by Lynne Graham
'Men always want what is out of reach. That was three-quarters of your attraction,' Rafael asserted drily. 'And as I got to know you—or believed I was getting to know you—I also discovered that you were bright, amusing and apparently outspokenly honest, a trait which for me was on a par with your beauty. Having to wait for you undoubtedly increased your desirability tenfold. I had never had to wait for anything in my life before and, while I waited, I endowed you with every conceivable virtue.'
The contempt with which he cynically dismissed what be had felt then angered and hurt Georgie. He resurrected memories of those innocent days and those memories burnt her now like acid. 'I don't believe in looking back,' she said tautly. 'It's a mistake.'
Rafael spread long brown fingers in a gesture of careless disagreement. 'I'm not so sensitive,' he drawled. 'You were a learning experience for me. Different culture, different values. I was young enough to believe that things like that didn't matter... but they do, very much.' 'Why on earth did you bring me here?' Georgie demanded shakily, denying the creeping tide of mortification consuming her.
'An overwhelming desire to punish you, and so far, I have to confess, it has been an extraordinarily satisfying experience,' Rafael murmured without remorse.
'You swine... you utter swine,' Georgie whispered in a stricken rush.
A slanting ebony brow quirked. 'But not yet quite as satisfying as I anticipate. I want you lying under me, gasping with excitement, begging for release. And after I have had you, I will be entirely satisfied. Playing this waiting game merely adds an edge.'
Without even thinking about it, Georgie hit him, the crack of her palm resoundingly loud in the smouldering silence. He didn't even flinch. The reddened mark of her fingers darkened one savage cheekbone. He snaked out a powerful arm and yanked her between his spread thighs, reading the raw apprehension flaring in her wide eyes. Incandescent gold raked over her scared face and abruptly he laughed. 'I'll take it out of your hide in bed. That's a first, Georgie. No woman has ever struck me before.'
'I hate you!' Georgie launched, with a sob of distress snatching at her raw vocal cords. 'I don't know how you can do this to me!'
'So easily, it would terrify you,' Rafael shared almost conversationally. 'In fact, I could develop quite a taste for your tears. Poor Georgie, one last dangerous impulse backed you into the tightest corner of all!' Long fingers forced up her chin, quelling her attempt to evade him. 'So impetuous, so uncontrolled... so very different from me. I was raised to be intensely disciplined, responsible, serious '
'I'm not interested!' she spat back at him, appalled by his insight into her character. 'Let go!'
'And you panic with such naked abandon,' he mur-mured flatly. 'I was a bastard after breakfast, wasn't I? But then I wanted the truth '
'But it wasn't the truth! It was what you wanted to believe!' Georgie condemned hotly. 'What you'd like to believe so that you can excuse yourself for treating me like dirt!'
Rafael laced a hard hand into her tumbling hair and tightened his fingers with painful thoroughness. 'He was your lover. I know it and, before I'm finished with you, you'll admit it,' he swore.
'For heaven's sake, I've never had a lover!' Georgie slung back at him between gritted teeth. 'And I'm sick to death of you acting like I'm some sort of raving ymphomaniac!'
'You've never had a lover?' Glittering dark eyes raked hers with pitying derision. 'Georgie...do you think I believe in those mermaids upstairs?' he asked very drily. 'Why pretend? It doesn't matter any more. But lies infuriate me.'
It was useless. She saw that and regretted her honesty. Please let go of me,' she muttered. Astonishingly, he released her and Georgie backed away on cottonwool legs, trembling in spite of her efforts to control that physical weakness.
'You are ashamed of your relationship with him now,' Rafael breathed with smouldering dark golden eyes pinned contemptuously to her. 'A little too late to impress.'
'Go to hell!' she spat, her throat choked up with tears. detest you!'
'But it's the wanting that hurts most, es verdad?' Rafael dealt her a slashing look of cruelly amused comprehension.
'I'd sooner go to bed with a—with a total stranger!'
'Oh, I'm sure you've done that at least once,' Rafael drawled with laconic certainty. 'Exclusive, you're not.'
