Читать книгу Italian Maverick's Collection - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 64
ОглавлениеSTILL FLOATING, Lara opened her eyes. His bedroom was a monochrome blur, pale walls, dark furniture, a painting on one wall that appeared to be just a splash of red. She turned her head towards the breeze blowing in through three windows that reached the floor, the transparent drapes fluttering and billowing in the breeze.
If she turned her head the other way she’d see Raoul. She could hear him breathing hard, almost as hard as she was.
She turned her head the other way.
Raoul’s eyes were closed, and his chest was lifting as he breathed in and out, the golden skin glistening under a layer of moisture. In profile his face had an austere quality, like a statue. His passion-sated body continued to exert a strong fascination for Lara; the strength, the hardness, the contrast between them was part of that fascination. He was in every way a physical male ideal—her ideal certainly—from his lean musculature to his long limbs.
She had experienced so much with him. For a time they had been two parts of one whole and yet now they were separate—worlds apart.
Lara suddenly felt sad, and she didn’t know why.
He was lying with one arm curved above his head, and without opening his eyes he lowered it. She wanted to hang on to the perfect golden moment but all the questions she didn’t want to think about popped into her head.
What would he say?
What should she say?
The sheet lay in a tangled heap between them. She hooked her toe in it and pulled, and had managed to drag a section halfway up her legs when she realised he was watching her.
‘Are you cold?’ Without waiting for a reply he reached for her, pulling her into his arms.
She lay stiff for a moment and then relaxed against him, tucking her head against his shoulder. Raoul stroked a hand down the smooth curve of her back, enjoying the satiny texture.
He had enjoyed her.
He’d enjoyed many women, he enjoyed sex, but it had been the most erotic experience in his life and she’d been a virgin.
Should he feel bad about that?
If he was honest, the knowledge, when he had realised, had obviously been staggering but had also been a massive turn-on. He supposed it was programmed into male genes, a hangover from less enlightened times, primitive man claiming his mate.
The theory did offer an explanation for the explosive surge of possessiveness he’d experienced when she’d nestled in his arms.
Bleakness filtered into his dark eyes. It would pass—most things did.
Before the dark thought claimed him she moved, snuggling in deeper, a slim arm snaking across his middle to anchor herself. She was half asleep already. Once more he felt a tightening in his chest, something breaking free that came perilously close to tenderness. He watched her eyelids, heavy with lashes that lay on her cheek like butterfly wings—she was sound asleep.
Another situation that he was not used to. Raoul could not remember the last time he’d slept with a woman in his own bed, and as for actually sleeping...that was easy. Never, not once, since the early months of his marriage.
Raoul closed his eyes. He had been functioning on a couple of hours a night since Jamie’s death. It had reached the point where he didn’t want to fall asleep, knowing that he’d relive the moment he found Jamie in his dreams, the images twisted and warped. He’d jerk awake in a cold sweat, the panic in his belly trying to claw its way out.
Tonight he didn’t dream at all, so it was a shock to be woken so abruptly.
Raoul was jolted into wakefulness by an ear-piercing scream. Beside him, Lara was sitting upright, her eyes wide, staring and unfocused. As he raised himself up on his elbow she turned her head and blinked several times.
‘You had a nightmare.’
‘Did I?’ She gave him a wide-eyed-kitten look.
‘You don’t remember?’ He slid an arm over her warm, bare shoulder and pulled her back down.
Raoul looked into the face inches away from his, her glorious hair a wild halo, wide luminous eyes looking back at him, and he experienced a wave of fierce protectiveness that was on several levels more shocking than her scream.
‘You really don’t remember?’
‘No, I never do, it’s a night terror. I thought I’d grown out of them.’
‘Not tonight.’
‘I suppose I should have told you.’
She might have meant the night terrors but he knew she didn’t.
‘It might,’ he agreed, ‘have been an idea.’
‘You...it was...thank you.’ She was back on earth, not floating two feet above it, but Lara couldn’t help wonder if it was the same earth...or she the same person.
There you go again, Lara—dramatising. It was sex, not an entry into an alternative dimension. People did it every day.
Of their own volition her eyes slid down his body; the light duvet that now covered them both reached his narrow hips, revealing the golden-toned skin of his flat, ridged belly and broad, powerful chest and shoulders.
The earthy image made her shudder. Her stomach muscles clenched, a stronger version of the delicious little aftershocks that had come in the wake of the crashing release.
‘I know a good cure for insomnia.’ And the darkness in his heart, which he felt receding.
She flashed a mock-innocent smile while inside her heart was hammering wildly. For the first time in her life she understood why people did crazy things for sex. ‘A glass of milk?’
