by Dani Collins
“No!” she said, horrified. Her emotions were right there under the surface, barely contained. She wasn’t standing under massive lights when she was this close to tears.
Setting his mouth into a displeased line, he went to the podium and waited for the applause to die down.
“This innovative software came out of a need for a specific effect. It wouldn’t have been developed if not for the people who demanded it. But I think the entire team will agree that we wouldn’t have delivered on time, on budget without the support of my exceptional assistant at the time, Sirena Abbott. She refused to come on stage with me because she’s more comfortable in a supporting role than in the spotlight. I’ve come to realize that about you, Sin.”
The nickname was a tiny endearment, but the intensity of his gaze picking her out across the crowded auditorium was monumental. Later she would realize heads and cameras had turned her way, but in this moment, all she saw and felt was Raoul’s undivided attention.
“You recently did the hard work on a very special project in which I played a very small role. I won’t take credit for the beautiful baby girl you made us. If we were giving golden statues for that tonight, this would be yours.”
Now her makeup was going to run, vexing man! She blinked, trying to hold back the tears.
He was escorted offstage by handlers for photos. He’d warned her that would happen and she gratefully grasped the chance to slip into the ladies’ room to collect herself. No one had ever made such a production of appreciating her. She didn’t know how to cope with it. Criticism was hurtful, but she was comfortable with it. She knew what to do after receiving it. The path to Better was right there and she always took it.
Arriving at Well Done made her look around in confusion. Part of her wanted to dismiss what Raoul had said as empty flattery, but she knew that wasn’t healthy and she loved their daughter too much to reduce the sweet things he’d just said about her, even if that meant accepting praise for her own contribution.
She did try to be a good mother and a good person. Was it so far-fetched that he might have noticed and come to value those things about her?
With her breath still hitching, she left the ladies’ room and ran straight into Raoul. He was clutching his award in one fist as he paced. He stopped when he saw her.
“I was about to come in there looking for you.”
“Shoes and a dress like this are challenging,” she joked to hide her discomfiture.
Someone else came into the short hallway and he nudged her farther into the moderate privacy of an area where a bank of outdated pay telephones still hung. That was the millionth time he’d stroked his fingers over the bare skin at her waist and it was totally short-circuiting her brain.
“Are you upset with me?” he asked.
“For what?” She ducked her head to the snap on her pocketbook, not wanting him to see how gauche she felt, unable to take one little compliment.
“For telling the world we have a baby together.”
“Oh. That.” She pressed her freshly painted lips together, mouth quirking wryly. “It’s not the way I would have done it, but I’m not going to pretend she doesn’t exist.”
“It’s not the way I meant to reveal her either. I was fielding some awkward questions backstage about whether we’re getting married. It made me realize we should. Then you wouldn’t worry about whether you could depend on me.”
Stunned, Sirena could only stare at his bow tie, eyes burning as she reflected that it was even less sentimental than Stephan’s awkward “Maybe we should get married.”
“And before you accuse me of saying it purely for practicality’s sake—” He clunked his heavy award onto a shelf and crowded her into a corner. “Let me remind you there’s a reason we wound up with an unplanned pregnancy.”
There went that hand again, possessively sliding to the small of her back, fingers dipping behind silk as he curved her into him, bumping her thighs into his.
She automatically caught at his sleeve for balance, but her other hand braced her pocketbook into his shoulder. Her head fell back a little, lips parting on a shocked gasp as her entire front lit up with seeking tingles, wanting contact with his.
“Fresh lipstick,” she managed as his mouth neared hers.
“I don’t care.” He pressed hard lips over her trembling ones, both soothing and inciting the ache spreading through her body. Heat rose like a circle of flames around them, burning her alive as they pressed together, spinning and hurtling directly into the sun.
She groaned and met his tongue with hers, lifting on tiptoes to increase the pressure and even diving her fingers into his short hair to pull him down, urging him to kiss her harder. He did, rocking his mouth on hers with feral hunger. Hard fingers dug into her buttock and spine as he crushed her to him.
