silky underwear in rainbow colours to slide to the floor. He hooked a provocative thong and swung it on his finger.
‘Do you mind? I spent...ooh!’
She landed with a throaty giggle on his lap. Framing her face, he kissed her deeply. When he finally drew back she laid her face on his shoulder, inhaling the warm scent of his skin as she looped her arms around his neck.
She focused on the moment and felt happy, though not totally relaxed. If she did that she might fall off the emotional tightrope that she’d been walking for the last few months. It was simply a matter of focusing on what she had, not on what she longed for. So long as she didn’t expect too much, this could work.
And she had a lot to be thankful for: the baby growing inside her, the anticipation of motherhood, which she had never expected to feel so right.
‘I need to finish packing.’
Raoul let her disentangle herself and lay back, hands behind his head, watching her finish her packing.
‘Won’t your mother and sister be hurt you haven’t told them until now?’ He had fallen in with Lara’s decision to keep her pregnancy a secret from everyone including her family, actually especially her family, despite the fact it had always made him uneasy.
He still didn’t understand it.
He felt the bed give slightly and heard her troubled little hitch of breath as she climbed onto it beside him. She tucked her feet under her as she adopted a kneeling position, looking down on him with her hair falling in a glorious fiery cloud around her face.
‘I told you, I’m not ashamed.’ She brushed her lips over his then, anchoring her hair with her forearm, and added, ‘But I’m not the only one having a baby. Lily is pregnant.’ Her sister’s due date was approaching fast.
‘Then surely that gives you something else in common.’ Beyond the fact they were virtually identical to look at. It still bewildered him how his reaction to two women with the same face and body could be so totally different. One made him yawn...no, that wasn’t fair, or even strictly true.
Lara’s twin sister was not boring, she simply wasn’t Lara, who ignited an insatiable desire in him that seemed to bypass every logic circuit.
His feelings for her might go deeper than desire? He pushed away the question, knowing that there was a limit to how many times it would go away unanswered.
How long could he keep dodging the issue?
Was he going to allow Lucy’s poison to reach out from the grave and infect his future?
He closed down the internal dialogue—things were all right, better than all right, as they were. Why meddle with something that was working?
‘Lily is facing being a single parent. Her situation couldn’t be more different than mine and I don’t want to make her feel—’
Raoul looped a hand casually around the back of her head, rubbing a caressing thumb across the angle of her jaw. He drew her down, pressing a hard, hungry kiss to her lips.
‘You’re a good sister.’ He landed a kiss on the tip of her nose as she pulled away. Shaking her hair back, she laughed, a hard little sound that drew a frown from Raoul.
‘Care to share the joke?’
‘I’m not the good twin, that’s Lily.’
She turned her head sharply, causing her hair to fall in a concealing curtain across her face. That she didn’t want to make Lily feel bad had been true and it still was, but the real reason Lara was delaying the moment was not to spare her twin’s feeling but her own.
They definitely weren’t the type of twins that had some kind of psychic bond, it was just that her sister had the ability to instinctively ask the right questions—all the questions Lara was avoiding. She knew the conversation was inevitable but it was one she wasn’t ready to have, or she hadn’t been until now.
At the wedding she had kept Lily at arm’s length for that very reason. She had known that Lily had been hurt but she also knew that her sister would never understand what she was doing... Who would?
She’d gone away to lose her virginity with one man and ended up falling in love and marrying another, and in the end neither man had loved her even the slightest bit.
Her hungry emerald stare shielded by a heavy fringe of lashes moved over her husband. There was bewilderment mingled in with the need and love that swept over her in a tidal wave of emotion.
The truth, or rather the public lie their relationship was based on, never went away, but there were some days when it remained a whisper in the back of her mind.
Admitting to her twin that their marriage had been a lie from the beginning and the only reason they were together was the baby would turn that whisper into a shout.
And she couldn’t bear the thought of Lily looking at her with pity.
Her words were more revealing than she knew. Raoul felt a slug of anger and an image flashed into his head of a younger, more vulnerable Lara being asked why she wasn’t more like her sister.
‘Just because you’ve been assigned a role,’ he roughed out softly, ‘doesn’t mean you have to live up to it.’
Her startled eyes flew to his face. ‘Nobody ever did that.’ There was defensiveness in the tilt of her chin as she tucked her hair behind her ears.
He angled a sceptical brow. ‘I’m not saying it was deliberate.’ He tried a different tack. ‘Has it occurred to you that you’re not so wild and she’s not so sensible? Just that you’re very different people?’ He didn’t want to encourage his Lara to compare herself to her twin all the time.
His...?
The possessive trend of his thoughts made him tense. A figure of speech, soothed the voice in his head. And what man with an honest breath in his body wouldn’t like the idea of Lara being exclusively his?
‘You think I’m not so wild?’
Her teasing was rewarded with a lustful growl. He curved a possessive hand across the back of her head and she went with it, allowing her body to fall across him as his mouth moved across hers in a slow, seductive kiss.
Several minutes later she sat back, pink-cheeked and dishevelled. ‘I have to finish my packing.’
‘What’s stopping you?’ he asked innocently.
Ten minutes later she clicked closed the lock on her overnight bag and gave a last glance around the room.
‘I’ll go tell Vincenzo we’re ready—finally.’ He huffed an irritated curse, fished out his phone and, glancing at the caller ID, signalled to Lara to go ahead.
By the time he had joined her she was already ensconced in the back seat of the limo. Raoul slung the case in the open boot and nodded to the driver before he slid in beside her.
He could sense her excitement.
‘You miss your family?’
She
