Forbidden to His Touch Read online

  “Your guilt is not my problem. Nor is your allegiance. Because mine is to Turino, and I intend to see his will carried out.”

  “You can’t force me to return home if I don’t wish to go.”

  Torn between his conflicting desires to draw her close and to force her far, far away, Rafael stared at the defiant tilt of her small face and debated his next words. For Turino’s sake he had to convince her to come home. But he knew he’d never survive her proximity unless she hated him. She had to hate him. It was the only way to keep her safe. So he stepped closer, and the air between them crackled with tension. “Try me,” he threatened.

  “You can’t be serious,” she blurted as she arched away from his looming presence. “I’m not a teenager, all doe-eyed and in love with you, anymore. I won’t jump to do your bidding just because you happen to crook your finger in my direction.”

  He didn’t flicker so much as an eyelash, though his body clamored to convince her with hands and mouth and tongue. “You’ll do as I say or else suffer the consequences.”

  “What consequences?” she scoffed. “You can’t touch me here.”

  “Can’t I?”

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  About the Author

  NATASHA TATE’S romantic side has its roots in childhood. Ask anyone and you’ll hear she spent too many of her formative years believing she was Cinderella. This despite the fact that she had two loving parents and no evil stepmother in sight. Her earliest drawings were of princess attire, replete with bows, ribbons and multiple flounces, she warbled about her future prince during chores, and began each night by assuming the most earnest Sleeping Beauty pose.

  Alas, school did not tolerate such fanciful notions, and she quickly learned to rely on romance novels to satisfy her cravings for happy endings. As an army brat and perennial new kid she consumed a book a day, hiding them within her textbooks while training half an ear on her teachers’ lectures. This habit persisted into college, despite her more traditional academic pursuits, equipping her with the skills needed to tame her own alpha male hero.

  Now that she’s married, and the mother of three strapping sons, Natasha’s experiencing her own happily-ever-after. As an author for Harlequin Mills & Boon, she lives her dream of crafting fairytale romances set in modern-day larger-than-life settings. Visit her at www.natashatate.com or e-mail her at [email protected]

  Recent titles by the same author:

  ONCE TOUCHED, NEVER FORGOTTEN AN INCONVENIENT OBSESSION

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  Forbidden

  to His Touch

  Natasha Tate

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  Visit www.dpgroup.org

  for more free ebooks uploaded by our generous members

  Visit www.dpgroup.org

  for more free ebooks uploaded by our generous members

  CHAPTER ONE

  “YOU have to talk to her.”

  Rafael Chaves looked up from where he crouched over a grapevine to see his employer’s normally placid features reddened with anger and distress. Without even asking, Rafael knew the her to whom Dante Turino referred. Only one female had the ability to bring the burly patriarch of California’s premiere vineyard to such an agitated state. “About what?”

  Turino paced tightly, his boots kicking up dust and his beefy hands clenching fistfuls of sunlit air. “That fool child won’t listen to reason!”

  Having worked since dawn in the fields, Rafael was tired to the bone and filthy. But no amount of mental or physical fatigue could ever fully distract him from the sweet torture of Sophia’s presence in the villa on the hill overlooking the vineyard. He was as aware of her as he was of his own breath, of the rough calluses on his palms, his big, hulking body and its brutal hands that possessed a capacity for violence too terrible to contemplate. “I don’t understand,” he said in a carefully neutral voice as he slowly straightened.

  “She’s leaving me. Leaving California. Says she’s moving to London and building a life of her own.”

  Rafael stopped breathing.

  Turino blinked furiously, his irritation and frustration stamped upon his features. “She’s already purchased her tickets and is packing her bags as we speak.”

  Rafael’s lungs tightened and the heavy thud of his pulse quickened beneath his ribs.

  “I forbade her to go. But she claimed she was an adult now and that she didn’t need anyone to take care of her.” Turino’s infuriated expression betrayed how impotent he felt in the face of Sophia’s rebellion. “My Sophia, an adult? She’s just a child!”

  The warm scent of soil and ripening grapes filled Rafael’s nostrils as he sucked in a sharp breath and forcibly relaxed his jaw and hands. Sophia had been an adult for a few years now, a fact that continued to haunt Rafael’s thoughts and dreams while escaping her oblivious father’s notice entirely.

  Turino spun on his heel to pace a tight circle in the tilled row of black earth, plowing his fingers through his wiry gray hair, while anger at losing his cosseted daughter etched deep grooves from his nose to his mouth. “Why would she do this to me?”

  Rafael held himself utterly still, allowing his expression to betray none of his thoughts. “I couldn’t say, sir.”

  “Haven’t I given that girl everything?”

  Though Rafael knew the question was rhetorical, he also knew the gruff American who’d saved his life so many years ago was blind when it came to his only child. “Of course you have,” he assured Turino. “But you know how Sophia is. Stubborn to the core.”

  “I warned her that if she left, she’d no longer be my daughter. That I’d cut her off and never forgive her.”

  Rafael was sure Sophia had recognized the truth of her father’s words as easily as he had. “That didn’t change her mind?”

