Читать книгу The Revenge Collection 2018 - Кейт Хьюит, Эль Кеннеди - Страница 58

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS.’ He shot her a look of amused disbelief. ‘You can’t be.’

Sophie continued to stare at him until he frowned as he continued to grapple with her bolt-from-the-blue remark.

‘And there’s no need to try to pique my interest by pretending,’ he crooned softly. ‘My interest is already piqued. In fact, my interest was piqued the second your brother walked through the door with his begging bowl and sob story...’

‘What are you saying? Are you telling me that...that...?’

‘I suddenly realised what had been missing for the past seven years—completion.’

‘You wanted us to end up in bed?’

‘I knew we would.’

‘Is that why you offered to help us?’ Sophie edged away from him, shaking with anger. ‘Because you wanted...completion?’

‘Why are you finding that so hard to believe?’ Javier couldn’t believe that the tide had turned so swiftly. One minute, he had been touching her, and now here she was, spinning him some tall story about being a virgin and staring at him as though he had suddenly transformed into the world’s most wanted.

‘I’m surprised...’ she said bitterly, grabbing clothes from the floor and hopping into them, beyond caring that he was watching her dress and wishing that he would follow suit and do the same ‘...that you didn’t try to blackmail me into bed by offering me a deal in return!’ Silence greeted this remark and she paused and stared up at him through narrowed eyes that were spitting fire.

‘You thought about it, though, didn’t you...?’ she said slowly.

‘This is a ridiculous conversation.’ Javier slipped on his boxers and moved to stand by the window, arms folded, his expression thunderous.

‘Did you pick all that stuff for the flat? I wondered about that, wondered how come everything seemed to have a personal touch when you didn’t actually live there. When your taste, judging from your office, didn’t run to old-fashioned... Did you think that shoving me into free accommodation where I’d be surrounded by stuff that made me feel at home was a good way to butter me up into sleeping with you, so that you could have your completion?’

Javier flushed darkly and glowered. ‘Since when is it a criminal offence to choose what to put in your own property?’

‘I’m going to add manipulative and underhand to arrogant and full of yourself!’ He was all those things and more, yet she still couldn’t tear her eyes away from his masculine perfection as he remained standing with his back to the window, which just went to show how downright unfair fate could be.

She should throw him out of the house, tell him what he could do with his deal and order him never to darken her doors again.

Instead, the awful truth was sinking in...

She still wanted him, still wanted to sleep with him, and for her it wasn’t all about completion, even though that was what she had told herself, because that was the acceptable explanation for what she felt.

For her...

A jumble of confused, mixed-up emotions poured through her, weakening her, and she feebly pushed them aside because she didn’t want to dwell on them.

Javier walked slowly towards her, half-naked, bronzed, a thing of such intense beauty that it took her breath away.

‘So I weighted the scales in my favour,’ he murmured. ‘Where’s the crime in that?’ He was standing right in front of her now and he could almost feel the war raging inside her. Flee or stay put?

She wasn’t running.

Because, like it or not, she wanted him as much as he wanted her and getting all worked up about the whys and hows didn’t make a scrap of difference. The power of lust.

‘I’m accustomed to getting what I want and I want you. And, yes, I did consider holding the offer of financial help over your head in exchange for that glorious body that has disturbed far too many of my nights, but I didn’t.’

‘Arrogant...’ Sophie muttered. But she reluctantly had to concede that at least he wasn’t trying to economise with the truth and the fact that he had used whatever ploys he had at hand to get what he wanted was all just part and parcel of his personality. There wasn’t a scrap of shame or sheepishness in his voice.

He shrugged and smiled. ‘Tell me you don’t like it.’

‘No one likes arrogance.’ Her heart was beating madly. In the space of a heartbeat, the atmosphere had shifted right back to the sexy intimacy they had been sharing only moments earlier, before everything had gone downhill.

Before she had told him that she was a virgin.

‘I’ve always been arrogant and you weren’t complaining seven years ago. Why did you tell me that you were a virgin?’

