there was no need for him to know how elemental her attraction to him had been from the first moment she had seen him sitting in the café. How she had woven richly embroidered dreams and fantasies around him before she had worked up the courage to make her reckless approach.
‘I wasn’t looking for a lover,’ she denied. ‘Just some company for my last night in Paris, and I thought you looked … interesting.’
‘But obviously not interesting enough to stick around for conversation after you’d had your wicked way with me,’ he goaded. ‘You don’t seem to require a very in-depth relationship in your sexual partners.’
‘You can talk! I didn’t notice you turning down the chance of a one-night stand!’ she said hotly.
His eyes gleamed with satisfaction at her response to his inflammatory statement.
‘Is that what it was? I thought it was a mutual coup de foudre. I assumed that after our exhausting revels, we’d wake up together in the morning …’
‘And what? And share a few laughs about how you fooled me into believing you couldn’t understand me?’ she threw at him.
‘Oh, I think that in the heat of the night we understood each other perfectly well,’ he drawled with rock-hard confidence. ‘You might recall I did let slip quite a few extremely fluent English phrases in your ear while I was inside you, and you told me quite explicitly what you liked about my body and what you wanted me to do with it. And when you begged me to make love to you, I certainly didn’t ask for a translation …’
‘Did I? I don’t remember—’ She flushed and turned her back, her arm brushing his body. How and when had she let him get so close?
She realised her strategic error when his arm snaked around her waist, stopping her from walking away.
‘Don’t you?’ His muscled arm slowly contracted, drawing her back against his chest, fitting her bottom into the warm saddle of his hips. ‘Are you sure?’ he murmured, his hard chin sinking into the hollow between her neck and shoulder, anchoring their upper bodies together.
She shivered at the feel of his lips moving against the side of her bare throat as he continued to speak in that dark, sultry tone: ‘I think you’ll find that you remember a lot more than you’re willing to admit.’ His arm was replaced with his big hands spanning the sides of her waist, his fingers slanting down across her hip-bones as he pressed her more snugly against his potent hardness.
‘There’s no need to feel shy, Veronica,’ he whispered with shattering insight. ‘See how wonderfully well our bodies are shaped to fit each other. You don’t have to be ashamed of what we did together. It was entirely natural … a man and a woman freely expressing their mutual desire. Je ne regrette rien …’
She stiffened, wanting to punish him for the accuracy of his perception and at the same time let him know that she wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. No matter how glorious it had felt at the time, the aftermath of her flirtation with fantasy had taught her that she wasn’t cut out to be a spontaneous wild-child.
‘I’m not shy. I know it was just a one-time thing, that it didn’t mean anything,’ she said, trying to sound crushingly sophisticated.
His cheek nuzzled against the side of her throat. ‘Are you sure about that?’ His hands slipped under the edge of her top, his palms skimming up over her bare skin to cup her breasts in their silky-fine casing of stretchy fabric. ‘Don’t you remember how good it felt when there was nothing between your skin and mine … when we were naked with each other and I touched you like this …?’ His fingers feathered across the centre of her breasts, circling the betraying tightness of her nipples, drawing them out to prominent points against the seamless tee-shirt bra, and capturing them between thumb and forefinger. He turned his open mouth into her neck and scraped her lightly with his teeth and sucking at the thrilling sting. ‘Don’t you remember saying how you wanted this feeling to go on for ever,’ he said huskily, applying delicate pressure and rolling her throbbing nipples between his fingers, ‘how you moaned when I took these in my mouth and tasted you for the first time, how you melted with pleasure when I showed you just how exquisitely sensitive you are here, how violently responsive to the lightest stroke of my tongue …?’
Veronica shuddered, arching helplessly back against him as his hands contracted, compressing the pleasure into a dangerous thrill of forbidden delight.
His mouth moved up behind her ear, his breath as hot as his words as he confided how much her eager delight had pleased him. ‘It gave me such an incredible rush when I made you come just by devoting myself to your gorgeous breasts, licking and sucking on these sexy, pointed nipples until you went wild in my arms …’
He ignored her choked cry; one of his hands abandoned its lavish attentions and moved down to smooth over her hip and push between their bodies, tracing the generous curve of her bottom to its bisecting crease. ‘And here, where you’re so lush and round and womanly …’ his velvety whisper paused as he sank his teeth lightly into her fleshy ear lobe, his hand adjusting her so that she could feel the thick shaft of muscle lying against her resilient flesh ‘… remember how I kissed my way down your spine to this highly sensitive spot, the one just here … and then …’ Using darkly intense language, he described what he had done with an explicit eroticism that made her squeeze her thighs together in an effort to control the hot pulse of arousal that threatened to melt her into a submissive puddle at his feet.
The involuntary clench of her buttocks gripped him in an intimate clasp, and she felt his groan vibrating from his chest.
‘Oh, yes, you liked that, didn’t you?’ he said thickly, his fingers plunging under the smooth edge of her bra to find her distended nipple while his hips pushed his engorged manhood against the cleft of her bottom, creating an exciting friction in both places that edged her even nearer to a total meltdown. ‘You liked everything that we did to each other,’ he purred, nibbling at the nape of her neck. ‘The trouble was, it was all over so fast we hardly had time to savour it …’ He strung a series of light, teasing kisses to the tip of her shoulder, at odds with the simmering tension in his body. ‘But here there’s no need for us to rush our love-making. We can explore the sensuous side of passion … see if we enjoy slow and lazy as much as fast and furious. Just imagine how much more exciting it could be if we take the time to learn each other’s most erotic, most intimate secrets …’
The mention of secrets made Veronica flinch. Where before the romantic fantasy of a mysterious lover had been thrilling, now she knew that where there was no knowledge there was no trust. The real Lucien Ryder was still an enigma to her; a wealthy, worldly sophisticate, prone to high-risk behaviour and embroiled in some nameless trouble. He might not be the psychotic killer of her foolish fears, but he could still turn out to be extremely dangerous to her emotional health.
Now that he had satisfied himself that Veronica wasn’t a threat to his own security, Lucien had evidently decided to take advantage of the fact that she was convenient and available, and spin out their one night of ‘no regrets’ into a ‘no strings’ holiday affair.
Of course it wouldn’t occur to him that she might not be interested in acquiring the questionable status of his temporary lover, she thought, desperately trying to whip up a defensive anger. He talked very persuasively of passion and exploration, but there was no mention of any desire for emotional intimacy in his suggested affair. While he might be able to retain the necessary detachment, Veronica was less sanguine about her chances of walking away with her heart intact. A few hours in his company had already caused her as much turmoil as pleasure, filling her with conflicting doubts and yearnings. She
