Kitabı oku: «Hot Summer Flings», sayfa 6

CHAPTER NINE

‘WAS I drunk?’

The simmering hostility in Emilio’s manner as much as the abrupt question made Megan blink. ‘What? ‘

His dark eyes flashed. ‘Was I forcing myself on you? Por Dios, no, I was not! ‘

‘I never—’

‘So at what point did I become the bad guy?’ he demanded, cutting across her.

‘I never—’

‘The fact is you were lucky I was there, but you’re too stubborn to admit it! You are just as stupid now as you were then!’

Megan’s chin went up at the insult. Eyes narrowed, she threw back her head, glaring up at him with simmering hostility. ‘And you are just as arrogant and judgemental.’

A hissing sound of irritation escaped his clenched teeth. ‘Also, do you know,’ he drawled, ‘how incredibly boring this ugly-duckling routine of yours is?’

Megan’s amber eyes lit up like beacons with anger. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to bore you.’ If she’d been some long-legged lissom beauty with plastic boobs attached to a skeletal clothes-hanger frame he would no doubt make allowances for an IQ in single figures.

Emilio’s teeth audibly ground in response to her sarcastic insincerity.

‘Of course, if I had known I was expected to entertain you, I’d have made more of an effort—worn a funny nose, perhaps?’ she suggested, pressing the tip of her finger to her small, classically perfect nose.

He gave a hard laugh and watched as her hand fell, revealing the delicate purity of her features only spoiled from being textbook classical by the generosity of her lips. Emilio, his eyes glued to the full, lush curve, did not think it spoiled anything.

It took every ounce of his strength not to grab her and crush her mouth under his. He inhaled sharply through flared nostrils and snarled.

‘Do not be absurd! ‘

His dismissive, plain nasty attitude fed her anger and sense of growing resentment. ‘So I’m assuming for “absurd” read anyone who says anything you don’t like?’

Which couldn’t, she reasoned darkly, be something that happened very often. The problem with Emilio Rios was that people were willing to cross oceans, let alone roads, to avoid antagonising him, and from where she was standing it was easy to see why.

He had not gained the reputation of being a bad man to get on the wrong side of by accident! And he did look pretty magnificent if you liked your dark and moody with an edge of danger.

And she, it turned out, did!

As Megan watched a shaft of sunlight from an angled skylight hit his face. He had no reason to fear the unforgiving light; there were no flaws or shortcomings to be revealed.

He was perfect.

A furrow of concentration appeared between Megan’s feathery brows as her rapt gaze lingered on the hard angles and hollows of his patrician face, the strong, sculpted contours emphasised by the dusting of dark hair sprinkled already over his clean-shaven jaw. She wondered how it would feel against her skin and shivered, unable to tear her rapt gaze from his face.

He was nothing short of breathtaking to look at!

‘You make a great deal of effort to be rude to me, querida. I wonder why?’ he mused.

‘It’s no effort, believe me, and don’t call me that,’ she snapped, her discomfort increased by the casual endearment.

Privately she conceded he did have a point. Where was the diplomacy she was famed for? Winding Emilio up was a bit like getting into a tiger’s cage and throwing sticks at it.

A person had to expect the tiger to leap so the question remained why? A mental image of Emilio falling across her body flashed into Megan’s head, the erotic fantasy so powerful that she could actually feel the weight of his body, the heat of him bearing down on her.

The effort of expelling the erotic intrusion wrenched a soft grunt from her aching throat that drew a quizzical look from Emilio.

Megan decided to avoid tiger analogies for the foreseeable future and took refuge in hostility—again.

‘What can I say? My job entails being pleasant to men who have to be told at regular intervals how marvellous they are. I’m on my own time.’ Her dad might disagree on that detail, but then nothing she had done so far today was going to make him break out in song. ‘I don’t have to play nice.’

A white line of anger appeared around the sensual outline of his sculpted lips as Emilio drew himself up to his full intimidating height.

‘I am not your father,’ he snarled, totally incensed by the implied comparison she made with a man he despised.

Megan, aware she had been appallingly indiscreet, not to mention unprofessional, began to back-pedal furiously. ‘I didn’t mean Dad, just men in a position of power generally,’ she finished lamely.

Emilio ignored her protestations. ‘And I do not,’ he imparted grimly, ‘need my ego stroked.’

