His voice cracked as he bent his head down to her, his nose brushing hers as he angled a kiss across her lips, before rolling away.
STILL FLOATING, Lara opened her eyes. His bedroom was a monochrome blur, pale walls, dark furniture, a painting on one wall that appeared to be just a splash of red. She turned her head towards the breeze blowing in through three windows that reached the floor, the transparent drapes fluttering and billowing in the breeze.
If she turned her head the other way she’d see Raoul. She could hear him breathing hard, almost as hard as she was.
She turned her head the other way.
Raoul’s eyes were closed, and his chest was lifting as he breathed in and out, the golden skin glistening under a layer of moisture. In profile his face had an austere quality, like a statue. His passion-sated body continued to exert a strong fascination for Lara; the strength, the hardness, the contrast between them was part of that fascination. He was in every way a physical male ideal—her ideal certainly—from his lean musculature to his long limbs.
She had experienced so much with him. For a time they had been two parts of one whole and yet now they were separate—worlds apart.
Lara suddenly felt sad, and she didn’t know why.
He was lying with one arm curved above his head, and without opening his eyes he lowered it. She wanted to hang on to the perfect golden moment but all the questions she didn’t want to think about popped into her head.
What would he say?
What should she say?
The sheet lay in a tangled heap between them. She hooked her toe in it and pulled, and had managed to drag a section halfway up her legs when she realised he was watching her.
‘Are you cold?’ Without waiting for a reply he reached for her, pulling her into his arms.
She lay stiff for a moment and then relaxed against him, tucking her head against his shoulder. Raoul stroked a hand down the smooth curve of her back, enjoying the satiny texture.
He had enjoyed her.
He’d enjoyed many women, he enjoyed sex, but it had been the most erotic experience in his life and she’d been a virgin.
Should he feel bad about that?
If he was honest, the knowledge, when he had realised, had obviously been staggering but had also been a massive turn-on. He supposed it was programmed into male genes, a hangover from less enlightened times, primitive man claiming his mate.
The theory did offer an explanation for the explosive surge of possessiveness he’d experienced when she’d nestled in his arms.
Bleakness filtered into his dark eyes. It would pass—most things did.
Before the dark thought claimed him she moved, snuggling in deeper, a slim arm snaking across his middle to anchor herself. She was half asleep already. Once more he felt a tightening in his chest, something breaking free that came perilously close to tenderness. He watched her eyelids, heavy with lashes that lay on her cheek like butterfly wings—she was sound asleep.
Another situation that he was not used to. Raoul could not remember the last time he’d slept with a woman in his own bed, and as for actually sleeping...that was easy. Never, not once, since the early months of his marriage.
Raoul closed his eyes. He had been functioning on a couple of hours a night since Jamie’s death. It had reached the point where he didn’t want to fall asleep, knowing that he’d relive the moment he found Jamie in his dreams, the images twisted and warped. He’d jerk awake in a cold sweat, the panic in his belly trying to claw its way out.
Tonight he didn’t dream at all, so it was a shock to be woken so abruptly.
Raoul was jolted into wakefulness by an ear-piercing scream. Beside him, Lara was sitting upright, her eyes wide, staring and unfocused. As he raised himself up on his elbow she turned her head and blinked several times.
‘You had a nightmare.’
‘Did I?’ She gave him a wide-eyed-kitten look.
‘You don’t remember?’ He slid an arm over her warm, bare shoulder and pulled her back down.
Raoul looked into the face inches away from his, her glorious hair a wild halo, wide luminous eyes looking back at him, and he experienced a wave of fierce protectiveness that was on several levels more shocking than her scream.
‘You really don’t remember?’
‘No, I never do, it’s a night terror. I thought I’d grown out of them.’
‘Not tonight.’
‘I suppose I should have told you.’
She might have meant the night terrors but he knew she didn’t.
‘It might,’ he agreed, ‘have been an idea.’
‘You...it was...thank you.’ She was back on earth, not floating two feet above it, but Lara couldn’t help wonder if it was the same earth...or she the same person.
There you go again, Lara—dramatising. It was sex, not an entry into an alternative dimension. People did it every day.
Of their own volition her eyes slid down his body; the light duvet that now covered them both reached his narrow hips, revealing the golden-toned skin of his flat, ridged belly and broad, powerful chest and shoulders.
The earthy image made her shudder. Her stomach muscles clenched, a stronger version of the delicious little aftershocks that had come in the wake of the crashing release.
‘I know a good cure for insomnia.’ And the darkness in his heart, which he felt receding.
She flashed a mock-innocent smile while inside her heart was hammering wildly. For the first time in her life she understood why people did crazy things for sex. ‘A glass of milk?’
Her smile made him hot. ‘You taste more of strawberries and cream.’ His mouth remaining a fraction of an inch from hers, he whispered throatily, ‘I want to touch you all over this time.’ He feathered a kiss across her parted lips. ‘Taste you.’
She gave a little whimper and whispered, ‘Please.’
It was a plea she made several times during the next hour, as he took her to the brink several times before he finally let her fall over the edge with him.
Utterly drained, but more at peace than he had felt in a week, no, a lot, lot longer, he barely had the strength to roll off her before sleep claimed him. It took Lara a long time to come down from the high she was floating on, and when she did her sleep was shallow and disturbed.
* * *
He woke up to the sound of the shower in the adjoining bathroom. He had barely managed to groggily lever himself into a sitting position and drag a hand through his hair when she appeared.
