He staggered to her small living room without answering or putting the light on, and slumped onto the sofa. He barely lifted a hand to pat his beloved dogs’ heads.
‘Emiliano?’
Haunted eyes met hers but he didn’t speak.
Crouching next to him, she took his hand in hers. It was icy cold. She patted his arm. His dinner jacket was damp. She caught a whiff of chlorine. Had he been swimming in his clothes? And then she noticed the red marks blazing over his knuckles. Had Emiliano been fighting?
Her chest tightened unbearably. Something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong.
‘Use the shower,’ she urged. ‘You need to get warm.’
He closed his eyes and rested his head back. His chest rose sharply, his features so tight she feared they could snap.
She patted his icy hand again and wished she could put it to her mouth and blow warmth onto it as her mother had done on winter days when Becky had been a little girl and her mother had been a real mother to her. ‘I’ll make you a hot drink.’
In the kitchen she put the kettle on and dug out the hot chocolate she’d spotted earlier in a cupboard. The rotors of a helicopter sounded above the lodging. Not even midnight and guests were leaving? What the heck had happened?
The living room was empty when she returned with his drink but, before she could worry, she heard the shower going. Then it occurred to her—he had nothing to change into. And she had nothing that would fit him.
Inspiration struck and she shrugged her towelling robe off. She knocked on the bathroom door and shouted that she was leaving it by the door for him.
She tried to keep the dogs calm while she waited for Emiliano to finish in the bathroom. Rufus and Barney had picked up on their master’s mood and seemed unable to settle. She didn’t have to wait long. Her heart tore to see his long, lean frame clad in her blue cotton robe. On Becky, it came to mid-calf. On Emiliano, it came to mid-thigh. On anyone else it would look ridiculous. It only made him sexier and she had to drag her eyes away from the deeply tanned, ridiculously muscular legs and snatch a deep inhalation to counter the rapid beat of her heart.
He hovered in the doorway. ‘Can I sleep here tonight?’ The drawling voice that normally vibrated with life was monotone.
If she hadn’t already guessed something bad had happened, this would have clinched it. Even the night he’d taken his polo team out to celebrate another cup win and knocked on her door at two in the morning more than a little inebriated, he hadn’t asked to stay or even hinted at it. He’d accepted a black coffee then staggered back to his mansion with the dogs at his heels.
‘Sure... I’ll make the spare bed up.’
‘I just need to get my head down for a few hours.’
‘Stay as long as you like. I’ll find some bedding for you. Your drink’s on the table.’
He met her stare briefly and nodded.
The staff lodge she’d been given had two bedrooms but only one of the beds had been prepared. She found spare sheets in the airing cupboard. It wasn’t much, just a couple of cotton blankets, but the summer evening was warm. Unable to find a pillow, she took one from her own bed and carried the bundle to the spare room. She made the bed then returned to the living room, where she found him looking out of the window, his drink in hand.
‘The spare bed’s made for you,’ she said softly. ‘I’m going back to bed. Are you going to be okay?’
He turned to look at her and blinked as if waking from sleep, then raised his mug in a half-hearted salute.
Her heart ached at his wretchedness. Her arms ached to wrap around him and give comfort. Her brain ached at all the possibilities of what could have caused such devastation. ‘Get some sleep,’ she whispered.
She felt his eyes follow her as she left the living room and headed back to bed.
Lying there in the darkness, she wondered how she could have slept through the noise of the helicopters considering the racket they continued to make. She hoped they weren’t too noisy to stop Emiliano from sleeping.
When she finally fell asleep, thoughts of Emiliano were the last thoughts in her head. Just as they’d been every night since the day she’d met him.
She slept deeply until loud, haunted shouts woke her in an instant.
CHAPTER THREE
A HAND TOUCHED his head. ‘Emiliano, wake up.’
Emiliano opened his eyes with a start. His body was racked with tremors, flesh riddled with goose bumps, his insides feeling as if they’d turned into a mass block of ice. Perched tentatively on the edge of the bed, a hazy shadow in the darkness of the small room, was Becky.
He grabbed at his hair and tried to catch a breath.
He hadn’t had a nightmare like that since he was a small child. He was living a nightmare. The wicked witch of childhood stories. His own mother. A killer.
She covered his hand and flinched. ‘You’re still freezing.’
He swallowed hard. The enveloping coldness had made his throat close.
‘I’ll get my duvet,’ she whispered. Rising to her feet, she slipped out of the room, leaving him alone in the still darkness. He tightened the sheets around him but couldn’t stop shivering. Didn’t dare close his eyes. He didn’t think he could endure the dreams that came with sleep. He was so damn cold his teeth chattered.
Becky returned in moments and draped the duvet over him before gently telling him to move over. The single bed hardly dipped as she slipped under the bedding and wrapped her arms around him.
She held him tightly, tenderly, rubbing her warm hands over his back and arms, her face pressed against his chest, the warmth of her breath gently heating his skin. He rested his cheek into the top of her head and held her just as tightly. The soft scent of her shampoo and silkiness of her hair played into his senses, soothing him.