‘Because it’s the truth,’ she whispered stiltedly. ‘I know you probably find that hard to believe.’

‘Try impossible.’

‘Roger...he...’

She wasn’t lying or making up something to try to pique his interest. She was telling the truth. He could see it in her face and hear it in the clumsy awkwardness of her voice.

‘Sit down.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You look as though you’re about to collapse.’ He guided her away from the bed with all its heated connotations of sex towards a chair that was by the window, facing into the room. Perhaps she sat there in the light evenings and read a book. It was the sort of thing he could picture her doing.

What he couldn’t picture her doing was marrying some man only to spend her married life in a state of frustrated virginity.

Who the hell did something like that?

‘You hadn’t slept with the man before you...agreed to walk up the aisle with him?’ This when she was sitting on the chair like a fragile wooden doll and he had dragged over the only other chair in the room, which had been in front of the oversized, dark mahogany dressing table.

‘He... I...’ The weight of all those nagging thoughts that she had temporarily pushed aside surged forward in a rush that made her breath hitch in her throat. She couldn’t even remember what she had expected from her doomed marriage to Roger. She had half believed her parents when they had told her that her feelings for Javier were just an adolescent crush, the result of being away from home, being free for the first time in her young life. It happened to everyone, they had insisted, and it would blow over in due course. She would gravitate back towards someone on her own level, from her own social class, and the thrill of the unknown would fade away in time.

They had been very convincing, and as all those other reasons for marrying Roger had piled up, so had the tug of war going on inside her intensified.

But had she ever foreseen a satisfying sex life with the man she should never have wed?

Had she properly considered what married life was going to be like for her? Had she simply assumed that forgetting Javier would be as easy as her parents had said it would be and so all those feelings would, likewise, be easily replaced, transferred to Roger? What a complete idiot she had been! Foolish and naïve.

She now knew that what she had felt for Javier hadn’t been a passing crush. She had fallen in love with him and he had been spot on when he had told her, just then, that his arrogance had never bothered her when they had been going out.

It was just something else she had adored about him. That and his utter integrity, his dry wit, his sharp intelligence and his sense of fair play.

She was still in love with him and all those traits that should have turned her off him but didn’t. He had become the billionaire he had quietly always known he would end up being, and of course he had changed in the process. How could he not? But underneath the changes was the same man and she was still in love with him.

And just acknowledging that appalled and frightened her.

Because things might have stayed the same for her but they hadn’t stayed the same for him.

He really did want completion. He hadn’t stayed celibate over the years. He was a powerful, wealthy man now who could have any woman on the planet with a snap of his fingers. She was the one who’d got away, and he was determined to put that right, so he was having a little time out with her.

He didn’t love her and whatever feelings he had had for her in the past had disappeared over the years. He’d made that perfectly clear. But she still loved him and that was a dreadful state of affairs.

Whilst one part of her realised that she must look very strange, just sitting with a blank expression on her face, another part recognised that there was nothing she could do about that because she couldn’t control the racing whirlpool of her thoughts.

One thing was emerging very fast, though. She couldn’t let him know how she felt. If he could be cool and controlled, then she must be as well. There was no way that she would allow him to see just how weak and vulnerable she was inside.

‘There’s no need to explain,’ Javier said gently. He was beginning to feel all sorts of things and top of the list was intense satisfaction that he was going to be her first. He’d never thought that he was the sort of primal guy who would actually be thrilled to the core by something like that but he had clearly underestimated his own primitive side. Under the civilised veneer, he was as untamed as they came.

‘What...what do you mean?’ Sophie stammered. Of course, he had no insight into her murky past, but she still had a moment of wondering whether he had somehow worked everything out, including her feelings for him.

‘I don’t suppose you ever anticipated entering into a sexless marriage.’

Sophie went beetroot-red and didn’t snatch back her hand when he reached out and idly played with her fingers.

‘I...er...I...’

‘No.’ He stopped her mid awkward sentence. ‘Like I said, there’s no need to explain because I understand.’

