The Gold Collection: Bedded By A Billionaire: Santiago's Command / The Thorn in His Side / Stranded, Seduced...Pregnant

‘Grass stains!’ he ejaculated, taking the helmet from her trembling fingers and resisting the growing compulsion to press one of her slim white hands between his palms. This woman did not need comforting, she needed therapy.

Needed kissing.

‘Por Dios! If you can’t say anything sensible, shut up!’

Lucy, who could not have said anything even had she wanted to, swallowed past the aching emotional occlusion in her throat and clamped her teeth down on her trembling lower lip.

‘This thing …’ His voice faded as he laid the helmet to one side with exaggerated care. He inhaled and levelled a burning glare at the top of her blonde head as he fought for control. ‘This thing probably saved your life. You were lucky.’ It was not always the way … His heavy eyelids lowered partially, concealing the bleakness in the dark depths as the brutal inescapable images played in his head.

For a moment the silence hung between them, broken when Lucy gave a strangled sob she turned into a cough before pressing her face into her cupped palms. ‘Don’t dramatise,’ she mumbled, unconsciously repeating the phrase her father had always said when she became overemotional as a child.

That brought his head up with a jerk. ‘Dramatise!’ He swore in his native tongue and sucked in a wrathful breath as he dragged a hand over his ebony hair. ‘You want to see dramatic …?’

She lifted her face, her slightly dazed electric-blue eyes connecting with his, and Santiago lost track of his train of thought. Despite the tough-guy act she looked as he felt, and the petulant rebuttal seemed to have exhausted her. All the fight was gone, leaving her looking defenceless and vulnerable and several million miles away from the seductress his brother needed saving from.

With her defences stripped away her luminous beauty shone through: perfect bone structure, flawless skin … It was hard to look at such perfection and remain unmoved. As he stared he felt his anger drain away, leaving him feeling as if his armour had been stripped away … He felt suddenly exposed … He pushed away the thought. The only thing that was exposed was her inability to think beyond her own instant gratification.

Lucy sat there, her breath coming in painful uneven rasps, chin on her chest, her eyes lifted to the man squatting casually on the balls of his feet beside her. As always, he gave off the impression of elegant good taste overlaid by an aura of raw sexual magnetism that always made the details of what he was wearing secondary. Today it was an outfit more appropriate to the office than riding—a pale grey suit, crisp white shirt and silk tie, all classic and tasteful.

As their eyes connected the anger that was rolling off him hit like a physical force.

‘You shouldn’t be moving,’ Santiago snarled, thinking in the same breath he had to stop her before she caused permanent damage and it would serve her right if she did.

Practically speaking, if she chose to ignore him, short of flattening her with a rugby tackle and pinning her to the ground—an image that his imagination tended to linger unhealthily over—Santiago recognised that all he could do was watch.

‘Just because I’m saying something doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do, Lucy.’

Lucy blinked, horrified to feel the sting of hot tears behind her eyes. She was proof against his insults but the unexpected gruff gentleness she heard in his voice sliced through her defences like a hot knife through ice cream.

She bit her quivering lip, held up a hand in mute appeal and husked a breathless plea. She couldn’t cry—her tears would be something else for him to curl his lip contemptuously at. ‘I just need a minute … to get my breath back.’

Santiago opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again and tilted his head sharply in acquiescence before rising to his feet in one fluid motion. He walked away feeling an urgent need to put some distance between them.

Running one hand over his jaw, he reached for his phone with the other. The woman, he decided, punching in a number with unwanted viciousness, was amazing. Considering the circumstances, he had been bloody restrained and yet with one look from her swimming blue eyes she managed to simultaneously look like some innocent virgin and make him feel like a bullying tyrant—it was quite a skill.

In the periphery of her vision Lucy was conscious of him pacing a few feet away while speaking tersely into a mobile phone. When he dropped down beside her once more a few moments later her breathing was normal and more importantly she was no longer on the brink of a teary outburst.

‘Better?’