How about other parts?

Shocked, not just by the shameless question that popped into her head, but the accompanying images that followed the thought, Megan dropped her gaze from his as she felt the shamed colour fly to her cheeks. She was not the sort of girl who went around mentally undressing men.

‘It’s the effect you have on me,’ she mumbled, struggling to find a plus side to this situation. He couldn’t read her mind, though sometimes when he looked at her she did get the uncomfortable feeling that she had no secrets from him.

‘It was not my intention to …’ His voice faded as she began to nibble nervously at her full lower lip.

The silence stretched way beyond dramatic pause and into nerve-shredding territory until finally Megan could bear it no longer.

‘Not your intention to what?’

Her voice dragged Emilio from the hot place his thoughts had gone. He blinked and met her eyes, still imagining her lips parting to allow his tongue deep inside.

‘Not my intention to—’ He paused again and exhaled slowly.

He could have said lose the thread … lose the plot. Both, to his intense shock, were true. He could sit in a high-powered meeting that went on into the small hours and when others faded, not miss a beat, stay on top of every detail discussed, some buried in a mass of techno babble, yet he looked at Megan’s mouth and his brain was mush.

Emilio chose to fast-forward the conversation. ‘I find your self-deprecating attitude annoying. You are a beautiful woman and, believe it or not, I was trying to help that night, not judging.’

Megan gave a derisive hoot. ‘Sure you weren’t.’ Beautiful? Her stomach muscles did a shimmy as she directed a wary look at his face, waiting for the punchline and telling herself not to start seeing or hearing things that weren’t there.

‘It was not your clothes that night,’ he said abruptly, ‘though they were enough to—’ He inhaled, turning his hand away sharply, providing Megan with a view of the nerve pulsing in his hollow cheek and the cords of tension standing out in his brown throat.

‘Of course, I can see the sense of power you had discovered must have been intoxicating,’ he conceded, struggling to be fair-minded and failing big time as he thought of Megan enjoying her feminine power in the arms of men like that creep he had dragged from the car.

As he remembered the fear in the said creep’s eyes he smiled thinly, not regretting having put it there—at least he knew there would be one less guy supplying willing arms.

She gave a baffled shake of her head, confused as much by his strained manner as his peculiar choice of words. ‘Intoxicating? ‘

‘You’d pretty much been invisible at home all through your adolescence and, I assume, school.’ Recalling the slights and snubs he had witnessed and imagining the ones he had not, Emilio struggled to keep his voice impassive.

‘Thanks.’ Megan finally saw where he was going with this. It was always good to be told you were a needy and pathetic outsider. ‘So you’re suggesting at some point I morphed into an equally pathetic attention seeker with self-esteem issues.’ She wasn’t sure which was worst.

His lips twisted in a spasm of impatience. ‘Don’t spin my words. I’m saying that the tables were turned. You weren’t the one doing the vying. It was not surprising that, after years of being overlooked, being the focus of male attention should go to your head. You wouldn’t be the first person deprived of parental approval to confuse sex with love. Sex is only ever a short-term fix.’

The expression in his eyes when he drew this bleak conclusion made Megan wonder if this was personal.

Was Emilio thinking of the women he had slept with since his marriage collapsed when he spoke of short-term fixes? Was Rosanna the only woman he had ever loved? It was obvious after the airport debacle that, whatever he said, he was not over her.

‘It is hard to recover your self-respect, Megan, once you have lost it.’

‘Is that a polite way of saying you think I’m a tart?’

‘Do not put words in my mouth,’ he responded irritably.

Megan gave a bemused shrug and stared up at him. For a man with the reputation of infallibility, she reflected grimly, when Emilio got it wrong he got it wrong big time!

‘And you got all that from the colour of my lipstick! Amazing, you’re even smarter than they say.’

The muscles around his jaw tightened at her mock admiration. ‘Oh, so I’m meant to believe you didn’t have the faintest idea what you could do to me … a man, looking that way.’

‘Do to a man?’ Her eyes widened. The expression smouldering in his deep-set eyes made her heart kick up several more uncomfortable notches. ‘Me? Sure,’ she drawled, coating her words with protective cynicism as she batted her eyelashes like crazy and struck a provocative pose, hand on hip. ‘It’s such a burden being irresistible. Ouch,’ she yelled, pulling back as his fingers closed like an iron band around her wrist.