‘You do?’

‘You were young. You weren’t to know that it takes all sorts to make the world go round and some men find it harder than others to face their sexuality.’

‘Sorry?’

For the first time in living memory, Javier wasn’t seeing red when he thought about the loser she had tossed him over for. In many ways, he felt sorry for her. With financial problems surfacing on the home front, and a man with control over purse strings her family needed, she had failed to see that he had his own agenda and had tied the knot in the expectation that life would be normal.

She’d been sorely mistaken.

Javier shunted aside thorny questions about whether she had loved the guy or not. That was then and this was now and, in the interim, she sure as hell had had her wake-up call on that front.

A virgin widow and now here she was. Here they both were...

Sophie was reeling from the series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Red-blooded alpha male that Javier was, he had jumped to the simplest conclusion. She was good-looking, she and Roger had married... The only possible reason they might not have consummated their marriage would be because he physically hadn’t been able to, and the only reason that might have been the case would be because he just wasn’t attracted to women.

End of story.

Was she going to set him straight on that count? Was she going to tell him the series of events that had led to her sexless union? The depth of feeling she had carried for him, Javier? Was she going to risk him knowing how madly in love with him she had been and then finding the link and working out just how madly in love she still was with him?

‘Roger, gay...’ He might as well have been for the amount of notice he had paid her.

‘Key thing here is this, Soph—it was nothing you did.’

‘Really?’ She very much doubted that but Javier nodded briskly.

‘I went out with a functioning alcoholic a couple of years ago,’ he confided, drawing her closer to him and liking her lack of resistance. ‘You would never have guessed that she drank her daily intake of calories. She was a model with an erratic, hectic lifestyle and she was very careful.’

‘Didn’t you suspect anything?’ Sophie stared at him, round-eyed. It was a relief to have the conversation off her for a moment.

‘We were both busy, meeting in various foreign locations either where she was modelling or where I happened to be. I only twigged when she started having more ambitious plans for our...relationship.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means she decided that meeting in various foreign locations wasn’t enough. She wanted something of a more permanent arrangement.’

‘Poor woman,’ Sophie said with heartfelt sympathy.

‘Misplaced sympathies,’ Javier said wryly. ‘She knew the game before it started. Not my fault if somewhere along the line she forgot the rules.’

She knew the game the way I know the game, Sophie thought, and I’d better make sure I don’t forget the rules or else...

And with a finger in the family company—frankly more than just a finger—parting company might be a little more difficult than he would want. Not just a simple case of ignoring calls and text messages after signing off with a bunch of flowers and a thanks-but-no-thanks farewell note...

‘So how did you, er, find out that there was a problem?’

‘She surprised me by inviting me over to her place in London for dinner.’

‘And it was the first time you’d been there?’

‘Like I said, the rules of the game...they don’t include cosy domestic scenes.’

‘You eat out all the time?’

Javier shrugged. ‘It works. I’m only interested in the bedroom when it comes to any woman’s house.’

Sophie thought that he’d seen more than just the bedroom of this particular house, but then, she knew, circumstances weren’t exactly typical even though the ground rules would be exactly the same.

‘But I went along and it didn’t take me long to see just how many bottles of alcohol there were in places where food should have been stored. And it took even less time to unearth the mother lode because there had been no reason for her to hide any of it as she didn’t share the flat with anyone. When I confronted her, she tried to make me believe that it was somehow my fault that she drank as much as she did, because I wouldn’t commit to her. She clung and cried and said that her drinking had gone through the roof because she was depressed that our relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Of course, I left her immediately and then got in touch with a private counsellor specialising in people with alcohol-related addictions. But the point I’m making is that there are just some people who won’t face up to their own shortcomings and will take every opportunity to shift the blame onto other people.’

‘And you think that, er, that Roger...’

‘I think nothing.’ Javier gestured in a way that was exotically foreign and then leant in closer to her. ‘It would be a tough call for a man to find the courage to face up to his own sexual inclinations when those sexual inclinations risk putting him outside his comfort zone and alienating him from the people he has grown up with.’

