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  In the hall below, tourist men of differing nationality and states of sobriety blocked her path to the restaurant. 'Well, hi, honey!' was freely interspersed with what amounted to wolf calls in several languages, and Laurel wasn't sure if she was glad or sorry when a firm male hand clasped her elbow and an unequivocally Latin voice murmured:

  'I have been waiting for you. Shall we dine here, or would you prefer somewhere more—intimate?'

  Laurel gazed bemusedly at Diego Ramirez's expressive eyes, at present looking for all the world as if he had, indeed, been waiting for her to appear. His fingers, warm and vibrant, were still encircling her elbow, although he had removed her safely from the circle of her would-be admirers.

  'There's no need for you to bother, Senor Ramirez,' she said stiffly, disengaging her arm. 'I can take care of myself.'

  Dark brown eyes surveyed her smoothly tanned face. 'Perhaps. You are meeting someone?'

  'No, I—' Laurel's lashes swept down, then lifted over eyes that met his boldly. 'I was on my way to eat at the hotel restaurant. They're used to seeing me on my own there.'

  'Then permit me to escort you to the restaurant.' With an inclination of the head, he offered his arm and after a moment's hesitation she took it. Under other circumstances, his courtly gesture would have been mirth-provoking, but now Laurel felt a sense of reassurance when her fingertips rested on muscles as

  smoothly taut as a cougar's.

  `Ah, Senorita Trent,' the maitre d'hotel greeted her, all smiles until his face registered shock at sight of her companion. 'Senor Ramirez!'

  `Como esta usted, Tomas?'

  ' Muy bien, gracias! I will find a good table for you and Senorita Trent.' The beaming dining room chief was already turning away when Diego's regretful decline came.

  `Unfortunately, I am not able to dine with Miss Trent tonight.' Turning the force of his dark eyes on her, he added in explanation: 'An unavoidable previous engagement.'

  His tone suggested heartfelt regret, but Laurel, despite an illogical stab of disappointment, managed a cool: 'It's not important at all, Senor Ramirez. I had planned to eat alone.'

  A light flickered behind his eyes, but he made no reply, turning instead to Tomas with a spate of Spanish too rapid for Laurel to follow. The words she did catch seemed to relate to 'Senora Ramirez' and a birthday celebration in her honour.

  To her dismay, Tomas informed her after seating her in solitary splendour at a table for four overlooking the light-studded Bay that the celebration was to take place right here in the hotel dining room.

  `My usual table would have been fine,' she told the suddenly solicitous Tomas. Normally, she had been escorted to a small table for two lining the wall and without a view.

  `Senor Ramirez insists that in future you will have this table.' Tomas returned imperturbably, his eyes frankly curious as they went over her smoothly arranged silvery hair, the unusual colour of her eyes. 'He will

  be dining with you many times, si?'

  'No,' Laurel returned firmly, glancing about her. 'El menu, por favor.'

  Rage seethed under her calm exterior as the chastened Tomas hastened across the room to speak with the table waiter. From his gestures and rolling eyes, she could well conjure up the words he spoke.

  'The senorita at Table Fourteen is Senor Ramirez's latest girl-friend. See that she has everything she wants.'

  If it hadn't been for the fact that it would be construed as an unwillingness to see him with his wife at the birthday celebration, Laurel would have forgone her dinner and returned to her room. As it was, she ordered the most simple meal on the menu from an obsequious waiter, who also brought a half bottle of expensive imported wine.

  'I didn't order this,' she said crisply, sighing in exasperation when she heard the expected reply.

  'Senor Ramirez has ordered it for you. It is the very best white wine we have, senorita.'

  'Maybe so, but I don't want it. Take it away, please.'

  Later, as she toyed with a sherbet dessert, she half regretted her high-handed refusal of the wine. The Ramirez celebration party, composed of several of what were evidently prominent Mexican socialites, occupied a long centre table with Diego Ramirez at one end, his wife at the other. The young woman was stunning in a lacy dress of all white scalloped cotton, the petulant droop of her mouth now lifted in happiness at the attention showered on her.