Slowly, under Becky’s tender embrace, his frozen body defrosted. The fog that had stupefied his brain began to clear.
He remembered trying hard to get in the party spirit, even throwing himself fully dressed in the swimming pool and horsing around. He remembered climbing the stairs, intending to change his sodden clothing but finding his brother outside his quarters. He remembered the damning evidence Damián had shown him against their mother, remembered the piercing agony when Damián had asked about his own involvement in the heinous act, the throbbing in his knuckles from when he’d punched a wall a reminder of how close they’d come to physical blows. And he remembered them pulling together as brothers for the first time in their lives to confront their evil, Machiavellian mother.
He remembered needing to escape the villa. Along with his brother, he’d detonated a bomb in the middle of the party but by then had been too numb to care about the wreckage.
But he barely remembered walking to the lodge. His aimless escape had taken him to Becky.
Her warming hands had reached the base of his spine when they suddenly jerked away. ‘Are you naked?’
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, cursing himself. Until that moment, his nakedness hadn’t even registered in his own head. He hadn’t been aware, either, that his body had roused itself to the beautiful woman he’d curled into.
‘It’s okay...’ Becky, who’d shifted sharply at the shock of heat that had torn through her at the realisation of his nudity, tried to breathe. Everything inside her had tautened like stretched nerves.
The foolhardiness of getting under the covers with this hunk of a man hadn’t entered her head. A deep-rooted need to warm his freezing body and soothe him from the nightmare that had tormented him had overridden everything. Now she found herself sharing a single bed with a naked man but, instead of freezing in fear, she found her hands aching to touch the muscular smoothness again and repeatedly having to swallow back moisture and breathe through her nose because the musky scent of his skin was setting off crazy things inside her. The greater her awareness of the crazy reactions, th
e more she became aware of others, of the tight heat bubbling low inside her, the new, strange excitement thickening and building, the strange sensitivity of her skin, the tingling sensation of her breasts pressed against his chest...
‘Sorry,’ he repeated, speaking into the top of her head before rolling onto his back.
Still trying to breathe, she rolled onto her back too and shuffled up so her head was on the pillow...but that brought no succour as the bed was so small the sides of their bodies remained pressed together. Their heads were so close the strands of his hair brushed against her forehead.
If it wasn’t obvious that something terrible had happened to him, she would go back to her own bed, use towels and anything else she could find as bedding. But she didn’t want to leave him, not in this state. She could still hear the shouts of his nightmare in her ears.
By unspoken agreement they moved in unison and turned their backs to each other. Becky pulled the duvet over her shoulders and closed her eyes. Their bodies no longer touched but there could only be millimetres between them and her skin quivered with awareness. Her heart thrashed with such intensity the beats resounded in her head. How long they lay there, unmoving, barely a breath escaping their mouths, she didn’t know. If the tension crackling between them had a colour it would be scorching red.
She fought her body, forcing it to lie like a statue, terrified to risk their skin brushing, terrified of unleashing the burn building inside her.
As deeply attracted to him as she was, Becky didn’t want to be one of Emiliano’s bedpost notches. No sane woman would. She didn’t want to be another faceless woman on a list so long it should be called a scroll. The danger of her response to him had been apparent from the start and she’d imposed a friendly distance between them and sensed he’d imposed one too, an invisible line neither of them breached.
That line had been severed.
She couldn’t breathe. Her quivering skin felt as if it had come to life. Never had she had such awareness of the mechanics of her body: her heart pumping so violently, the weight of her tingling breasts, the melting of her pelvis...
Emiliano tried to sleep. He’d turned his back to Becky and closed his eyes. The nightmare that had called her to him had dissolved, not even fragments remaining. Everything that had happened that night had been driven out, his senses attuned only to the woman lying so close to him.
Grimly, he told himself to stay exactly where he was and not move.
How the hell had he found himself in bed naked with Becky?
He did not involve himself with employees. He didn’t care how sexy they were or how heavily they flirted with him and batted their lashes, he kept his hands off. Becky had been the biggest test of that resolve since he’d made it ten years ago, and she’d never given him so much as a suggestive smile. Seeing her every day in those tight jeans that caressed her fabulous curves would test even the holiest man’s resolve, especially when she bent over to scoop a ball up, and then there was the way her breasts bounced when she threw the ball... Dios, it was enough to make a man salivate.
And now he was naked in bed with her and the desire he’d kept under the tightest of leashes was pulling madly for release. Every inch of his body throbbed with awareness, heart beating weightily against his ribs, loins burning. A lock of her long hair lay against his back, the strands feeling like tickling silk against his skin.
Dios, this was torture.
He had to leave. Right now. Put his damp clothes back on and take his boys to the villa. They could run riot over the polished floors to their hearts’ content.
Gritting his teeth, he sat up and threw the duvet off him. ‘I have to go.’
A needle tip of panic pressed into Becky’s chest and, before she knew what she was doing, she had pushed herself upright.