The touch was light and the effect on her nervous system totally disproportionate. ‘This habit you have of putting yourself down before someone else does is one you should try to break.’

‘I don’t—’ Emilio watched the flash of recognition in her eyes before they fell from his.

‘That hurts,’ she lied, wincing not in pain but at the breathy sound of her own voice.

Emilio was breathing hard as he brought her hands together and pressed them, palms sealed, between his.

It was a moment before his gaze lifted from their entwined fingers. The blaze of hunger in his eyes as they connected with her own made Megan’s insides dissolve.

‘So does wanting a woman so much you can’t think of anything else, so much that you can’t function!’ he growled, jerking her roughly towards him until they stood thigh to thigh.

They were so close now that Megan could hear his heartbeat, or was that her own? His hands had moved to the small of her back, leaving her own trapped between their bodies. She might have struggled to work out where he ended and she started, except he was harder … much harder. The muscular thighs she was pressed against had as much give as oak-tree trunks.

Shaking her head to clear the dreamy, light-headed sensation, she forced herself to recognise the abrupt rise in her core temperature for what it was: a hormone rush—God, a hormone avalanche!

She struggled hard to inject a note of humour into her response. ‘Your concern for your fellow man does you credit, but I promise to behave and never wear pink lipstick again.’

‘I have no concern for them.’ Emilio dismissed the mental well-being of one half of the population with an expressive sneer. ‘And,’ he added, gritting out the words with force, ‘I don’t want you to behave.’

‘You don’t?’ she whispered.

His glittering eyes held hers. ‘Not at all,’ he confirmed in a deep smoky voice that sent shivers of anticipation down her spine.

Emilio wanted her to misbehave—with him.

She said it twice in her head and it still didn’t seem real. Did she even know how to misbehave in the way he clearly expected? Her eyes drifted to his gorgeous, incredibly sexy mouth and suddenly her lack of experience felt less important as need swelled inside her, tightening into a hard fist of hot desire in her belly.

Emilio was the one man whom she had always been prepared to sacrifice her principles for. She had frequently told herself she was lucky he had never asked her to. That way, she had reasoned, she had no regrets—what she also did not have, but had not previously acknowledged, were no memories.

Now he was standing there, not asking directly but sending some pretty explicit messages, unless she had disastrously misinterpreted his thinly veiled comments and the gleam of sexual intent in his eyes was a figment of her overheated imagination.

She checked. That gleam looked real. It felt real, she thought as a fresh shiver rippled through her body. At that moment it hit her that it was real; she wasn’t dreaming.

What am I doing?

Belatedly Megan’s self-protective instincts kicked in and her head dropped forward, causing her hair to fall in a silky screen around her face.

Space, she told herself. I need space and I need not to say, Take me!

Do not say it, Megan!

She bit down on the shameless words. She remained dumb but couldn’t put the space plan into action as her feet remained nailed to the floor.

She felt the sweat trickle down her back and realised with horror that if anything she was leaning into him, not pulling away. Her body just wasn’t listening to what her head was telling it.

Her body had its own agenda!

And to make the situation even more unbearable her brain might have closed down but her senses were painfully alert. Being this close to him, being able to smell him, feel the heat coming off his body, was physically painful.

She started shaking like someone with a fever. The intensity of the need pounding through her terrified her. It was utterly and totally outside her experience.

Had he noticed? Of course he had. The knowledge that she was trembling with sheer lust would presumably confirm his conviction she was a bed-hopping tart.

CHAPTER TEN

‘WOULD you like to not behave with me?’

This time the invitation left no room for misinterpretation.

Megan felt vulnerable, exposed and excited all at the same time. ‘It really isn’t that simple.’ A person standing on the brink of a precipice stepped back; they did not jump—so why was every atom in her body screaming, Jump?

‘It is.’ There was no trace of uncertainty in Emilio’s voice.

But then why would there be uncertainty in his voice? This was simple for him: he felt an attraction and he acted on it. He had no moral dilemma, no trust issues, no deep fear of having his heart broken.

‘Has someone hurt you, Megan?’

His question triggered her self-protective instincts.

‘No. There are no great dramas in my life.’