His erection imprinted her through the fabric of his pants, making the ethereal layer of silk gown seem nonexistent. She didn’t want it between them. She wanted to feel nothing but satin skin over hard flesh, flexing muscle and the slam of his heartbeat against hers. She whimpered, almost sobbing in her need for him.
Drawing back a fraction, he muttered, “This is crazy.” He had a hand tangled in her hair, clenching a handful in a way that kept her immobile. It would have been too caveman and primitive if he wasn’t also holding her as if he was saving her from a shipwreck and dropping hot kisses down the side of her face to her nape.
She trembled, mortified by how close she was to losing it in public. It was no consolation that he had her buried in a corner. People were coming and going behind him. They had to be glancing this way. Her hands had burrowed beneath his jacket, but they were flexing on his shirt, trying to pull it from his waistband so she could stroke the indent of his spine.
“Raoul, we have to stop.”
“I know. I’m about to drag you into a janitor’s closet.” He straightened and pulled his snowy handkerchief from his pocket. He swiped it across his mouth, then asked her with a look if he’d gotten all the color off.
She thumbed a tiny smudge from the corner of his mouth and stole the cloth for herself, thinking to take it into the ladies’ room, but he caught her hand and his award and started for the exit.
“What—?”
“Don’t make me pick you up, Sin.”
“I have a feeling you just did,” she mumbled and heard him chuckle as he snapped for a limo.
“That one’s not ours,” she said.
“Ours will find us when we’re ready,” he assured her and had them driven about four blocks to the palatial entrance of a hotel. Throwing his platinum card on the counter, he got them a key in record time and seconds later they were walking into the decadence of the honeymoon suite.
Sirena stopped a few steps in, wondering what she was doing. It was one thing to be swept away, quite another to book a room and take off her clothes with deliberation.
Raoul unbuttoned his tuxedo jacket, shrugging out of it and throwing it across the arm of a wingback chair. “Second thoughts? I’ve had a vasectomy, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“What?” Her pocketbook hit the floor before she realized her fingers had released it. She quickly crouched to retrieve it, but couldn’t take her eyes off the man with his hands pushed into tight fists in his trouser pockets. “When?”
“About a week after we fought about it. You asked if I’d pulled a hamstring on the treadmill and I said, ‘something like that.’”
“You should have said—” She was floored, unable to process it. “Why would you do that? I’m a fluke. Other women—”
“I don’t think about having sex with other women. Only you.”
Her heart stumbled and she had a hard time rising to stand on her weak knees.
“I have condoms, too.” He extracted a length of conjoined foil squares from his pocket. “In case you’re worried about anything else. I’ve been tested and have never, ever not used one of these. Which frankly makes me nervous of my performance without on
e, given it’s been so long since we were together.”
Her mouth opened. Her lips and tongue wanted to form words, but no air moved from her throat. Her voice had left the building. He hadn’t been with anyone else?
“We’re good together, Sin.” He crossed to her with a laconic scuff of his shoes on the tiles. “Even without taking this to the bedroom. We always were.”
“Because I did as I was told,” she managed to counter.
He took her chin, forcing her to look into his eyes. Her hair practically lifted off her scalp at his touch. His nearness and the way he studied her mouth caused her breath to stutter.
“I can’t stand being around idiots or sycophants or women who act helpless. You’re bright and funny and incredibly competent. I’ve always been as attracted to that as the knockout body and gypsy looks.”
Her lips began to quiver. “I still feel like anything could happen and it would all fall apart and you’d hate me again.”
A sharp spasm seemed to take him. “You know what I hate? Not having you in my life at all. Oh, hell, don’t cry. There’s a lot to build on here, Sin.”
“I know,” she murmured, fingering the tail of his bow tie, wishing she had the courage to boldly yank it free. “Not to mention how much it would mean to me that Lucy would never wind up with a stepmother like my own.”