Outraged, Georgie stalked back to him. 'Well, then, you're not very fastidious, are you?' she hissed, in a tone shaking with red-hot fury and frustration at her inability to shut him up. 'But brace yourself for disappointment, Rafael. After this morning's little honesty session, I would be certifiably insane to let you anywhere near me.'
He reached for her and she bristled like a spitting cat, ready to claw as she went into startled retreat, registering her mistaken direction only as the wall connected with her taut shoulderblades. 'I will not stand for this!' she erupted in a burst of indignation.
As Rafael closed the distance between them, an appreciative smile slashed his golden features. 'You are so much more entertaining now than you were then. Four years ago, it was, "Yes, Rafael, no, Rafael, whatever you think, Rafael," and I couldn't understand where all your spirit had gone,' he confided, bracing a hand on either side of her head. 'Of course, it was an act put on
to impress. Then you were playing for high stakes. You may not have guessed what was on my mind but your
goal was certainly marriage '
'Like hell it was!' Incensed by the scathing accusation, Georgie's every muscle clenched defensively as he deliberately moved closer. 'Now, back off!'
'But that is not what you want.' Rafael lowered his dark head, veiled eyes a shimmer of hot gold on her wildly flushed face, and she was entrapped by a curious stillness, her breath locked in her constricted throat. 'What you want with every fibre of your being is to possess me as thoroughly as I intend to possess you...'
CHAPTER SIX
George was mesmerised by the savage brilliance of Rafael's sexually explicit gaze and the ragged edge of blatant need in his dark, deep voice. The familiar musky scent of him teased at her flaring nostrils as he dropped a hand to her hip and suddenly hauled her against him. Her heart raced crazily. The hard thrust of his masculine arousal pulsed against her abdomen and then he lifted her up to him with a powerful ease that exhilarated her. For a split-second she was looking down at him and hunger tore at her with cruel claws, ripping away every proud layer of pretence.
A desperate pain pierced her then, a terrible vulnerability. In all this time, all these years, no other man had ever drawn her as he did. In the dark of the night, in the secrecy of her dreams, she had tossed and turned and craved him, and despised herself for that treacherous yearning. But now, as she clashed with devouring golden eyes and burned, she felt the answering tremor of response snaking through his magnificent physique.
His arms tightened fiercely around her and he drew her down, taking her mouth in a deep, shuddering admission of need that sent her every sense rocketing to fever-pitch. And she knew then that the power was not his alone. Wrapped round him like a vine, Georgie kissed him back with all the fire he had awakened. As his tongue penetrated between her parted lips, her nails dug into his broad shoulders, a stifled whimper of excitement escaping her.
Rafael groaned something in his own language and swept her right off her feet with bruisingly impatient, hands. She captured his hard cheekbones between her. palms and stared up at him with dazed eyes, out of focus with passion. He succumbed to the lure of her swollen mouth again somewhere halfway up the stairs and control seemed to go out of the window at that point, because he braced her against the wall and took her lips with a driving, demanding sexuality which reduced her to mental rubble.
'Madre de Dios...' he swore roughly against her throat, struggling for breath, and then he carried her up into the bedroom, tumbled her down on the bed and pinned her there with a wildly exciting lack of cool.
He wrenched his jacket and tie off and ripped at his shirt without break
ing the connection of their mouths once. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears like a pulse-beat of desire. His fingers found the neckline of her cotton top and tore it down over her arms. He curved his hands over the shameless thrust of her pouting breasts and she shivered in violent reaction, helplessly arching her back to increase the pressure on her unbearably sensitive nipples.
He seized on a taut rosy crest with his teeth and the explosion of sensation he released made her cry out, her teeth gritting, her throat extending.
'Perdicion' he groaned, lifting his arrogant dark head to look down at her as he dealt at speed with the re-mainder of his clothing. 'So long.. . have waited so long for this.'
