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  Her concerned gasp drowned beneath his kiss. The kiss that rocked her to her very soul. His tongue pushed inside, warm, insistent and pulse-melting as he showed her the extent of his mastery. Unable to bear the torrent of sensation, she jerked, her hands flailing as she tried to find purchase. He moved over her, pinned her more firmly to the bed with his hips flush against her. When he winced again, she wrenched her mouth from his.

  ‘Before you say it, I’m fine. Dampen the mood with another virtuous monologue and I will spank you. Hard.’

  She flushed deep and fierce, but it didn’t keep her silent. ‘I can’t...I can’t stop caring about your well-being just because it’s inconvenient for you. Just tell me if you’re okay.’

  ‘I’m okay. But if I had to, I’d cut off my arm just to be inside you, to feel you close around me like you’d never let me go.’

  ‘Bloody hell, do you practice those lines or do they really just fall off your lips?’

  ‘If I plan to relaunch myself as a multimillion euro best-selling writer, bonita, then a way with words is a must.’ He sobered. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t mean them. I mean every single word I say to you.’

  Her heart stuttered, then thundered wildly. ‘Rafael...’ Her eyes drifted shut.

  ‘I’m lethal. I know.’ He settled himself more firmly until she felt his rigid size against the fabric of her knickers. He rocked forward and the relentless pressure on her clitoris made a few dozen stars explode behind her closed eyelids.

  ‘You’re beyond lethal,’ she breathed shakily. ‘You’re everything I should be running away from.’

  His mouth drifted down her cheek to her jaw and back again. He pressed another kiss to the corner of her mouth, then she felt him move away. ‘Hey, open your eyes.’

  Reluctantly, she obeyed, already missing his mouth on her.

  His gaze was solemn. ‘Don’t run, Raven. I’m broken and cannot chase after you. Not just yet.’

  Her breath caught. ‘Would you really? Chase after me?’

  ‘Most definitely. Because I get extremely grumpy when I’m cheated out of an orgasm.’

  The slap she aimed at his arm was half-hearted because his mouth was descending to wreak havoc on hers once more. When he finally allowed her to breathe, she was mindless with pleasure.

  ‘I’ve wanted you for so long, I can’t remember when I didn’t want you.’

  ‘But...why? Because I was the only paddock bunny who wouldn’t fall into your bed?’

  She expected a clever quip about his irresistibility. Instead, his gaze turned serious. ‘Because within that tainted, false existence, you managed to remain pure. Nothing touched you. I craved that purity. I wanted to touch it, to see what it felt like. But you wouldn’t even give me the time of day.’

  ‘Because you had enough groupies hanging around you. I...I also thought you were with Sasha.’

  He groaned. ‘I guess I played the playboy game a little too well.’

  ‘You mean you weren’t?’

  ‘I grew jaded a long time ago but some cloaks are more difficult to cast off than others.’

  At her half-snort, he laughed. ‘Do you know this is the longest I’ve been in a bedroom with a woman without one of us halfway to an orgasm?’

  She knew that he meant the woman, not him. ‘How trying for you.’

  He pushed against her once more, his erection a fierce, rigid presence. ‘Sí. It’s very trying. You should do something about it before my poor body gives out.’ He trailed his mouth over hers before planting a row of kisses along her jaw.

  ‘You really are incorrigible,’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he murmured, slowly licking his way down her neck to her pulse. ‘I am incorrigible. And I deserve to be punished. Mercilessly.’ He slid a hand to caress her belly, then lower to boldly cup her. ‘Show me who’s boss, my stern, sensible Raven. Give me the punishment I deserve.’

  Her breath snagged in her chest. The same chest where her heart hammered like a piston about to burst its casing.

  His fingers pressed harder, rhythmic, unrelenting. This time the explosion of heat stemmed from her very core and radiated throughout her body. Her legs parted wider, inviting him to embed himself even deeper. Her restless fingers traced the line of his jeans and found firm skin. Her fingers slipped an inch beneath and he moaned. The sound vibrated along her nerves as heat oozed between her legs.