  The big man seemed to deflate before Rafael’s eyes, his grief already bowing his shoulders. “No. She just frowned in that little way of hers, said she was saddened by my inability to wish her well, and then returned to her packing.”

  Rafael could see that Sophia’s insistence on leaving had wounded Turino more than he cared to admit, and Rafael’s inability to ease his mentor’s pain sent a flare of distress through his veins. But what could he, a bastard and a nobody, possibly do to help?

  “You will change her mind for me, won’t you?”

  Rafael’s stomach clenched at the thought of being close enough to Sophia to try. “I don’t think—”

  “Please? She’ll listen to you.”

  “No,” he blurted, a jolt of panic making the word come out more harshly than he’d intended. “She won’t. Not anymore.” Sophia had craved his company during the summers of her childhood, when vacations at the vineyard had been the highlight of her year. She’d listened with rapt attention while trailing after him, his world such a marked contrast to the London boarding schools she attended during the year.

  She’d even listened to him after her mother’s death, when the adjustments of adolescence and grief had cast Rafael in the role of friend, protector and confidant. And he’d allowed her friendship, knowing it kept Sophia from interrupting her busy father with her woes. For years, they’d been inseparable.

  Until things between them had irrevocably changed.

  Until she’d matured into a woman with ripe curves, golden curls and an intoxicating blend of innocence and sensuality that turned every male head in the valley. Until he’d called a halt to their proximity in order to keep his forbidden longing for her hidden.

  “You have to try,” Turino insisted, hauling Rafael’s thoughts back to the conversation
at hand.

  Though Rafael didn’t ever verbalize his sense of obligation to Turino, they both knew he would do anything for him. Anything. But he couldn’t risk revealing the way his entire body was attuned to Sophia’s slightest movement, how his wretched heart clubbed like a runaway horse whenever she was near. As it was, when he caught so much as a glimpse of her, he felt his tenuous control waver. Weaken. She was far too fine for someone of his debased origins, and he had to remind himself of that fact multiple times each day. Countless times each night. “You overestimate the influence I have over her, sir.”

  “No. You’re the one who underestimates it,” Turino snapped, moving forward to grip Rafael’s forearm with his thick fingers. “Your opinion matters to her. You know it does. That girl has worshipped you for years.”

  Torn between the conflicting desire to assist the man to whom he owed everything and the need to maintain a safe distance from Sophia, Rafael fought to deny Turino’s request. “It won’t work,” he claimed. “You know she—”

  “If the life you’ve lived here means anything to you, if I mean anything to you,” Turino warned, “you’ll try. You’ll talk to her.”

  Ten minutes later, Rafael had washed the worst of the dirt and grime from his skin, changed his shirt and climbed the wide steps of the main villa’s staircase. He hesitated at the top step, his pulse thundering loudly in his ears while his hands gripped the polished rosewood banister.

  He knew from the single time he’d visited Sophia’s rooms four years ago, when she’d been ill and asked for him, that her door was the last one on the right. He knew the large, square space was crowded with antique wood furniture, hundreds of books, bright, cheerful rugs and countless yards of white, billowing cotton.

  He remembered the way her hair had spread in a gilded fan upon her pillow, the sweet curve of her fevered cheek, the bright blue eyes and the fragile wings of collarbone beneath her long, pale throat. He remembered how small she’d looked in her big white bed and the way her mouth had curved up in an innocent smile when she’d seen his hulking frame at her door.

  He remembered, too, the way her guileless expression had changed and shifted, the way she had grown pink and bashful the minute she’d read the hunger in his eyes. It had only taken the one time for her to stop seeing him as the boy her father had saved. One unguarded moment for her to realize that he had become a man.

  Glancing at her opened doorway, knowing that she stood mere steps away from his looming presence, every muscle in his body drew taut. His breath thinned and heat coiled in his veins. He stalled, frozen in a purgatory of indecision while his blunt fingernails gouged dents in the banister’s polished varnish.

  He wasn’t certain how long he stood before he braced his shoulders, hauled in a fortifying breath and strode toward the one woman with the power to threaten his control. Stopping at her doorway, he stood in silence for several long moments, watching her as she prepared to leave. He swallowed against a thickened throat while her scent—an intoxicating blend of black currant, citrus and warm cedarwood—robbed him of speech. He’d forgotten how she smelled, had willed his mind to erase the memory of her flushed skin, bright eyes and the cool press of her slim fingers against his rough, hair-dusted arm.

  “Sophia.”

  “Raf,” she said without turning. “This is certainly a surprise. Did Papa send you to change my mind?” Her voice, soft and smooth, wound around his chest and tightened. Hard.

  “You can’t leave like this,” Rafael answered as he fought to sound calm. Unaffected.

  Separate.

  Sophia closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, struggling not to react. Rafael hadn’t spoken to her in so long, it took all her strength to continue packing as if his presence didn’t affect her. It required all her will to not betray the swell of longing and frustration that collected beneath her skin.

