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‘I don’t think so—I don’t think that this is a good idea.’
‘You don’t think!’ Raul exploded. ‘You don’t. No, look …’ he amended hastily, seeing the way she stepped back at his outburst, the clouded look that had come into her eyes. ‘Alannah, querida—just stop this nonsense. Just don’t think. It doesn’t help matters.’
‘Help what?’
‘Thinking just gets in the way—what we have doesn’t need thought, or sense, it just needs this …’
He reached for her, wanting to kiss her back into the hot, hungry state she had been in just moments before, The hot, hungry, demanding state where she had been clutching at his arms, his back, his hair, anything she could get her hands on to hold him closer, bringing him as tight against her body as he could be. But she dodged away from his hand, moving to the far side of the room, where she faced him, stubborn defiance stamped into every line of her face.
‘This isn’t going to happen again,’ she flung at him, stamping her foot in emphasis, though because she was barefooted and the carpet was soft and thick the result was obviously not what she had hoped for. The glare she turned on him warned him not to laugh, so he swallowed down his amusement though some of it still lingered in his voice.
‘Of course it’s going to happen again. We can’t stop it—we don’t have any say in the matter.’
‘On the contrary—I have plenty of say in the matter and what I’m saying is no.’
‘That’s not what you were saying just now—in there.’
A tilt of his dark head indicated the abandoned bed, where the covers and pillows were still crumpled and in disarray.
‘Are you going to claim that—?’
‘I’m not claiming anything,’ Alannah cut in on him sharply. ‘Only that I want to go home. And you have a plane to catch. And I have no intention of being slotted in for a quick tumble to while away the time between now and the point where you have to leave. So if you will please call your driver …’
‘I’ve called him already,’ Raul pointed out.
If her problem was that she thought he was going to spare her only a minimum of time then she couldn’t be more wrong. He had no intention of rushing this. There was no way in hell that she was going to be just a ‘quick tumble’.
‘And told him not to come at the time we originally arranged but to leave it until I called him. But if you’re worried about the plane then—’
‘I don’t give a damn about the plane! I’m well aware of the fact that Don High and Mighty Il Duque Raul Marcín has the power and the money to have a private plane at his beck and call so that all you have to do is snap your fingers and the pilot is ready to fly as and when you command. But you needn’t think that you can do the same with me.’
Now he couldn’t hold back the laughter. This was just too ridiculous.
‘I don’t have to snap my fingers—just use them to touch you, and you’ll be mine to do exactly as I command.’
He moved forward, hand raised, fingers spread, to show her just how stupid this all was. But she started like a nervous horse, edging backwards again, and this time her hand actually came up and dashed his aside with a sharp slap before she whirled away from him, moving swiftly to the other side of the room.
‘Don’t you dare! I don’t want this!’
‘You don’t want …’
This time his laughter was cold, hard, no trace of humour in it anywhere.
‘You little liar,’ he said in a low, deadly tone. ‘You wanted it only too much just now—so what the hell has changed your mind?’
‘I’ll tell you what’s changed my mind.’
Her chin came up, her eyes flashing even more, and Raul couldn’t help but be distracted by the way that the unevenness of her breathing made the precariously fastened dress gape even more, exposing the smooth swell of her breasts, rising and falling in the most provocative way.
‘Please do.’
‘You changed it!’
‘I did? And how?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? You come sauntering back in here, clearly expecting that I’ll be waiting for you—just dying to finish what we started! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you didn’t think that I might have stayed naked and ready in this bed—’ a wild gesture with one hand indicated the bed that now stood between them ‘—to save time!’ ‘I told you—’
‘Yes, I know what you told me. You told me that you had already phoned your driver—that you were so sure of your conquest that you didn’t bother to check whether I was still—still up for it—before you postponed your travel plans so that you could have a quick—’
‘Don’t you dare!’ Raul broke in on a roar of fury. ‘You know it wasn’t like that.’
‘Do I? Do I really? So tell me, Raul, just what was it like?’
‘You wanted it as much as I did.’
‘Wanted. You’re right there, Raul. The word is wanted. Past. I might have wanted—wanted you—but you made one big mistake. You gave me time to think … time to have second—and third, and, believe me, fourth—thoughts about this. And I came to the conclusion—the only wise, the only sensible conclusion—that I do not want anything more to do with you. I should never have come here—I would never have come here if it hadn’t been for your damn phone and I’ve given you that back—so now it’s goodbye, and this time it’s for ever!’
Hell and damnation, no! Rejection of everything she said was like a red haze in Raul’s mind. It couldn’t stop now. Not like this. This wasn’t going to happen again. She wasn’t going to walk out on him all over again, not when he had just rediscovered that sensual satisfaction—the deepest, most perfect satisfaction—that he only ever found with her.
