strain against the constriction of his jeans as she parted her lips beneath his.
He was surprised to discover a vulnerable side to her. On the journey from Manaus he had been impressed by her determined spirit and amused by her dry sense of humour. But now she was clearly distraught and he felt her tremble as she burrowed against him like a frightened animal seeking shelter from danger.
She was so tiny. He felt a surge of protectiveness. ‘What’s the matter, pequeno?’ Instinctively he felt sure that her tears were not just because she had believed he’d left her alone at the cave.
‘I don’t know if I am doing the right thing.’ Clare’s iron control over her nerves crumbled and her fears poured out in a flood of tears. Maybe she should have gone to the police and asked them to find her sister’s kidnappers. Maybe she wasn’t brave but stupid and naïve to think that she could rescue Becky.
‘It’s natural for you to have doubts,’ Diego said gently as understanding dawned in him. Clare was facing the biggest decision of her life when she would make her final vows and commit herself fully to a nun’s life. Perhaps she was having second thoughts about the life she had chosen. His conscience told him he should step away from her and suppress his desire, somehow stifle the sexual chemistry that existed between them, which must add to her confusion about her future. But how could he resist her when she wound her arms around his neck and sought his mouth with hers, initiating a sensual kiss that stirred his body into urgent awareness?
She did not look like a nun. When he had walked into the cave and seen her wearing just a plain white bra and knickers, with her auburn curls tumbling around her shoulders, he’d been stunned by her beauty. She was a petite package of voluptuous curves and he could not stop himself from running his hands over her body, exploring the gentle flare of her hips and the indent of her slender waist.
She tensed when he slid his hands across her ribcage and lightly stroked his fingers over the underside of her breasts. But she did not pull her mouth away from his, and when he deepened the kiss she melted into him and parted her lips to allow him to push his tongue between them.
Diego heard a faint voice inside his head warning him that he must not take advantage of her innocent eagerness. But she had told him she’d had one serious relationship, he reminded himself, so she could not be completely innocent. The way she was kissing him with fiery passion and sliding her hands over his chest was heating his blood and evoking a primal hunger in him that obliterated all rational thoughts from his mind and left only an insistent throb of desire that demanded to be appeased.
* * *
Once again, the situation Clare found herself in seemed surreal. A week ago she had been engrossed in company spreadsheets and wondering what to wear to the Association of Accountants’ Christmas dinner. Now she was in a cave in the Amazon rainforest, dreading tomorrow when she would meet her sister’s kidnappers, but at this moment she was half-naked and the sexiest man on the planet had laid her down on a sleeping bag and was looking at her with a gleam in his eyes that blazed hotter than the flames of the fire.
Maybe it was all a dream, and if so she did not want to wake up from this part of it. The sensible, circumspect Clare Marchant from England had been transformed by the sultry heat of the Brazilian rainforest into a sensual siren who was burning up with desire. Diego incited in her a need for sexual fulfilment that she had never felt with any other man.
She realised she had been fooling herself by thinking that her decision not to sleep with Mark was because she had wanted to be sure of their relationship. He seemed like a preening, self-obsessed boy compared to Diego’s raw masculinity, and the truth was that Mark had not turned her on like Diego did. She had been unaware until now that she was capable of feeling such an intensity of lust. Every word of Aunt Edith’s advice about waiting to fall in love before she gave away her virginity was drowned out by the loud drumbeat of desire pounding through her veins.
Diego was kneeling above her, his thighs straddling her hips and his hands resting on the ground on either side of her head so that she was caged by his powerful body. In the firelight his blond hair looked like a golden halo, but he was a fallen angel with a wicked promise in his eyes to fulfil Clare’s wildest fantasies.
He bent his head and kissed her mouth again, slower this time, coaxing her lips open so that he could take his pleasure while he increased hers until she moaned softly and curved her arms around his neck. His blatant seduction intoxicated her senses and made her want more, more...
She snatched air into her lungs when he finally released her mouth and trailed his lips down her throat, but the sensation of him sucking the tender skin at the base of her neck where a pulse beat erratically made her catch her breath. The caress was outrageously erotic, but he did not give her time to assimilate the new sensations he was creating, for he was already sliding his lips lower, over the slope of one breast.
Clare felt his warm breath through the material of her bra cup and wished his mouth was on her bare skin. He must have read her thoughts because he slipped his hand beneath her back and, with a deftness that indicated plenty of experience in undressing women, unfastened the clasp and removed her bra.
His silver wolf’s eyes gleamed as he rested back on his haunches and stared at her naked breasts. Clare had always felt self-conscious of her curvaceous shape and compared herself unfavourably to her sister who was a model-thin size zero. But the undisguised hunger in Diego’s eyes made her glad that her breasts were full and firm, and for the first time in her life she felt proud of her feminine figure.
She did not feel apprehensive when she read the feral intent in his gaze. She felt as though she had been waiting for this, for him all her life. Sexual chemistry had sizzled from the moment they’d met and she felt a connection with him on a fundamental level that defied explanation.
‘Diego...’ She whispered his name like a prayer.
He gave her an oddly crooked smile and held his finger over her lips. ‘Don’t speak, anjinho. Maybe this isn’t real, and I don’t want to return to reality,’ he said softly.
Clare understood exactly what he meant. It was easy to sink into the dream and forget the world beyond the fire-lit cave; easy to sink into bliss as Diego lifted his finger from her lips and traced a feather-light path down her throat to her breast. She sucked in a sharp breath when he touched her nipple and it immediately hardened.
His husky laugh was rough with desire. ‘Bela.’ He was still kneeling above her and he cradled her breasts in his hands and flicked his thumb pads across her nipples in a repetitive motion that created such a storm of exquisite sensations in Clare that the pleasure was almost too much to withstand. Diego lowered his blond head and soothed one engorged peak with his tongue before he drew it into his mouth and suckled her until she moaned, and he transferred his lips to her other nipple and lavished the same delicious torment.
She tangled her fingers in his hair and tugged to bring his face close to hers. His smile should come with a government health warning, she thought, but then he claimed her lips in a possessive kiss that emptied her mind of all rational thoughts and left only the certainty that she wanted the kiss to last for ever.
His passion was scorching, yet he tempered his hunger with an unexpected tenderness that infiltrated her heart. When he slipped his hand between her legs it felt perfectly natural for him to caress the silken skin of her inner thighs. Clare’s lack of experience meant that this was uncharted territory for her, but she offered no resistance as his fingers skimmed inexorably higher and slipped inside her knickers.
‘Open your legs for me, querida. That’s right,’ he murmured his approval when she relaxed her thighs to allow him to gently part her
