in front of her, she didn’t huddle into a defensive ball. Instead, she stared right back up at him with a degree of boldness she hadn’t known she possessed.
So he fancied her. So she hadn’t been the only one to feel that fierce, uncontrollable attraction.
‘What else was I supposed to think?’
‘This conversation is...’ He shook his head and looked away for a few seconds, but his eyes swerved back to her upturned face.
‘Is what?’
‘Dangerous,’ Rafael said softly.
‘Okay.’
‘Okay? Is that all you have to say on the matter?’
‘I feel better about you taking the dress off.’
‘Because you wanted it off or because you now know that you turn me on?’ He didn’t take his eyes off her when he said that.
Heat crawled through her. She felt the pinch of her nipples and a spreading dampness between her thighs. She’d never wanted anyone as much as she wanted him, right here and right now. But she just didn’t have it in her to take that final step and brazenly invite him into bed with her.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.
‘Sofia, I made a conscious decision not to do anything about the attraction I felt for you because I didn’t want to complicate an already complicated situation.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think I mean? I wanted this to be about business. Emotions have a way of stealing the show and never in a good way.’
‘My emotions or yours?’
‘I don’t have emotions.’
Sofia opened her mouth to tell him that he surely didn’t mean that but then realised that he really did. Or that was what he told himself, because when she thought about how devoted he was to his godfather she knew that he was far from being the unemotional hard case he purported to be.
So what did they have here? Stripped down to the bare bones, what they had was a physical attraction that was as strong as a riptide, as darkly powerful as the swirl of a dangerous whirlpool in the middle of still waters.
‘Nor do I,’ she said boldly. ‘Not for you, at any rate.’
‘What are you trying to tell me, cara?’ Rafael asked thickly.
‘I’m trying to tell you that I wish you’d come sit on the bed again.’
Rafael looked at her for a long moment and she wondered whether, having reached a crossroads, he would now turn his back and walk away, stick to following his head.
She’d come so close to opening herself up to him physically when they had been out in Argentina before the truth had spilled out. She was at that point again, all cards on the table.
He slowly moved towards her and she felt her breathing slow as she watched him. So beautiful, so graceful, so mesmerisingly alpha male.
Her eyes tracked a leisurely route from face to torso and then down to where his jeans pulled tightly across his thighs.
‘You’re playing with fire,’ he said shakily, but his hand was resting lightly on the zipper of his trousers and she stared, fascinated, as he undid it.
She didn’t want to give herself time to think or even to remember that this was not the sort of thing she’d ever done before. She didn’t want her head to start following his lead and take control of the situation.
She didn’t want her own negative experiences in the past to determine what happened at this precise moment in time.
‘Maybe I am,’ she agreed in a low voice. ‘I’ve never played with fire before.’
‘Never?’ He smiled, lowered himself next to her on the bed and stretched out, arms folded behind his head. Sofia remained upright but shifted so that she was looking down at him. His gaze slid across to her and stayed there.
‘No. Have you?’
‘Once. Doesn’t everyone need a learning curve? Let me see you.’
‘See me?’
‘You know what I mean.’ He trailed a finger along her collar bone, beneath which the duvet was still pulled up tightly, shielding her naked breasts.
She slowly let the duvet drop and watched with increasingly heated excitement as Rafael sat up, barely breathing, eyes trained on her nakedness.
Her nipples were pink and swollen and she released a long sigh, relaxing her whole body into his caress as he manoeuvred himself into a position from which he could take one bud into his mouth and gently suck on it.
He propelled her back so that she was lying flat, then pinned her hands above her head and straddled her.
‘You have no idea how much you turn me on,’ Rafael offered huskily. ‘Everything about the way you look is a turn-on. The second I laid eyes on you, every other woman on the face of the earth faded into insignificance.’
Sweet words, she thought helplessly, but so meaningless in the context of what we have. But what’s the point of analysing? When we’re bound together through convenience and destined to part company before the ink on the marriage certificate has time to dry?
Meaningful or meaningless...did either matter when the physical need he aroused was so explosive?
She turned him on and that thought was as powerful as a rush of pure adrenaline...
She moved sinuously against the sheet and felt a rush of feminine empowerment as his nostrils flared and his eyes darkened in the grip of lust.
When he straightened to sling his legs over the side of the bed, he left behind a cool void that made her want to touch herself.
Should she tell him that she was not going to be able to live up to all those racy model types he dated? She’d known from the minute she’d begun developing what it felt like to have boys drool over her. Her first girlish crush had been a mistake, and her experiences after that had rammed home to her that the only reason men looked twice at her was because of her appearance. She hadn’t asked to be born sexy, but she had been, and she had grown wary over the years. So wary that the touching and experimentation that should have been part and parcel of entering adulthood had passed her by.
The constant travel hadn’t helped matters either.
Now, here she was, and he was in for a shock if he expected high jinks between the sheets.
Caught up in her thoughts, she gasped when she realised the T-shirt had been removed and the jeans were being dispatched to join it on the ground.
The bulge of his erection distorting the shape of his boxers brought hectic colour to her cheeks and she went as stiff as a board as he joined her on the bed under the duvet, pulling it up so that it covered both of them, drawing her close so that her
