by Various
He wanted to say, You know damned well why not. But he didn’t. Because once you openly acknowledged sexual attraction, it became almost impossible to resist. He wanted to tell her to stop looking at him as if butter wouldn’t melt in those luscious lips of hers—because he knew that was simply an illusion. Yet their soft petal shape was putting him in danger, making him forget the conflict of interests raging within him.
‘Because maybe you’ve learned a lesson after all,’ he said. ‘That you have to confront your demons in order to get rid of them, and that running away doesn’t solve anything.’
Reality hit her with a harsh jerk. ‘You’re thinking about those rules,’ she said slowly.
‘Sí. The rules—and your father’s wish that you learn the importance of commitment. I hope you have.’ His voice hardened as he told himself that she was no longer his responsibility. ‘But that is up to you, Kat. If you want to spend your life running away, then so be it, but I am no longer willing to be your enforcer. Not any more. I will order the crew to set sail for shore and as soon as we reach dry land in the morning—I can arrange to have you flown back to London.’ His eyes narrowed in question. ‘Unless there’s somewhere else you’d prefer to go? France, maybe? Or perhaps the States?’
Kat swallowed. He was giving her back her liberty—but never had freedom seemed to mock her quite so much. She thought about how nomadic and pointless he made her life seem. The little rich girl with no real place to go—who could just choose where she wanted to flit around the globe, like someone idly stabbing a pin into a map.
She looked into those cold black eyes of his and suddenly a wave of longing washed over her—because didn’t the cloak of darkness liberate her from convention? She didn’t want to go and she didn’t want to leave him—it was as simple as that. At least, not before she had sampled some of his magic. A taste of the sensual promise which radiated like an aura from his powerful frame, and which had ensnared her from the beginning.
She knew it was probably wrong and almost certainly foolish—because what if he pushed her away yet again? But Kat couldn’t help herself. He had ignited a flame in her and she wanted Carlos Guerrero with a hunger she’d never experienced before. And maybe never would again.
She found herself wondering if a woman could just come out and tell a man that she wanted him. And wasn’t it crazy that at the ripe old age of twenty-two, she didn’t have a clue?
‘Let’s not talk about it now,’ she whispered, and snuggled into the warmth of his bare torso.
Uncomfortably, Carlos shifted again—because now her appeal was growing by the minute, and acquiring all kinds of different dimensions on the way. Like a neglected kitten that had been brought inside and given food and shelter, she was looking up at him with something in her eyes which looked uncomfortably like trust.
He wanted to tell her not to trust him, that he never gave enough of himself to a woman to warrant such trust. But he knew from experience that even opening up a topic like that made women brighten. It made them think they were getting close to you. And there was only one way he wanted to get close to Kat Balfour…and no way was he going to give into it…
So why was his hand drifting down from her shoulder to her slender waist, the slick movement of his wrist bringing her soft body even closer? Like a drowning man he fought for control—a steely control and self-will which had always come as naturally to him as breathing. And to his fury and despair, he felt it slipping away from him.
‘Kat…’
‘Mmm?’ All she was doing was whispering her lips against the line of his jaw and there wasn’t anything so very wrong in that, was there? Not when he felt and smelt so warm and so vital.
‘Kat.’ Carlos swallowed, because the ability to speak coherently seemed suddenly to have deserted him. He felt his body tense with a sudden sense of urgency. ‘If I don’t get off this damn bed in a minute, I’m going to do something…something I’ll regret.’
‘Something like what?’
Just then she lifted her face to his, and the moment he felt her warm breath against his skin, Carlos knew that it was too late. ‘Something like…this.’
Feeling the last of his self-control desert him, he pulled her against his hard and hungry body. And with a small, angry curse, he began to plunder her lips with a hunger which now seemed unstoppable.