He looked unconvinced by her response, but was quickly distracted. ‘Your skin is so soft,’ he said, looking at her mouth. ‘And I have dreamed of your mouth.’

She lifted her head and groaned. ‘It’s not even dark! ‘

Emilio threw back his head and laughed. The deep, attractive sound lowered the sexual temperature but the respite was brief. A moment later he was looking at her, his teeth bared in a white, wolfish grin, and the expression of predatory intent written into every line of his lean face as he looked down at her sent the sexual temperature zooming off the chart!

‘Are you a lights-out girl?’

She was a good-book-and-a-mug-of-cocoa girl, but even had she felt inclined to confess this Megan doubted he would have believed her.

‘While I agree darkness has an allure,’ he continued in the same deep, seductive, throaty purr that made the downy hair on her neck and arms rise and the skin they covered tingle. ‘It breaks down restraints and frees up the imagination.’

Megan, whose imagination had broken free of all her own restraints, her eyes sealed to his, began to pant softly. She couldn’t seem to draw enough air into her tight, aching chest.

‘I find visual stimulus very—’

With a cry she pulled her hands out from between their bodies and clamped them over her ears, closing her eyes and yelling, ‘We weren’t talking about your sexual predilections!’

A static silence followed her outburst. Megan stood there with her eyes tight shut, knowing she had pretty much blown her I’ve-been-here-done-this-got-the-T-shirt card!

‘No, we were talking about yours.’

At the quiet but firm correction her eyes flickered open. She angled a wary look at his face and immediately felt her defences crumble as she read tenderness mingled in with the driven hunger in his lean face.

‘I would like to know what pleases you.’

The answer did not require much thought and Megan felt her knees give as the truth emerged uncensored from her lips. ‘You!’

Heat flared hot in Emilio’s eyes in response to her whispered admission.

Megan could not understand a word of the flood of liquid, passionate Spanish that flowed from his lips, but she listened raptly, observing with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension the smile of gloating male satisfaction that curved his sensually sculpted lips.

‘I don’t know what you just said, but—’

He cut her off, which was possibly just as well because Megan hadn’t the faintest idea what she wanted to say. What sort of but was appropriate after you’d just told a man that he virtually embodied your sexual fantasies? There was actually no virtual about it—he did!

‘I said I intend to please you,’ he promised thickly.

Megan’s heart lurched wildly further south; the liquid heat between her thighs throbbed. She never doubted for a moment that he could fulfil his promise and she couldn’t wait—it was what she wanted.

It was what she’d always wanted.

You can’t have what you want. You can just have a tiny piece of it. Will that be enough?

Megan lifted her chin and silenced the whisper of doubt in her head. You had to take a risk. Life was short and when it threw the possibility of something precious your way it would be churlish, not to mention stupid, not to grab it with both hands!

The alternative was always wondering what if? Megan didn’t want what ifs. She wanted Emilio. She wanted Emilio heavy on top of her; she wanted him inside her.

For the first time she allowed herself to look at him without trying to disguise what she was feeling. The sensation was simultaneously liberating and scary, but since when was anything that involved Emilio uncomplicated?

‘I want you so badly, Emilio, I can’t stand up.’

Megan heard the sharp intake of his breath and sighed as his long fingers slid into her silky hair. Her head fell back, the expression in her golden eyes hazed by a sheen of lust as he slid a supporting second hand into her hair and angled her face up to him.

‘You are so beautiful—that face, that body.’ Megan saw the raw hunger in his eyes and tasted for the first time some of the female power he had spoken of—it felt pretty good. She wanted to tell him it was the first time she’d felt this way, that he was the first man who—

Her eyes widened. God, she had to warn him that she hadn’t done this before it went any further, even at the risk of her confession ruining the mood. The possibility of that happening made her hold back, but only for a moment. If he had a problem with her inexperience it was better to know now, not later down the line.

Rejection later on really would be crushing. ‘Do you remember that night in the car?’ Emilio swore softly under his breath at the reintroduction of the subject.

Obviously he remembers, stupid, she told herself. He thinks it’s the event that triggered your moral downfall. ‘Well, I know that it looked—’ ‘I remember that that night I came this close …’ he interrupted, bringing his face within a whisper of hers.