She nodded in response to his abrupt enquiry and said in her head, Suck it up Lucy, keep it together.

Santiago remained sceptical. The alarming rattle had gone, but her breath still seemed to be coming rather fast; she was almost hyperventilating.

Aware that it might appear he was staring at the heaving contours of her full breasts, which he was, but with total clinical objectivity—not everyone might get the objectivity—Santiago dragged his gaze clear.

‘Your leg.’ For the first time he saw the damage done to the well-worn jodhpurs that clung to her hips and the long lines of her magnificent legs. Along the outside of the right leg the fabric was torn, from thigh to ankle it gaped, revealing a section of bare skin.

His fingertips barely brushed her calf before she snatched her leg up. ‘It’s fine—a graze.’ With a dismissive shrug she tucked the limb underneath her and concentrated on the pain in her calf to stop herself thinking about how much she had wanted him to touch her.

Perhaps she had had a knock on the head?

Friday night it had been the glass of wine, or so she had told herself through the long, sleepless, guilt-racked night that had followed, and now it was a bang on the head—what excuse would she have the next time she found herself craving this man’s touch?

There isn’t going to be a next time.

He arched a sardonic brow and shrugged. ‘If you say so.’ The doctor might have other thoughts. The groove above his nose deepened as he glanced down the track—where was the doctor?

‘I do,’ she said firmly.

As he replayed the phone conversation of moments before in his head the oddness of Ramon’s response to his request to call for a doctor struck Santiago for the first time.

‘Good idea,’ his half-brother had said without asking why or for whom medical assistance was required.

Hand on the back of her neck, she angled a cautious look at Santiago’s face. She knew the lull in hostilities would not last; this reprieve was definitely only temporary. Even when she hadn’t ridden off on his favourite horse he couldn’t open his mouth without being snide and cutting.

Now she actually was in the wrong the comfort of the moral high ground was a dim and distant memory … Oh, God. She took a deep breath and thought, Take it like a man, Lucy. Bite the bullet and when you run out of clichés, apologise. She closed her eyes and thought, What the hell was I thinking?

She hated admitting she was wrong at the best of times, but admitting it to Santiago made it a hundred times worse. She could take his anger—it was the knowing she deserved it that she struggled with.

Crazily, with all the legitimate things she had to stress about, it was the irrational one that was giving Lucy the most problems. She knew he couldn’t read her mind—he just liked to leave the impression he was all-seeing, all-knowing—yet she couldn’t shake the conviction that he was going to look at her and know she had spent the last few nights fantasising about him.

‘Did Santana run home?’ she asked in a small voice.

Santiago’s head jerked towards her, his silent anger more articulate than a stream of abuse.

Unable to take her eyes off the errant muscle that was clenching and unclenching spasmodically in his cheek, in the face of his fury she leapt to the obvious conclusion. She began to shake her head in denial.

‘Oh, no, he isn’t injured …!’ The thought of being responsible for an injury to that beautiful and expensive animal … God, no wonder he looked as if he wanted to throttle her. ‘He’s …’ Her blue eyes widened in her milk-pale face as she whispered fearfully, ‘He’s not dead, is he?’

‘Would you care if he was?’

A sound close to a whimper emerged from her throat and Santiago, who never had been comfortable with kicking someone when they were down, took pity on her obvious distress.

‘I have no idea how Santana is,’ he admitted, before adding with a scowl, ‘But he was so spooked when I saw him that it will probably take a week for him to calm down and an army to catch him.’ He lied, well aware that the animal would have gone straight back to his stable.

‘I’m so, so sorry.’

‘For stealing a valuable horse, for proving you can’t handle anything bigger than a donkey or for getting caught?’

Her blue eyes flew wide. ‘I didn’t steal anything!’

He arched a brow at the protest. ‘Tell that to the police.’

She regarded him in horror. ‘You wouldn’t call the police.’

He smiled and arched a sardonic brow. ‘You think?’

Was he serious? Lucy refused to let him see that his threat had scared her. ‘I think you’re a total bastard.’