Chapter Eight
‘OH!’ KAT squirmed with pleasure as every fantasy she’d ever had about Carlos began to come true. She was in bed with the black-eyed Spaniard and he was kissing her—kissing her with the kind of passion she had somehow known existed, even if she’d never experienced it before. And somehow it didn’t surprise her a bit to realise that she’d found it, with him.
‘Oh!’ Moaning softly, her body jerked in disbelieving reaction as he captured her breast, his fingers playing with one pert nipple which peaked against her cotton pyjama top. Sharp sensations of pleasure shot across its tightened bud and she could feel it begin to flower beneath his expert caress. Words slipped straight from her mouth and into his. ‘Oh. That’s…gorgeous.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’ he growled.
Now the hand had slipped beneath the thin cotton top and made contact with the naked flesh there and she shuddered at that first intimate contact with her skin. ‘C-Carlos!’ she gasped.
‘You want more?’
Breath drying in her throat, she nodded.
‘How much more?’
‘I—’
‘This much?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes.’
Trailing his hand down, he let it skate over the warmth of her belly and down beyond that to the faint fuzz of hair to where she was warmer still. Slicking his fingertips with soft precision to delve into her honeyed heat, he felt her buck beneath his touch.
‘Carlos!’ she gasped again.
Oh, but she was responsive—instantly and gratifyingly so—yet Carlos was a little taken aback by her unashamed hunger. Hadn’t he expected her appetite to be jaded, as befitted a woman who must have enjoyed sex time and time and again? But instead she seemed almost wondrous…with a sense of near awe in her bright eyes as she cupped his face and kissed him back so passionately. Who would have thought it?
With the sleight of wrist which had made him so masterful in the ring, Carlos skimmed the little top up over her head and tossed it to the floor. Then he tugged at the matching bottoms, peeling them down over her hips before sliding them off completely. And, oh, she was beautiful—her body a creamy cascade of inviting curves and enticing shadows. ‘Mía bella,’ he ground out unsteadily, as he caught hold of her fingers.
Her breath gasped against his neck as he guided her hand to the hard ridge at his groin, clearly discernable even through the thick denim of his jeans. ‘C-Carlos,’ she stumbled, her cheeks growing hot at this very physical evidence of how much he wanted her.
‘I think I’m a little overdressed, don’t you, Princesa?’ he questioned unsteadily.
‘Y-yes.’ She should have been scared, but strangely enough fear was the last thing she was feeling as she heard the sound of his zip rasping down.
He moved away from her to remove the jeans from his aching flesh—and then he was naked and so was she, and Carlos could never remember feeling so hard and hot and hungry before. Because this was forbidden? he wondered fleetingly as he stroked his fingertips over her silken skin. He didn’t know—and right then, he didn’t care.
With one sure, swift movement, he moved on top of her and thought how light and how slender her body felt beneath his. ‘Now,’ he said huskily. ‘Where shall I begin, mía princesa?’
‘Anywhere,’ she whispered, praying that he wouldn’t expect her to take some sort of lead. To perform any kind of erotic act with him. The kind she’d heard her more experienced friends talk about. ‘Anywhere you like.’
His mouth was at her throat as his hand moved down to the silken surface of her thighs, feeling them part beneath the soft insistence of his touch. He kissed her for a
n age, tempering his own hunger as he felt her melt into ever more willing compliancy. He touched her in places which made her moan, until he felt the restless urging of her body—and only then did he allow his own hunger to spiral up inside him. Technique and restraint were forgotten as he found himself compelled by a primitive urge to fill this woman, and for a moment he tensed, before driving into her body with what felt like the most powerful thrust of his life.
‘Ah!’
A small sound was torn from her lips. A sound he’d never heard before. Feeling her flinch beneath that first exquisite thrust, Carlos lifted his head to see the briefest twist of discomfort cross her beautiful features. He stilled, his heart wrenching as he wrestled to take in the unbelievable implications of her reaction. ‘Kat?’ he questioned in disbelief.
