was what she had dreamed of and it was only now, when she was touching him, that she realised just how long those dreams had been in her head, never-ending versions of the same thing...touching him.
Javier eventually pulled back and gazed down at her flushed face.
‘We need to get to a bed.’ He barely recognised his own voice, which was thick with desire, the voice of someone drunk with want. ‘If we don’t, I’m going to turn into a caveman, rip off your clothes right here on the staircase and take you before we can make it to a bedroom...’
Sophie discovered that she was wantonly turned on by the image of him doing that.
‘My bedroom’s just along the corridor,’ she whispered huskily, galvanising her jelly-like legs forward.
There were numerous bedrooms on the landing and most of the doors were shut, which led Javier to assume that they were never used. Probably in as much of a state of disrepair as some of the rooms downstairs which had been sealed off.
Her bedroom was at the very end of the long, wide corridor and it was huge.
‘I keep meaning to brighten it up a bit,’ she apologised, nervous all over again because, now that they were in the bedroom, all her fears and worries had returned with a vengeance. ‘I’ve had some of the pictures on the walls since I was a kid and now, in a weird way, I would feel quite sad to take them down and chuck them in the bin...’
He was strolling through the bedroom, taking in absolutely everything, from the books on the bookshelf by the window to the little framed family shots in silver frames which were lined up on her dressing table.
Eventually he turned to face her and began unbuttoning his shirt.
Sophie tensed and gulped. She watched in fascination as his shirt fell open, revealing the hard chest she had earlier felt under her fingers.
He shrugged it off and tossed it on the ground and her mouth went dry as he walked slowly towards her.
‘There’s...there’s something I should tell you...’ she stammered, frozen to the spot and very much aware of the great big bed just behind her.
Javier didn’t break stride.
Talk? He didn’t think so. The marriage she had hoped for and the guy she had ditched him to be with hadn’t gone according to plan. That changed nothing. She still remained the same woman who had strung him along and then walked away because, when you got right down to it, he had not been good enough for her.
‘No conversation,’ he murmured, trailing his finger along her collarbone until she sighed and squirmed and her eyelids fluttered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘No confidences, no long explanations about why you’re doing what you’re doing. We both know the reason that we’re here.’ He hooked his fingers under the checked shirt and circled her waist, then gently began to undo the buttons on the shirt. ‘We still want one another,’ he murmured, nibbling her ear.
‘Yes...’ Sophie could barely get the word out. Her body tingled everywhere and his delicate touch sent vibrations racing through her. She rubbed her thighs together and heard him laugh softly, as if he knew that she was trying to ease the pain between them.
‘This is all there is, Soph.’ There was a finality to stating the obvious which, for some reason, set his teeth on edge, although he didn’t quite understand why when it was pretty straightforward a situation. He was propelling her very gently towards the bed; she realised that only when she tumbled back, and then he leant forward, propping himself up on either side of her, staring down at her gravely.
Sophie couldn’t have uttered a word if she’d tried. She was mesmerised by the compelling intensity of his expression, the soft, sexy drawl of his voice, the penetrating, opaque blackness of his eyes.
Somehow he had managed to undo every last button of her shirt and the cool air was a sweet antidote to the heat that was consuming her.
He stood up and paused for a few seconds with his fingers resting loosely on the zipper of his trousers.
She could see the bulge of his erection and half closed her eyes when she thought about the mechanics of something so impressively large entering her.
But no talking, he’d said...
No talking because he wasn’t interested in what she had to say.
As though reading the anxious direction of her thoughts, he dropped his hand and joined her on the bed, manoeuvring her onto her side so that they were lying stomach to stomach, then she flopped over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.
‘Look at me, Soph.’ He framed her face with his hand so that she was forced to look at him. His breath was warm on her cheek and she wanted to evade the deadly seriousness of his gaze. ‘Whatever it is you want to tell me, resist, because I’m not interested.’ He felt a sharp jab of pain deep inside him but pressed on, because this had to be said, and wasn’t this all part of that wheel turning full circle? That she’d come to him and now, with her in the palm of his hand, he could reduce her to humility? That he could let her know, without even having to vocalise the obvious, that the shoe was firmly on the other foot?
That he was the one calling the shots?
He had the uncomfortable feeling that it should have felt more satisfying than it did.
‘This is something we both have to do, wouldn’t you agree? If you hadn’t ended up back in my life in a way neither of us could ever have predicted, well, we wouldn’t be here now. But we’re here and...’ He smoothed his hand over her thigh and felt her shudder, wishing she wasn’t wearing clothes because he was itching to feel all of her, naked, supple and compliant. ‘We have to finish this. But finishing it doesn’t involve tender sharing of our life histories. This isn’t a courtship and it’s important for you to recognise that.’
Sophie felt the hot crawl of colour seep into her cheeks. Of course, he was just being honest. Of course, this was just about the sex they should have had all those years ago. Nothing more. If she could, she would have slid off the bed, looked at him with haughty disdain and told him to clear off, but what her body wanted and needed was calling the shots now.
‘I know that,’ she assured him in a calm voice which was not at all how she was feeling inside. ‘I’m not on the lookout for a courtship! Do you really think that I’m the same idiotic young girl you knew all those years ago, Javier? I’ve grown up! Life has...flattened me in ways you couldn’t begin to understand.’ Right now, she didn’t feel very grown up. Indeed, she felt as unsure and uncertain as a teenager.
But she really wasn’t the same girl she had once been. That much, at least, was true.
Javier frowned. Her words were the words of a cynic altered by circumstance, but the tenor of her voice...the soft tremble of her mouth...seemed to be saying something different, which was, of course, ridiculous.
‘Good,’ he purred. ‘So we understand one another.’
‘A one-night stand,’ she murmured, flattening her hand against his chest as a tingle of unbridled excitement rippled through her. She’d never been a one-night stand kind of girl but a one-night stand with this man would be worth the final demolishing of all her girlhood,