‘Roger was certainly a coward,’ Sophie said bitterly.

‘But all that is in the past.’ He waved his hand elegantly. ‘We find ourselves here and I’m glad you felt comfortable enough to bare all to me.’

‘You would have found out anyway,’ she said vaguely.

‘You shouldn’t have put your clothes back on. Now I’m going to have to strip them off you all over again. No, scrap that—what I’d really like is for you to take them off for me, bit by slow bit, a piece at a time, so that I can appreciate every delectable bit of your glorious body...’

‘I...I can’t do that.’

‘You’re shy...’ Had she ever undressed in front of her husband? he wondered. Was all of this completely new to her? He confessed to himself that he was tickled pink and turned on like hell by the thought of that, the thought of him being the absolute first on so many counts.

Shy but unbelievably turned on...

She liked the way his dark, appreciative eyes roved over her like a physical caress. She liked the way he made her feel. She had never done any kind of striptease for a man before but now she began undressing as he had asked, very slowly, eyes never leaving his as she removed her clothing.

He made her feel safe and she knew why. It was because she loved him. She knew that he could hurt her beyond repair—knew that her love would never be returned and, after tonight, she would be left with only the memory of making love and the knowledge that what she wanted would never happen—but none of that seemed to matter. She’d thought that her heart could never again be made to beat but she’d been wrong. Her love overrode common sense and she couldn’t fight it.

And what was the point of fighting anyway? She lived with enough regret on her shoulders without adding to the tally. If she had this one opportunity to grasp a bit of happiness, then why shouldn’t she take it? She would deal with the aftermath later.

She unhooked her bra, stepped out of her undies and then walked slowly towards him, sashaying provocatively and seeing for herself the effect she was having on him.

Javier held his erection through his boxers, controlling the wayward effects of his surging libido. He breathed deeply and tried to think pleasant, pedestrian thoughts so that he could gather himself sufficiently to do justice to the situation.

No rushing.

‘You look tense,’ Sophie murmured. She was amazed at how at ease she was with her nakedness. Indeed, she was positively basking in it. She delicately stroked the side of his face with one finger and Javier grabbed it and sucked it, watching her with smouldering passion so that every bone in her body seemed to go into meltdown.

‘Tense isn’t quite the word I would use...’ He drew her close to him so that their bodies were lightly pressed together and, eyes still locked to hers, he eased his hand over her hip, along her thigh and then between them.

Her wetness on his finger elicited a moan of pure satisfaction from him.

Sophie couldn’t breathe. Her eyelids fluttered. There was something so erotic about them both standing, looking at one another while he rubbed his finger against the small, tight bud of her clitoris, rousing sensations like little explosions and fireworks inside her. She shifted and moaned softly.

‘This is just the appetiser,’ Javier murmured, kissing her on her mouth, small, darting kisses that left her breathless. ‘And there will be lots of those to enjoy before the main course.’

‘I want to pleasure you too...’

‘You already are. Trust me—just touching you is giving me more pleasure than you could even begin to understand.’

In one fluid movement, he swept her off her feet and carried her to the bed as easily as if she weighed nothing. He deposited her as gently as if she were a piece of priceless porcelain and then he stood back and looked at her, and Sophie looked back at him, eyes half-closed, her breathing shallow and jerky. The outline of his impressive erection made her heart skip a beat.

She realised that she had never actually considered the dynamics of sexual intercourse; how something so big would fit into her...

‘Your face is as transparent as a sheet of glass,’ Javier told her drily. ‘There’s no need to be nervous. I am going to be very gentle.’

‘I know you will.’ And she did. He might be ruthless on the battlefield of high finance, but here in the bedroom he was a giver and utterly unselfish. That was something she sensed.

Javier decided that he would leave the boxers on. He didn’t want to scare her. He was a big boy and he had seen that flash of apprehension on her face and interpreted it without any difficulty at all. He’d said he was going to be gentle and he would be; he would ease himself into her and she would accept his largeness without anything but sheer, unadulterated pleasure.

