by Sarah Morgan
With a soft curse he curled his fingers round both her wrists, clearly intending to remove her arms from his neck, but then he seemed to think better of it, his hands sliding down her body and settling in the centre of her back. ‘A better man than I would probably stop you, but I’m not that man.’ He hauled her roughly against him and there was a fire in his eyes hot enough to burn both of them. Suddenly she found that she could hardly breathe.
‘I’m glad you’re not that man.’
His mouth hovered tantalisingly close to hers. ‘I’m not a good person.’
‘You’re the only person I want.’ And she wanted him now. She wanted him so badly that she was afraid her entire body might melt under the intense heat of her sexual longing. ‘Can’t you feel it?’
He hesitated for a moment longer and then, with a low growl, he brought his mouth down on hers.
Intoxicating excitement immediately engulfed her and she clutched at his shoulders, knowing that without the support of his firm hands holding her she would certainly fall.
He drove her backwards with his powerful frame, until she felt the edge of his desk pressing against the backs of her thighs.
In a decisive movement he lifted her, pushing her thighs apart and then sliding his hands over the curve of her bottom with a groan of masculine appreciation. His mouth devoured hers and he yanked her against him so that her soft feminine core was pressed against the hard ridge of his manhood.
Shockingly aroused and unaware of anything except the touch of his hands and the erotic slide of his tongue in her mouth, she reached for his shirt, ripping at the buttons in her attempt to get closer to him. His shirt fell open and her fingers encountered silky male chest hair and hard male muscle.
And then his hand was between her thighs, and his clever, seeking fingers dispensed with the totally inadequate barrier of her panties and slid into the hot, moist warmth that awaited him.
Grace felt her body explode in an instantaneous reaction that was as shocking as it was powerful and she cried out his name as her body pulsed around the determined stroke of his fingers. But somehow that glorious release didn’t give her the satisfaction that her body craved and she moaned in desperation, her trembling hands reaching urgently for the zip of his trousers.
Without lifting his mouth from hers, he covered her hand with his, speeding the task, and she gave a soft whimper as she felt the velvety brush of his arousal against her inner thigh.
He pushed up her thighs, positioned her to his satisfaction and then thrust hard into her sweet, welcoming warmth.
Excitement rocketed to unbearable proportions and he drove into her again and again with almost explosive force. She strained against him, completely swept away by his primal possession, his ferocious sexual hunger, and then her body erupted in a climax so intense that for a moment she lost all sense of time.
As the world splintered around her, she heard him mutter something harsh against her neck, felt his hands anchoring her hips, and then he powered into her for a final time, his fingers digging hard into the curve of her bottom as he reached his own completion and his body emptied itself into hers.
CHAPTER NINE
SHATTERED and stunned, Rafael steadied his breathing and gradually became aware of his surroundings. His face was still buried in her neck and the sweet, tempting scent of her hair and skin teased his senses and created a dull haze over his usually acute brain.
Forced to acknowledge that he couldn’t concentrate on anything at all when she was this close, he reluctantly moved his hands from her hips.
Without his hands supporting her she flopped forward, her head against his chest, her blonde hair soft and tangled. Her breathing was unsteady and she rubbed her fingers over his chest and gently pressed her lips to his skin.
The affectionate gesture took him by surprise and for endless seconds Rafael stood still, his hands suspended in the air while he decided what to do with them. What he wanted to do was to drag her back into his arms and just hug her, and the impulse shocked and spooked him because he’d never before felt a desire to express affection following sex.
Reminding himself that gestures of affection could easily be misconstrued, he gritted his teeth and let his hands fall to his sides. So far he’d been entirely honest with her, and that wasn’t going to change.
But something had changed, hadn’t it?
Since when had he ever been tempted to have sex with a woman on his desk in his glass office?
No one would have described the encounter as romantic. Hot, yes. Sizzling, yes. Incredibly powerful, definitely. But it had been a primitive act of lust that had bordered on the sordid and if there was one thing that Grace Thacker definitely didn’t deserve, it was sordid.
Gritting his teeth to resist the temptation to sample her for a second time, Rafael gently eased away from her and made some rapid adjustments to their clothing.
For a moment she didn’t speak. And then she slid off the desk cautiously, as if she wasn’t entirely sure that her legs were going to support her.
‘There are things we need to sort out.’ His voice was rough and he thought he saw her flinch slightly when she lifted her head to look at him.
‘Absolutely.’ Her voice was unsteady and her smile was a little too bright. ‘I should be going.’
‘Going?’ His dark brows met in a frown. ‘Going where?’
‘Home, of course.’ She slipped her feet into her shoes, which had somehow become dislodged from her feet during their frantic encounter. ‘I have things to work out. And you need to get on with your life.’
He stared at her with blank incredulity. ‘That’s it? We have phenomenal sex and you just walk out on me?’
She smoothed her dress with hands that shook. ‘I thought that was what you wanted, Rafael. No commitment.’
