Curiosity was a beast within her, begging for release, thrashing its way through her nervous system. But anxiety caged it.
“Are you okay?” She heard herself ask quietly, all her doubts evident in the single, softly-voiced question.
“Si.”
“Guy?” She moved to stand in front of him, a frown spreading across her face. “What is it?”
His eyes might as well have been cast from ice. “Nothing, querida.” This time, he spat the word at her as though it were venom in his mouth. “What could possibly be bothering me? Not your acting skills, certainly.”
Addie’s brows knit closer together. “You’re pleased with how tonight went?”
“Oh, yes,” the words were filled with anything but pleasure.
“Then why are you behaving like…”
He stared at her for a moment, and her heart skidded in her chest, bumping to a stop. She tried not to focus on the depth of his eyes, eyes that were devouring her, that she wanted to read like a book.
“The ease with which you lie is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
Addie’s frown was just a slight smudge on her face. His words hurt , but she wasn’t offended. She knew nothing about the evening had been a lie – not for her. “Isn’t that why you brought me here?”
“Yes,” he nodded, turning away from her and shrugging out of the jacket he’d worn to dinner. “I just didn’t believe I could think less of you than I already did.” The words were scathing.
Addie’s blood gushed at the indictment. “That’s highly unfair.” She said after a moment’s pause. “You told me I had to give a stunning, realistic performance or else our deal would be off.”
“So I did.” He angled his head, so that she could see his profile. “It certainly makes me see our ‘relationship’ through new eyes.”
“You know that’s different. I wasn’t pretending then.” I’m not pretending now. The words hovered on her tongue, but she didn’t say them. Fear kept them locked inside of her.
“You’ll understand why I find that impossible to believe.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Guy, because that month in London was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. Being with you…”
“Stop,” he spun around to face her, and his chest moved in time with the force of his breathing. His eyes, cold and angry, locked to hers, pinning her to the spot, and tension arced around them, splicing Addie’s nerves in two. She pressed her fingertips into a nearby bench for support, but she didn’t look away. She didn’t move away.
Fear was welling inside of her, but she knew how important it was to make Guy believe her. To speak the truth.
“Guy,”
“Do not talk about the past,” he interrupted warningly. “It is the last thing I wish to discuss.”
“Fine,” Addie murmured, concealing – with difficulty – the frustrations that were slicing through her. She took a step closer, her eyes unflinching as she moved nearer to this impossible brute of a man. “Let’s talk about the present.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, and said nothing. She took this as an invitation to continue. Yes, she was terrified, but fear was no barrier to imperative, and she needed to convey her feelings to Guy. To help him understand.
“You were angry at me when you left London.”
A muscle throbbed at the base of his jaw. “That’s something we have already addressed.”
Addie’s eyes were silently pleading. “Let me finish.” She bit down on her lip for a moment, focusing on his mouth, a mouth that was so beautiful and capable of giving pleasure. “You were angry with me, but I wasn’t angry with you. Not at all.”
“Why should you have been?” He demanded, his nostrils flaring as he examined her with ruthless disinterest.
Addie pretended he hadn’t spoken. “Nothing changed for me, that night. Everything I felt then,” she sucked in a wavering breath, telling herself to be brave, “I feel now, Guy.”
His eyes narrowed, his expression laced with rejection – almost humour. “I’m sure you do.” It was a delayed response, drawled through a jaw that was clamped like a vice.
Addie frowned a little. “I mean it, Guy. I fell in love with you the night we met…”
“Don’t.” The single word hissed from his lips. “Don’t you dare make this about love.”
His anger was like an electrical storm, filling the room with cracks of lightning. “Why not? Why pretend that’s not what I feel…”
“Because pretending is what you do, Ava. You pretend until you’re tied up in knots, not knowing what way is up.”
“No,” somehow she dredged a smile to her lips, but it was awkward and heavy. “You’re wrong about me. I didn’t plan to fall in love that night…”
He made a guttural noise of rejection. “Love? Love?” His hands curved around her arms, pulling her to him, holding her body pressed to his. “We were never love. We were sex and lies.”
His lips shattered whatever she’d been about to say, crashing down to hers, ripping apart her equilibrium as desire took its place, hot and urgent, desperate for acknowledgement. Desperate for release. A noise of fight and surrender burst through her. Surrender to this, but fighting his suggestion that this was all they were.
Her hands lifted to his shirt, pushing at it, too impatient to bother with the buttons. She fumbled one and then ripped, needing to see him and feel him more than she’d known it was possible to feel a need for anyone. She made an exhilarated sound of success when the shirt gave way, opening to reveal his tanned chest, sprinkled with coarse hair that ran down his middle, all the way to his impressive manhood.
Her breath was hot and dry in her mouth; impatience zipped through her. She dropped her lips, kissing his throat, running her tongue along his collarbone, while her hands continued to push at his shirt. He helped, shaking his arms out, freeing himself from its confinement, revealing himself to her so that she could touch all of his torso. His strong, powerful, honed torso.