Her eyes snapped open but she could read nothing in the dark, shuttered features, and suddenly Kat didn’t want him to say the words out loud. Didn’t want questions or explanations. Didn’t want him to do anything but to carry on. The pain had passed now and she wanted it—she wanted him—just the way she’d always wanted him.
‘Please,’ she whispered, her voice slurred with the pleasure of feeling him inside her—and a thought flew into her mind before she could stop it. That this was what her body had been made for. To have Carlos Guerrero’s joined so intimately with hers. That this was exactly where she was supposed to be—and her heart turned over with longing. ‘Make love to me.’
If Carlos hadn’t been deep inside her, he might have objected to her choice of words—for what did this have to do with love? If her tight, virginal hotness hadn’t been clamped around him in the most delicious way he could ever recall, he might even have had the strength to pull away from her.
But it was too late for that. Her innocence had been taken—unwittingly—by him. He couldn’t undo what had already been done, so why not make the most of it?
His own hunger now put on hold, Carlos proceeded to employ every pleasurable technique he had ever learnt in the arms of a woman. And there were plenty of those. He knew that virgins notoriously had a disappointing introduction to sex and rarely orgasmed. Well, not this one. Oh, no. Miss Kat Balfour may have sprung on him the biggest surprise of all, but she would leave his bed knowing real pleasure.
He teased her and played with her. Withdrawing from her so that she gasped aloud with instinctive alarm that he wasn’t going to continue. As if he would stop now! First tantalising her with the tip of his manhood as she gave breathless little moans of pleasure, he then drove deep inside her, so that the moans became gasps of pure joy.
He did it to her slow. Then fast. And just about every variation in between. And when he felt her pleasure begin to build to an unstoppable peak, he watched her. Felt her. Enjoyed the exquisite sensation as she spasmed around him. Saw her lips part and her back arch—and the corresponding rosy flush which bloomed all over her breasts. Heard the way she gasped his name.
Only then did he let go, allowing his own orgasm to wash over him with bittersweet waves which had never seemed quite so intense nor so long-lasting.
His body was still shuddering as he withdrew from her, taking a moment to steady his breath before turning to look at her, where she was lying back against the bank of pillows, her body looking completely relaxed and satiated but her eyes wary, and watchful. But not nearly as wary as him.
Because Kat Balfour had just detonated his image of her as a sexually experienced party animal and blown it clean out of the water. It had thrown him off balance—unsettled him—and Carlos didn’t do unsettled. After sex he was used to turning over and going to sleep—not lying there as feelings of disbelief and anger began to build up inside him. Propping himself up on one elbow, he surveyed her flushed face and kiss-bruised lips.
‘So,’ he drawled. ‘Am I supposed to be flattered?’
There was an odd, fraught silence as his question echoed round the cabin and Kat found herself feeling lost, the dying waves of her first-ever orgasm now muddied by the mocking tone of his words. A sudden chill iced her skin. His beautiful golden-olive body was sprawled naked amid the rumpled bedclothes and it should have felt perfect. But the expression on his face drove home the cold-blooded nature of his question, leaving her wondering what she could possibly say in response. Because wouldn’t a lie or an evasion only sound hollow?
Play it as cool as he is, she told herself, even though her heart felt as raw as her newly awoken senses.
‘Flattered?’ she answered softly. ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
Black eyes iced into her. ‘But that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? If there was any telling to be done, then it should have been you. Telling me.’ He gave a short and disbelieving laugh, saying the words aloud in some vain hope that she might deny them. ‘That you’d never had sex with a man before.’
Kat swallowed. He made her virtue sound like a moral offence! But still she was determined to keep calm. She tried for her best light, cocktail-party tone. ‘Is that how it’s usually done, then—some kind of confession from the woman before it all begins?’
His face darkened. ‘I wouldn’t know, since you’re the first virgin I’ve ever had.’
She tried to be flip. ‘And did you like it?’
‘Of course I liked it!’ he bit out. ‘It just might have been better if you’d warned me.’
