cheek and the cords of tension standing out in his brown throat.
‘Of course, I can see the sense of power you had discovered must have been intoxicating,’ he conceded, struggling to be fair-minded and failing big time as he thought of Megan enjoying her feminine power in the arms of men like that creep he had dragged from the car.
As he remembered the fear in the said creep’s eyes he smiled thinly, not regretting having put it there—at least he knew there would be one less guy supplying willing arms.
She gave a baffled shake of her head, confused as much by his strained manner as his peculiar choice of words. ‘Intoxicating? ‘
‘You’d pretty much been invisible at home all through your adolescence and, I assume, school.’ Recalling the slights and snubs he had witnessed and imagining the ones he had not, Emilio struggled to keep his voice impassive.
‘Thanks.’ Megan finally saw where he was going with this. It was always good to be told you were a needy and pathetic outsider. ‘So you’re suggesting at some point I morphed into an equally pathetic attention seeker with self-esteem issues.’ She wasn’t sure which was worst.
His lips twisted in a spasm of impatience. ‘Don’t spin my words. I’m saying that the tables were turned. You weren’t the one doing the vying. It was not surprising that, after years of being overlooked, being the focus of male attention should go to your head. You wouldn’t be the first person deprived of parental approval to confuse sex with love. Sex is only ever a short-term fix.’
The expression in his eyes when he drew this bleak conclusion made Megan wonder if this was personal.
Was Emilio thinking of the women he had slept with since his marriage collapsed when he spoke of short-term fixes? Was Rosanna the only woman he had ever loved? It was obvious after the airport debacle that, whatever he said, he was not over her.
‘It is hard to recover your self-respect, Megan, once you have lost it.’
‘Is that a polite way of saying you think I’m a tart?’
‘Do not put words in my mouth,’ he responded irritably.
Megan gave a bemused shrug and stared up at him. For a man with the reputation of infallibility, she reflected grimly, when Emilio got it wrong he got it wrong big time!
‘And you got all that from the colour of my lipstick! Amazing, you’re even smarter than they say.’
The muscles around his jaw tightened at her mock admiration. ‘Oh, so I’m meant to believe you didn’t have the faintest idea what you could do to me … a man, looking that way.’
‘Do to a man?’ Her eyes widened. The expression smouldering in his deep-set eyes made her heart kick up several more uncomfortable notches. ‘Me? Sure,’ she drawled, coating her words with protective cynicism as she batted her eyelashes like crazy and struck a provocative pose, hand on hip. ‘It’s such a burden being irresistible. Ouch,’ she yelled, pulling back as his fingers closed like an iron band around her wrist.
The touch was light and the effect on her nervous system totally disproportionate. ‘This habit you have of putting yourself down before someone else does is one you should try to break.’
‘I don’t—’ Emilio watched the flash of recognition in her eyes before they fell from his.
‘That hurts,’ she lied, wincing not in pain but at the breathy sound of her own voice.
Emilio was breathing hard as he brought her hands together and pressed them, palms sealed, between his.
It was a moment before his gaze lifted from their entwined fingers. The blaze of hunger in his eyes as they connected with her own made Megan’s insides dissolve.
‘So does wanting a woman so much you can’t think of anything else, so much that you can’t function!’ he growled, jerking her roughly towards him until they stood thigh to thigh.
They were so close now that Megan could hear his heartbeat, or was that her own? His hands had moved to the small of her back, leaving her own trapped between their bodies. She might have struggled to work out where he ended and she started, except he was harder … much harder. The muscular thighs she was pressed against had as much give as oak-tree trunks.
Shaking her head to clear the dreamy, light-headed sensation, she forced herself to recognise the abrupt rise in her core temperature for what it was: a hormone rush—God, a hormone avalanche!
She struggled hard to inject a note of humour into her response. ‘Your concern for your fellow man does you credit, but I promise to behave and never wear pink lipstick again.’
‘I have no concern for them.’ Emilio dismissed the mental well-being of one half of the population with an expressive sneer. ‘And,’ he added, gritting out the words with force, ‘I don’t want you to behave.’
‘You don’t?’ she whispered.
His glittering eyes held hers. ‘Not at all,’ he confirmed in a deep smoky voice that sent shivers of anticipation down her spine.
Emilio wanted her to misbehave—with him.
She said it twice in her head and it still didn’t seem real. Did she even know how to misbehave in the way he clearly expected? Her eyes drifted to his gorgeous, incredibly sexy mouth and suddenly her lack of experience felt less important as need swelled inside her, tightening into a hard fist of hot desire in her belly.
Emilio was the one man whom she had always been prepared to sacrifice her principles for. She had frequently told herself she was lucky he had never asked her to. That way, she had reasoned, she had no regrets—what she also did not have, but had not previously acknowledged, were no memories.
Now he was standing there, not asking directly but sending some pretty explicit messages, unless she had disastrously misinterpreted his thinly veiled comments and the gleam of sexual intent in his eyes was a figment of her overheated imagination.
She checked. That gleam looked real. It felt real, she thought as a fresh shiver rippled through her body. At that moment it hit her that it was real; she wasn’t dreaming.
What am I doing?
Belatedly Megan’s self-protective instincts kicked in and her head dropped forward, causing her hair to fall in a silky screen around her face.
Space, she told herself. I need space and I need not to say, Take me!
Do not say it, Megan!
She bit down on the shameless words. She remained dumb but couldn’t put the space plan into action as her feet remained nailed to the floor.
She felt the sweat trickle down her back and realised with horror that if anything she was leaning into him, not pulling away. Her body just wasn’t listening to what her head was telling it.
Her body had its own agenda!
And to make the situation even more unbearable her brain might have closed down but her senses were painfully alert. Being this close to him, being able to smell him, feel the heat coming off his body, was physically painful.
She