Though it was dark, her eyes were adjusted enough to see the rigidity of Emiliano’s muscular back, and she clutched tightly to the duvet to stop her hand placing itself flat on it.
Let him go. Lie back down and go to sleep.
But the burn spreading like a wave from deep in her pelvis told her sleep was impossibly far away. For the first time in her life she was caught in desire’s claw, the fight she’d been waging with herself liquefying.
Over the thudding of her heart, she heard him take a deep inhalation. Then another.
She inched closer to him without any thought. ‘Emiliano?’
Slowly, his head turned.
The thudding of her heart became a thunderous canter.
Never had she seen his features so tight, the nostrils flare so rapidly. Or the expression in his eyes, which held hers so starkly.
The taut stillness stretched for an age before something that looked like pain contorted his face and in the whisper of a moment his body twisted and he lunged, hands cupping her face tightly as he crushed his mouth to hers.
Taken off-guard, Becky had no time to mount a defence. Heat ignited inside her like a furnace and she leaned into the kiss with a moan of relief. Her lips parted and then they were moving ferociously in time with his, her senses engulfed with the taste of something so hot and intoxicating that any defence she could have mounted would have melted instantly.
In what could only have been seconds, she was flat on her back below Emiliano’s lean, muscular body. There was a moment of stillness as she gazed into his pulsing eyes before their mouths fused back together in a kiss so hard and deep it erased any coherent thought.
For the first time in her life she didn’t want to think. She wanted to feel. She wanted to feel...everything.
Her suddenly greedy hands ran through Emiliano’s hair and over his neck, fingers touching and exploring every part she could reach, his hands sweeping over her sides with the same urgency. Her cotton T-shirt was pulled over her head and then her naked breasts were pressed against his hard chest, right until he dived a hand between them and spread his fingers over the sensitised flesh, making her gasp at the pleasure this induced and Emiliano groan and mutter something unintelligible. His groan deepened when he slipped his hand into her shorts and touched her where no man had touched before.
The furnace in her grew with every kiss and touch, melting every part until she was nothing but molten liquid. There was a deep ache low inside her, the pulsations she’d often experienced at unbidden times when her fantasises about this man had pushed their way into her mind before she could stop them magnified. Every time his erection brushed against her thigh the pulsations turned into a strong spasm of need and she pressed herself even closer, her body taking the lead over a mind that had become lost in a drugged, sensitised fog called Emiliano.
Together, they pulled her cotton shorts off and then she was as naked as he and too drunk on the wonderful sensations rippling through her to care. Nothing mattered, only this, this hunger, this unquenchable fire.
Her legs parted instinctively as their tongues entwined in a heady dance of their own making, and then he was right where she craved him to be until, with one long thrust, he was buried deep inside her and she cried out the last of the air she had left in her lungs. If there was pain, she didn’t notice. Emiliano was inside her, filling her, and it felt incredible. From the strangled groan that fell from his mouth into hers, the pleasure was shared.
Legs wrapped tightly around him, hands gripped together, Becky closed her eyes and submitted herself entirely to the intensity of his lovemaking.
In and out he thrust, his groin grinding against hers, driving the fever in her blood to boiling point. She responded by instinct, letting her body guide her, the pulsations inside her growing and growing, reaching, searching for something...
Something shattered inside her. Something that set off a riptide of unimaginable pleasure pulsing like a runaway train through her blood, her bones, her flesh, so powerful her back arched and a feral moan ripped from her throat.
The mutters in her ear fro
m Emiliano’s tongue had become a distant echo as she clung tightly to him while she rode the waves, but there was a dim awareness of his changing of tempo. His thrusts became harder and more urgent, and then her name flew from his mouth before he cried out and thrust so hard into her and for so long that their bodies fused together to become one.
* * *
The first thing that really penetrated Emiliano’s brain was the strength of his heart. He’d never known it beat so hard or so fast. The second awareness was the strength of Becky’s heartbeat crashing through their conjoined skin in time with his own and the raggedness of her breaths perfectly matching his. The third was that he was still burrowed deep inside her.
The earthy scent of their lovemaking filled his senses. His loins still twitched at the strength of his climax...
And that was when sanity came crashing down and he pulled away from her so quickly he created a draught.
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he grabbed at his hair, curses flying from his tongue in all the languages he knew.
‘That was not supposed to happen,’ he said between gulps of air.
The woman he’d just made love to didn’t answer.
Dios, he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. What the hell had he just done? Of all the stupid, idiotic, foolish things...
He should have left while he’d had the chance.
What the hell had compelled him to come to her in the first place? Had he been subconsciously seeking his boys? But that only then begged the question of why he hadn’t collected them and gone back to the villa. It wasn’t as if he was going to see his mother; she’d escaped on a friend’s helicopter.
Self-recriminating rage and nausea roiled violently in his stomach. What the hell had he done?
‘Tell me you’re on the pill?’ he demanded as he scraped his fingers over his skull.
Her continued silence gave him the answer and sent his roiling stomach dropping to his feet.
The Cost of Claiming His Heir Page 3