  When Diego raised his glass of sparkling champagne, his eyes beaming a protective tenderness down the length of the table, Laurel rose hastily and made a swift retreat from the restaurant.

  How could a man, so obviously devoted to his wife, make advances to another woman as if he were free to do so? Only a Latin ... a man who had a rigid set of rules for his wife to follow, but none for himself in amatory affairs.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A WEEK went by—a week during which Laurel exchanged not a word with Diego Ramirez, yet she was conscious of him in the background of her daily existence.

  Several times during that week she had looked up from the customer she was dealing with to see his lithe form silhouetted against the glass of the display windows. When she visited the large market in search of her modest food requirements, he would be there, a stall or two away. Even in the echoing resonance of the church where she sought the spiritual calm that had been hers during all the years of her education in a Los Angeles convent, he was there at the far side of a back pew.

  It was unnerving—but devastatingly successful if his purpose was to keep himself in her awareness. She found herself watching for him, knowing he would turn up somewhere in the line of her vision. And in an odd way, she knew that if she failed to feel his presence during any of her excursions outdoors she would know a ridiculous sense of anxiety.

  Anxiety about what? she mocked herself as she lay on the hot sand behind the hotel the following Saturday afternoon. About the waning interest of a man locked into an indissoluble marriage in the Latin tradition? Even without considering Brent, her own husband-to-be, every facet of her early upbringing and religious education cried out against an illicit relation-

  ship with any man, however attractive he might be.

  And Diego Ramirez was undoubtedly attractive, with a purely sensual appeal to a woman's susceptibilities. Something about him sent primitive senses clamouring for a satisfaction Laurel herself could only guess at.

  She watched idly a scene unfolding further along the beach—a scene she had observed repeatedly during the weeks of her stay in Acapulco, and one which still had the power to sicken her. A young Mexican in swimming briefs, his body moulded like an Aztec warrior, had attracted the attention of a middle-aged American woman ... one of the many who came, idle and rich, to seek a diversion denied them in their own respectable home community.

  Leaning back on her beach towel, Laurel closed her eyes against the fierce heat of a sun that threatened to melt her body to a grease spot. Soon she would take a dip in the ocean, unafraid of the advances of beach boys. She was neither rich nor middle-aged, and they seemed to have an uncanny perception as to where their talents could be best employed.

  Would Diego Ramirez have had to resort to being a beach boy lover of deprived women if his background had been the same as the young men she saw flirting along the beach? He'd have been excellent at it, she decided with a startling turn of thought. He must have been devastating as a young man, even without the confident air of sophistication he had acquired in the years since then.

  Partly in rebellion against her thoughts, but mostly because of a cooling shadow cast across her face, Laurel blinked her eyes to openness and stared bemusedly up into Diego Ramirez's smouldering dark eyes. For the

  space of several drawn-out moments, each was aware of the other in a way which strangely excluded the other. A wholly male gaze took in the curving length of her female body, and Laurel's eye seemed compelled towards the supple smoothness of muscled flesh exposed in white swimming briefs.

  'What are you doing here?' she gasped, wishing she c
ould whip her beach towel around her, an impossibility because she was lying on it.

  'I am here for the same reason as you, presumably—to swim.' He straightened away from her, his height impressive.

  'Don't tell me you haven't your own private beach,' she said sarcastically, rising to a sitting position and hugging her knees with her arms.

  Diego dropped down beside her. `No beach is private in Mexico,' he commented drily, then gave her a sidelong look. 'However, I have a villa a few miles south, and tourists rarely venture that far from the attractions of Acapulco.'

  'How nice to have enough money to buy privacy,' she jeered, dropping one hand to filter the fine sand through her fingers. With the other, she took sunglasses from her beach bag and slid them on to her nose.

  'It is nice to have money,' he conceded. 'It also brings with it—responsibilities.'

