The Thorn in His Side (15 page)

He was basing his present actions on the assumption that once he had satisfied the latter of these impulses his emotional equilibrium would return to normal.

‘There will even be time for you to have some supper with me.’ She looked as if she needed feeding.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘How many meals have you been skipping? You are working hard enough for two people.’

‘You said—’

‘Forget what I said,’ Rafael instructed, waving aside his previous comments with a regal wave of his hand. ‘You are obviously not eating enough to keep a sparrow alive,’ he condemned harshly.

‘I eat!’ she protested.

‘I will believe that when I see it,’ he returned smoothly.

Libby shook her head and reached for her belt. ‘I’ll catch the train.’ She cursed softly under her breath when her trembling fingers fumbled the clip. ‘I shouldn’t have got in anyway. Certifiable idiot that I am I thought that … How was I to know I was your good deed for the day—?’

‘Be still.’

Libby obeyed the stern caution, not out of choice, but because she couldn’t not obey. She couldn’t have moved if her life had depended on it, for no better reason than he was touching her. He was touching her and she had forgotten how to move.

She stared at his big hand on her lap where it imprisoned both her own hands; the slight movement of his thumb over the inner aspect of her wrist was sending hot flurries.

‘Dios,
you are shaking!’

Libby, made dizzy by his closeness, overwhelmingly aware of the clean male scent that rose from his warm body, closed her eyes.

A thoughtful expression drifted across his face. ‘What did you think, Libby? Why did you think I asked you to get in the car?’

‘Ask?’ she echoed bitterly. ‘You didn’t ask, you ordered.’

‘Do not try and deflect—it will not work with me.
Answer me, Libby. I am not getting any younger sitting here.’

‘Fine!’ Libby shook her head, unable to withstand either the pressure of his questions or the pressure inside her skull. ‘If you must know I thought you were going to renew your proposition.’ She buried her face in her hands. ‘I thought you were going to ask me to go to bed with you,’ she mumbled miserably.

‘And if I had what would your reply have been?’

Libby lifted her head, her expression cautious as she scanned his face. The fierce hunger she saw in his eyes drew the air from her lungs in one gasp.

The mixture of excitement and exhilaration coursing through her veins made it difficult for Libby to force the words out. ‘I would have said yes,’ she admitted.

‘Then I am asking.’

Libby swallowed and levelled her clear blue gaze on his face. She was shaking feverishly but her voice was steady as she whispered, ‘Yes!’

At that point the voice of caution in her head threw in the towel; the only thing that Libby was listening to was the hunger roaring like an out-of-control forest fire through her veins. She didn’t know if this decision was wrong but, more to the point, she didn’t care—it felt right.

The look of carnal promise in Rafael’s half-closed eyes sent a fresh rush of heat through her body. Libby felt weak with lust when she looked at him.

‘Do not look at me like that or we might not make it to my apartment,’ he growled wincing and sliding seamlessly into his own language as he crunched the gears in his eagerness to move off into the traffic.

‘You make me act like a teenager.’ Rafael was
unaware that he voiced this rueful opinion in his native tongue. ‘But I will not be clumsy in bed,
querida,
I promise you,’ He added in the same tongue.

They exchanged not a word during the fifteen-minute journey to the apartment building that housed Rafael’s penthouse flat. It had seemed to a frustrated Rafael that every light was against them.

To Libby, sitting silently beside him, the journey went by in a blur. She abandoned any attempt to try and rationalise what she was doing and concentrated instead on a more practical aspect of the situation.

She had just been invited into the bed of a man who was experienced and highly sexed. The subject had not come up but she was pretty sure that he was not expecting to take a clumsy, clueless virgin to bed.

Should she warn him or should she wing it? If she told him would he run a mile? Libby didn’t have a clue, but why should she have any insight? She barely knew the man.

The idea of discussing anything so private horrified her, which was pretty perverse considering she was planning to share her body with him.

Libby gave up trying to see any pattern of logic in her decisions because clearly there wasn’t any. It was as if she became a different person around him, one she didn’t recognise.

When the lift opened into his apartment she hung back.