Her smile made him hot. ‘You taste more of strawberries and cream.’ His mouth remaining a fraction of an inch from hers, he whispered throatily, ‘I want to touch you all over this time.’ He feathered a kiss across her parted lips. ‘Taste you.’
She gave a little whimper and whispered, ‘Please.’
It was a plea she made several times during the next hour, as he took her to the brink several times before he finally let her fall over the edge with him.
Utterly drained, but more at peace than he had felt in a week, no, a lot, lot longer, he barely had the strength to roll off her before sleep claimed him. It took Lara a long time to come down from the high she was floating on, and when she did her sleep was shallow and disturbed.
* * *
He woke up to the sound of the shower in the adjoining bathroom. He had barely managed to groggily lever himself into a sitting position and drag a hand through his hair when she appeared. Her freshly scrubbed, shiny face and wet curling hair looking incongruous against the indecently sexy red dress.
‘Sorry I woke you.’ The chirpy voice belonged to the red dress. ‘Hope you don’t mind, but I used your toothbrush.’
‘You can use anything you like but keep the volume down,’ he pleaded, holding his head.
‘Are you hung over?’ Did he even remember making love? She smiled her way through a stab of totally irrational bitterness. For her this one-night stand had been memorable, her first, but that didn’t mean it had any significance for him.
‘No, but I’m human,’ he retorted. ‘Being that cheerful in the morning,’ he concluded positively, ‘is not.’
‘So you’re not a morning person.’
The scowling lines of his staggeringly handsome face melted without warning into a wicked grin as he leaned back against the pillows, hands behind his head, and raised a mocking brow. ‘There are those that might dispute that...’
Her cheeks burning, Lara lifted her chin. ‘I’ll take your word on that one,’ she said, wondering whether he could be any more smugly self-satisfied. Even if his smugness was justified, it was an unattractive trait, and discovering a flaw in this perfect specimen made her feel slightly more cheerful as she moved across the room towards a mirror, combing her fingers through her wet curls.
Watching the gentle sway of her breasts against the red silk as she walked across the room, he felt his lust stir lazily. Actually, not so lazily.
‘I have never slept with a virgin before.’ And it had not been on any list of things to do in the near future.
She swivelled gracefully around, the expression on her beautiful face wary.
‘You’ve clearly got no sexual hang-ups...’ Though she did possess a delicious ability to blush. ‘It’s none of my business,’ he conceded, ‘but why?’
She stood there, poised, he suspected, on the point of telling him to go to hell, when she shrugged and pulled out a stool, sinking with a sigh and a rustle of silk onto it.
‘You know, I’ve been asking myself just that,’ she admitted with disarming candour. ‘I planned to lose my virginity last night, just not with you. I never really thought that casual sex would work for me without the emotional stuff, you know—liking, a connection...but it did quite beautifully, thank you.’
‘Liking...not love?’
Her candid gaze slid away as she got to her feet. ‘I think we communicate on more of a lust level.’
‘I’m assuming there is a man somewhere that came with the emotional stuff wondering where the hell you are.’
If it had been him, he’d have died a thousand deaths through the night imagining all the things that could have happened to her. ‘What were you thinking?’ he growled. ‘You could have met anyone!’
‘I expect Mark is asleep still.’
He reined in the surge of emotion. Sharing casual sex did not entitle him to bad-mouth a guy he didn’t know, although the confirmation that he existed at all had not improved his mood, and he could think of no circumstance that excused a man allowing a woman to wander around a strange city alone at night.
‘Poor guy,’ he said in a voice laden with insincerity.
Lara missed the insincerity but heard the words, and saw a red mist.
She turned slowly, rounding on him with eyes shooting green flames.
‘Poor guy,’ she echoed. ‘Poor guy! He’s a...’ Her mouth closed over a word her mum would have been shocked her daughter even knew, and, teeth clenched, she stalked towards the bathroom.
‘So you’re not planning a kiss-and-make-up session.’ The relief he felt was on her behalf, he told himself. Lara deserved something better.
Lara’s anger faded as quickly as it had sparked into life. ‘I overreacted, didn’t I?’ She covered her face with her hands and shook her head. ‘Mark is a total and utter louse, but the situation is as much my fault as his. If I hadn’t been walking around thinking I’d found my soulmate I’d have seen this coming a mile off.’
‘Your hero fell off his pedestal.’ It seemed suddenly sad that she would learn all too soon there were no heroes. ‘So what did he do?’