  His pause before the last word brought her obscured eyes round to observe him curiously. Somehow 'responsibilities' brought to mind the wife whose birthday he had celebrated so tenderly a few nights before.

  'Do you have children?' she asked abruptly, and saw the swift narrowing of his eyes.

  'None, I regret to say. But that is something for the future when the right—moment comes.'

  Laurel smiled acidly and looked out to where the heads of swimmers bobbed on the green hued water. 'I thought that was the primary purpose when Latin men marry, to prove their machismo by forcing a child a year on their wives:

  Good grief, what a conversation to be having with a man she scarcely knew, let alone one who had Spanish nobility stamped on every feature of his stormy face!

  'Force should not be necessary in such matters,' he decreed softly, bringing a touch of rose to her skin with a penetrating stare that pierced the smoked glass covering her eyes. 'You have no man?'

  'What?'

  'It is strange for a beautiful woman to be lying on a beach alone, with no man to protect her from others who lust for her with their eyes.' His supple brown hand indicated with a wave the assorted unattached men who had, indeed, been sending hopeful glances her way since her arrival on the beach. Not the beach boys, but Americans for the most part who were obviously determined to make the most of their two-week vacation in what they had heard was swinging Acapulco. And maybe it was for them.

  'I can take care of myself,' she snapped, suddenly remembering the lacy overtop she had brought. Reaching behind her, she slid her arms into the loose sleeves and hugged the scanty garment round her. 'To answer your question, yes, I do have a man. My fiancé is in Los Angeles.'

  There was a sharp hiss of indrawn breath, but she kept her eyes averted from the smooth features. Really, the colossal nerve of men—and she had encountered many in her career—who blithely ignored their own

  wives sitting at home, but showed resentment at her own loyalty to Brent!

  'You are engaged to be married, yet you do not wear his ring?' he asked caustically after a while.

  'I have his ring. I—I didn't want it to get lost in the sand, that's all.'

  'And you are also afraid to lose it where you work?'

  Laurel flashed him an irritated look. 'My employers prefer that I wear no jewellery apart from what they supply with the fashions. And now, if you'll excuse me, senor,' she rose with her habitual grace and collected up her things, 'I'll leave you to enjoy the swim you came for.'

  'I can swim at any time,' he shrugged carelessly, and to her chagrin he walked back across the sand to the hotel with her. But even as rage prickled at her skin like heat rash, she noticed that women of all ages took a second look at his superb masculine figure, and spared a third for a glance at herself.

  He held open the glass door for her to pass into the delightful coolness of the air-conditioned lobby, and at the bank of elevators opposite the long reception counter he leaned nonchalantly against the wall, towel draped round his neck, while Laurel waited impatiently for a vacant elevator.

  'Will you have dinner with me tonight?' he asked with an imperious lift of one black brow. 'It is not right for a woman to eat alone in a place such as this.' His eyes went with lazy eloquence round the sumptuously furnished lobby.

  'I prefer to eat alone rather than dine in the company of a well-known man who happens to be married.' She waved a slim hand in the direction of the glass doors leading to the beach. 'Why do you waste your

  time on me? There must be dozens of women out there who'd jump at the chance and ask no questions.'

  'Si,' he sighed, one corner of his mouth quirking in a half smile. 'But it is in my nature to play the part of the hunter, not the prey.'

  The words sent a chill down Laurel's spine, and she shivered despite herself. It would be easy to picture such a man relentlessly stalking his prey until in sheer exhaustion it gave up.

  'Fine,' she summoned crisply. 'Just as long as you do your hunting in another neck of the woods from mine.'

  'I think not,' he said softly, his eyes following her into the elevator which had at last arrived. 'Rasta la vista, Laurel.'

  For almost a week it was as if Diego Ramirez had disappeared from the face of the earth—or at least from the Acapulco scene. And although Laurel told herself that she felt only relief that his pursuit had ceased, illogically she missed his unmistakable presence in the background of her existence.