  Her hips undulated in sync with the movement of his fingers, and in that moment, Raven felt as if she were melting from the inside out. She moaned at the intensity of it.

  ‘That’s it, precioso, give it up for me,’ he murmured in her ear, then bit on her lobe. Her cry echoed in the room, the sound as alien to her as the feelings coursing through her body. When his hot mouth trailed down her neck, over her shoulder blades, she held her breath, at once dreading and anticipating the sensation of his stubble roughness on her breast.

  With a hungry lunge, he sucked one nipple into his mouth and drew hard on it. At the same time, one firm finger pressed on her most sensitive spot.

  ‘Oh God!’ Pleasure exploded in a fiery sensation that made her hips buck straight off the bed. She felt Rafael move off her and alongside her, but the pressure of his fingers and mouth didn’t abate. Her climax dragged out until she feared she would expire from it. When her tremors subsided, he left her breasts to plant a forceful kiss on her lips. She fought to breathe.

  Heavens, he was too much.

  She opened her eyes to find his gaze on hers, intense and purposeful. ‘If you’re thinking of concocting a means of escape now you’ve come, know now I have no intention of letting that happen.’

  ‘Why would I want to escape? Unless I’m mistaken, the best is yet to come. Yes?’

  The relieved exhalation made her guess he’d suspected she was feeling overwhelmed. ‘You have no idea. Kiss me.’

  Raven’s fingers curled into his nape, glorying in the luxurious heat of his skin as she complied with the heated request.

  No, she didn’t want to escape. Touching him felt so good, so incredibly pleasurable, that fleeing was the last thing on her mind. The thought surprised her, almost tripping out of her mouth. She curbed it in time. Rafael’s head was already swollen by the thought that he could turn her on. Admitting how totally enthralled she was by him would make him even more insufferable. Although, the way she was feeling right now, she wouldn’t be surprised if his sharp intellect worked it out before long—

  ‘You’re thinking again.’

  She stared into blue eyes filled with raw hunger and masculine affront. Slowly she let her fingers drift through his hair, experiencing a keen sense of feminine satisfaction when he groaned. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  His lips parted in a feral smile. ‘Don’t challenge a man on the knife-edge of need, sweetheart. You might regret it. If you survive the consequences.’

  Without giving her time to answer, he pulled her down on top of him, both hands imprisoning her to his body as he fell back on the bed. Unerringly, his mouth found hers.

  Raven stopped thinking.

  And gave herself over to sensation. Rafael’s pelvic bone might have been broken and pieced back together but there was nothing wrong with his arms. He lifted her above him and held her in place while he feasted on her breasts. When he was done, he lifted even higher. ‘Take off your panties for me.’

  With shaky fingers she drew them off, experienced a momentary stab of self-consciousness, which was promptly washed away when he positioned her legs on either side of him and looked up at her.

  ‘You might want to hold onto something,’ he murmured huskily, taking a sharp bite of the tender skin of her inner thigh.

  The statement wasn’t a casual boast. At the first brush of his tongue on her sex, her whole body arched and shook. She would’ve ca
tapulted off him had he not been holding her hips in an iron grip.

  Pain shot through fingers which had grasped the wooden headboard at his warning. He licked, sucked and tortured her with a skill that left her reeling and hanging on for dear life.

  When she tumbled headlong into another firestorm, he caught her in his arms and caressed her body until she could breathe again. Then he left her for a moment.

  The sound of foil ripping drew her hazy gaze to him. The sight of his erection in his fist made her sex swell all over again.

  He caught her stare and sent her a lethal smile. ‘Next time, you get to do it.’

  Raven didn’t know what to do with that. Nor did she know how to find the correct words to tell him she’d never done it before. In the end, they just spilled out.

  ‘Rafael, I’m a virgin.’

