between them. ‘I—I have another long walk ahead of me tomorrow.’
‘We will make love …then we will rest.’
Possessively clasping her hand, Leandro commandingly steered Isabella over to the bed. He sank down onto it pulling her onto his lap. His hands were warm and hard and she sensed the urgency in them. The only other sound in the room was the gentle creak of the mattress and the now less violent hiss of the rain as it hit the windows. As Leandro studied her face her gaze held his with a silent devastating plea, and the deep river of lust that was compelling him to be with this woman flowed with even more forceful demand in his veins. Had he ever witnessed such palpable longing in a woman’s eyes before?
As he tipped up Isabella’s chin the edges of Leandro’s lips lifted a little in a deeply satisfied smile. Her brow was so smooth and fair with little obvious hint that she’d been walking in strong sunshine for days now and her compelling eyes were as dark as the black robes of a nun.
Running his glance across her sexy mouth, he saw that her lips still carried the faint trace of moisture from his and as he observed them with increasingly ravenous thirst he witnessed just the tiniest quiver. If she were an actress and he were directing her in a love scene, he would be instructing the most heart-stopping close-up of her features right now and her lovely face would stay in the mind long after the closing credits had rolled.
Heady desire sweeping through him like a fierce tornado, the buttons on Isabella’s shirt irresistibly beckoned and Leandro obeyed the deep, silent, fevered impulse to undo them. A trickle of sweat sluggishly meandered down the middle of his back and clung to his heated skin as he did so. The heat in the room was bordering on sultry and weighed on the air like a heavy overcoat but he knew too that later on tonight it would be a different story. In early May, as it was now, the mornings could be piercingly chill to the point of ice, but by midday the sun would be roasting, burning down on the landscape in a relentless haze. More compelling to Leandro, however, was the fever of carnal need that had taken his body prisoner. His mind became emptied of every thought but Isabella, conjuring up rich, erotic fantasies of what they would do together, his strong abdominal muscles bunching hard to constrain his rapidly escalating desire. He should not overwhelm her …this enchanting English girl who was walking the Santiago de Compostela trail to ‘find’ herself. He had no wish to be the one discordant note in her symphony of self-discovery. Yet Leandro would not deny himself this exquisite opportunity to discover her in the most intimate way. He wanted her far too much for that and so he would take what he wanted without regret.
Isabella gasped when Leandro’s lean, bronzed hands practically tore open her blouse and pushed it down over her shoulders. Her full breasts bounced a little in her white balconette bra and she felt her nipples pinch tight. When she dared a greedy glance at the beautifully hewn masculine features and light copper skin that was so close to her, she immediately ached with almost violent need. Nothing could adequately convey this man’s stunning allure, she was certain—but Isabella knew her memory would not fail her. Now his hungry stare grazed lasciviously on her breasts and she ached for the sweet release of his hot mouth caressing them, unconsciously pursing her lips to moisten them a little at the flagrantly erotic thought.
Then he kissed her, splaying his palm against the back of her head to hold her fast, and it barely took even a second for Isabella to pay him back with the hot, hungry response his lips almost brutally demanded. The explosion between them was a nuclear fusion of white hot heat. Already Leandro’s sizzling X-rated kisses had ruined Isabella for life. Withdrawing from her with a teasing little smile, he practically ripped open the buttons of his shirt to reveal a chest so beautifully defined with lean, hard muscle that Isabella sucked in her breath and let it out slowly again, in awe. After that, she couldn’t have said who undressed whom, all she knew was that taking their clothes off had become an imperative tide that they could not turn back from, and as hands grasped and mouths clashed Isabella likened the furore of sensation soaring through her blood to a fire ripping through a dry forest …a fire that could not be doused with even a lake of water.
With passionately voiced whispers of appreciation and encouragement, Leandro caressed her hips, her breasts, her thighs, his deliciously erotic hands elevating the tension between them with every stroke, heatedly encouraging Isabella’s growing desire to break all its previously guarded bounds and simply surrender. Her nervousness dissipated like a snowflake in the sun as she relinquished her natural inhibition, and discovered a spontaneous lustful side to her character instead. A quality that frankly was a revelation to her. And she no longer had to hope or wish or yearn to have the attentions of Leandro’s mouth on her breasts—not when he was in turn taking her exquisitely tight nipples deep into the moist cavern of his mouth and driving her near mad with the need to have him inside her. His body was a mouth-watering study in masculine perfection too. Lean but muscular—every perfectly delineated, smooth-as-silk muscle in that copper skinned torso was a fascinating revelation never to be forgotten.
Briefly thinking about the promised phone-call to her sister, Isabella knew she’d already abandoned the idea. If Emilia even guessed that her ‘principled’ big sister had wound up in bed with a man she’d only just met and that man happened to be the very man she’d dispatched Isabella to try and win an interview with for her magazine …then Isabella would never hear the end of it! But once she started back on the Camino trail tomorrow, no one would be able to contact her, thank God. She would once again know some peace from her demanding family.
‘Isabella …’ Leandro’s hot breath skimmed erotically over the delicate skin on her ear ‘ …usted es tan hermoso, asi que fino.’ She recognised the Spanish for ‘beautiful’ and ‘fine’ and shivered with pleasure.
***
A woman’s scent had always been the biggest turn-on for Leandro, but surely Isabella’s had the undeniable power to drive a man ‘loco’ with desire? He decided this because he wanted her with an almost feral lustfulness that left him breathless and aching as he had never ached for a woman before. His body was all but crying out for him to make that final inevitable connection with hers and it was strange—but he almost intuited a sense of destiny as he stroked his hands over her temptingly curvy hips and slid his muscular, more hirsute legs down over hers. Quickly dismissing the unsettling thought, he told himself that sexual desire could stir the most outrageously fanciful ideas in a man and he should be careful. Isabella was a beguiling woman, that was true, but at the end of the day all Leandro wanted to do was enjoy her beautiful body for a while …not marry her! When his fingers slid over the scalding heat of her womanhood, then inside her provocative wetness, he heard her sharp, excited intake of breath and momentarily lost himself in the stunning eroticism of the highly charged moment. The sensation almost unravelled him right there. At her small ecstatic moan, he smiled, kissed her softly on the mouth, then raised himself up from her trembling form and leaned across the bed to reach for his jeans. Taking out his wallet from the back pocket, he withdrew one of two foil-wrapped condoms that had been concealed in the zipped compartment and, sitting back, carefully sheathed himself with it. When he returned to Isabella, his knee urged her trembling legs apart—his expression a deeply masculine study in unleashed passion as he did so—and gratifyingly sensed her clasp his body tightly with her slender silken thighs. Then, slowly and with almost agonising pleasure, Leandro eased his hard, aching shaft deep inside her. Madre mia! She was fire and satin, this exquisite woman, and her expressive dark eyes locked sensually onto his as he started to ride her.
Her eyes drifted closed as the growing sensual tension inside her inexorably built with each demanding thrust into her body. They swiftly opened again in shock as Leandro said fiercely, ‘Look at me, Isabella! Do not hide your pleasure from me! I want to witness everything!’ As the tension reached an exquisite plateau and sensual waves ebbed through her with force Isabella’s heartbeat went wild. In those highly charged moments, she knew a deepening sense of destiny. For whatever reason fate decreed …she had been meant to meet Leandro Reyes …even if it was
