slid over him and settled on top of him more fully, her hands either side of his head as her hair fell across one shoulder to curtain them both. ‘I want to spend the night with you,’ she said as her lips brushed his jawline.
‘Yes.’
‘The whole night.’
‘Yes.’ He drew her down for another kiss. Not sated, that kiss told her. Not nearly.
Good.
She let his possession of her mouth inflame her. She let the feel of his body beneath hers consume her. The hard and rippling planes of his chest. She wanted to go slow this time, to record and to remember, and, wordlessly, he made the world turn slow as he rebuilt the flames of desire caress by deliberately slow caress.
Only when she was on the brink of ecstasy did he enter her and with unerring certainty drive her once more towards oblivion; that place where the world fell away and there was only one anchor and his name was Rafael. Rafael dozed in the aftermath of Simone’s lovemaking. He wanted to remain awake the better to remember every moment, but with his body urging him towards sleep and with Simone already embracing it, he knew he’d soon surrender to the pull of night. Rafe knew how to live in the moment. He knew how to seize it.
Keeping it was the hard part.
One hand above his head and his other around the only woman he’d ever loved with all that he was. The only woman he’d ever exposed his scarred but steadfast soul to.
It hadn’t been enough.
His love for her. His dreams of a future together if only she would believe in him, and be with him. His confidence in her love for him.
It hadn’t been enough.
Simone had stayed on at Caverness, Rafael had stormed away in anger and in grief, and, God, it hurt to look back. Don’t look back. Don’t ever look back.
He closed his eyes and willed sleep to come.
There was nothing there he wanted to see.
MORNING came too soon for Simone.
‘No,’ she murmured when Rafael shifted restlessly beside her. A half-asleep protest as she opened her eyes and realised the advent of the day. She closed her eyes tightly and rolled onto her stomach as she reached for the pillow to fill the space Rafael had just vacated. ‘No.’
‘Shower,’ he said huskily. ‘Care to join me?’
‘No.’ And then with one eye cautiously open…‘Maybe.’
His smile was lazy. His eyes were bold. ‘Suit yourself.’
He left and closed the bathroom door behind him. The shower came on. The sheets came off. Simone had never been one to linger in bed when a challenge had been issued. She recalled with a tiny smile the firm hardness of every bit of Rafael’s lean and luscious body.
Challenge had most certainly been issued.
She almost chickened out as she stood on one side of the glass shower door with Rafael and a cascade of steaming water on the other. And then the door slid open and a hand reached for her and dragged her inside and that was the end of that.
‘You’re very decisive,’ she murmured. ‘It’s irritatingly appealing.’
He smiled a devil’s smile as he pinned her against the cubicle wall. ‘I know. Come with me today. To Sydney. I’ll get someone else to drive your hire car back.’
She wanted to. Badly. But caution had arrived with the day. Bedding Rafael had solved none of the issues hovering between them. Okay, maybe it had solved one, but the rest remained in place.
‘The meeting with Etienne won’t take long,’ he said next. ‘You could come along, and then afterwards I’ll show you Sydney.’
She slid from his grasp, stalling for time, as she stood beneath the spray. ‘Will you show me where you got your tattoo?’
His eyes grew shadowed. ‘No.’
‘Turn around,’ she ordered next, and pushed and prodded until she had Rafael where she wanted him, with his head flung back and his arms raised, hands resting on the tiles as water ran in rivulets down his back, over the words and the picture she’d striven so hard to forget.
‘I hate you for this,’ she murmured, tracing the darkened words that flowed across his back with the tips of her fingers, before finally pressing her mouth to the ink that graced his shoulder blade. ‘I love you for it too.’
Pleasure and pain. More pleasure than pain as he turned and thrust his hand into her hair and kissed her hard. They wouldn’t make it out of the shower before he took her again, she knew that much already.
She wouldn’t make it through the day without sacrificing her heart. She knew that too.
‘Show me your Sydney, then,’ she murmured as the last of her resistance to this man was crushed beneath the feel of his hands on her. ‘I’ll give you this day.’
They made it to Sydney with half an hour to spare before Rafael’s meeting with Etienne. By the time they’d parked the car underground and Rafael had caught her and kissed her as she got out of the car, and they’d made it to the lifts and into the foyer of the hotel, and found the washrooms and freshened their appearances, they only had five minutes to spare.
Being five minutes early to a meeting with a reigning monarch who wanted to offer you a plum commission wasn’t such a bad thing, she assured Rafael laughingly, before asking him yet again if he thought she would be in the way.
‘I’ve never met the man before, Simone. He’s known you since childhood. You won’t be in the way.’
Etienne had chosen to meet Rafael for lunch in the restaurant attached to the hotel. He stood as they approached him. A big, spare-framed man, immaculately attired in a dark suit and shirt. A man with a handsome face and a brilliant blue gaze that fixed on Rafael and never wavered.
Simone stopped abruptly, sucker punched into immobility.
Comprehension dawned.
Etienne’s knowledge of Rafael’s achievements. Gabrielle’s insistence that Etienne stay away. Not from the vineyard, but from Rafael. ‘Oh, no.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’
Rafael had stopped too, his eyes on her, puzzled and questioning. ‘Simone? What is it?’
‘Rafe—’
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t…I can’t…’ She shook her head, trying to clear it. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t…’
‘Shouldn’t what?’ His words echoed her unspoken ones.
‘Let’s just forget this meeting and