Megan’s eyelids drooped. She could feel the waft of his warm breath on her skin, on her mouth. The thought of confession slipped from her head as lust and longing shuddered through her body. She stared transfixed at the fine lines around his eyes, the gold tips at the end of his otherwise ebony eyelashes. Her heart ached. He was the most breathtaking, perfect thing on the planet and he wanted her.

‘This close?’ she parroted, fighting her way through the sensual fog in her head.

‘To throttling the bastard,’ he explained matter-of-factly.

Not following this instinct had taken a large chunk of will power, but the effort had faded into insignificance beside the will power he had needed to tap into to stop himself taking Megan in his arms to comfort her.

The sight of her standing there, white-faced and shaking, looking so vulnerable and fragile, had awoken every protective instinct he had and some new ones. While she had struggled not to cry he had struggled to keep his distance.

Emilio hadn’t allowed himself to even touch her.

He couldn’t. If he had he knew it wouldn’t have stopped at comforting.

He had been tempted. Dios, but he had been so tempted standing there, fighting against his baser instincts, especially given the status of his relationship with his then wife playing in a loop through his head.

Little snippets of the beginning of the end of his marriage slid into his head now.

‘I understand,’ Rosanna said when she discovered he had removed his things from the room they shared.

‘And are relieved?’ he asked, genuinely curious, and taking no satisfaction from her obvious distress.

Emilio felt a lot of responsibility for what had happened. His mindset when he had entered into the marriage had not differed from how he would enter into any other contract.

With the benefit of hindsight he could see that this had been a mistake—this wasn’t any contract.

Mistake number two had been not factoring in the emotional factor, not allowing for the possibility that, despite what she had said, Rosanna needed more than he had been prepared or able to offer.

What had happened had been inevitable.

The suggestion made his errant wife look uncomfortable. ‘I wasn’t dissatisfied with what we had. That isn’t why I slept with—’

Emilio took pity on her. ‘It’s all right, I don’t want a score out of ten, Rosanna, and I don’t want to know his name.’

‘I know you don’t. If you’d loved me you would have.’

‘I never—’

‘I know you didn’t,’ she cut in quickly. ‘He didn’t love me either, but he said that he did, and I needed to hear that even if it was a lie,’ she admitted sadly. ‘Don’t look like that, Emilio. Don’t be sorry for me. I’m not asking you to sleep with me. I don’t expect it, and I do realise that you will need—when you do I won’t make a fuss.’

‘So you are giving me permission to have sex with other women?’

‘It’s a sensible solution.’

Cold-blooded and clinical were the words that slid unexpectedly into Emilio’s mind; they were two things that he had been accused of in the past. And mostly those accusations had been justified, so why now did settling for a dispassionate solution make him feel discontent?

Why did he think it was settling? Settling implied there was a better option. He knew there wasn’t—marriage was by definition flawed, at best a compromise.

‘More sensible than a divorce? ‘

She looked at him, white with anxiety under the perfect make-up he had never seen her without. ‘But you agreed we could make this work.’

‘I agreed that a divorce would be messy. I agreed that we make better friends than lovers. I agreed that domesticity is not something I am suited to.’

‘You haven’t met anyone?’ she began tentatively. ‘Someone special?’

The idea amused him. ‘I have met no one I wish to have sex with and, even if I had, I have no desire to leap into another marriage,’ he promised, believing it.

They left it like that.

When six months passed and he had not taken up the offer of guilt-free cheating, he did pause to consider the situation. Six months was a long time and he was a man with a healthy sex drive. He recognised channelling his energies, no matter how successfully, into work was not a long-term solution to the problem.

Did his reluctance to even acknowledge a problem existed stem from the fact he still thought of sex outside marriage as cheating?

It was not a distaste of cheating that held him in check when he looked at Megan that night and burnt with a primal need to make her his.

It was the knowledge that following through with his instincts, taking advantage of her at a moment like this would make him no better than the man he had just sent packing.

The idea filled him with repugnance; for the first time in his life he wanted more than sex. He did not want some sordid hole-in-the-corner affair; he did not want their relationship to be tarnished with his past mistakes. He knew he had to be patient.

Despite his reputation for infallibility, Emilio had made bad decisions in the past. While he did not advertise that, neither did he agonise over it; he shrugged and moved on.

But the decision he made that night to be patient had not been one he had been able to shrug away. It had tortured Emilio for two years.

He never made the same mistake twice.