Warned him? You warned people about ice on the road or about high winds at sea, but surely it was the wrong word to use when talking about the fact that a woman was completely innocent of men. Suddenly, faced by the censure which blazed from his eyes, Kat found the shaming words slipping from her lips, as if trying to offer him some kind of explanation. ‘I thought…I thought it might spoil the mood.’
There was a pause. ‘Damn right it would have done.’ In fact, it would have spoilt the mood so completely that he would have dragged himself from her cabin—no matter how hot and how aching he’d been—and spent a night in bed alone with his frustration.
But instead…Instead, he had taken the sweet, curvaceous body she had offered him so willingly. Had entered her with a fierce hunger of his own and discovered that he was thrusting into hot virgin tightness. Carlos winced, for he was macho enough and old-fashioned enough to acknowledge virginity as sacred territory. And somehow he felt as if she’d tricked him into taking her. The protectiveness he had been feeling towards her after her nightmare had somehow been warped by what had just happened. As if she had cast some dark net over him and dragged him forcibly into her inner life—a place he had no desire to be.
And now…What the hell did he do now?
‘Madre de Dios, I can scarcely believe it,’ he exclaimed softly. ‘You always look like you…’
Kat’s heart missed a beat. ‘Like I what, Carlos?’
He shrugged but didn’t falter. ‘Well, let’s face it—you hardly dress or act like an innocent, do you?’
It hurt—and yet it was true, wasn’t it? Apart from these past few days, she always dressed in haute couture—and sometimes those clothes were very provocative. Kat now saw that she might be guilty of sending out the wrong message entirely. And coupled with the way she’d come onto him at last year’s Balfour Ball, who could blame him for thinking that she was a woman of the world, with many lovers in her past?
‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ she said quietly.
So could women, he thought bitterly. ‘You should have told me.’
‘And if I had?’
‘I would never have done it, Princesa’.
‘Maybe that’s why I didn’t.’
‘So why?’ His words were soft now. ‘I mean, why me?’
She wanted to laugh. Was he serious? Possible explanations buzzed around in her head. She could tell him the truth. That he had enchanted her from the moment she’d laid eyes on him—and that on some subliminal level she’d always wanted him. Or would that inflate his already swollen ego? Fill him with fear that she might now demand some kind of commitment from him? Of course it wou
ld! Women always wanted Carlos—he had told her that himself—and she was no different from any of the others who had shared his bed. Just because she’d willingly given him her virginity wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—make a difference.
So she must show him. Show that she wasn’t going to become needy or dependent. Wasn’t going to fall in love with him. She wasn’t.
Raking her hand back through her tousled hair, she shrugged, as if she’d given the question some thought. ‘Well, you do have a bit of a reputation, Carlos.’
‘Really?’ he questioned silkily. ‘Pray, enlighten me, querida. What kind of a reputation is that?’
‘You’re known in certain circles as a lover par excellence. And let’s just say that I decided that it was time to lose my innocence.’ Deliberately, she injected a nonchalant note into her voice. ‘Virginity can become such a burden after a while. I wanted a lover and I wanted the best—and you, it seems, fitted the bill very nicely.’
He had never heard anything so outrageous in his life—and for a moment her sheer audacity took his breath away. But then the truth behind her words began to nag at him, like a rogue grain of sand which rubbed insistently at the skin. Because this was a scenario with which he was all too familiar. When he’d been a young matador, born on the wrong side of the tracks, rich and predatory women had made no secret of their desire to be possessed by his hard, powerful body.
And yet, hadn’t she now made it easy for him? Easy for him to just give her one more taste of pleasure and then tell her that it wasn’t going to happen again.
‘Like a common stud, you mean?’ he demanded hotly. ‘A little bit of rough for the princesa?’
The accusation was angry and harsh, and completely at odds with what his hands were doing—for one was cupping her breast and feeling the nipple spring to instant life again beneath his questing fingers. While the other…