hot and heavy against her belly. She slid down the shower stall and took him in her hands, exploring him with sensuous movements that brought his breathing to a stumbling halt. ‘Careful, cariño,’ he said. ‘I might not be able to hold back.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said recklessly.
She gave him a sultry look from beneath her lashes before taking him in her mouth in one slick movement that provoked a rough expletive from him. She smiled around his throbbing heat, her tongue gliding wetly along his length. She tasted his essence, inciting her to draw more of him into her mouth. His hands shot out to the glass walls of the shower to anchor himself, his thighs set apart, his chest rising and falling as he struggled to control his breathing. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said, but the subtext, she knew, was really: please don’t stop doing this.
‘I like doing this to you,’ she said. ‘You do it to me so it’s only fair I get to do the same to you.’
He swallowed tightly, his jaw clenching as he watched her return to his swollen length. Emelia felt the tension in the satin-covered steel of his body. He was drawing closer and closer to the point of no return and it excited her to think she could have such a powerful hold over him.
He jerked and then shuddered into her mouth, spilling his hot life force, his flesh lifting in goosebumps in spite of the warmth of the shower.
Emelia glided back up his body, rinsing her mouth under the shower spray before meeting his dark lustrous eyes. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at her with dark intensity, his hands reaching for the soap and working up a lather. She quivered with anticipation as he started soaping her, firstly her neck and shoulders, and then her breasts, the length of her spine and then her belly. He used circular movements that set all her nerves into a frantic dance, his touch so smooth and sensual she felt every bone inside her frame melt.
His hand cupped her feminine mound, seeking the swollen nub of her desire. She felt her breathing come to a stumbling halt as he bent down before her as she had done to him. His tongue separated her, teasing her, a soft flicker at first and then increasing the pace until she was gasping her way through an orgasm that shook her like a rag doll.
She collapsed against him as he rose to hold her, his arms coming around her as she rested her head against his chest. His heart was drumming under her cheek, one of his hands coming up to stroke her wet hair. He rested his chin on the top of her head and for a moment she wondered if he was going to tell her he loved her after all, that he wanted the same things she wanted.
But of course he didn’t. Instead, he turned off the water and silently reached for a bath towel, wrapping her in it as one would a small child.
Emelia stepped out of the shower cubicle and did her best to squash her disappointment. Was this intense physical attraction the only thing she could cling to in order to keep him by her side? How long would it last? What if he tired of her and went to someone else to fulfil his needs? The thought of it was like an arrow through her heart. She hated even thinking about all the partners he had had before her. He never spoke of them and she never asked, but she knew there had been many women who had come and gone from his bed.
Javier turned her face to look at him. ‘What is that frown for?’ he asked.
She gave him a half-smile. ‘Nothing…I was just thinking.’
His hand moved to cradle her cheek. ‘About what?’
She pressed her lips together momentarily. ‘I don’t know…just where this will lead, I guess.’
His hand dropped from her face. ‘Life doesn’t always fit into nice neat little boxes, Emelia,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t always give us everything we want.’
‘What do you want from life?’ she asked.
He paused in the process of drying himself to look at her. ‘The same things most people want—success, a sense of purpose, fulfilment.’
‘What about love?’
He tossed the damp towel on the bed. ‘I don’t delude myself that it’s a given in life. Love comes and it goes. It’s not something I have ever relied on.’
Emelia mentally kicked herself for setting herself up for more hurt. If he loved her, he would have told her by now. He’d had almost twenty-three months of marriage to do so, irrespective of what had occurred over the past couple of weeks.
‘Come to bed, querida,’ he said. ‘You look like a child that has been kept up way past its bedtime.’
She crawled into bed, not for a moment thinking she would be able to sleep after spending so much of the day in a drug-induced slumber, but somehow when Javier pulled her into his body she closed her eyes and, limb by limb, her body gradually relaxed until, with a soft sigh, she drifted off…
Javier lay with her in his arms, his fingers laced through the silky strands of her hair, breathing in its clean, newly washed fragrance. In sleep she looked so young and vulnerable. Her soft full mouth was slightly open and one of her hands was lying against his chest, right where his heart was beating.
He’d thought he had the future all mapped out but now he was not so sure. Things were changing almost daily. The more time he spent with her, the more he wanted to believe they could be in this for the long haul.
He tried to picture a child they might make together: a dark-haired little boy or perhaps a little girl with grey-blue eyes and hair just as silken and golden as her mother. But the image faded, as if there was no room in his head for it.
Perhaps it was fate. He wasn’t meant to be a father. It wasn’t that he didn’t like children. One of his business colleagues had recently become a father and Javier had looked at the photos with a strange sense of loss. His lonely childhood had marked him for life. He couldn’t imagine himself as a parent. He didn’t think he would know what to do. He hated the thought of potentially damaging a child’s self-esteem by saying or doing the wrong thing. Children seemed to him to be so vulnerable. He had been so vulnerable.
He had never forgotten the day his mother had died. She had been there one minute, soft and scented and nurturing, and the next her body was in a shiny black coffin covered with red roses. He still hated the sight of red roses, any roses, in fact. They made his stomach churn. Within a year he had been sent off to boarding school in England as his father couldn’t handle his ongoing grief. Javier had taught himself not to love anything or anyone in case it was ripped away from him without warning.
The thing that worried him the most was that it might be too late to change.
EMELIA woke up in bed alone and when she came downstairs Aldana informed her that Javier had left to see to some business in Malaga and would be back later that evening. She handed her a note with pursed lips. Emelia thanked her politely and, taking a cup of tea with her, went out to the sunny terrace overlooking the gardens.
The note was simple and written in Javier’s distinctive handwriting, the strong dark strokes reminding her of his aura of command and control. It read:
Didn’t want to wake you. See you tonight. J.
Emelia