His bearing hardened before her eyes, taking umbrage.
“Oh, please, you don’t really need to hear that’s not my only motive. I’ve been insanely attracted to you for years.”
“I do need to hear that,” he said with a tight white line around his mouth. “I need to hear it, see it, feel it...”
When he covered her mouth with his, the passion behind his kiss was cataclysmic. If she had wanted to be swept away, the tsunami of desire was here, lifting her so she found herself clutched to his chest and carried to the bed. But there an odd, intent stillness took him over. Everything slowed.
He sat beside her to run light fingers from her bare shoulder to her wrist, lifting her hand to his mouth. Hot, damp lips pressed into the thin skin of her inner arm, following the faint blue line to the crease of her elbow.
She compulsively wove her fingers into his silky hair, enjoying the play of the short strands on the sensitive spaces between her fingers. He smelled faintly of aftershave and firmly of himself. The compelling scent overwhelmed her as he nuzzled the hollow of her shoulder, then grazed his lips over the upper swell of her breast.
His shirt was a crisp annoyance as she sought the heat beneath his collar, restricted by the tight buttons and bow tie and his refusal to crush her under his weight.
“I want to feel you,” she complained, restively scraping her fingers up from his waistband to free his shirt, crumpling the fine silk.
He sat up. His narrow eyes glittered with something smug and arrogant, but his movements were urgent as he pulled at his clothing.
He does need to hear it, she thought, even as she rose on an elbow and picked at his buttons, trying to hurry him. As he threw off the shirt, she stroked across the twitching muscles of his chest, lightly scratching with her nails as she stroked from his collarbone to his abs.
“You’re so hot,” she breathed, thinking, figuratively and literally. He epitomized an underwear model’s fine physique, but radiated heat from his swarthy, flush-darkened torso. His pure male sexuality weakened her. She was glad she was lying down, but a distant part of her was flinching in alarm. She’d done this once, stroked and satisfied her curiosity and his libido, and the next day her world had been devastated.
“Every time you clip up your hair, I want to let it down,” he said in a sensuous rumble, gently seeking pins to release the hair pulled back from her temple. As he finger-combed, he bent to let his hot breath tease the delicate whorls of her ear. “I think of you doing very erotic things to me with this hair,” he said, words and lips sensitizing her to screaming pitch before he took her to a new level of shivering excitement, dabbing his tongue and lightly biting and sucking her lobe. By the time he moved to the flesh at her nape, she was head-to-toe goose bumps, forehead pleated in an agony of delicious excitement. He further paralyzed her with soft bites into the incredibly responsive tendons of her neck, making her moan and arch to offer herself.
“What are you doing to me?” she gasped, making no protest as he slid her wrists upward and clasped them in one of his hands.
“I haven’t even got your dress off,” he husked, seeking and finding the zip at her side. Slowly he released it, watching her pant as she waited, completely absorbed, wanting nothing except to belong to this man.
“You’re like a goddess. A fantasy coming true, making me insane. I can’t think of anything but having you.” He released his grip on her to peel the one shoulder down her arm, exposing her breasts and avidly looking at them.
“Raoul.” She brought her elbows down and forward, forearms wanting to shield herself, but his undisguised desire was a type of seduction. A deep part of her wanted to please him and if the thrust of her breasts excited him, she wanted to give him that.
He clasped the full globes in splayed hands and anointed them with reverent kisses. “So beautiful. So perfect.” His hands slid to push the fabric down further and she lifted her hips, letting him take the gown off her legs, leaving her naked but for her slutty shoes and a nude thong that wasn’t any kind of cover.
She’d been waxed, plucked, exfoliated and moisturized today, but she still held her breath, fearful he’d make note of her imperfections.