In the grip of an escalating tension that he didn’t entirely understand, Rafael strode across to her. ‘There’s no way I’m letting you go,’ her look of astonishment matched his own feelings and he quickly added, ‘yet. I mean, I’m not letting you go, yet.’ Eventually, yes, of course.
Her eyes lingered on his mouth and then she looked away. ‘I have to go home. You know I do. I have a million things to sort out.’
‘What things?’ What could possibly take priority over him?
‘How can you ask me that? My life is in crisis. My business is going under and my own father has cheated me. I need to confront him about it and then I need to find someone to help me make sense of the figures …’ The dark shadows under her eyes and the unmistakable shake in her voice racked his already soaring tension levels several notches higher. Surveying her slim, delicate frame, he felt a burst of almost volcanic anger at her father for causing her pain.
‘You’re not dealing with this on your own.’
‘It’s fine. Really. I’m tougher than I look.’
His eyes raked her pale features with no small degree of irony. ‘I sincerely hope so,’ he said with sardonic bite, ‘because you look as though you’d be blown over by a small gust of wind. If I hadn’t actually seen you in action in the jungle I’d think that you were fragile.’
‘I’m not fragile, Rafael. I think I’ve proved that to you.’ Her eyes met his boldly and he knew that she was remembering the rampant, almost aggressive nature of their last steamy encounter.
For a brief, disconcerting moment he wondered whether he’d hurt her but the look shimmering in her blue eyes assured him of the opposite and, remembering her soft cries, urging him on, he knew that she’d been as desperate as him.
‘Maybe not fragile, but how do you intend to deal with your father?’
‘I don’t know yet. I have a long flight ahead. That should give me time to think about it.’
He frowned. ‘You have no idea who in your company you can trust.’
‘That’s right.’ She gave a shrug. ‘I’ll just have to develop a suspicious nature as fast as possible.’
‘We both know you don’t have a suspicious bone
in your body. You trust everyone,‘ Rafael growled, just appalled by the thought that someone else might still take advantage of her. Driven as he was by emotions that he didn’t even bother trying to understand, it suddenly became imperative that she stayed, but she was shaking her head.
‘This time I’ll employ a stranger. Someone with good references.’
The thought of a total stranger sitting across a desk from her, giving her advice that might be completely useless, made him cold. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Stay here with me and I’ll help you with your finances. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s the perfect solution.’ Satisfied that he was now back in control, he was more than a little disconcerted to see her shake her head again.
‘No. Definitely not. I don’t need your help.’
He looked at her with naked incredulity. ‘You’re refusing me?’
She flushed slightly. ‘I can do it by myself. I don’t need your help.’
‘Offhand I can’t think of anyone who needs it more.’
She lifted her chin and he saw the flash of determination in her eyes. ‘I need to do it by myself. I should do it by myself. And anyway, why would you be able to do a better job than me?’
‘Because I have extensive experience with liars and cheats and you have none,’ he slotted in helpfully, wondering why they were even having this conversation. ‘It’s perfectly obvious that I should help you.’
‘It’s not obvious to me.’ There was a stubborn note in his voice and he decided that perhaps she simply hadn’t understood him correctly.
‘Let me just spell out what I’m trying to say here. I’m proposing to give you all the money you could possibly need to keep your business solvent, straighten up your accounts and then appoint someone from my team to look after your finances from now on.’
‘That’s very generous of you.’
Confident that he was now in familiar territory, he smiled. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
‘But I don’t want you to do it.’
The smile froze on his face. ‘You don’t?’
‘No.’ She frowned thoughtfully. ‘Well, actually I’d be silly to turn down the offer of someone from your team to help me in the future because at least then I know that I have someone I can trust, so yes to that, thank you, but I don’t want anything else from you.’
‘I’m offering you money.’
‘I know. I don’t want your money. And I’m sure you have better things to do with your time than help me understand the figures. You’d find it horribly frustrating.’
Never having encountered a woman who didn’t want money from him, Rafael found himself at a loss. ‘I want to help you,’ he said quickly, surprised to find that he actually did. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone taking advantage of her. ‘In order to shift your father from the business you’re going to need your facts straight.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’ She bit her lip and looked at him. ‘You’d help me with the figures? Really? But you must be horribly busy with your own business. You’re always glued to your computer screen.’
‘My work isn’t particularly demanding at the moment,’ he lied swiftly, ‘so I’d be more than happy to go through your accounts with you.’ And he’d make sure that she took his money, too, although he was prepared to postpone the inevitable argument about that subject.
‘I’m infuriating to teach. I’m terrible with numbers.’
Unable to conceive of a single situation in which he’d find her infuriating, Rafael shrugged dismissively. ‘I’m brilliant with numbers, so that’s fine. Although you’ll have to tell me the best way to go through them so that you understand what I’m saying.’
‘Oh.’ Her cheeks were pink. ‘My father never cared whether I understood or not. He just told me the figures.’
‘And they were the wrong ones.’ Resisting the temptation to punch his fist through something to relieve his mounting tension, Rafael urged her towards the table that only moments earlier had been the scene of their passionate encounter. ‘Sit down. I’m going to teach you to handle numbers.’
