Kept at the Argentine's Command (Harlequin Presents)

by Lucy Ellis

  *

  Alejandro returned from the bathroom freshly shaven, dressed in boxer shorts and with bare feet, to find Lulu in the armchair.

  He’d assumed she’d take the bed as her due. Obviously not. Her expression in the lamplight was serious, and there was something about the way she was evidently trying to find a way to make herself comfortable that he recognised in other things she’d done today. It was crazy, but he got the idea she was trying her hardest.

  Alejandro looked at the bed, and then at the girl curling herself up in the chair.

  Dios.

  Deep down he’d known from the start that he’d have to take the chair. She’d never been going to share that bed with him.

  She would sleep in the bed and he’d play footman in her fairytale, try to arrange his large frame on that armchair and get what shut-eye he could.

  He’d slept in the saddle before.

  He could manage a badly sprung armchair in a Scottish farmhouse.

  He dumped his toiletries bag, strode over and scooped her up, blanket and all. It was a mistake, because everything suddenly felt incredibly intimate between them. The lovely weight of her, his arms around her… She felt like his.

  She seemed to know it, because she didn’t struggle.

  He put her on the bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like? I’m giving you the bed.’

  That was when he realised she’d shed the dressing gown. The blanket was pooled at her hips and Lulu was sitting up in the sexiest lingerie ensemble he’d ever seen.

  Or maybe it was just the girl wearing it.

  Some kind of vintage cream satin bra and panties trimmed in old-fashioned white lace. Later, when he was thinking with his brain again, he would wonder what it was about that white lace…

  But now he was more interested in the soft pale curves poured into it.

  She was delicate, and more lovely than anything he’d ever seen.

  She’d also seen him. The snug boxers didn’t hide much.

  She looked fascinated, and it was only when the mattress gave under his weight and he got close enough to feel the warmth of her body that she seemed to realise she was only wearing her underwear. She made a wordless gesture, pulling the blanket towards her, which should have stopped him. He kissed her anyway. But not as he had kissed her in the car, with his blood up and her mouth full of snippy demands and his male ego making him want to prove a point.

  His blood was up, all right, but he was looking to prove something else.

  That he was good enough for her.

  That she could trust him.

  That she was his.

  Tomorrow he would have to share her with everyone at the wedding, but right now she was his, and he realised that this knowledge had been growing from the moment he’d boarded that flight and set eyes on her—before everything else had intervened between them.

  She pulled away first, looking at him as if she was every bit as stunned by this turn of events as he was.

  ‘I don’t know—’ she began, and it was everything he didn’t want to hear.

  He watched her, waiting.

  Lulu could see his amber eyes gleaming beneath those ridiculously long, thick sable lashes, holding all kinds of knowledge she wanted to have. He was one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen. He made her feel so…alive, and he hadn’t treated her like glass all day. He’d been absolutely, appallingly awful to her. Just the thought made her body ache a little more for him.

  If I don’t have sex with him I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.

  Even before she could think about doing it she was tracing the seam of his parted lips with her fingertip.

  He took her hand and gently folded her fingers into a fist. ‘You are not sure, hermosa.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I’m not looking for a relationship, and I think you are.’

  Lulu weighed that up. Non, she knew how hard relationships were to sustain when you were trapped in your own fears, as she was. She knew she couldn’t have that.

  ‘That’s not what I want.’

  ‘No?’

  Frankly, she didn’t know what she wanted—other than what she was having right now. When what she’d been having for far too many years was—nothing.

  ‘I just want something different,’ she admitted.

  ‘Different from what?’

  Where did she begin? Lulu tried to find words that just wouldn’t come. Everything was bound up so tightly inside her—safe and sound, she’d once thought. But she was beginning to feel like a prisoner, locked up along with her anxieties.

  Alejandro watched the struggle on her face. She couldn’t answer him because he suspected ‘different’ for her was having sex outside a relationship.

  He always had sex outside relationships, and there was the salient difference between them.

  This was going to kill him.

  ‘You’ve had an exciting day, a little wine, and you don’t know what you want. I don’t want to be the man who takes advantage of that.’

  As he spoke Lulu found herself being boxed very neatly back into the corner she’d fought so hard to get out of.

  Poor invalid Lulu, whose disability always had to be taken into account.

  In this case that disability appeared to be her inexperience with men.

  ‘You’ll regret this in the morning,’ he assured her, as if he knew best. ‘And I don’t do regrets.’

  She remembered what he’d told her about his parents. A war of attrition.

  Her parents hadn’t been at war—her mother had been a civilian casualty, with her biological father rampaging about like a one-man vigilante mob, until the day Félicienne had got up the courage to leave.

  But being brave was something Lulu recognised she’d lost touch with. Somehow she’d allowed her courage to slip away, with the tide of her childhood going out and the sea of her anxieties rushing in.

  Seeing the risk to her friendship with Gigi had been the catalyst to make her want to change all that.

  It had taken something that big to push her out into the open.

  Because of that determination to change she was sitting on this bed tonight, in the middle of the Scottish countryside, with a gorgeous, fascinating man—and he was the man she wanted.