So long, yes, she thought intensely, reaching back up for him with the single-minded motivation of a pro-grammed doll. A relentless hunger seized her as he sealed his virile length to hers. Her whole body flushed with consuming heat and she turned to him, driven by thing much more powerful than she was, and let her hands travel through the light mat of curling black hair across his muscular chest, glorying in the freedom to touch him at last.
Raising his head, he pressed her down to the pillows again, stilling her fluttering hands, the dominant male, sentencing her back to passivity. From below ebony lashes he dealt her a wholly predatory look that made her burn and quiver. He reached down and peeled off her shorts and panties in one impatient movement. He thrust a hair-roughened thigh between hers and fanned out her hair with his fingers so that the vibrant strands surrounded her exquisite face, tumbling in a fiery cascade across the white pillows. From somewhere he had found control again and now he contemplated her with an indolent air of possession.
Georgie trembled and met that look and suddenly remembered about this bed, this room. The significance of their surroundings and the recollection of his savage desire for revenge suddenly chilled her to the marrow.
'No,' she said shakily. 'Not here '
'Si... it is what I want,' Rafael said softly.
'But not what I want!' Georgie suddenly gasped, the ability to think returning by degrees in dangerous little warning spurts.
'All you want is me.' Rafael evaded her attempt to drag herself free of his intimate hold and flattened her back to the mattress with his vastly superior strength. He subjected her to a wolfish appraisal, golden hawk eyes scanning her shocked and confused face with a dev-astatingly cruel amusement. 'Your one virtue. All you ever wanted was me from the very first moment. It wasn't the limo, it wasn't the accent and it wasn't any schoolgirl fantasy either,' he asserted. 'It was far more basic. An intense sexual desire to possess and be possessed.'
'No.' Georgie sucked in air and shook her head back and forth in urgent negative.
His thumb pried apart her lips, brushed against her teeth. 'And you can't control it... unnerving, isn't it?
The tip of her tongue brushed of its own volition against his thumb and then withdrew sharply as he laughed. 'Is it?' she whispered.
'You tell me... Here, now, you're mine to do with exactly as I please.' To illustrate that raw assurance, Rafael bent his head and circled a distended pink nipple with his tongue and then his teeth, and the entire conversation was, for Georgie, plunged into some dark limbo as her swollen sensitive flesh screamed with sensation and craved more.
He took her mouth with carnal expertise, slowly, tormentingly, denying her the greater force that her every skin-cell demanded, until her hands rose and speared into his hair and she held him to her, quivering with unabated need, surrendering to the incredibly powerful urges of her own body.
His fingers roamed over her flat, taut stomach and into the damp tangle of curls at the apex of her thighs and suddenly she couldn't be still any more, suddenly she was burning alive. He explored the moist tender flesh with a knowing eroticism that made her breath sob in her throat. Nothing could have prepared her for the intensity of the pleasure or the electrifying throb of primal excitement making her hips rise in supplication. There was an ache now, an intolerable ache, building down deep inside her.
Cristo... you're so tight.'
She heard him groan, but no words could connect now. Her brain had shut down. Every response she gave was instinctive and out of control. She writhed as he cupped her hips and came down on her, was suddenly stilled by forceful hands, and then she felt him, the hot thrusting hardness of his masculinity alien against her. Her eyes flew wide with an intuitive fear of the unknown and she met the pagan stamp of intense desire on his dark features above hers. Another kind of ache stirred inside her, tugging violently at her heartstrings, making her lie back in helpless submission, trembling with the force of her own need.
'Dios... you feel like a virgin.'
His hand pushed her thighs wider, higher, drawing her up to receive him. He entered her with one sure thrust and the piercing pain of his intrusion took her completely by surprise.
'Georgie...' Golden eyes abruptly swept hers, a frown of incomprehension drawing his arrow-straight ebony brows together. 'No...imposible,' he groaned, black lashes dropping low on his damp, driven features as he moved again in an instinctive surge to deepen his possession.
