accustomed to that first sight of him. Even if she’d seen him the evening before, even if she’d seen him five minutes before, he still always blew her mind and took her breath away.
As always when he drove up north—quitting work earlier than he normally would because, he had confessed, those few hours behind the wheel of his car afforded him a certain amount of freedom which he deeply valued—he arrived still in his suit.
Minus jacket, which, she knew, he would have flung into the back seat of the car, oblivious to the fact that what he treated with such casual indifference had cost more than most people earned in a month.
‘Have I told you that I missed you...?’ Javier growled, closing the space between them in one fluid stride.
He had. It had been three days and he’d gone to sleep every evening with an erection and woken up with one. Not even those sexy phone calls late at night to her had been able to do the trick. There was only so much pleasure to be had satisfying himself.
He kissed her thoroughly, so thoroughly that Sophie forgot that this wasn’t going to be the sort of evening they had both been anticipating: an evening of chat, food and lots of very satisfying sex. No, things were going to be different this evening because of that picture.
She pushed ever so slightly against him but immediately weakened as he plundered her mouth, driving her back until she was pressed against the wall.
She’d stopped wearing a bra in the house, liking the fact that he could touch her whenever he wanted without the bother of removing it, and she hadn’t thought to put one on this evening. Her head fell back as he pushed up her long-sleeved tee shirt to feel her.
He’d thought of nothing but her on the drive up and now to touch her breast, feel the tautness of her nipple between his fingers, was almost indescribable.
‘I want to take you right here,’ he confessed unsteadily. ‘I don’t even think I can make it to the bedroom. Or any room...’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Sophie returned breathlessly. She needed to talk to him. She knew that it wasn’t going to be a comfortable conversation, but talking couldn’t have been further from her mind as he dragged at the waistband of her jeans, fumbling to undo the button and pull down the zipper.
She rested her hands on his broad shoulders and her mind went completely blank, swamped by the powerful churn of sensation. Her tee shirt was still over her breasts and she could feel the air cooling her heated nipples. She wanted him to lick them, suckle at them, but, like him, she was frantic for them to unite, to feel him moving in her, free and unencumbered, because she was now on the pill, so there was no need for him to reach for protection.
She helped with the jeans, tugging them down and then somehow wriggling out of them, while he, likewise, dealt with his trousers and boxers.
When she opened drugged eyes, she saw that his white shirt was unbuttoned all the way down, revealing a broad slither of bronzed chest, and he had dispensed with his shoes and socks. When had that happened? Her socks were tangled up with her trousers.
They’d barely closed the front door and here they were, practically naked in the hall, unable to keep their hands off one another.
Hands balled tightly behind her back, she literally couldn’t keep still as he crouched in front of her and began tasting her, savouring her. She planted her legs apart to accommodate his questing mouth, barely able to breathe. When she glanced down to see his dark head moving between her legs, she felt unspeakably turned on.
‘You need to come in me now!’
She heard his low laugh and then he was lifting her up and she was wrapping her legs around him, clinging to him as he began thrusting hard inside her, his hands supporting her bottom, her breasts bouncing as they moved together.
It was fast, furious, raw and earth-shattering. And utterly draining. For a short while, Sophie was transported to another place, another dimension, one in which difficult, awkward conversations with unpredictable outcomes didn’t have to take place.
But as soon as she was back on her feet, hurriedly snatching clothes to put them on, her mind returned to what it had been chewing over before and she edged away from him, horrified at how easily she had dumped all her worries the second he had touched her.
And that was the essence of the problem, wasn’t it? He did things to her, turned her to putty in his hands. He put her in a position where she couldn’t seem to say no to him, which meant that this could go on until he got bored, and then he would chuck her aside and move on and where would her precious dignity be when that happened?
She was so cautious about never revealing the depth of her feelings for him, so fearful that he might gaze back into the past, understand how much she had meant to him then and work out how much he meant to her now. She was just so damned careful to play the adult game of keeping it cool, matching his control with control of her own.
She’d still be a mess when he decided that it was time to move on and he’d spot that in an instant.
The mere fact that she was about to tell him about that picture said it all but she didn’t care because she had to find out.
‘There’s something I want to show you,’ she told him in a rush, having put some vital distance between them. ‘Well, something I want to ask you.’ She sighed on a deep breath. ‘Javier, we need to talk...’
‘WHAT ABOUT?’ HE TOOK his time getting dressed while she watched him from the door, arms folded, her expression revealing nothing. ‘There’s nothing more guaranteed to kill a good mood than a talk.’
‘Are you speaking from personal experience?’ Sophie asked coolly. She held up one interrupting hand even though he hadn’t said anything. ‘Of course you are. I suppose some of those women you went out with might have wanted a bit more from you than sex on tap.’
‘Is that what this talk of yours is going to be about?’ Javier’s voice was as cool as hers, his expression suddenly wary and guarded.
Sophie spun round and began walking towards the kitchen. She could feel stinging colour washing over her because, in a way, this was about that. This was about more than just sex on tap.
‘Well?’ He caught up with her and held her arm, staying her, forcing her to turn to look at him. ‘Is that what this talk of yours is going to be about? Wanting more?’ He hadn’t worked out the exact time scale, but it hit him that he had been seeing her now for several months, virtually on a daily basis, and he wasn’t tiring of her. Immediately he felt his defences snap into position.
‘I’m not an idiot,’ Sophie lied valiantly. ‘You’d have to be completely stupid to want more from a man like you!’
She yanked her arm free and glared at him. Her heart was thumping so hard and so fast in her chest that it felt as though it might explode.
She wanted to snatch the conversation back, stuff it away, take back wanting to talk. She wanted to pretend that she hadn’t seen a picture of him at a gallery opening with some beautiful model clinging like a limpet to his arm, their body language saying all sorts of things she didn’t want to hear.
‘You’re