Rafael’s patience snapped. So far she hadn’t said a single word and now she stood there looking like a martyr about to be thrown to the lions.

‘What is the matter?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing, I just … Is there anyone here?’

‘I have no live-in staff. I am quite capable of taking care of myself. I have been doing it for a long time.’

‘Oh,’ she said, stepping with marginally less trepidation into the big loft-style space. ‘Someone said you have a castle that’s been in your family for generations. I thought—’

‘You thought I needed someone to put toothpaste on my toothbrush. And I was not brought up in any castle or even any house, just a series of …’ He paused. ‘My lifestyle was nomadic. The castle was my grandfather’s home. I have never even visited it.’

‘Nomadic—that sounds very romantic.’

The innocent remark drew a grim, hard laugh from Rafael. ‘It was not,’ he said bluntly. ‘I had lived in five South American countries before I was twelve and nothing in any of them was.’ He stopped abruptly, allowing Libby a glimpse of shock in his eyes before his luxuriant lashes swept downwards. ‘It was not romantic or picturesque, but it was a good school for survival skills.’ It was about the only school Rafael had gone to; he had taught himself to read and developed a ferocious appetite for the written word that had stayed with him.

Libby’s rioting curiosity dried up the moment he turned to her and said casually, ‘Would you like a drink or would you prefer to go straight to the bedroom?’

She started to shake her head; the glow of arousal that had brought her this far dissolved. ‘That sounds so
clinical.’

Rafael looked startled by the comment. ‘What did you expect—a rose-petal path to the bed?’

His comment sent an unexpected stab of pain through Libby, who had always thought her first time would be special or at least not like this, just for sex.

‘I don’t know what I expected,’ she admitted, biting her lips and hating the fact she was acting like a scared virgin.

You are a scared virgin.

Rafael took it for granted she shared his ability to enjoy sex just for sex … Libby was not so sure.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ Rafael said, struggling to see the situation from her point of view. He did not date women to whom the courtship ritual of dinners and flowers was important. ‘If I seem … I would like nothing better than spending the entire night with you, but you set the rules and I wanted to make the most of what time we have, because to be honest wanting you is driving me insane.’

Libby, recognising his attempt to understand her feelings, felt some of the tension leave her shoulders. It was also pretty flattering to be told by an incredibly sexy man that he was mad in lust with you.
‘Think of it as make-up sex.’

The suggestion drew her startled gaze to his face.

‘I hate to sound picky—’ actually she sounded breathless ‘—but to have make-up sex, you have to have already had sex in the first place. Or did we and I forgot?’

Rafael’s eyes lifted from her heaving bosom; his eyes burnt so hot they made Libby dizzy.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t have forgotten,
querida.’
His throaty purr of promise sent a fresh lick of heat through Libby’s trembling body.

A nerve throbbed in his cheek as he leaned in closer, his breath stirring the sensitised nerve endings around
her ear as he whispered throatily, ‘And if we had already had sex this wouldn’t be—my brain wouldn’t be … I wouldn’t be feeling—’ He stopped, swallowed and thought, If we’d had sex I might be able to complete a sentence. ‘All right, if you want to be pedantic let’s call it make-up-for-lost-time sex.’

Save-my-sanity sex, he thought, holding his breath as he reached out. Libby froze as his fingers grazed her scalp. She was nailed to the spot by a tidal wave of enervating lust and longing. Inside her chest her heart hammered away; her mouth was dry.

Libby wanted him to touch her so much that it physically hurt. She literally ached with need that tingled under her skin like a dark flame. She moistened her lips nervously with her tongue, drawing his hungry cinnamon stare to the quivering curve.

Rafael was unprepared for the shaft of tenderness mingled in with the consuming lust as he looked at the face turned up to him, eating up the delicate perfection of her flawless cut-glass features with his hungry eyes. Her delicate blue-veined eyelids fluttered as he bent his head, brushing his lips across the surface of each in turn.

Libby gasped and her eyelids flew open just as his fingers worked free the pins that held her hair back from her face.