He’d tried to find it elsewhere—tried for two long, frustrating years. And no woman had ever even come close. He would do anything, pay any price, resort to any blackmail, just to have this woman where she belonged—in his bed.
‘You’re not leaving.’
‘No? Just watch me.’
She flounced past him, tossing that glorious red hair as she did so. He knew from the flashing, sideways, wary look she gave him that she expected him to try and grab at her, hold her back, so he derived a dark satisfaction from wrong-footing her, instead leaning back against the wall, folding his arms across his chest and watching her, waiting a nicely calculated moment.
‘Don’t you think that you’d be better off with something on your feet?’ he drawled at last, just in time to stop her halfway across the room.
‘What?’
Alannah stopped dead, half turned back, then looked down at her bare feet, pale against the deep burgundy colour of the carpet.
‘Where—?’ she began, but Raul ignored her and cut across her indignant question.
‘And were you really planning to walk through the hotel—and all the way back to your flat—dressed, or perhaps I should say undressed, like that?’
As he spoke he let his cool gaze slide from her angry face and down over her body, lingering deliberately at the spot where three buttons were missing and the front of her dress gaped wide over the lace of her bra.
She looked a total mess, Alannah admitted, while he … well, his clothes were faintly crumpled from their time on the floor and on anyone else that should have looked untidy, even messy, but somehow on Raul they had a very different effect. He looked ruffled, relaxed—and real. Light-years away from his normal smooth, sleek, business-suited self—and very, very sexy. It was impossible to look at him, at the expanse of broad chest exposed by the still unbuttoned shirt, and not think of how just a short time before she had lain with her head pillowed on that chest, the crisp dark hairs tickling her cheek as she heard his breathing slow, the thundering of his heart gradually ease as he too recovered from the wild ferocity of their lovemaking.
Gasping in shock, she felt the hot colour flood her cheeks as she grabbed at her dress again, pulling the pieces back together as closely as she could. But holding it there meant that she had no way of opening the door. And she still had to find.
‘Where are my shoes?’
Close to something like panic, she scanned the room, searching for any sign of the pale leather pumps she had worn on her way here. She couldn’t see them anywhere.
‘Raul …’
‘Alannah …’
He levered himself up from his position against the wall, and she watched warily as he came towards her slowly.
‘Why don’t you sit down for a moment and let’s talk about this?’
He sounded so calm, so reasonable that her mouth actually fell open and she gaped at him in blank bewilderment. Whatever had happened to Mr ‘Of course this is going to happen again’? Was he actually prepared to be reasonable? Or was he just hiding his darker side behind this suddenly civilised veneer?
She had no way of knowing and the truth was that her own thought processes were far from trustworthy. She felt as if she had been at the eye of a tropical storm ever since she had come to Raul’s hotel room, picked up and whirled around, battered by a fury of conflicting feelings. Even now, her body still ached with the hungry passion that had raged through her in the moment when Raul had taken her in his arms and kissed her. The honest truth was that even as she’d collapsed into sated exhaustion from his lovemaking a weak, greedy part of her had already been anticipating something more.
If the knock at the door had never happened, or if it had come a minute or two later, then there would have been no going back. She would have turned to Raul once more and if he had taken her into his arms and kissed her again then she would have gone to him, opened herself to him willingly and eagerly. All it would have taken was another kiss, another caress from Raul to stoke the fires that she knew had only died down, not died away. She knew she would have been incapable of saying no—that she wouldn’t have wanted to say no—and once more Raul would have made her his, stamped his possession on her without a thought.
But the knock at the door had come. It had broken through the burning haze that had filled her mind, snatching her out of the delirium of need and right back into harsh reality in the space of a couple of seconds.
She had waited, shivering in heated reaction, in the bedroom, listening to him dealing with the porter, handing over the case, heard the door shut. Every nerve in her body had still been so alive, so awake that if he had come to her then she still wouldn’t have been able to think. If he had walked through that door right then she knew with a sense of despair that she would have gone straight into his arms, drawn to him like a fragile needle was brought close by the fierce pull of the strongest magnet. She would not have been able to stay away. All he would have had to do was to say ‘Come’, and she would have obeyed. So great was the spell he had cast over her.
But he hadn’t come to her. He hadn’t opened his arms. He hadn’t said ‘Come’. Instead he had paused, picked up the phone and called Carlos.
And suddenly it was as if the bottom had dropped out of her world. Her heart had plummeted, twisting as it went and every last trace of heat had ebbed from her body, leaving her shivering in a very different way.
‘I’ve called him already,’ Raul had said. ‘And told him not to come at the time we originally arranged but to leave it until I called him.’
