on the edge of losing things completely, that Ricardo felt his own control crack. That swirling hair had brushed against his face, the feel, the scent of it bringing so many memories rushing to the surface of his mind.
How could he ever forget the fresh, clean scent of it, perfumed by some herbal shampoo that tantalised his senses? Or how it had felt to know the silken slither of that long blonde hair over his skin as she knelt above him, his body sheathed in hers? As his groin tightened in instant response he almost felt again the slow, sensual movements that had driven him to the edge of his control, keeping him there in subtle torture until he could take no more.
‘Lucia—stop…’ he growled, reaching for her flailing hands. ‘Stop it, now! This isn’t doing you any good.’
The rough little shake was just meant to force her to rethink, to come back to herself. But when she threw back her head, drawing in a ragged breath, ready to speak again, he knew that touching her had been a mistake. A big mistake.
A mistake he had been heading towards all evening. Ever since that moment when she had touched his arm earlier in the shabby little room in the boarding house. No—earlier than that, when she had been about to fall and he had caught her, yanking her upright so that she had slammed hard against him. Her body pulled into close and intimate contact with his.
Just recalling that made his heart kick up a pace, his breath coming raw and uneven into his lungs. His hands tightened even more about her arms, moving upwards, towards her shoulder, stilling her, holding her…
And, in that moment, she looked up into his face, her soft pink mouth half open, her breath coming as unevenly as his. Their eyes caught and clashed, held and…
And all control left him as he saw her eyes widen, saw the shocked response and then the sensual awareness that clouded them. It clouded his mind too, leaving him no ability to think. He could only feel.
And hunger.
And that hunger drove him into mindless action, pushing him into hauling her hard up against him, wrenching her chin up towards him and clamping his mouth down hard on hers. Letting loose a rough grunt of satisfaction as he felt her lips give, opening instinctively under the hard, fierce pressure of his kiss.
A small murmur of distress got through to him, ripping apart the clouds of burning sensuality that clouded his mind, bringing a flash of rational clarity to his heated brain. Immediately he gentled his kiss, easing the pressure on her mouth, using softness, enticement, seduction to counter the brute force he had subjected her to just moments before.
It started out hard to silence her, control her. He had snatched at her lips, trying to crush back the cries of distress, stop them from pouring from her mouth. He didn’t understand why she should be so upset, why she was in such a state, but there would be no talking to her until she had calmed down.
‘Hush, Lucia, hush…There’s no need for this. Whatever you need—whatever you want—whatever trouble you’ve got yourself into—I’ll deal with it.’
That stopped her, froze her. She could only stare mutely into his face, her expression white and strained, huge eyes colourless in the moonlight. With a devastating sense of shock, Ricardo realised that the strange glitter on their surface was not the effect of the pale, cold moonlight but the glisten of unshed tears.
‘Lucia?’ It was a shocked whisper. And his next kiss was soft, gentle, wanting to wipe the upset from her lips. He took her mouth slowly, carefully, and his heart seemed to stop dead, then start up again in double-quick time, ragged and uneven as he felt the tiny, involuntary, almost automatic softening of her lips in response, the gentle pressure of her mouth against his.
The scent of her skin was all around him. The slide of her hair was against his hands. The softness of her body was in his arms, tight against him. And deep inside the hunger was waking, starting to grow.
But, even as he slid his hands down her back, he knew that something had changed. Lucy had hesitated, drawn back faintly, then a little more strongly, putting her hands on his chest to push him away from her.
‘You mustn’t do this. You shouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’ Trying to make light of it, he even tried a rough laugh deep down in his throat. ‘You were becoming hysterical. Something had to be done—and there are only two traditional ways to calm a hysterical woman. You surely wouldn’t have wanted me to slap you.’
Numbly she shook her head, her eyes glazed with something that looked close to despair. ‘You might wish you’d done that when I tell you.’
‘When you tell me what? Damnation, Lucia, what the hell are you talking about? What is it that you want? And why are you so sure that I won’t give it to you?’
Her hesitation caught him on the raw, tugging on nerves that suddenly felt painfully exposed, desperately vulnerable. A terrible sense of oppression shot through him, a prediction of something that was coming that he wasn’t going to like at all.
‘Because you won’t give me Marco. And that’s what…who I want…nothing else. The only thing in the world that I want is my son.’
If she had spat right in his face he couldn’t have been more appalled. As it was, he felt the sense of dark shock reverberate through him so that he released her at once, almost dropping her to the ground as if she had turned into a poisonous snake in his arms. From wanting to hold her so close, he jumped to the sense that holding her would contaminate him in the space of a single devastated heartbeat.
‘Marco? You came here for Marco? To take him…’
Unable to find the words, Lucy just nodded, then immediately realised that that was just what she should not have done. She hadn’t come to take Marco, not in the way that Ricardo meant. But it was already too late. She had nodded and she watched Ricardo’s face close down, the tightness of his jaw and the darkness in his eyes making her shiver.
‘Never,’ he said and the word was disgust, an ultimatum, a warning and a threat all rolled into one. ‘After what you did? Not in my lifetime.’
‘But—’ Lucy’s voice broke on the word. ‘I can explain…’
‘You can try. But I cannot imagine that anything you say will ever convince me.’
He paused, waited, head slightly tilted to one side, giving her such a pointed look that she practically felt it scrape over her skin like the sharp end of a needle, raising a raw, red weal.
He would listen, that look said, but he would not believe. He was already armoured against her. Even if she mentally beat her fists hard against his unyielding defences until they were raw and bleeding, he would not let her reach him.
‘So…’ he goaded when she still didn’t speak, couldn’t find a way to start ‘…explain.’
She wished she could. But how could she say anything when those cold black eyes seemed to probe her skull as her brain frantically tried different ways of beginning and discarded each one as unusable? At least that was what she thought she was doing but her thoughts seemed so completely unfocused that she found that nothing she tried made sense. And nothing would form clearly so that she could follow it through for herself, let alone explain it to Ricardo so that he would understand and believe her.
Because he had to believe her.
‘You