Her teeth sank stoically into the soft underside of her lower lip, for beyond the pain was the most extraordinary pleasure at the feel of him inside her. Intimate beyond belief. Heat flooded her in a blinding wave. She could feel the force of the control he was exerting as he thrust slowly, carefully into the very heart of her. His breathing was ragged, his sweat-slicked body sliding against her supersensitive flesh, and she threw her head back, moaning his name as the pressure began to build again unbearably.
Every new sensation was torturously intense. Her heart slammed madly against her ribcage as he began to drive into her faster, harder, with shredding control and fierce, masculine domination. The pleasure took her over, rising to a shattering crescendo that plunged her entire body into quivering, indescribable ecstasy. Above her, she felt him reach the same plateau and shudder and groan as he sank deep into her one last time.
Afterwards she was in a state of prolonged shock, still lost in the intensity of extraordinary physical response.
He lay in the circle of her arms and she liked that so much, the weight of him, the feel of him, the so familiar sceiit of him that when he shifted away she felt disturbingly bereft as he flopped down on the pillows beside her in the thrumming silence. Her fingers curled into fists by her sides until she conquered the terrible urge to reach back for him, for that closeness her every sense craved.
Was she crazy? a little voice asked. They were not lovers in any sense of the word. There was no relationship, no tenderness, no love. Suddenly she felt empty and cold. But everyone had the right to sin at least once in a lifetime, didn't they? And Rafael was her sin. Just this one time and never again. They had made love—no, they had had sex, she adjusted, her troubled face tightening as she fought off a dismaying sense of vulnerability. He had-not used her any more than she had used him, she told herself fiercely. She had always wanted Rafael Rodriguez Berganza...
'I'll buy you an apartment in Paris,' Rafael murmured smoothly into the silence. "There will be times you will be able to travel with me... if you can be discreet, but you will never be able to come here again and you will have to break off your correspondence with my sister. You will live like a princess. I will give you everything but my name.'
It was like having a knife driven into her heart. Her stomach twisted sickly. He was so unemotional. Was this what she had waited for all these years? An invitation to be his mistress? A shudder of revulsion assailed her. So he didn't use you any more than you used him? Who are you kidding, Georgie? You are not up to this, you are way out of your depth.
'Say something... anything.' Rafael leant over her without warning and skimmed a surprisingly unsteady hand over the damp tendrils of hair clinging to her brow.
The nagging ache between her thighs felt like the greatest act of treachery she could ever have committed against herself. She clashed one fleeting tim
e with brilliant dark eyes scanning her with probing intent, and hurriedly looked away again, hating herself.
lMadre de Dios!' The interruption to her frantic
thoughts of shame and self-reproach was explosive.
'Georgie ?'
'I need a bath,' she mumbled, not listening, still glued to the edge of the bed and struggling for the act of courage it was going to take to walk across the room naked as a jaybird. But escape was definitely a necessity.
A hand like an iron vice closed round her forearm and turned her back abruptly to face him. Rafael stared at her with fierce demand in his eyes. His rigid facial cast and the pallor below his naturally golden skin betrayed his state of shock.
'What's wrong?' she questioned.
'Tell me that doesn't mean what I think it does...' Rafael urged in a ragged undertone.
Her brow furrowed, Georgie followed the direction of his gaze and saw the bloodstain on the sheet. She was appalled. She wanted to cover it again. But it was too late. He had seen it. She just couldn't believe that her body could have let her down like that. A keen athlete from an early age, it had never occurred to her that there could possibly be any physical evidence of her lost innocence.
'You were untouched,' Rafael breathed, driving a set of long brown fingers roughly through his tousled hair.
'Don't be ridiculous!' Georgie scoffed, lifting a pillow to hug.
'Look at me.'
Her sultry mouth set in a positively vicious line of mutiny. His shaken voice told her he was on the edge of extinction by severe shock.
'You were a virgin '
'Nonsense! Now, if you don't mind, I'd like this bed back to myself.'
Abruptly, he snatched the pillow off her and flattened her back to the mattress with two very forceful and determined hands. 'I mind... I mind very much.'
Shattered, Georgie's eyes collided with tormented dark ones that devoured her every fleeting expression. 'Will you stop looking at me like that?'