She ripped her head back, to stare at him, her eyes hungrily devouring the sight of him, something she’d been denied for far too long. God, he was so handsome. So perfect. But his face, oh, how it was filled with derision. With scathing distaste, even as his fingers found the hem of her dress and pushed it up, over her naked body, revealing all of her to his gaze.
Her nipples were taut, her flesh covered in a fine sprinkling of goosebumps, and her knees buckled forward, swaying her to him without her knowledge or consent.
The second her breasts connected with his naked chest, her insides melted away. So too her doubts that this was right. It would always be right with them. Perfect. No matter what words they threw at one another, no matter what he said he felt, bodies didn’t lie, and theirs were as perfectly in-sync as ever.
You were easy to replace in my bed, Addie.
His statement flooded her brain out of nowhere, and she pushed aside the coldness that threatened in the wake of that memory. She didn’t want to think about Guillem – her Guillem - being with anyone else. She didn’t want to imagine that he’d known this blissful pleasure, this soul-deep connection, with another woman. No, he was hers, all hers. This, the intensity of their coming together, was uniquely theirs.
She knew it.
“It was good sex, I’ll admit,” he muttered roughly, reaching for his pants and undoing the button, pushing them down his legs with fiery impatience, bringing his mouth to hers urgently once he was naked, lifting her, wrapping her legs around his waist as he carried her through the yacht.
The moon was high in the sky and its light cut through a window optimistically, carving a line of silver in the middle of the boat. Addie was bathed in it as they crossed.
She didn’t notice.
Her fingers knotted in Guy’s thick hair, luxuriating in every single feeling he sparked inside of her. The closeness of their bodies, the feeling of their mouths dueling, the smell of his skin, the taste of him, the sound of his heart that she could hea
r in her own blood.
Everything.
He backed against the door to his room, fumbling against his side table without breaking their kiss, before dropping her down onto the mattress. He stood then, his eyes glittering as he stared down at her, his face all angles and planes, hardened by a determination Addie couldn’t analyse.
“How can I want you even now?” There was loathing in his voice; loathing for her? For himself? She somehow suspected the latter and a ball of tears gathered in her throat, along with a desperation to relieve him of that pain.
It was all so hard when it should have been simple. So complex and knotty when it should have been straight-forward. She remembered the clarity and perfection that came of their love-making. The sense of complete togetherness and rightness, the certainty that they could take over the world, side by side. She always felt it when he moved inside of her, and that same sense was tantalizingly near now.
He towered over her, close, naked, clearly as desperate for her as she was for him, all of him hard and imposing. There was no denying that his body craved her touch, and she wanted to give him that.
Not just because of the physical ache that was tightening her nipples into taut buds, and slicking her insides with warm heat, but because touching him, kissing him, moving with him, was a way of setting everything to rights within the universe.
She pushed up off the bed, kneeling on its edge, running her fingertips over his chest tentatively at first, as though she no longer had the right to touch him as if he were an object that belonged to her.
His eyes bore into her, but she felt the satisfying snag of his breath, the proof of how her touch affected him, and her lips curled into a small smile, moved by the delicious knowledge that she was doing this to him. That it was her. Them. What they were.
“Make love to me, Guy.” She threw the challenge at him, her eyes slowly lifting to meet his, all her hopes beating within her breast, begging him to be kind to her.
She saw the way something flared in his expression, dark emotions that writhed through him, contorting his masculine beauty for a moment into something else, a hardness and a pain. And then his hands reached down, long, confident fingers curving around her wrists and pushing her hands away, holding them beside her.
Addie’s lungs worked overtime, pushing breath out and sucking it in, in shallow, raspy beats that did little to inflate her body. Her head was spinning.
And then, he was kissing her, his lips a challenge and a torment as they moved over her mouth, pushing her back to the bed, his hands holding her arms wide as his body, so large and heavy, so strong and toned, pressed down on her.
Oh! The pleasing weight of this; she had forgotten that this alone, the sense of safety and security, could curl her toes. Her breathing was no easier when he paused to protect them from any unplanned consequences of this night, a precaution Addie was far too gone to consider. She was glad he had the forethought she lacked, though.
“This was always just sex and lies,” he murmured against the curve of her neck, the words so gentle, like little, fiery emissaries dipped in his bold, Spanish accent, so that she didn’t hear them at first for what they were: ruthless daggers that pierced the fabric of her soul.
“No,” she denied, her head flinging around to face his, her hands lifting to cup him on either side. “You’re lying to yourself if you think that, Guy.”
For a moment, their eyes held, and she hoped – with no reason for hope – that he would believe her. That he would start to listen to the truth of what they were. But then his lips curled in a derisive sneer and he pushed inside of her in one slow, determined thrust. A mark of ownership that was as undeniable as it was perfect. Addie’s moan emerged in a long, slow husk, a sound of total surrender and completion, all wrapped into one.
“Sex,” he withdrew himself before taking her once more. “And lies.”
