He could count on one hand the number of serious mistakes he’d made in his life. Convincing his father to give the untested Emiliano a senior role in the business had always been the top one, a mistake that had cost Damián and his father half a billion dollars of their private wealth. The weight in his stomach told him Mia Caldwell could easily topple that.
He’d not even known her a day but he’d never met anyone outside his immediate family who pushed his buttons as easily as she did. For the sum he was paying her he’d assumed she would be deferential to him. In Damián’s world, people moulded themselves to fit his expectations.
While Mia had played her part in the restaurant beautifully, she clearly had no intention of moulding herself to fit his expectations when they were alone. She wanted him to know the contempt she held him in. She’d gazed at him throughout their meal with the soft, dewy expression he’d demanded but her eyes had told their own story. She’d made no effort to hide her loathing. Like the character he’d watched her play the evening before, she had a wilfulness about her.
This alone would not be an issue, not so long as she played the role he was paying her for when he needed her to.
The biggest problem, he was forced to admit grimly, was his undeniable attraction to her. This was not something he had factored in when desperation had forced him to go down the route of paying an actress to help him. And what the hell had compelled his tongue to reveal that it was his brother he was up against? His answer to her question had come from nowhere.
It had been indoctrinated in Damián from birth that emotions were for the bedroom not the boardroom. Never mix business with pleasure on a sensual level. And all for very good reasons, namely that the man who allowed his head to be turned took his eyes off the ball. That, he’d always been certain, had been the reason behind Emiliano’s disastrous time working for the business. Rumours had flown throughout the Delgado Group that he’d been having an affair with one of the staff. Damián had never found proof of this but, considering Emiliano’s lust for life and lust for beautiful women, had believed it. True or not, something had turned Emiliano’s head far enough away from the job in hand that his eyes had lost sight of the ball altogether.
In all his thirty-six years Damián had never had a problem separating the boardroom from the bedroom. Like his father, he’d never taken his eyes off the ball. Yet now, at the time he most needed to keep his famed focus, when his entire fortune and place in the world were at stake, he kept finding himself staring at the woman he was relying on and forcing himself not to strip her naked with his eyes. Every word exchanged between them came with a charge that raced through his veins and an uncomfortable heat that stirred his loins.
Even now, when the space she’d sat in in the back of the car had been empty for twenty minutes, he could still feel the charge rippling through him.
How he wished he could have agreed Mia’s request to terminate their agreement. He didn’t know if her request had been some kind of game to force more money out of him; he’d put her straight before she could ask. Terminating the agreement was out of the question. It really was too late to turn back. The wheels really had been set in motion. They’d been seen together. The world was vast but rumour could shrink it to the size of a snowball. If they weren’t already aware, whispers would soon reach his family that he’d taken a new lover. Having always been fussy about the women he chose to bed, suspicions would be raised if he dumped Mia and immediately hooked up with another actress.
For all the dangers he could see himself having to navigate in the coming weeks, he was stuck with her.
The theatre audience the next night was a particularly enthusiastic one who laughed uproariously and applauded with gusto. This was the kind of audience Mia, like all stage performers, adored. It made the curtain call at the end of a performance a joy and made her cheeks hurt from smiling so widely and for so long. That night, though, she needed all her acting skills to fake her smiles during the curtain call. Right at the end of the song ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ she suddenly spotted the hulking figure sitting on the far right of the third row. Her heart clattered and the nightgown she’d been twirling around the stage dropped out of her hands. How she recovered without any of the audience noticing anything amiss she had no idea.
As she bowed, she made sure to keep her gaze far from the right, just as she’d done for the rest of the performance. But, just as had happened throughout the evening, Damián’s stare burned straight through her. She couldn’t get off the stage fast enough.
The chatter amongst the female cast members she shared the dressing room with was a distant buzz in her head and she could only smile and nod at any conversation directed at her, trying hard to control the tremors in her hand as she removed her stage make-up.
A loud rap on the door made her heart clatter all over again. There was not a single doubt in her mind as to who was knocking, and she frantically smoothed the loose stripy top she’d changed into over her skinny black trousers while Nicole, who played Mrs Higgins, opened the door, still continuing her conversation with the others. Her words came to an abrupt halt.
‘Well...’ Nicole said after letting out a very low yet very obvious whistle. ‘What can we do for you?’
Mia squeezed her eyes shut as Damián’s deep, distinctive voice rang through the sudden silence. ‘I am here for Mia.’
Behind her, she heard someone, probably Jo, mutter, ‘Lucky Mia.’
Clutching her overnight bag to her chest, Mia fixed a smile to her face and spun around. Damián stood at the threshold, dressed down in a navy polo shirt and black jeans, hair impeccably groomed, dark eyes fixed on her. She knew perfectly well what he expected of her.
‘Damián!’ she cried, hurrying over to stand before him. ‘You made it!’
The smile he gave could have powered the Eiffel Tower but, before she could appreciate its full effect, a wave of his cologne hit her as he hooked a giant arm around her waist, pulled her against him and, before she could blink let alone think, covered her mouth with a kiss that managed to be both fleeting yet hungry.
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ he murmured. ‘Mi vida, I couldn’t keep my eyes off you on that stage.’
Dumbstruck at the unexpected intimacy and the tingling rush of heat it sent careering through her lips and straight into her bloodstream, Mia could only stare into the dark, dark eyes and pray her legs didn’t give way beneath her.
Noting the bright stain of colour flush over Mia’s cheeks, Damián conceded that she really was a superlative actress. Aware too of the open-mouthed shock on the other actresses’ faces, he released his hold around her waist and took her hand. ‘I hope you ladies will not be offended if I take Mia from you now? This is my last night in the UK so we want to make the most of the time we have left together.’