She gave a laugh that rang with self-mockery and shook her head. ‘Oh, why not? It’s a bit of a cliché really. I came here with my boss—he asked and I said yes.
‘What I didn’t know was that I was a last-minute stand-in for his girlfriend who couldn’t come, and he’d paid for the room, and he is a bit tight with money.’
It was a fault she’d been prepared to accept when he had still seemed the sensitive man of her dreams.
‘It turns out he asked because he thinks I’m basically easy, actually I think he’s not the only one, not that I care what people think.’
Hearing her fall back on a defence that was only used by people who did care, Raoul was forced to subdue a surge of protective tenderness.
‘And the virgin thing,’ she continued. ‘I think he thought he’d been sold a...what do they call it...?’
‘False bill of goods?’
She nodded. ‘I said I was going to sleep with the first man I saw. I was almost right.’
‘This boss of yours sounds like a total loser.’
‘I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.’
He raised a sardonic brow. ‘Because I asked.’ Which in itself was not just unusual and totally out of character, it was completely unheard of.
A few murmured nothings that constituted post-coital conversation were normally the precursor to him rolling out of bed and making a practised exit.
Except it was never his bed he was exiting.
From every angle this was a weird situation, almost as weird as finding he wanted to prolong this. He didn’t even have a major objection to hearing her open up more, talk nonsense...maybe even contribute to that nonsense himself...?
He didn’t read anything significant into it, recognising that it was not an emotional connection that was making him behave so out of character, but the knowledge that the world he had escaped from in her body last night would come rushing back the moment she vanished.
‘Look, I should be going before anyone...’
He looked up and saw she was looking at a framed photo on the wall.
‘That’s my mother.’
‘Oh!’ Had she really been that obvious? ‘She doesn’t look Italian.’ Everything about him epitomised Lara’s own version of an idealised Latin male but his English was perfect and she couldn’t detect any accent.
‘I’m Italian on my father’s side. My mother was American with a Spanish mother.’ And you are sharing this information why exactly, Raoul? Maybe the opening-up thing was contagious?
‘Your mother’s dead?’
He nodded. The memory of his mother was influenced by snapshots like that one and a couple of formal portraits, which didn’t match the laugh he remembered or the warm lemony scent he associated with her.
‘A flu epidemic. She ought to have been safe—she wasn’t an infant or elderly, she was fit and young. I was just a kid.’
An image drifted before her eyes of a boy with scratched, long brown legs and big dark eyes. Her eyes drifted of their own accord to his face, their eyes connected and something seemed to pass between them. She found the sensation so uncomfortable that she looked away quickly and changed the subject.
‘Do you have such a thing as a hairdryer?’ She lifted a water-darkened strand of hair. ‘It takes hours to dry on its own.’
‘Bottom drawer,’ he said, pointing to the bathroom.
Inside the room she closed the door and, sighing, leaned back against it. Now that she didn’t have to hold it together and act a version of cool, the images she had fought to banish from her head while in the room with Raoul crowded in. Remembering the exquisite sweetness of their lovemaking was agony.
She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. She had been prepared for remote and maybe irritated, but not for him to be so... She shook her head. What did she know? Absolutely nothing when it came to the morning after the night before.
And this might feel awkward but she was leaving here with a lot of positives. Her first time had been with a great lover, and she had not disgraced herself by saying anything terminally stupid like, Last night was special—it must mean something to you.
When Lara emerged from the bathroom, her hair dried to a smooth gloss, the bedroom was filled with the aroma of fresh coffee. She followed the scent downstairs.
Raoul was standing there, coffee cup in hand, wearing a black robe loosely tied around his hips. It showed a wide vee of hard, golden, hair-roughened chest. Lara struggled to keep her eyes on his strong, angular face, which, with its dark shading of stubble, was only fractionally less disturbing.
Hauntingly beautiful. From some corner of her head the description of a hero in a novel she had read recently flashed into her head. At the time she had rolled her eyes and given up on the story midway, unable to imagine a real-life man who could be described this way, and unable to connect with the book’s heroine who had walked away from a perfectly good husband to be with him.
‘I cried at the end,’ the friend who had recommended it had confided.
Lara hadn’t cried. She’d lost patience with the heroine long before. She’d thought, Who walks away from everything for an orgasm, no matter how bone-meltingly incredible?
Lara hadn’t known a lot about orgasms at the time, but she couldn’t imagine anything that would make her give up a stable home.
And then Raoul had come into her life.
And soon he would be out again, which was good. Clean breaks were good when it came to uncomplicated sex. Actually, they were probably essential.
He put down the mug in his hand, his eyes making a sweep up from her feet to the glossy, smooth curls on her head. ‘You found it, then.’