But she didn’t need him to tell her that. She didn’t care what he had said, or, rather, exactly how he had phrased it. She had heard him through the door. Heard how, once he had got rid of the porter, his first instinct had been to pick up the phone, call his driver. She’d heard the name Carlos, and even if she hadn’t understood the rest of the fast, autocratic Spanish, she had known only too well what was going on.
Because by then realisation had already hit home. And realisation had brought with it a heavy dose of cold reality—the sort of reality that she couldn’t dodge away from, couldn’t avoid, no matter how much she might want to.
While she was still dealing with the aftershocks of the hurricane of feeling that had swept her up, while her body still trembled in stunned delight at the sensations she had experienced and her mind whirled and spun from the force of feeling she had been subjected to, Raul had been calmly and coolly getting on with his life, dealing with the practicalities.
The practicalities of packing and checking out of his hotel room—leaving England, going back to Spain.
And leaving her behind.
Well, what had she expected, poor stupid fool that she was? Had she really thought that there might be more for her than this? That he might actually want more than he had just had—her willing body under his in the bed? Could she really think that once he had made love to her … had sex with her—she forced herself to look at what had just happened as it truly was—even the hotly passionate, wildly fulfilling sex that they had both enjoyed, he would put all his plans on hold, wanting to stay with her, wanting to have her in his future?
If she’d even allowed herself to dream of that then she would have been desperately disappointed. No sooner had he had his way than Raul had called his chauffeur, sorting out the arrangements for his journey back to Spain as if nothing had happened.
Because to him, nothing had happened. Lying alone in that bed, with her passionate responses cooling as rapidly as the sheets that Raul had just left, Alannah had had to force herself to face the real truth. Two years before, when he had believed her worth marrying, even if her value to him had been only that she would be his virgin bride and bear him the children he so desperately longed for, Raul had always held back; always restrained his hungry passion for her.
He would not make love to her until they were married, he’d said, and he’d held to that no matter how hard it had obviously been for him. Until tonight.
If she had needed any proof of how little she meant to him then it had been there in the way he had taken her here, in this bed that she now could no longer bear to stay in but had flung herself out of, grabbing at her clothes and rushing into them in miserable desperation.
She had handed herself to Raul on a plate and he had taken everything she had offered. He didn’t want to want her but he couldn’t stop himself. And as soon as he had had what he wanted he had been making plans to leave. Assuming that what had happened had meant as little to her as it had to him.
And then he had strolled back into the room, large as life and twice as arrogant, assuming something else. Assuming that she would be sitting there—preferably lying there—waiting for him to take up where he had left off. So that he could deal with the problem as quickly as possible and be on his way.
And, fool that she was, she had been waiting. She had stayed in that room, silent and—damn it—obedient to his wishes! No wonder he had thought that he could take what he wanted from her, that she would pander to his every desire. If she had had any sense she would have snatched the opportunity while the porter was at the door to come out of the bedroom, sweep past him and out of the door before he had a chance to protest or complain. And the thought of him trying to explain why a half-dressed woman with no shoes might need to get out of the hotel suite as swiftly as possible brought a certain grim satisfaction to her mind.
‘Why should I want to sit down? And what could we possibly have to talk about?’
‘I have a proposition I want to put to you.’
‘A proposition?’
Alannah eyed him warily. He still looked calm—worryingly so. What had happened to the hotly passionate lover of just a few short minutes before—and the arrogant swine who had declared ‘I don’t have to snap my fingers—just use them to touch you, and you’ll be mine to do exactly as I command’? It seemed that in the space of just a few brief moments Raul Marcín had been at least three different men, if not more. There was the hotly passionate lover, the man who with calm good humour and spectacular arrogance had dismissed her protests as unnecessary and now here, it seemed, was the businessman who had a proposition to put to her. And she had no way of beginning to guess just which of them was the real person.
‘What sort of a proposition?’
Why was she even asking? She didn’t want to spend any more time in his company. It was too upsetting, too disquieting, too dangerous to her peace of mind and her sense of self-preservation. She wanted to get out of here.
Didn’t she?
But just as her mind threw the question at her she knew that she had already hesitated for too long even to convince herself. The angry impetus that had fired her, driving her feet towards the door, refusing to let her look back or even consider any other possible alternative, had seeped away from her, her yearning senses were already reminding her of what they were missing and the nagging ache of frustration low down in her body was almost too much to bear.
‘Sit down and I’ll tell you.’
Raul gestured towards the settee but the memories the big leather sofa held were too strong, too devastating for her to be comfortable. So she deliberately chose another seat, one of the big armchairs that matched the settee, and sat there stiffly, legs primly together, her hands clasped on her knees. She was painfully aware of the way that there must be a huge contrast between her position and the state of her tumbled hair, the still gaping dress.
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