  But when she was called to the shop's telephone the following Friday afternoon and heard his distinctive accent, irritation lent a ragged edge to her voice.

  'Will you please stop pestering me?' she gritted through her teeth, glaring so hard at the intrigued Marta that the girl scurried out of the small office. 'If you don't, Senor Ramirez, I'll find someone who will stop you!'

  The threat of officialdom left him unperturbed, and there was even a husky laugh in his voice when he returned: 'Such a fiery temper for so cool a beauty! But my intention is not to pester, Laurel, simply to ask you to have dinner with me tonight.'

  'That comes under the label of pestering, senor!' she snapped. 'How many times do I have to tell you that I'm not interested?'

  'You would be doing me a great favour, Laurel,' he went on persuasively, ignoring her question. 'I have to entertain a business associate, a countryman of yours and his wife, and it would be better if the numbers were even.'

  It was as if the lines were crossed and they were having different conversations. 'It's impossible, senor.'

  'You have an engagement for tonight?' he asked sharply.

  The word 'engagement' reminded her of Brent, and she said sweetly: 'Yes, I have. With my fiancé.'

  His swiftly indrawn breath hissed in her ear, and after a fractional silence he said stiffly : 'I see. Then of course I must find another partner.'

  'As I've said before, that shouldn't be too much of a problem for you,' she told him acidly, then dropped the receiver back in its cradle.

  For a few further moments she stood thoughtfully over it, biting irritably on her soft lower lip. Now the dratted man had forced her to tell an untruth, and she was uncomfortable with dishonesty. Mingled with that was a nagging reminder that she would be spending the evening alone, as usual. Her imagination leapt to the evening she might have had in Diego Ramirez's company, sensing instinctively that he would be any woman's dream of an escort, witty, suave, handsome. And too well aware of it for her liking!

  She was back in her apartment pondering her plans for dinner when she remembered the way her name sounded on his lips. His emphasis on the 'r' in the middle gave it a special quality it had never had for

  her before, a sensuously caressing sound. She hadn't told him her name, or that he could use it, but it would have been a simple thing for him to have found out.

  The phone rang noisily on its table beside the colourfully upholstered couch, and she went quickly to answer it, the thought half formulated that perhaps Diego had found out somehow that Brent wasn't in town after all. Then all thoughts of both men flew from her mind when she heard the voice at the other end of the line.

  'Da
d! Is it really you? Where are you?'

  The questions tumbled from Laurel's lips, and her father gave his unmistakable chuckle.

  'Hold on there, honey! I'm, right here in Acapulco. A couple of fellows chartered my boat in L.A., so I thought it would be a great chance to visit my one and only daughter.'

  'How long are you going to be here?'

  'Just a few days. These fellows were hell bent on getting to Mexico City—though it would have been a lot quicker to have hopped on a plane. But they said they wanted to fish on the way down and back, though neither of them seemed to know one end of a rod from the other.'

  In her joy at hearing her one remaining parent's voice, Laurel dismissed the two faceless men. 'That's not important. What I want to know is, when can I see you?'

  'Well, I have to pick up a couple of things for the boat, so how would it be if I come right along to the hotel after that? Let's really celebrate, baby, and have dinner somewhere special. You must know all the best places by now,' he teased.

  'We could go to the El Mirador and you can see the

  divers go off the cliff after dark,' Laurel responded elatedly. 'It's quite a sight.'

  'Whatever you think, honey. Can you make reservations from there?'

  Assuring him that she would, Laurel hung up the receiver and lifted it again almost immediately to dial the hotel. She made the reservation for eight-thirty. That would give them time to eat a leisurely dinner before watching the spectacular display from the lounge overlooking the cliffs.

  She took a hurried shower, then selected one of the dresses supplied by Madeleine Fashions to advertise their wares even in her off-duty hours. It was a black figure-hugging creation which contrasted sharply with the silvery sheen of her hair. Her mind was filled with thoughts of her father while she sat at the mirrored dressing table and swept her hair into a sophisticated chignon style.