have.?’ She shook her head.
He watched a visible shudder pass through her body and realised it was another ‘what if’ that was plaguing her.
‘They are fine, you are fine.’ A nerve in his lean jaw jerked as the slow-motion replay of the event in his head reached the moment when he had thought she would not be fine. ‘You can’t live your life thinking what if.’ he continued hoarsely.
Maggie turned her head, their eyes meshed and Maggie felt some of the tension leave her body. She sighed slowly and nodded and said, ‘But what if…?’
He loosed a husky laugh and lifted a finger to her lips. ‘Enough.’
It wasn’t the firm admonition that silenced Maggie, but the confusing combination of sensations that was coursing through her body.
His thumb stayed at the corner of her mouth, his eyes sealed to hers; the air was thick with an almost electrical charge that made it hard for her to breathe.
He leaned into her close, very close, but not touching. Her heavy lids half closed as she swayed closer as though drawn by some invisible thread that connected her to him. ‘Your skin smells.’ He exhaled and she felt his brandy-scented breath on her cheek.
He stopped and she thought, Bad…good? Say something…do something…touch me.
‘It’s late. We should go to bed.’ He had never in his life felt a need so raw, so primal to possess a woman.
She gave a fractured sigh. Her heart rate quickened but her body relaxed. It seemed right. ‘Yes.’
He met her eyes shining with promise and trust and he heard himself say, ‘Perhaps this is not a good idea.’
She felt her smile slide off her face, and flinched as if he’d just thrown cold water in her face. Not water, Maggie, just a reality check. This is what happens when you start thinking you’re irresistible.
She lifted her chin. ‘I am a bit tired.’ She gave an artistic yawn to demonstrate the point, then spoilt the pretence by adding, ‘I’m not drunk, you know.’
‘I know you’re not.’ Scruples, he decided, were very overrated and painful, and what would be achieved by depriving them both of an experience that would, he knew, be pleasurable?
She felt the mortified heat reach her cheeks. To have one man politely excuse himself from her bed was one thing; two. There had to be something seriously wrong with her.
‘This day started quite well, and this may sound dramatic but it really is turning into the worst day of my life. You’ll laugh, but actually I thought…’ She stopped, shook her head. He wasn’t laughing; he was staring at her with a fixed intensity that she was not going to mistake for blind lust. ‘I really do feel like an idiot.’
‘You’re not an idiot.’ He took hold of her elbows and looked down into her heart-shaped face, gazing deep into her liquid dark eyes. ‘But you do have a smudge on your nose…right there,’ he said, kissing the spot.
Do not read anything into it, Maggie… ‘It’s fine—you don’t fancy me…perfectly understandable…look, you’re not the first man to be able to resist me. I’m not going to take it personally. I’m not really—’
‘Shut up!’ He hooked a finger under her chin and he captured her eyes and like a primal blast the blaze of hunger in his drove the air from Maggie’s lungs in one shocked gasp.
She melted, paralysed by a combination of raw lust and desperate longing, unable to catch her breath; her fingers closed around the hard muscles of his upper arms.
‘Do you want to spend the night alone, Maggie?’
Maggie’s eyes closed as he kissed the corner of her mouth, her body twisting and arching as she tried to insinuate herself closer. ‘No,’ she whispered against his mouth. Then she opened her eyes, looked at his lean dark face so close to her own, and said, ‘No!’
He smiled at the defiant declaration, a slow, predatory smile that sent her stomach into a spasm of raw excitement. The tension in the air between them thickened; it shimmered.
‘Neither do I.’
CHAPTER NINE
THE raw hunger in his kiss blazed along Maggie’s nerve endings, vaporising any lingering doubts or fears. This was what she wanted, Rafael was what she needed.
She held his face between her hands as his lips moved expertly over her own, the slow, languid exploration a torment and a revelation. At the first erotic incursion of his tongue into her moist mouth she moaned deep in her throat and opened her mouth to invite him deeper, meeting his tongue with her own.
They kissed with a frantic hunger and all the time he touched her, his hands sliding over her soft womanly curves, dragging moans from her lips.
When he did lift his mouth fractionally from hers it was to rasp, ‘I love your mouth. It is a miracle. You are a miracle…so soft.’ He ran a finger down her throat, his eyes darkening as he felt the deep shiver that rippled through her body. ‘So sensitive to my touch.’
‘You won’t stop, will you?’
She felt the rumble of laughter vibrate in his chest as he pulled her under him and laid her full length on the sofa. There was no laughter in his face as he stared down at her, just a fierce, relentless hunger that tightened the knot of excitement low in her belly.
‘Not any time soon,’ he promised huskily as he lowered his body onto hers. ‘I don’t believe any man could resist you. It is not possible… Madre mia, I have wanted you from the moment I saw you.’
Maggie gasped, her eyes flying wide as she felt the pressure of his arousal against her belly. Her arms slid around his middle, pulling him closer. She was revelling in the amazing feel of his lean hard body against her and pleasurably conscious of the fresh rush of liquid heat between her thighs.
The heat burned between them as they kissed, he touched her everywhere. Maggie slid her hands under the hem of his shirt. She heard him gasp at the touch of her fingers on his bare flesh and would have pulled her hand away but he caught her wrist and, holding her eyes, placed it back on his body, spreading her fingers and saying huskily, ‘I want to feel your hands on me, querida.’
Maggie’s throat was too congested with emotion to speak. She nodded mutely and trailed her fingers slowly across the ridges of muscle on his flat belly.
Rafael closed his eyes, sucked in a breath, then lowered his head and kissed her with a driving ferocity that made her head swim. His mouth still connected to hers, he raised himself off her, unfastened his shirt with one hand and stroked her face with the other, his fingers tangled in her hair.
Maggie opened her eyes just as the fabric parted. Weak with lust and longing she stared, her passion-glazed stare moving hungrily over the gleaming hard lines of his greyhound-lean, muscle-ridged bronze torso.
A deep, sobbing moan was wrenched from her throat. The sound made the hairs on the nape of Rafael’s neck stand on end and propelled him into frenzied action.
Slowed only by the tremor in his fingers, he unbuckled his belt and slid his