Their eyes locked, Rafael straightened up. A nerve in his lean cheek pulsed, the muscles in his jaw and neck standing out taut. He watched with a satisfied smile as her hair slid in a silky cloud around her shoulders.

‘Now shake your head.’

Without thinking Libby obeyed the instruction. She had a feeling she’d do pretty much anything he asked
of her. She wanted to please him, which should, if she’d been in her right mind, have scared her witless.

She wasn’t scared any longer, but then she definitely wasn’t in her right mind.

A low growling sound of approval emerged from Rafael’s throat as he watched the silky cloud bounce then settle around her face.

‘Like silk,’ he said, sliding his fingers into the mesh of glossy waves. ‘Hot silk.
Dios,
I have been wanting to do this for ever.’

‘We only met three weeks ago,’ she protested, thinking, Stop talking and kiss me.

And then he was.

The kiss did not start slow and build, it just exploded. Rafael prised her lips apart with ruthless efficiency and stabbed his tongue deep into her mouth.

Her lingering doubts were blitzed away at the first touch of their lips. Libby gasped as the heat exploded everywhere; it rolled over her in waves; it burnt inside her; it prickled across the surface of her skin.

She felt the purr of approval in his throat as she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back with a wild passion that matched his own. Not once during the wild kissing frenzy did she think of herself as a virgin.

She just thought, More, and closed her eyes to shut out the rest of the world.

She could do it; she was great at this—who’d have known?

When Rafael finally drew back it was to sweep her up into his arms. Supporting her weight with casual ease with one hand, he swept the hair back from her face with the other to reveal her passion-flushed features.

‘You’re beautiful.’

The raw wonder in his voice made her stare. It seemed miraculous to her that she could affect a man like this, that he could want her.

She looked back at him with those big eyes and Rafael felt something break loose inside him. Not even attempting to put a name to this nebulous feeling, he ran a finger down the soft curve of her cheek, fascinated by the texture of her silky skin.

Fascinated by all of her.

He wanted all of her in a way that he had never experienced with any other woman.

‘So are you.’

Rafael grinned, then stopped as Libby turned her head and touched her tongue to his finger. She felt his gasp and gave a sultry smile. ‘You taste good. Are you taking me to bed?’

Rafael stared at her with glowing eyes that made her think of a hungry wolf.

‘That,’ Rafael admitted huskily, ‘is the idea, but much more of this I might not make it that far.’ Striding across the room urgently, he kicked open the door and walked straight across to the bed.

Mesmerised by the hot embers of passion glowing in his eyes, Libby pushed her face into his neck, nuzzling her way along the strong column of his throat as he strode across the room.

He dragged the duvet down and laid her on the bed.

Leaning over her, one hand either side of her face, he kissed her slowly, deeply, with an eroticism that made her stomach muscles quiver.

‘Look, I really should tell you I’m not that great in bed.’

He didn’t look unduly concerned by her confession. ‘I like a challenge.’

Libby thought, Well, I did warn him—kind of, and arched up to him, looping her arms around his neck, sliding her fingers into his hair, then protesting a moment later when he unpeeled them and stood up.

The alarm that flared in her smoky blue eyes faded as he began to fight his way with flattering haste out of his jacket, pausing only to fling it across the room before moving on to his shirt. She watched, tongue caught between her teeth, her breath coming in a series of short choppy gasps as the fabric parted to reveal the golden hair-roughened skin of his chest and the muscled ridges of his flat belly.

The voluptuous sigh of pleasure that left her lips drew his eyes to her face. With her red hair tousled and spread across the pillow, she was the fantasy that had haunted his dreams made warm flesh.

Except for the clothes. The thought of divesting his wanton angel of those unnecessary items and revealing that lovely body for his delectation put extra urgency into Rafael’s actions.

His fingers felt clumsy as he reached for the buckle on the belt of his trousers. The thought of her watching him, the thought of her growing hot for him, increased the level of his desire several more painful notches. He winced. The tailored cut of his trousers was making very little allowance for his level of arousal.

It was a relief to finally kick them away.

Libby’s heart was in her mouth as he returned to join her on the bed, all lean muscle and raw strength, a rampant male at the height of his powers.