He had forgotten that this single act was supposed to be about revenge.

He positioned her arms above her head and she shifted into the position so that her breasts were pointing at him. Hunkering over her, he delicately circled one rosy nipple with his tongue until she was writhing in response.

‘No moving,’ he chastised sternly. ‘Or else I might have to tie those hands of yours together above your head...’

‘You wouldn’t.’ But now that he had put that thought in her head, she found that she rather enjoyed playing around with it in her mind.

Maybe another time, she thought with heated contentment only to realise that there wouldn’t be another time. This was it. This was all he wanted. A night of fun so that he could get the completion he felt he deserved.

She felt a sharp, searing pain as she pictured him walking away from her, taking his sense of completion with him, returning to the queue of beautiful, experienced women patiently waiting for him.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, blocking out the intrusive, unwelcome image and succumbing to the riot of physical sensations sparked as he trailed kisses along her collarbone, down to her pouting, pink nipple.

He took his time. He drew her aching nipple into his mouth so that he could caress the tip with his tongue in firm, circular movements that had her gasping for breath. Every time she lowered her arm to clutch his hair, he pushed it back up without pausing in his devastating caress.

‘Now let’s try this another way,’ he murmured, rising up and staring down at her flushed, drowsy face.

‘I’m not pleasing you...’ Sophie’s voice was suddenly anxious and her eyes expressed concern that she was taking without giving anything in return.

‘Shh...’ Javier admonished. ‘Like I said, you’re doing more for me than you can ever imagine possible.’ Doing more than any woman had ever done before.

She made him feel young again. He was no longer the boy who had grown into a man whose only focus was forging the financial stability he had grown up wanting. He was no longer the tycoon who had made it to the top, who could have anything and anyone he wanted. He was young again, without the cynicism invested in him by his upwards journey.

‘Straddle me,’ he commanded, flipping her so that their positions were reversed, and she was now the one over him, her full breasts dangling like ripe fruit, swinging tantalisingly close to his face. ‘And move on me...move on my thigh...let me feel your wetness...’

Sophie obeyed. It was wickedly decadent. She moved against his thigh, slowly and firmly, legs parted so that she could feel the nudge of an orgasm slowly building.

She didn’t care that he could see the naked, open-mouthed lust on her face or hear the heavy, laboured breathing which she could no longer get under control.

She didn’t care if he watched her, in her most private moment, come against his leg.

She was so turned on, she could scarcely breathe. She gasped when he held her breasts, massaging their fullness, drawing her down towards him so that he could suckle on first one, then the other, while she continued to pleasure herself against him, hands pinned on either side of him.

As limp as a rag doll, she lay for a while on him, taking time out to quell the rise of an impending orgasm because she wanted to have it all. She didn’t want to come like this. She wanted to feel him moving hard in her.

The apprehension she had earlier felt when she had seen his impressive size had faded completely.

He was in no rush. He stroked her spine and then, when she propped herself up once again, he kissed her slowly, tasting every morsel of her mouth. Her hair fell around her and he pushed his hand through its tangle and gazed at her in perfect, still silence.

‘You’re beautiful, Sophie.’

Sophie blushed, unused to compliments. She felt as though she had given away her carefree youth somewhere along the line and that single compliment had returned it to her for a little while.

‘I bet you say that to all the women you get into bed with.’ Her voice was soft and breathless and he quirked an eyebrow in amusement.

‘Is that the sound of someone fishing for compliments?’

Sophie thought that actually it was the sound of someone trying to be casual when in fact she was eaten up with jealousy over lovers she had never met or seen.

‘It’s been a very long time since anyone paid me a compliment,’ she told him truthfully and for a few moments Javier stared at her seriously.

‘Weren’t you tempted to get some sort of life of your own after your husband died? Or even when he was alive, given the extraordinary circumstances?’