  “Did you hear me?” he growled. The bulwark of his tempered anger heated her bowed back and coiled low in her stomach.

  “Of course I did.” She didn’t lift her head, her hands methodical and unhurried as she tucked silk shirts, tailored business suits and toiletries into her bag. “But I don’t have time to waste. My flight leaves in less than three hours.”

  “Exactly. You’re being impulsive. Impulsive and irrational, just like always.” He strode toward her and she tensed. He didn’t touch her, though she could feel his desire to stop her preparations crackling in the slim space of air separating them. It sparked a futile urge to drive him to the point where he’d forfeit his perfect restraint enough to grip her between his big, square palms. To close the distance that yawned between them like some impassable chasm.

  She wanted him to touch her, to pull her away from the evidence of her pending departure and demand that she stay. With him. She wanted him to lose control of the emotions that he kept so carefully hidden beneath his beautiful, austere features and let her in. But she knew he wouldn’t. The past four years had taught her that once he’d made up his mind, there was no changing it. “I’m leaving,” she told him. “Whether you agree with my decision or not.”

  “What are you trying to prove?”

  “Prove?” she repeated before straightening and then turning to face him. She abandoned her opened suitcase and strode past him to shut her bedroom door. As much as she knew it unnerved him to be alone with her, she refused to grant him an easy escape. Not when this was her last chance to speak with the man who’d stolen her heart so long ago. “Why don’t you tell me, Raf? What do you think I’m trying to prove by abandoning my life, my home and the only real family I have left?”

  Rafael didn’t visibly react to the closed door or her questions, remaining as still as stone as he tracked her movements. But color rose to darken the crests of his cheeks and his black eyes flashed with an agitation that contrasted with his usual aura of calm control. She was reminded of the ferocious youth her father had saved from the streets, the orphan who’d lived by his wits and will before fate intervened. Before life on the Turino lands had civilized him.

  “What? No response?” she asked, coming to a stop before his big, tense body. She hadn’t seen him exhibit the snarling emotions of his past for a long, long time, and she knew she was pushing him further than was wise. But desperate times called for desperate measures. “No appeal to my sense of duty, my reason, or my loyalty to a father who’s ordered me to stay?”

  He merely glared at her, his jaw clenched tight while his stony expression concealed any hint of soft emotion. The hard exotic lines of his Brazilian features and the cold, immutable control he exerted made her long for the days of their youth, when he hadn’t minded being alone with her. Before he had become so closed off all the time.

  “Since you seem to be as silent as ever on the subject, I’ll tell you,” she said while her pulse beat uncomfortably against her throat. “I can’t keep living like some fragile doll destined to spend her days boxed up and on display. Between you and Papa, I’m always held at arm’s length, protected from every risk, and hemmed in no matter which way I turn. I can’t live that way.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “No. I can’t. Not anymore. I need to make my own choices. Take my own chances. I need a life of my own, and I can’t have it here.”

  He scowled. “You have a life others only dream about, and you want to throw it all away for no reason. None.”

  “I need more.”

  “More? You already possess unimaginable wealth and the lavish attention of a father who treats you like a princess. What more could you possibly need?”

  You. “My freedom.”

  “Your freedom?” he repeated with a low growl. “You know damn well you can do anything, have anything, your little heart desires. You’re just being stubborn to make your point.”

  “Like you’re one to talk?”

  His nostrils flared and his fists tightened into knots. “You’re going to get hurt.”

  I’m already hurt. “By whom?” She scoffed audibly, refusin
g to back down. “London is perfectly safe, even if Mother is gone now. I have both a job and an apartment waiting for me, and I’ll be living in the middle of a very respectable neighborhood.”

  “A big city is more dangerous than the home you have here, no matter where you live. And if it’s a job you want, you can find one in California just as easily as in London. There’s no need to go overseas.”

  “I wish that were true.”

  “It is.”

  “It’s not.” No matter what other strategies she’d tried, she couldn’t eradicate the barriers between them. He held himself separate. Apart. And always, always alone. Though they’d known each other since she was eleven years old, he’d never allowed himself to play any role but protector.

  She wanted more from her life and she wanted more from him. And she suspected he knew it, too. But he’d met her every overture with an impenetrable wall of resistance. He refused to see beyond his obligation to her father, and fought to maintain the distance between them despite the emotions she could sense between his steely surface. She wanted him to admit that she meant more to him than a child he’d vowed to protect, to acknowledge the woman she’d become. And until he did, it was too painful to remain.

  “I can’t stay here any longer.” She looked up into his hard black eyes, willing him to understand. To say the only thing that would change her mind. “But I’ll be safe,” she assured him. “I promise. You don’t need to worry about me anymore.”

  He ignored her reference to the boundaries of their relationship while the brutal curve of his mouth flattened into a harsh, implacable line. “Your father will never forgive you if you insist on this madness.”

  It was a price she had to pay, a price that made her stomach tense and her eyes sting. “You’re wrong,” she said, willing herself to believe it. “He’s just angry right now.”

  “He’s more than angry. He’s furious. And if you insist on closing this door, it may never be opened again.”