a little as her breasts firmed, her nipples peaking inside her thin bra and, for the first time in a long time, her thoughts turned full-frontal to sex, her mind suddenly filled with images of tangled limbs and a pillow-strewn bed and this man somewhere in the midst of it all—minus the towels …

And the pictures were so vivid and powerful that she forgot all about congratulating herself for making it this far. ‘I’m disturbing you,’ she managed to whisper. I’m disturbed. ‘I should come back.’

‘I warned you I wasn’t dressed for visitors.’ He let that sink in for just a moment. ‘You said you didn’t care what I was wearing.’

She nodded weakly. She did recall saying something like that. But never for one moment had she imagined he’d be wearing nothing more than a towel. She swallowed. ‘But you’re not … I mean … Maybe another time.’

His smile widened and her discomfort level ratcheted up with every tweak of his lips. He was enjoying himself. At her expense. ‘You said it was important. Something about Felipe?’

She blinked up at him and remembered why she was here. Remembered what she was about to propose and all the reasons it would never work. Added new reasons to the list—because the pictures she’d found hadn’t done him justice—he wasn’t just another good—looking man with a nice body, he was a veritable god-and because men who looked like gods married super-models and heiresses and princesses and not women who rocked up on their doorstep asking for favours.

And because nobody in their right mind would ever believe a man like him would hook up with a woman like her.

Oh God, what was she even doing here?