He chuckled with gruff pleasure and drew a wickedly teasing fingertip over the silk covering her hot and pulsing mound. His sure hands skimmed away that defense and suddenly she was painfully aware of wearing only shoes on a broad bed while she writhed in arousal before a half-dressed man.
“Raoul.”
She didn’t know what she wanted to say, but he said, “Shh,” with quiet command.
His brows lowered in concentration as he cupped her hip in one hand, stilling her. His other hand moved to smooth a testing fingertip over her C-section scar. It was the starkest mark left by childbearing, even more pronounced than the faint stretch marks and the fading brown line descending from her belly button.
“Don’t,” she said, wriggling self-consciously and trying to brush his hand away.
“Tender?”
The scar was oddly both oversensitive and numb, but mostly his touch felt too personal. He bent to touch a kiss there and she gasped, shocked and moved and flooded with embarrassed excitement.
Then he shifted to blow softly over her mound. He’d been seducing her so gently, she’d overlooked how powerful and forceful he really was. Her contracting thighs smoothly parted for his superior strength as he made room for his wide shoulders, settling low to press licking kisses high on the insides of her legs.
“You don’t have to...”
“Oh, sweet, hot Sin, I do. I really, really do.”
She clenched her eyes shut as knowing fingers caressed. This was the sort of intimacy she’d never been able to relax for, knowing he was looking at her— Oh, God. Her muscles clenched on the finger that slid in to test her slippery depths.
“Tell me when I get it right,” he said, taking a soft bite of her flesh. At the same time he withdrew his touch, then filled her with the span of two thick fingers. His tongue flicked and she couldn’t bite back her keening moan. Everything in her gathered to this one bundle of pure sensation, paradise beckoning with each languid caress that he lazily bestowed on her, as if they had all the time in the world.
It was pure torture and so good she was dying, losing herself, growing wanton, inviting more with a tilt of her hips, encouraging him in gasps of sobbing murmurs.
“I can’t take it,” she cried, pulling mercilessly at his hair.
He reared back onto his knees with a near-primal growl, making her wail with loss even though she’d forced the issue.
Jerking at his trousers, he freed himself, shoving them off and away bef
ore he crawled over her. Her legs instinctively twined up to hitch her ankles behind his waist, trying to draw him down as he clasped the sides of her face and kissed her, hard.
His weight settled, crushing her pelvis before he lifted to allow her seeking hand to clasp his sleek shaft and guide him into her.
He slid home with a delicious plunge that turned his whole body to granite. For a few seconds he was a blistering, immovable cage around her, mouth locked to her lips, his heart the only movement as it pounded the wall of his chest, trying to reach hers.
A sigh of pure bliss left her. It felt so good to have him in her, filling the hollow ache she’d thought would be with her the rest of her life.
Then he eased back, pulling at her nerve endings as though they were harp strings, drawing her taut with ecstatic tension before he thrust again. Joy expanded within her.
The crescendo built, both of them clasping to be closer even as they fought to make the strokes harder, deeper, more irrevocable. This wasn’t just her, she knew distantly. He was as lost to need as she was, clawing for satisfaction as if their lives depended on it. It did. She needed this, him, the raw hunger and the sweet struggle and the fight to hold on, hold back, to never let this end, to give and take...
The pinnacle arrived, holding them balanced on its tip, breath caught as they swayed between anguish and joy.
Elation won, tumbling them into the maw. He crushed her as he throbbed with his final thrusts making deep contractions pulse rapture from her center to the tips of her fingers. Deaf, dumb, blind, she could only feel. She was in heaven.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RAOUL HAD NEVER feared for his life during sex, but tonight came pretty close. His heart still felt as though it was under enormous pressure. Taxed. Too full.
Sitting on the foot of the bed, he wanted to believe a trip to the cardiologist would fix him, but it wasn’t the answer. The woman avoiding his gaze as she pulled the green gown over her head and let it fall into place was the shard of glass piercing his chest.
“Are you all right?” he asked, voice burning like whiskey in his throat.