She whimpered beneath him, but pleasure was a wave, washing over her, removing any of the pain that his insistence should have inspired. She pressed her fingers into his back, holding him, kneading the muscles that ran against his spine, her whole being transformed and relieved by this. How long it had been, and how badly she’d needed him.
She had missed all of him, over the past six months, but she had never realized how much she’d come to depend on this. Having been denied any kind of physical closeness for so long made her particularly reliant on it now, and Guy had answered all her silent, unspoken needs. Her desperation had met its perfect match. For a time. And then he’d gone away again.
She pushed the heartbreak aside. It had no place in the bliss of Guy’s bed, in the midst of what they shared. She lifted her hips, rolling herself closer, a fine bead of perspiration running between her breasts. His raven black head dipped forward, his mouth taking a nipple into his mouth with urgency, his tongue flicking against it in time to his body’s possession of hers, so that a spark of electricity started in her stomach, just a bundle of light and nerves, before radiating through her whole body, pulsing with a white-hot heat that made her breath stretch and her voice quiver.
“Guy,” she cried out, digging her nails into his sides as the electricity moved to her head, to behind her eyes, making her see only bright white lights as momentum built and an explosion locked into place, pressing against her every nerve ending, careening through her body. She said his name over and over and over again, like an incantation that held magic and more. And then, the electricity surged through her with a final, paralyzing intensity, searing her with its power.
She cried out, the words no longer comprehendible, and he pushed harder, his own body racked with the intensity of his relief, his body giving way to the same current that had driven Addie, the same inevitable pull of satisfaction that made them move as they did, in this ancient, spell-binding dance.
The room was filled with the sounds of their breathing, the throb of awareness and the dizzying relief that was surrounding them. It was filling Addie, making her lips smile, her body weak.
And yet, there was awkwardness, too. This wasn’t like before, when there’d been such easy familiarity and comfort. It wasn’t the same as when she’d arrived in his apartment in London, after finishing a night shift, tired but energized by adrenalin and need. Those nights, when he would throw open the door and pull her into his arms, their bodies rasping with the heat and need that had arisen after twelve hours apart.
That had been different.
There’d never been awkwardness afterwards. Addie had never wondered what to say, or how he felt, or what he was thinking. She had been confident, then, that they were on the same page, and it was easy and perfect.
It was hard to know what he was now feeling, but she did know he was withdrawing from her. Physically, mentally, emotionally. In every way, he was putting space and distance between them, his manner completely at odds with the man who’d just dragged her to his room and made her heart soar.
“Well,” he drawled, disposing of the condom in a waste-paper basket before reaching for his pants and pulling them over his long, lean legs. He zipped them up but didn’t do the button, leaving the taut, hair-roughened expanse of his abdomen exposed to her. “That was unexpected.”
He sounded so in control, so scathing! A frown tugged Addie’s lips downward. “Was it?” It hadn’t been for Addie. From the moment she’d arrived at his home in Spain, a month earlier, she’d felt the beginning of the storm building up, pressure increasing, heat building, until this – the breaking – had been inevitable. Addie pushed up on her elbows, uncaring for her nakedness, too distracted by his.
“Still,” he said, already moving towards the door, “There might as well be some silver lining to having you here.”
The words flew across at Addie, stinging her as they landed inside of her, pulling apart the warmth that his love-making had spread through her body. She pushed up to standing, unable to comprehend his sudden shift in demeanour.
Only, it wasn’t sudden. They’d been arguing before.
Sex had come out of that argument. He was still angry with her. So angry.
“Wait,” she murmured, her brain trying to process this, to think of what to say or do. He paused, his hand on the door, but his body was tense, his broad shoulders squared. He didn’t look at her.
“You asked me to come here,” she said softly.
“You asked me for help,” he spun around then, his eyes locking to hers accusingly.
“Yes,” she nodded jerkily. “For help. Not to be blackmailed into pretending to be your girlfriend.”
He glared at her, silently, for a long moment, his expression giving nothing away. He was tense and he was angry. She didn’t know how she was going to crack through the hardness that had overtaken him, but she knew that she had to. “Nothing comes for free, Ava,” he lifted a finger, running it over her cheek, before dropping it to her breast and circling her nipple.
Her traitorous body responded instantly, a shiver of anticipation running down her flesh. It angered her, that he could stir her desire even as he spat derision at her feet.
“At least now I know your price.”
* * *
He stared at the stars with a sinking feeling in his gut. Every blink brought her face to mind. The hurt there. The pain.
And then, the knowledge he’d done that.
Guilt feathered through his body, at the way he’d tormented her. At the way he’d accused her of little more than prostitution when he knew that what they’d just shared had moved her as much as it had him. Damn it! It wasn’t about love, it wasn’t about anything emotional, it was a purely physical lust that had driven them into bed. A lust he should have been able to control!
Only watching her all night, seeing her charm his parents and grandfather, seeing her smile and laugh and lean close to him, knowing that tiny red dress hid a body that was almost naked, tension had stretched between them, and finally snapped.
Claiming his Secret Baby & Blackmailed by The Spaniard Page 28