Hot Summer Flings: A Spanish Awakening / The Italian Next Door... / Interview with the Daredevil

CHAPTER TWELVE

FINALLY Emilio rolled off her. Megan missed the weight of him pressing her into the mattress. Without the heat of his body the air-conditioned air felt cool on her hot, sweat-slick skin.

Megan, her breathing still all over the place, turned her head on the pillow. Emilio lay beside her on his back, one arm curved above his head. His eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply; his chest rose and fell in sync with each shallow breath. Megan rested her cheek in the crook of her arm, her expression rapt as she followed the play of muscles sliding below the golden glistening surface.

Everything about him fascinated her.

She reached out a hand to touch his skin and drew back. So far he hadn’t said a word. Was that normal? Should she be bothered by his silence?

How crazy was this? Minutes earlier they had been intimate in a way that should have shocked her but hadn’t; now she was scared of touching him in case it was the wrong thing.

Megan chewed her lower lip fretfully as the doubts crowded in. Had he fallen asleep?

Perhaps he would expect to find her dressed or even gone when he woke up? The instincts that had kicked in earlier had definitely switched off.

It was ironic—when she might have expected to feel some uncertainty there had been none, except for that brief moment when she was sure that they were simply not compatible in a purely dimensional sense—she had been very pleased to be proved wrong.

Beautifully wrong!

She might no longer be a virtuous virgin, but she still had no clue how a person was meant to behave post-lovemaking.

She glanced around the unfamiliar bedroom with the vast bed and modern art on the walls almost guiltily, as though she were a voyeur intruding on a scene in someone else’s life.

But this wasn’t happening to someone else, it was happening to her. Had happened.

No wonder it seemed surreal. I spent the morning in bed with Emilio Rios—now how weird did that sound? Actually, not so weird at all. A person, it seemed, could adapt awfully quickly to some things.

But she couldn’t allow herself to lose sight of the fact that for Emilio this was just sex. While in one sense his pragmatic approach to his physical needs and appetites shocked Megan, in another way she did kind of admire his painful honesty.

It would never be possible for her to match his honesty, she thought, refusing to acknowledge the lonely ache in her heart—time enough for that later. To him she was a one-night or any rate one-morning stand, so wanting more was a stupid waste of time.

She had always wanted more from him. God, it really did stink when your first crush turned out to be your last!

She had always been his for the taking; he just hadn’t felt the urge to reach before today. Megan blinked away the hot tears burning behind her eyes and gave a fierce frown as she told herself that for once in her life she would not think about tomorrow.

Her eyes made a covetous sweep of his body. A natural athlete’s body, long and lean, it was a sculpted, breathing miracle of taut muscles, hard bone and glistening, satiny bronzed skin. A tiny sigh of appreciation left her lips; he really was beautiful!

And he had done beautiful things to her.

And tomorrow he would be doing them to someone else.

The pucker between her arched brows smoothed out as she firmly pushed away the thought. She swallowed, refusing to acknowledge the ache in her throat—why spoil a perfect moment?

She rolled onto her side, watching the rise and fall of his chest as Emilio sucked air deep into his lungs through flared nostrils. There was not the slightest suggestion of softness in any part of his lean, hard body. She exhaled a shaky sigh and thought, This is perfect.

He was perfect.

As she watched him, need unfurled from the tight knot of nameless emotions locked in her chest. She had imagined she was in love with him, but the man she had fallen for had never really existed. She had been infatuated with a fantasy.

She had seen the real Emilio Rios the night he had ripped her character to shreds, not a kind man, but dangerous and capable, as she knew to her cost, of being cruel.

She tried to work out the attraction. She knew it wasn’t just his amazing face or athlete’s body. Emilio projected a raw power, an intensity that drew her like a moth to a flame.

Scratch the surface of polished sophistication he was famed for and there was something primitive, a danger that should logically have made her run. Instead Megan found his earthy magnetism impossible to resist.

Throat thick with emotion that shone in her amber eyes, she responded to the compelling need to touch him. She reached out, tangling her fingers in the light fuzz of hair on his chest before trailing her fingers slowly in the direction of his flat, muscle-ridged belly. She had never imagined feeling this greedy fascination with a man’s body, but she was utterly enthralled by everything, from the texture of his skin to the faint quiver of muscles just under the satiny surface she stroked.

The dark fan of his ebony lashes lifted slowly from the sharp angle of his cheekbones.

Megan held her breath.

Emilio turned his head.

Their eyes connected, liquid brown on topaz.

She could not read the expression in his dark eyes but she could feel the waves of strong emotion rolling off him, not something she had anticipated.