She hesitated. ‘My flight leaves Rio in four hours.’
‘You won’t be on it,’ he informed her immediately. ‘I don’t want you to leave.’
She gave a faint smile. ‘Because the sex between us is so amazing?’
Her honesty surprised him. ‘That’s one reason, yes,’ Rafael replied with an equal amount of honesty. ‘But I also don’t want to see your father get away with stripping money from your company.’
‘No.’ Her eyes lingered on his, warm and admiring. ‘Of course you don’t. You care a great deal about Carlos and Filomena.’
Rafael found himself so captivated by the look of approval in her amazing blue eyes that for a moment he didn’t answer. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Carlos and Filomena.’
‘You really love them and they love you, too, I could see that instantly. I’m so sorry they’ve been hurt because of me.’ There was a choked note to her voice that halted the instinctive denial that her mention of love had brought rushing to his lips.
She wasn’t going to cry, was she?
So far she held the record for being the only female never to resort to feminine tantrums while in his company.
And, considering everything she’d been through in the past forty-eight hours, he was more and more astonished by her composure.
‘I’m very fond of them, that’s certainly true, and you don’t need to worry about it any more because it will all be sorted out,’ he told her hastily. ‘And when it’s time to leave you can use one of my private jets.’ But as he focused on the tiny dimple that played alongside the corner of her mouth, he promised himself that it wasn’t going to be any time soon.
‘It’s incredibly kind of you to help me.’
‘Not kind,’ he said immediately, frowning slightly as he corrected her altogether inaccurate description of him. ‘I have all sorts of thoroughly selfish reasons for keeping you here.’
‘Like sex?’ The sudden flare of heat in her eyes astonished him.
‘That’s certainly part of it.’
She gave a soft smile. ‘Yes. The sex is pretty amazing.’
Stunned by her direct approach, and feeling an uncomfortable flare of lust, Rafael ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Let’s get on with these numbers while I’m still able to concentrate.’
Three hours later Grace sat back in her chair and let out a long breath. ‘Well.’ She smiled at him. ‘You’re right about one thing. You are brilliant at numbers. And you’re brilliant at teaching.’
For the first time in her life after a session on finance, her head wasn’t bursting and her brain wasn’t twisting itself into knots. Nor did she feel like a complete failure.
Rafael put down the red pen he’d been using to illustrate a certain point. ‘I can see how hard it is for you and that makes the whole thing even more amazing.’
‘What’s amazing?’
He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. His hair gleamed blue-black in the late-evening sun and the usual chill in his eyes had been replaced by something significantly warmer. ‘The fact that you’ve managed to run a successful business despite your problems with numbers. I’m staggered. And impressed.’
‘How can you say that? I didn’t make you a profit and, because of me, Carlos and Filomena lost money.’
The chill was back in his eyes. ‘Not because of you, but the people around you.’ The dark frown cleared from his brow. ‘But that’s history. From now on your advisors are going to be hand-picked by me.’ He glanced back at her company accounts and flicked through the pages with a disbelieving shake of his head. ‘Your takings in the cafés are amazing. If your father hadn’t been draining the money away you would have had a hugely profitable business.’
She couldn’t resist teasing him. ‘Would I have made you rich?’
He glanced up, a strange expression on his handsome face. �
��If I had more people like you working for me then my life would be a great deal simpler, meu amorzinho. How do you manage to keep the cafés so busy?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m good at ideas. I’m hopeless at financial detail and probably always will be, but I see the bigger picture. I know what people want and what is likely to work. I was good at pulling in the customers.’
‘Don’t put it in the past tense.’ He dropped the accounts onto the table and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘How would you feel about extending Café Brazil?’
Her eyes widened. ‘You mean across the country?’
‘Actually I meant across the world,’ he said drily, the faint smile that touched his mouth telling her how amused he was by her provincial ambitions. ‘I think it’s an idea that could become a global phenomenon.’
‘There are already lots of very successful chains of coffee shops.’
‘True, but none of them have you at the helm. You have an astonishing flare for innovation.’
She couldn’t prevent the warm glow of happiness that suddenly filled her. ‘You’ve just spent hours going through numbers with me and yet you still make me sound like an asset, not a hindrance.’
He looked at her with ill-concealed impatience. ‘You are an asset. Forget the numbers. Adding up the numbers is the easy bit—anyone trained in accountancy can do that.’ The dismissive wave of his hand told her everything she needed to know on his opinion of accountants. ‘The hard bit is coming up with the business idea and making it work. Making it original. And you’ve done that.’
‘But I’m very hands-on. I mean,’ she bit her lip, trying not to be daunted by the fact that she was discussing her small business with a billionaire who made more money in an hour than she would in a lifetime, ‘I know everyone working in all the cafés and we all meet up regularly. I can’t imagine handling anything bigger.’
‘And if you turned your business into a global enterprise then you wouldn’t have time to linger in the rainforest with me.’ He gave her a wolfish smile and she felt her heart perform a frantic dance in her chest. ‘No, meu amorzinho, you’re right. That’s not a good plan. If we go global, then I’ll do it for you.’