Sophie felt a distinct twinge of guilt that she had allowed him to believe something that couldn’t have been further from the truth. But then she reminded herself that she was simply avoiding opening a can of worms and where was the harm in a very small white lie? It hardly altered the fact that she was a virgin, did it?

She decided to completely skirt around the whole thorny business of life as she had known it when she had been married to Roger.

‘By the time my husband died,’ she said instead, snuggling against him, ‘I was so snowed under with financial problems, I barely had time to eat a meal and brush my teeth, never mind launch myself into the singles scene and start trying to find a man.’

‘And you must have been pretty jaded with the male sex by then,’ Javier offered encouragingly.

‘Um...with life in general,’ she returned vaguely.

‘And with your husband specifically,’ Javier pressed. ‘Understand one hundred percent—he lied and used you and on top of that managed to ruin what was left of your family company.’

Sophie sighed. Put like that, she marvelled that she had had the strength to go on after her mother had moved down to Cornwall. She marvelled that she just hadn’t thrown in the towel and fled to the furthest corners of the earth to live on a beach somewhere.

She had been raised to be dutiful and responsible, however, and she could see now, looking back on her life, that those two traits, whilst positive, had in fact been the very things that had taken her down the wrong road. At the age of just nineteen, she had been dutiful and responsible enough to put herself last so that she could fall in line with what everyone else seemed to want from her.

‘Let’s not talk about all that,’ she said gruffly, sensing the tears of self-pity not too far away. What a fantastic start to her one big night that would be—snotty nosed, puffy eyed and blubbing like a baby in front of him!

It enraged Javier that she still couldn’t seem to find it in herself to give the man the lack of due credit and respect he so richly deserved, even with a string of unpalatable facts laid out in front of her. But, he thought with harsh satisfaction, who was she here with now? Him! And he was going to take her to such heights that by the time he walked away from her he would be the only man in her head. No one forgot their first lover.

‘You’re right,’ he breathed huskily, expertly reversing positions so that he was the dominant one now, on top of her. ‘I’ve always found talking superfluous between the sheets...’

Sophie sadly thanked her lucky stars that she had ended her rambling conversation before she could really begin to bore him witless. If he didn’t care for women talking when they were in bed with him, then she shuddered to think what he might feel if she began weeping like a baby and clutching him like a life jacket flung into stormy seas to a drowning man.

Javier lowered himself and began to kiss her. He started with her mouth and he took his time there, until she was whimpering and squirming, then he moved to her succulent breasts, nibbling and nipping and suckling. Her skin was like satin, velvety smooth and warm. When he began to lick her stomach, her sides, the path down to her belly button, she moaned with fevered impatience.

She reached down compulsively and tangled her fingers in his hair.

‘Javier!’

Sophie met his darkened gaze and blushed furiously. ‘What...are you doing?’

‘Trust me,’ he murmured roughly. ‘I’m taking you to heaven...’ He gently pushed her thighs open and she fell back, then sucked in a shocked breath. The delicate darting of his tongue as he explored her was agonisingly, explosively erotic.

She moved against his mouth, rocking and undulating her hips, and groaning so loudly that it was a blessing the house was empty. She arched up, pushing herself into that slickly exploring tongue, and cried out when two fingers, gently inserted into her wetness, ratcheted up the wildly soaring sensations racing through her as fast as quicksilver.

‘I’m going to...’ She could scarcely get the words out before a shattering orgasm ripped through her and she clutched the sheets, driving herself upwards as his big hands supported her tightened buttocks.

It was an orgasm that went on and on, taking her to heights she had never dreamed possible, before subsiding, returning her gently back to planet Earth.

She scrambled onto her elbows, intent on apologising for being so selfish, but Javier was already out of the bed and rooting through his trousers.

It was only when he began putting on protection that it dawned on her what he was doing.

The last thing he would want was a pregnancy.

She barely had time to register the treacherous stab of curiosity that filled her head... What would a baby created by them look like?

‘Lie back,’ he urged with a wolfish grin. ‘The fun is only beginning...’