  He stilled, shock darkening his eyes. A look flitted through his eyes a second before he shut them. The hand he raked through his hair was decidedly shaky.

  He sucked in a long harsh breath, then opened his eyes. The raw hunger hadn’t abated but the fisted, white-knuckled hand on his thigh showed he was making an inhuman effort to contain it. ‘Do you want to stop?’ he rasped, jaw clenched as he fought for control.

  The thought of stopping made her insides scream in rejection. ‘No. I don’t. But I wanted you to know before...before it happened.’

  He exhaled slowly. His hand unclenched, then clenched again as his gaze slid hungrily over her. ‘I can guess your reasons for remaining celibate. What happened to you would make anyone swear off sex. I know the chemistry between us is insane, but you need to be sure you want to do this now, with me.’

  ‘Would you rather I do it with someone else?’ she quipped lightly, although the very thought of anyone but Rafael touching her made her shudder in rejection.

  He lunged for her, firm hands grasping her shoulders in a rigid hold before she could take another breath.

  ‘Not unless that someone else wishes to get his throat ripped out,’ he bit out. He pinned her to the bed and devoured her with an anger-tinged, lethally aroused intensity that made fire roar through her body.

  By the time he parted her legs and looked deep into her eyes, she was almost lost.

  ‘I’d planned for you to be on top our first time. But I think this will be easier on you.’

  His bent arms caged her as he probed her entrance, his gaze searching hers with every inch he slid inside her. The momentary tightening that made her breath catch stilled his forward momentum.

  ‘Raven?’ he croaked, tension screaming through his body as he framed her face in gentle hands.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘That makes one of us.’

  Her fingers tried to smooth back his hair but the silky strands refused to stay in place. ‘I...can I do anything?’

  His laugh was tinged with pain. ‘Sí, you could stop being so damned sexy.’ He pushed another fraction and her breath hitched again. ‘Dios, I’m sorry,’ he murmured, bending to place a reverent kiss on her lips.

  Raven didn’t know what was in store for her but she knew her body was screaming with the need to find out. With a deep breath—because, hell, no pain no gain—she pushed her hip upward. His cursed groan met her hiss of pain, which quickly disappeared to be replaced by a feeling so phenomenal words failed her.

  ‘Raven!’ Rafael’s response was half praise, half reproach.

  Tentatively, she moved again.

  He growled. ‘Damn it, woman. Stay still.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because this will be over sooner than you’d like if you don’t.’

  Heart hammering, she inhaled and gasped when the tips of her breasts brushed his sweat-filmed chest. ‘But at least we know the equipment is working, right?’

  He pushed the last few inches until he was firmly seated inside her. Sensation as she’d never known flooded her. At her cry of delight, he pulled out slowly and repeated the thrust. Her head slammed back against the pillow, her fingers clenching hard in his hair as she held on for mercy.

  Yep, there was nothing faulty in Rafael’s equipment.

  With another hungry groan, he increased the tempo, murmuring hot, erotic encouragement in her ear as she started to meet his hips with tiny thrusts of her own.

  This time when she came the explosion was so forceful, so completely annihilating, she wasn’t sure whether she would ever recover.

  Rafael plucked her hands from his hair and pinned them on the bed, then proceeded to dominate her senses once more until she was orgasming again and again.

  When she heard his final guttural groan of release, she was sure she’d gone insane with pleasure overload.

  ‘Dios...’ His voice was rough. Mildly shocked. ‘This must be what heaven feels like.’

  A bolt of pleasure, pure and true, went through her.

  Don’t get carried away, Raven.

  To bring herself down to earth, she searched her mind for something innocuous to say.

  ‘If you break out into At Last, I’ll personally make sure you never walk again.’

  His laugh was deep, full and extremely contagious. She found herself joining in as he collapsed onto his side and pulled her body into his.

  They laughed until they were both out of breath. Then he fisted a hand through her hair and tugged her face up to his. After kissing her breathless, he released her.

