feelings still lingered for the creep who had married her for all the wrong reasons, he would be the man who would be imprinted in her head for the rest of her life. Not her ex-husband. When she lay in bed, the loser she still refused to hold in contempt would no longer dominate her thoughts. No. Instead, he would be in her head now, and the memory of this first night spent together.
Sophie inhaled and tensed but she was already so turned on that the tension quickly evaporated. Nor did she want him treating her like a piece of china that could shatter into a thousand pieces if he happened to be just a little too rough.
She wanted him to thrust long and deep into her. She wanted his urgency.
‘Move faster...’ she moaned.
It was all the invitation Javier needed. He was unbelievably aroused. Holding on had required a superhuman feat of willpower because having her touch him had driven him wild.
He began moving with expert assurance, felt her wince as he drove deeper, then gradually relax as he picked up pace until their bodies were moving in harmony, as sweet as the coming together of the chords of a song.
Still, he refused to satisfy himself at her expense, waiting until her rhythm was inexorably building and he could feel her fingers dig into the small of his back and knew that she had raised her legs, wrapped them around his waist, all the better to receive him...
Sophie came, spinning off to a different world where nothing existed but her body and its powerful, shattering responses. She was distantly aware of Javier arching up, his whole body tensing as he reached orgasm.
Apart yet inextricably joined. She had never felt closer to anyone in her entire life. And it wasn’t just because of the sex. Somewhere in the core of her she knew that it was what it was because of what she felt. She couldn’t disentangle her emotions from her responses. The two were inextricably linked.
Not good. Yet so right. She couldn’t imagine feeling anything like this for anyone else, ever, and that scared her because when this was over she would have no choice but to pick up the pieces and move on. She would have to put him behind her and one day find herself a partner because she couldn’t envisage spending the rest of her life on her own.
She was lying in the crook of his arm, both of them staring upwards. His breathing was thick and uneven and with a little chuckle he swung her onto her side so that they were now facing one another, their bodies pressed together.
Somewhere along the line he had disposed of the condom. He was a very generously built man, however, and even with his erection temporarily subsided she was still aware of his thick length against her, stirring her, although she was aching a little and as tired as if she had run a marathon at full tilt.
She wondered what the protocol was for a one-night stand. She couldn’t leap out of bed, stroll to get her clothes and head for the door, having thanked him for a good time, because it was her house. Which meant that she would have to rely on him to make the first move, and that made her feel a little awkward, because she didn’t want him to imagine that she was hanging around, waiting for an encore.
She was afraid to carry on being intimate, in these most intimate of circumstances, because she didn’t want him to guess the depth of her feelings for him.
She wanted to maintain her dignity. It wasn’t just a case of self-preservation, but on a more realistic level: he now had a slice of the family company. He might decide to take a back seat now that they had made love and completion had been established, might disappear never to be seen again, but on the small chance that she bumped into him at some point in the future the last thing she needed was for him to know her feelings. If she bumped into him, she wanted him to think that she had been as detached from the whole experience, on an emotional level, as he had been. She wanted to be able to have a conversation with him, with her head held high, and preferably with a man on her arm.
‘So,’ Javier drawled, breaking the silence and stroking her hair away from her face.
‘So...’ Sophie cleared her throat and offered him a bright smile. ‘That was very nice.’
Javier burst out laughing. ‘That’s a first,’ he informed her wryly. ‘I’ve never had a woman tell me afterwards that the sex was “very nice”.’
Sophie didn’t want to think about the women he had bedded or what sexy little conversations they had had post–making love.
‘You don’t have to tell me that.’ She was going to keep it light, brace herself for when he levered himself out of bed and began getting dressed. She didn’t think he’d be spending the night.
‘No?’
‘I already have a picture in my head of the sort of women you, er, entertain and I guess they’d be busy telling you how great you were and offering to do whatever you wanted...’
‘Did you think I was great?’
Sophie blushed a vibrant red.
‘Is that a yes...?’ He nuzzled her neck and then absently rested his hand between her legs.
‘What happens about the shoot?’
‘I don’t want to talk about the shoot. I want to talk about how great you found me between the sheets.’
Sophie didn’t want to laugh but her lips twitched because there was just something so incredibly endearing and boyish about his arrogance.
‘I’m glad we made love,’ she told him truthfully. ‘I...’
‘Don’t go there, Soph.’ He fell onto his back and gazed upwards because this was what he didn’t want. Any sort of half-hearted, limp excuses and explanations for the choices she had made seven years ago. She’d already told him enough. He knew enough. He wasn’t interested in hearing any more.
‘Don’t go where?’
‘This isn’t the point where we pick up sharing our life histories.’ He gathered her into him, his arm draped loosely around her. He could touch her nipple with his fingers and he liked that. He liked the way the little bud stiffened in response to the gentle pressure of his fingers rolling it. And he liked what that did to his body, the way it made him feel as though he could keep going indefinitely, his body resting between bouts of lovemaking only long enough to build back up the vigour to carry on.
After sex, no matter how good the sex had been, his instinct had always been to get out of bed as fast as he could and have a shower, his mind already racing ahead to work and business, deals that had to be done.
He’d never been one for hanging around between the sheets, chewing the fat and talking about a future that wasn’t going to happen.
But he wanted to hang around between the sheets now.
Minus the chat.
He’d managed, just, to relegate her loser ex-husband to a box somewhere in his head that he could safely ignore. The last thing he wanted was for her to begin recapping her past, forcing him to confront the unpalatable truth that, whether she had come to him a virgin or not, she had still ditched him for someone else and probably still loved that someone else, even though the man in question had failed to deliver.
‘No,’ she agreed quickly. ‘I was simply going to say that it’s probably a good idea if you head back