  She wasn’t just someone he could put in a box labelled ‘Defective’.

  He thought she’d be like glue. Sticking to him all weekend because she was so needy.

  Well, she was. Needy, that was. Her whole body felt as if it had been stirred up by his kisses and there was an ache low in her pelvis. And although she knew it would go away, and also knew she would eventually fall asleep, when tomorrow came she would have lost her chance to know what it felt like to have this intimate connection with another person.

  It was entirely probable, given the circumstances of her life and her condition that she was going to never have this chance again.

  I don’t do regrets.

  Well, neither did she. Before she could chicken out Lulu rose up on her knees. In a single move she wrapped her long legs around him and looked at him fiercely.

  *

  Any arguments Alejandro had against this fell away.

  He was a man, not a monk. And Lulu was… She was…

  Lowering herself onto his lap, draping her slender arms over his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t want anything more than tonight,’ she said, and Alejandro found himself at her mercy as her eyes dusted over the top of his bare chest as if mesmerised by him. ‘Just one night—with you.’

  She fitted her mouth to his inexpertly and want shuddered through his body.

  He caught her face in his hands, because in a moment there wouldn’t be any going back.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he made himself ask.

  She smiled, a dimple winking alongside her mouth as she bent to kiss him again.

  He took over then. His tongue made forays along her lower lip, into her mouth, and L
ulu could feel the fire burning inside her. He was stoking it with his mouth.

  Not just his mouth.

  Lulu could feel him against her most intimate place, much bigger than she’d ever imagined, and hard, and his hands on her satin-covered bottom were bringing her into closer contact.

  Lulu couldn’t believe how aroused she was getting, or how much she wanted him. His shoulders felt like rock under her hands, but his flesh was hot and springy. He felt so alive, and for the first time she began to understand the scale of what she’d been missing. She’d only been half alive, and that didn’t have much to do with sex, although that was a part of it. It was just that the fear had taken so much away from her and she’d let it.

  She wasn’t letting this go.

  She was having this.

  It was hers.

  He broke their kiss to give her one last warning, ‘I’m not looking for anything more than this, Lulu.’

  ‘Bon,’ she said breathlessly, ignoring everything but what she was finding with him.

  Alejandro slid his hand under the satin and lace bra and found skin much softer than the satin that had encased it, and an astonishingly plump breast for such a slight girl, with a taut little nipple that seemed to furl under his touch.

  Madre di Dios.

  He rubbed, she whimpered, and he said a word of prayer under his breath, because this was pushing him to the brink and he hadn’t even got her naked.

  She was breathing in low, shallow pants that were growing more frantic. He could deal with that. He took one taut lace-covered nipple gently between his teeth and sucked. She gave an almost startled cry before he applied the same attention to the other, sliding his hand under the loose leg of her cami-knickers. She felt so soft and wet and warm and he couldn’t wait.

  He shoved down his boxers.

  She knelt on the bed, just looking, her eyes all over him and her expression almost unbearable in its curiosity.

  Then she seemed to remember herself, and reached around to unhook her bra. But he was there before her. He could feel the subtle tension in her body as he carefully peeled down the straps and she held out her arms to let the satin and lace drop away. Her breasts were crested with raspberry-coloured nipples. She actually raised her arms again to cover herself—an act of modesty he recognised but one that didn’t make sense. He witnessed a flash of uncertainty in the eyes she lifted to his, but then she set her chin and slowly took her arms away.

  Alejandro was convinced he saw that chin jut out a little more.

  A tenderness spread through him that somehow wasn’t at odds with the lust tearing at his insides.

  He ran his hands gently over her shoulders, down her arms, watching the tightening of the buds of her nipples, the way her breasts lifted slightly with the deep shuddering breath she took. She put the palms of her hands to his shoulders, ran them over his arms in a mimicking movement.

  ‘Are we going to have sex?’

  It was a crazy question, but it was one he took seriously because it was Lulu asking.

  ‘Only if you want to.’

  ‘Mmm. Yes. I want to.’ She put her arms around his neck as he came over her. ‘With you,’ she said, looking into his eyes.

  He considered asking who else? There was nobody but them in the room. But her words reminded him of how sweet she was.

  Sweet and sexy and not like any other woman he’d ever been with.

  ‘Lulu?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Just tonight.’

  ‘Stop saying that.’ She screwed up her nose.

  She was right. This wasn’t about her—it was him. He was finding an intensity in this experience and as a man of experience it gave him pause.

  But not enough to stop. He couldn’t have stopped now if the whole damn farmhouse had collapsed around them.

  Besides, she’d assured him she only wanted one night. It was his problem if it felt like something more.

  He put his hands to her cami-knickers and drew them down, past her ankles, feasting his eyes on her.

  She had surprisingly rounded hips, and tiny dark curls at the apex of her thighs, and her skin had clearly never seen the sun—it was like snow.

  Lulu was breathing shallowly. There was something touchingly private about the way she watched him, as if trying to work out what he was thinking.