She touched her face, now clear of the last remnants of make-up from the night before. She felt naked without even a smear of lip gloss to protect her from his dark, bone-stripping stare. ‘Thanks, yes.’
‘Help yourself to coffee. I won’t be long.’
‘Thanks but I should be going.’ Last night now seemed like a lifetime ago, and the rejection from Mark was a distant dream.
‘I’ll take you back to your hotel.’
Move on...never, ever see this man again...never touch him...never... ‘No, that’s—’
His voice cut across her. ‘Have you got money for a taxi?’
She flushed and, gnawing on the soft fullness of her under lip, brought her lashes down in a concealing sweep.
‘Exactly.’
With a flash of defiance she lifted her head, tossing back her red curls. ‘I could walk.’
‘And that worked out so well the last time...’
Recognising that this was a battle she wasn’t about to win, Lara managed a superficial attitude of amusement as she arched a brow and asked, ‘Do all your one-night stands rate taxi service?’
She was trying so hard and her pretence was painfully transparent. Raoul hid his reaction to the vulnerability he didn’t want to see under an attitude of brusque impatience, and reminded himself that Lucy had once seemed sweet and vulnerable to him too.
‘They do if they don’t mind hanging around...’ He arched a brow. ‘Five minutes.’
* * *
It was only when she got in the car that she realised she’d forgotten the hotel name.
‘I think it begins with a C or maybe a T and I think there was a coffee shop on the corner, no, there was definitely a coffee shop.’
‘Oh, well, that makes it much easier.’
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. I’m sure the name will come to me.’
When? he wondered fifteen minutes later when, naming another hotel, he got the same negative shake of her head.
‘You’re just confusing me now,’ she accused. Bad enough that even with the top of the low-slung sports car up, in the skin-tight red dress her appearance had still elicited a lot of unwanted attention.
Raoul had advised her to ignore the horn blares and the calls from pedestrians—the Latin male seemed to have a very extensive non-verbal vocabulary—and then gone on to ignore his own advice, rolling down his window to react with hand signals that had never found a place into the highway code!
‘I’m sure now it begins with an A...’
He audibly ground his teeth. ‘I thought you’d decided it began with a T.’
‘Well, a T or maybe...wait, that place there.’ She hit his arm and began to bounce in her seat as she turned to look behind them. ‘I remember that bar with the potted palms outside and the blue squiggly writing on the sign. Turn around...turn around...’
‘We’re in the middle of a one-way system. Do you mind sitting still? I’m trying to focus.’ To focus on the road and not the way her breasts were trying to fight their way out of the bodice of her dress. ‘Do you want me to cause a crash?’
‘I don’t suppose this is how you planned to spend your day.’
‘Dio mio, do not go all humble and apologetic on me.’ He found unreasonable and wilfully awkward much easier to deal with.
‘It’s not this way,’ she said as he swung the car down an alley where the walls of the tall buildings almost touched the car on either side. To make things worse he didn’t reduce his speed.
‘So how well do you know Rome, then?’
She flashed him a killer look and compressed her lips.
‘It was a shortcut,’ she said in a quiet voice as he drew up outside the hotel.
Raoul grunted and turned his attention to the building. Like most in the area, it could have done with some TLC; he was not a person who found peeling paint picturesque. ‘You’re sure this is the right place?’
She nodded.
‘Your boyfriend really knows how to treat a lady, doesn’t he?’
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ she gritted.
‘Has it occurred to you he might have called the police?’ Her wide eyes said it hadn’t.
She was thinking.
‘I hope not! Well, thank you and last night...you were...kind.’ With a swish of silk she left the car, her comment making him feel like a total bastard.
And maybe he was, Raoul mused as watched her walk up the steps, the sinuous sway of her body in that wicked dress causing several turned heads before she vanished inside the clapped-out-looking building.
How was the man who’d brought her here and then rejected her going to react when she appeared? Raoul knew how he’d have reacted in that position. He wasn’t a possessive man, but if she’d left him and spent the night with another man he’d have throttled her, or maybe just thrown her on the bed and made love to her.
And would Lara forgive him? You never knew with women. Some were drawn like magnets to men who treated them badly.
While he was grimly contemplating make-up sex and wondering if that was what was happening, Raoul was suddenly struck by how extreme his reactions to this woman were. There was no middle ground. Much like her, he reflected grimly, either spitting disdain or melting in submission.
With a curse he put the car into gear and pulled away from the kerb with a rubber-burning squeal. The last thing he needed at this point was a redhead to distract him.