Emilio was going to make Megan Armstrong his. He was going to make her forget every man she had ever known. Determination hardened to steel inside him. The need to claim her had not lessened with time, but deepened—she was going to be his.

He ran a finger down her smooth cheek, smiling as he felt her shudder. He breathed in the fragrance of her hair and allowed the scent of apples to flood his senses.

‘I did not warm to the man,’ he explained.

Megan, deep in the sensual thrall, responded to the wry admission with a vague, ‘Who?’ The warmth of his breath on her ear lobe was sending shivers of sensation all the way down to her curling toes.

He brought his face close to hers until their noses were almost touching. ‘The clown you were fighting off in the car.’

‘I was fighting him off,’ she said, thinking, Kiss me, please kiss me. Every second he didn’t was sheer torture.

‘I know.’ He lifted his head fractionally and hooked a thumb under her chin, tilting her head from side to side as he studied the soft curves of her face with an expression of ferocious fascination. ‘I should have throttled him,’ he mused thickly. ‘I really wanted to, but not as much as I wanted to do this.’

Without warning he grabbed her bottom, his big hands curling over the feminine curves as he hauled her upwards and hard against his body, sealing them from waist to thigh.

Megan’s eyes flew wide, the breath leaving her body in a gusty sigh as she registered the bold imprint of his rock-hard erection as it ground into the softness of her belly.

‘Oh, God!’ she groaned as a rush of liquid heat exploded inside her. ‘You wanted. That night. But you were married.’

His mouth twisted into a smile that left his dark eyes cold. ‘Do you think that a piece of paper stops a man wanting another woman? You of all people should know that isn’t so, Megan.’

She flinched at the reference. ‘So you’re saying if it did I wouldn’t exist,’ she said quietly, trying not to be shocked by his admission. Maybe some men shouldn’t get married. Especially highly sexed ones like Emilio.

He kissed her then, hard and possessively, the bruising pressure of his lips driving the breath from her lungs, his tongue probing deep into her mouth. Megan’s arms slid around his middle as she clung, kissing him back wildly, without finesse, just with a hunger that equalled his.

When he finally lifted his mouth from hers it took several seconds for her head to clear, for a tiny sliver of sanity to filter back.

‘You’re going to do that again, aren’t you?’ Not that much sanity.

He smiled, his liquid, dark, incredible eyes fastened on to her face absorbing every detail as he ran his fingers down her throat. ‘That’s up to you.’

His reply frustrated her. ‘Do I have to beg?’

No wonder he looked so smugly confident; he had to have had women begging him all his life.

God knew Megan didn’t want to be another notch on his bedpost, but if she had to beg she would. Where Emilio was concerned it seemed she had no pride.

‘You have to tell me you want me as much as I want you.’

She began to turn her head, her lips trembling. ‘Because you don’t know.’

The bitterness in her voice brought a frown to his face. ‘Because I need to hear you say it.’

She couldn’t bear it. Every cell in her body craved his touch. ‘I want you, Emilio.’

His nostrils flared as he moved in to bite her lower lip, breathing in her warm womanly smell as he nipped his way towards the corner of her mouth. ‘But if you prefer to go sightseeing.’ he teased, running his tongue along the sensitive skin of her inner lip. Her moan of pained protest drew a fierce grin from Emilio. ‘Though I should point out that my bedroom is much closer …’

If they got that far it would be a miracle. He was clinging to what control he had with his fingernails. To have her shaking with lust for him was incredible and her wild response had blown him away. All he could think about was burying himself in her.

Megan’s head fell back to look into his lean face. Her eyes were half closed, her cheeks flushed. ‘Bed, please.’

A low growl vibrated in Emilio’s throat as his hold tightened, his arms like steel bands around her ribcage as he bit and nuzzled his way up the exposed curve of her white neck.

Megan went limp in his arms, her eyelashes fluttering like butterfly wings against her flushed cheeks, her toes brushing the ground as Emilio walked blindly across the room to the bedroom door, his lips moving up the curve of her throat.

He reached the door and her lips at the same moment. Keeping his dark eyes trained on her face, his mouth a tantalising whisper from her own, Emilio hefted her higher into his arms as though she weighed nothing, an arm scooping her bottom as he swung her upwards. She shivered, some buried primal instinct in her responding to the raw power revealed in his casual action.