  He could have told her what he was thinking—that he was the luckiest man in Scotland tonight.

  Her eyes were big, her mouth wet from their kisses. Her nipples looked like bright jewels against her flushed breasts.

  Her arms tightened around his neck.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ she blurted out.

  ‘Tell me.’ He tried not to sound too gruff, because right now talking wasn’t high on his agenda.

  ‘I watch a lot of old films.’

  Alejandro looked at her and wondered if lust could jam up your hearing.

  ‘You watch old films?’ he repeated huskily.

  She nodded. ‘There’s a film… Joanne Woodward…Paul Newman. It’s very good.’ She moistened her lips. ‘It’s about a girl who tried love once but it didn’t stick. So she’s given up on men.’

  ‘Good. I’ll watch it some time.’

  He lowered his mouth to her throat, where the skin was soft as satin. But Lulu kept talking.

  ‘She’s a semi-maiden.’

  His head came up. He looked into her eyes, surprise registering. ‘This is you?’

  She nodded, no longer talking, just fixing those big brown eyes on him.

  He wasn’t completely taken off guard, but there was something about her admitting it and giving him that trustful look that made him feel incredibly protective of her.

  It’s a gift, he thought. She’s giving you a gift. Her trust.

  It twisted inside him painfully. Because what did he have to give her in return? Cynicism born of a deep understanding. Most people had strings attached to gifts—everyone had a motive. Nothing was ever as it seemed.

  ‘It’s worse than being one thing or the other—you’re sort of stuck.’ She spoke softly, tangling her fingers in the soft whorls of dark hair on his chest. ‘I’m so very, very tired of being stuck, Alejandro.’

  This he could understand. She wanted a little more experience—he could give it to her.

  ‘Let’s see what we can do about it, then,’ he said, and slid down the bed, parted her thighs and put his mouth on her.

  She gave a squeak of dismay and a husky, ‘Non!’ But her body was on board and she melted under his tongue as he had known she would, until he had her twisting, panting, pinned to the mattress as he drew an orgasm from her that had her crying out into the pillow.

  He considered telling her that the Baileys assumed they were married and she could yell as loud as she liked, but there was something about her restraint that was highly erotic.

  He kept his mouth where she most wanted it until she subsided and then he began again, until the throbbing in his own body became unbearable and all he could concentrate on was being inside her.

  He dealt with a condom and joined her on the pillow, kissed her soft, responsive mouth. She was flushed and gratifyingly dazed.

  He told himself this was what he did. He worked hard, he rode like a demon, and he gave good sex. Women didn’t leave his bed disappointed.

  But what he was doing now wasn’t a part of that. He didn’t stroke a woman’s hair and gaze into her eyes, a little mesmerised by the wonder he saw there as she gazed back at him, and he didn’t question why he felt so good being with her.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  She nodded and kissed him and he moved carefully over her. He nudged her thighs apart with his knee and shifted between them. He was desperate to feel her around him, but as he forged forward into that soft, slick heat there wasn’t a lot of room. He was big and she was small and her body wasn’t giving way.

  Lulu was aware of him nudging at the heart of her and she forgot to breathe. She felt so excited—she wanted this—a
nd yet as she shifted a little and he pressed she knew it wasn’t happening. Something was wrong. She froze. Frustration and humiliation joined hands and Lulu just wanted to cry. How typical of her. She couldn’t even pass through this fundamental rite of passage without her body conspiring against her.

  She was useless—useless.

  ‘Lulu.’ Alejandro steered her face with his hand so she was looking into his eyes.

  ‘You just need to relax,’ he told her, his expression making her think he must be in some degree of pain.

  Relax? She didn’t want to relax. She wanted to have sex. She’d relax when it was over. Which looked like round about now…

  Oh…

  She felt his index finger gently circle her little bud of nerve-endings and familiar sensation streaked through her—only it was sharper, more intense, with him lodged partway inside her. He kept up the circular motion, sipping at her lips, and Lulu soon found herself caught up in this very nice activity that was coaxing her senses towards that blissful rippling pleasure.

  It was only as she softened around him and gave way, and he forged forward inside her, that she realised what he’d done. But it was only a moment’s flashing thought, because his thumb continued to stroke her and her body seemed instinctively to take up the dance, drawing him into her.

  He was coaxing her with husky words to wrap her legs around him, his hands remarkably gentle as he cupped her hips. It was only then that he began to move, with immense restraint, and she knew he was doing this for her. All for her. Her breath stopped in her chest at the sweetness of it.

  His jaw was locked and he was studying her face with an almost unholy intensity.

  ‘Am I hurting you?’

  She shook her head.

  Lulu tried to think, but all she could do was feel. She began to give herself up to the rhythm they were creating together, and as she arched against him his thrusts lengthened. She could hear herself making small sounds, until she cried out and her entire body seemed to release around him.

  His rhythm quickened and he moved inside her with a fierceness he hadn’t shown before, finding his own pleasure. Buried inside her, he shuddered heavily and Lulu was overcome by a sense of utter unity with him. She revelled in the sheer animal heat of their bodies wrapped around one another.