Neither had she anticipated the wave of paralysing shyness, not after the intimacies they had just shared and the total lack of inhibition she had displayed. She lay there aware of every imperfection, feeling horribly exposed and vulnerable, wishing with every ounce of her being that she could recapture the liberating pleasure in her own body she had experienced while they had been making love.

Emilio’s stare had not wavered from her face. The intensity of his unblinking regard was starting to be unsettling, but suddenly overwhelmingly conscious of her nakedness Megan reached down for a sheet to cover herself.

The next seconds were a blur. One moment she was clumsily attempting to grab the sheet, the next her hands were pinioned above her head.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I should get dressed.’ It was pretty hard to hit a casual note, but Megan thought she did quite well given the circumstances. ‘I’m sure you have things to do, a busy schedule, and I should touch base with D—’

‘You should stop babbling.’

‘I’m not babbling,’ she protested.

His broad shoulders lifted fractionally. ‘All right, talking nonsense.’ His dark eyes dropped from her face, sliding slowly down her body.

The insolent, sexually overt scrutiny made her stomach muscles twist in excitement.

‘I do have things to do.’ His eyes glittered as he bared his white teeth in a fierce smile. ‘All of them include you, and clothes are not involved. Your body pleases me. I find it utterly and totally exquisite. You will not hide it from me. You should be proud of it and enjoy it as much as I intend to.’

The explosive quality in his fierce stare made her shiver, then cry out when without warning he pressed his face against her breasts, the stubble on his chin abrading the smooth, sensitive skin, but not in a bad way.

He thinks I’m beautiful.

Her breath came in a series of shallow gasps as, eyes half closed, she watched through heavy eyelids his dark head against her body, her back arching as his tongue began to whip slowly across the peaks of her breasts, still painfully sensitised from their recent lovemaking.

When he loosed her hands to cup one quivering peak she tangled her fingers in his dark hair, pushing through the ebony strands still damp from their recent exertions to cradle his skull and hold him against her.

They stayed in his hair when he lifted his head and grinned down at her.

‘Also there is no point trying to hide from me in a bed this small.’

The bed was vast but she let it pass. ‘I wasn’t trying to hide,’ she protested.

He arched an ironic brow, making her eyes slide guiltily from his.

‘I was cold.’

‘Cold?’ Emilio laid his hand possessively on the soft feminine curve of her stomach. Megan started and trembled at his touch, shifting restlessly under his hand, but not wanting it to go away.

‘You do not feel cold to me.’ He leaned across her, sealing his mouth to hers as he kissed her, and he ran his hands down the silky skin of her thighs, wresting a whimper from her throat.

‘Not cold at all.’

Eyes closed, her head fell to one side as he began to nuzzle her neck.

Emilio’s head lifted, but his eyes remained riveted on her raspberry-pink thrusting nipples, wet and gleaming from his recent ministrations, dark against the milk-pale skin of her perfect breasts. With the utmost reluctance he clenched his jaw and tore his gaze free of temptation.

‘We have things to talk about,’ Megan heard him say with some unease.

She opened her eyes. ‘I thought you were a man of action, not words.’ Would the challenge successfully divert him?

It didn’t. Emilio saw through her tactics. ‘Nice try,’ he admired sardonically. ‘And I am tempted,’ he admitted with a smile that made her heart flip. The smile was absent as he added in a voice stripped of the sexy smokiness, ‘But we will talk. Your economy with words and my actions could have hurt you.’

He stopped and moved a hand across his face. She was shocked when his hand fell away to see his face contorted in a grimace of self-loathing.

‘Did hurt you,’ he added sombrely.

Megan was shaken by the dark anguish she saw reflected in the shadows of his incredible eyes. ‘No …’ she protested. ‘No, you didn’t.’ The memory of the moment of pain had already faded, supplanted by the incredible pleasure that had followed.

The muscles in Emilio’s brown throat stood out corded with tension as he dragged a hand jerkily across the surface of his dark hair, making it stand up spikily in front.

It was, she decided, a good look on him, but then any look was good on Emilio. God, but I am so besotted.

‘Do not lie to me, Megan,’ he rasped throatily as he caught her jaw between his long fingers and angled her face to him.

Megan struggled to judge his mood; his enigmatic expression gave nothing away. ‘I’m not—’

‘You have never been with a man before.’ The shock still fresh in his mind, Emilio struggled to frame the words. ‘It was your first time.’

If he pursued the theme too far Megan knew there was a real danger of her revealing more than was sensible.

The last thing she wanted was Emilio knowing that she had only been a virgin, not because she was virtuous or even that she had major hang-ups about sex, but because … God, how could she admit, without sounding incredibly old-fashioned, that she’d made a choice early on not to have sex outside marriage?

