at the screen. The sexual tension emanating from him died as if he’d flipped a switch. He scrolled through his phone, shutting her out.
Rebecca gripped the railing behind her, stunned both at the immediacy of her reaction and at his ability to turn off his own response. Because he had wanted her. She’d seen it. Hadn’t she? Or was this simply another part of his game?
Unbidden, images of him flashed into her head. The jagged scar from a bull’s horn slicing across his ribcage, the taut ripple and glide of muscle when he moved, the impressive jut of his erection. The ecstasy on his face when she straddled him and drove them both out of their minds with her slow, even thrusts.
He’d accused her of enduring his touch for the sake of her family business, of seeing him as nothing more than a bullfighter dirty from the ring. If only he believed that she’d truly loved him, how sexy she found him in spite of the barbarity of his former profession.
If only… They were words she’d thought so many times before.
Now, standing in this elevator in his custom-fit suit, Alejandro was as far from the glittering garb of a matador as any man could be—and yet she still saw the bullfighter beneath the polish. The raw, hungry, intense man who could stand in a ring with an angry bull barreling toward him and never, not even once, flinch. This was a man who could stare death in the face and not blink.
After their affair ended, she’d actually gone through a torturous phase of tracking down and watching his recorded fights. Holding her breath while the bull charged, while the cape swept down, then whirled away as Alejandro went up high on his toes and plunged his sword home. She’d thought it barbaric, and yet Alejandro had once explained, when she’d been tracing his scar in the aftermath of their lovemaking, how honorable the fight was for both man and bull. It wasn’t her kind of thing, to be sure—and yet there was a certain beauty in it.
A beauty in him.
She closed her eyes, remembered the heat of him, of the two of them tangled together in his sheets. It’d all gone so wrong, so horribly wrong. And she wasn’t the same person she’d been back then, the same starry-eyed girl with dreams of love and a life with the most magnetic man she’d ever met. The world had certainly taught her the folly of those beliefs.
The elevator glided to a halt, the doors whispering open to let them into a spacious private office. Overstuffed chairs and a sleek sofa sat beneath a wall of books. A chrome and glass desk was positioned in front of floor to ceiling windows that ran the length of one wall. Alejandro went behind the desk and sat down without looking at her.
In the distance, the twin glass and steel structures of the Puerta de Europa leaned toward each other across the busy Paseo de Castellana. Much closer, the giant Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, where Madrilenians flocked to watch their soccer team, squatted against a bright blue sky.
“The board meeting will be in an hour. I suggest you prepare.” He picked up the phone and spoke to someone. A second later, a pretty woman opened the door.
“Please escort Señorita Layton to a desk, Maria.”
Rebecca followed the woman without another word, smiling and giving her thanks when Maria deposited her in a small, windowless office. Though she needed to prepare for the meeting, she first placed a call to the Cahill Group’s offices in London. Roger was out of town until tomorrow, so she hung up and clicked open her briefcase. A glance at the clock told her she had fifty minutes left.
She didn’t know what she’d encounter in that boardroom, but she wasn’t going down without a fight.
When she was finally called to the meeting, more than an hour after she’d been told she would be, she was ready. She’d spent the last two hours completing her projections, dragging her finance people out of bed to give her numbers, and making sure her arguments were sound. Layton International would be out of the red in six months if she were allowed to continue on the path she’d chosen.
And though it burned her up to have to humble herself to these people, to explain her plans and defend her actions, she had no choice. She had to keep her company intact until she could somehow manage to