  ‘I was thinking more along the lines of Again and Again and Again. If there’s a song like that, I’ll need to learn the lyrics. If there isn’t I might need to write one.’ He cupped her nape and pulled her down for another unending kiss that left her breathless and seriously afraid for her sanity. ‘I love kissing you,’ he rasped.

  A bolt of something strong and unfamiliar went through her, followed swiftly by a threat of apprehension. Steadying a hand on his chest, she pulled herself up.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.

  She averted her gaze from his and fought to find reason in all this madness. ‘I need to get up.’

  ‘No. You need to look after me, and my needs demand that, after what you’ve just done to me, I stay in this bed. Which means you have to stay too.’

  Unable to resist, she glanced down his body and swallowed the hungry need that coursed through her. It was unthinkable that she would want him again, so voraciously, so soon. But she did.

  ‘If you carry on licking your lips and eyeing me like that, I’ll have to teach you this lesson all over again.’

  She blinked. ‘I can’t...we can’t...it’s too soon.’

  ‘As you rightly noted, the equipment works so I most certainly can, pequeña.’ He moved and she saw his fleeting grimace. ‘But maybe you need to go on top this time.’ He held out his hand and she swayed towards him.

  ‘This is crazy, Rafael,’ she protested feebly, even as she let him arrange her over him.

  ‘But crazy good, no?’

  She melted into his arms. ‘Crazy good, yes.’

  * * *

  ‘Tell me what really happened with your father. What did he do to make you yearn for your eighteenth birthday?’

  Rafael couldn’t believe the words tumbling out of his mouth. But then again, he couldn’t believe a lot that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. From the moment he’d placed the phone call to set things in motion to fly them to Mexico, he’d felt control and reason slipping out of his grasp.

  Not that he’d had much in the way of control when it came to the woman drifting in and out of sleep only a heartbeat away. Sure, he used the Los Cabos villa for entertaining. But it was mostly on business, never for pleasure. And he’d never let a woman stay over. Until now.

  Her raven-black hair spread over his arm and he couldn’t resist putting his nose to the silky strands, i
nhaling the peach-scented shampoo as he waited for the answer to the question that invited shared confidences he wasn’t sure he wanted to reciprocate. But what the hell? She’d pried more information out of him in the last few weeks than he’d ever released in years.

  A little reciprocity didn’t hurt.

  She turned towards him and spoke in a low, quiet voice. ‘Remember I told you he barely acknowledged my existence at first?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Over time, as I got older, that began to change. I noticed from the way he looked at me. I thought I was imagining it. Then I overheard the housekeeper saying something to my father’s driver.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That my father didn’t really believe I was his daughter. I couldn’t be because I looked nothing like him—he has ash-blond hair and blue eyes. I inherited my mother’s colouring. Between fourteen and fifteen, I shot up in height and grew breasts. I tried not to link that and the fact that he’d started entertaining more and more at his house instead of at his private club.’

  Rafael’s hand tightened into a fist out of her sight and he fought to maintain a regular breathing pattern as she continued.

  ‘He encouraged me to stay up at the weekend, help him host his parties. When I refused, he got angry, but he didn’t take his anger out on me. The housekeeper’s son, who was the general handyman, got fired when my father saw me talking to him, then the gardener went, then his driver of fifteen years. I got the hint and decided to do as I was told. By the time I turned sixteen, he was entertaining a few nights during the week and most weekends, and the outfits he wanted me to wear to those parties got...skimpier.’

  Rafael’s sucked-in breath made her glance up, her eyes wary. Swiftly he kissed her and nudged her nose with his to continue. But the white-hot rage inside him blazed higher.

  ‘I knew I had to do something. I asked for the housekeeper’s help, even though I knew I was putting her livelihood in jeopardy. Luckily, she was willing to help. We forged my father’s signature and got a DNA test done. When the results came I showed them to him. He was angry, of course, but he couldn’t refute the evidence any longer.’