Megan had simply never been able to imagine being intimate with a man she didn’t have a strong emotional connection with.

The man she slept with would be the man she fell in love with, and as the only man she’d ever fallen for had been married she had accepted it might never happen and she was fine with that, or so she had told herself. There was more to life than sex and there were few things worse in life, it seemed to her, than sex with the wrong man.

There had been a lot of wrong men for her mother, a parade of ‘uncles’ whom Megan could recall appearing and disappearing at intervals. The eternal optimist, Clare Smith had always embarked on a new relationship believing it was the one, only to end up crushed and heartbroken when things fell apart.

As she got older and recognised the destructive pattern Megan, not sharing her mother’s optimism, had begun to dread seeing a new man appear. Some of the youthful anger she felt had been aimed at her mother; she wished very much now she had been more understanding.

‘Why do you need a man?’ she had yelled. ‘Why can’t I be enough? ‘

The stricken look on her mother’s face had stayed with her and she had never had an opportunity to retract it. Her mother had slipped off a crowded pavement at rush hour and under the wheels of a passing bus.

A hissing expletive left Emilio’s lips as, face dark with wrath, he stared at her, the muscle in his lean cheek spasmodically clenching and unclenching.

He looked ready to implode.

Megan struggled to respond to the blunt statement of her virginal status without blushing and failed. ‘Guilty as charged,’ she joked in an attempt to play the subject down.

Megan bit her lip. So much for lightening the mood!

‘You think this a joke?’ he grated. ‘Your first time should be special.’

Megan stared and thought, And he thinks it wasn’t?

‘I may not have used the word,’ she told him in a voice that shook with the emotions she was struggling to suppress, ‘but if you’re talking special as in unique and outstandingly brilliant, I do seem to recall saying something along those lines, quite loudly actually.’

‘You’re blushing, all over.’ The discovery appeared to distract and amuse him, though a moment later he was looking darkly sombre once more as he picked up a theme that Megan found acutely uncomfortable.

‘Your first time only happens the once, and … and I …’ His face contorted with a grimace of self-disgust, he broke off and dragged a hand down his jaw. Hearing the sound in his head, he felt as if he’d never be able to forget her sharp cry. His voice dropped as he accused, ‘You wept.’

Silently, and he had held her shaking body and felt like a total animal.

Megan laid a tentative hand on his shoulder; his muscles felt rock-hard and rigid. ‘It wasn’t because you hurt me,’ she protested, stunned by his reading of the situation.

‘If I had known—’ His jaw clenched; the knowledge that he had hurt her felt like a blade sliding between his ribs. ‘But how could you be … Why?’

Megan groaned and scanned his face. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’

He looked at her as though she had just announced she was actually a Martian. ‘Let it go!’ He’d waited two years for that moment and when it had happened he had blown it! When he thought of the way he had … ‘Por Dios! I think you owe me an explanation,’ he announced grimly.

Her eyes slid guiltily from his. I’m yours and I love you. I actually pretty much always have, was a fairly accurate summing-up of the situation, but she doubted it would go down too well.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that you—?’

Her voice tight with humiliation, Megan cut across his incensed demand. ‘You didn’t seem all that interested in conversation at the time.’

The line of colour across the angle of Emilio’s cheekbones deepened as their glances clashed. Even now the air between them hummed with a sexual tension that was almost tangible. Despite the intensity of their lovemaking it had not even taken the edge off his hunger for her.

He did not need reminding that his actions had been ruled by his own selfish carnal desire, a carnal desire that after two years of denial had been stripped to its primitive and most basic form.

It had been a point of pride with Emilio that he had never been a victim of his hormones. He had certainly never lost control in bed before, and now the one time he should have shown restraint with a woman, when he should have been gentle, he had snapped. His relentless, ravenous need for her had made him utterly blind to her inexperience until that last moment.

There must have been clues? How had he missed them? Missed the opportunity to make her initiation special.

‘And you were not acting like a virgin,’ corrosive shame made him retort defensively.

‘Know a lot about virgins, do you?’

His eyes narrowed as his eyes drifted to her tender lips still swollen from his kisses. ‘Nothing, as it happens,’ he said, thinking it seemed he also knew even less about women, or this one at least.

‘You’re making a big thing of nothing. Being a virgin isn’t like having a contagious disease. It’s not obligatory to go into isolation.’ Her mouth settled into a mutinous line of defiance as she tried to hide her hurt. ‘I’m sorry you feel cheated and short-changed but I’m not about to say sorry.’

His brows lifted. ‘What are you talking about now? Cheated …?’ he asked irritably. ‘You are not making sense.’

Face scrunched in an effort to hold back the tears that threatened to spill over, she lifted her chin and blinked hard.