Kept at the Argentine's Command

Alejandro watched the struggle on her face. She couldn’t answer him because he suspected ‘different’ for her was having sex outside a relationship.

He always had sex outside relationships, and there was the salient difference between them.

This was going to kill him.

‘You’ve had an exciting day, a little wine, and you don’t know what you want. I don’t want to be the man who takes advantage of that.’

As he spoke Lulu found herself being boxed very neatly back into the corner she’d fought so hard to get out of.

Poor invalid Lulu, whose disability always had to be taken into account.

In this case that disability appeared to be her inexperience with men.

‘You’ll regret this in the morning,’ he assured her, as if he knew best. ‘And I don’t do regrets.’

She remembered what he’d told her about his parents. A war of attrition.

Her parents hadn’t been at war—her mother had been a civilian casualty, with her biological father rampaging about like a one-man vigilante mob, until the day Félicienne had got up the courage to leave.

But being brave was something Lulu recognised she’d lost touch with. Somehow she’d allowed her courage to slip away, with the tide of her childhood going out and the sea of her anxieties rushing in.

Seeing the risk to her friendship with Gigi had been the catalyst to make her want to change all that.

It had taken something that big to push her out into the open.

Because of that determination to change she was sitting on this bed tonight, in the middle of the Scottish countryside, with a gorgeous, fascinating man—and he was the man she wanted.

She wasn’t just someone he could put in a box labelled ‘Defective’.

He thought she’d be like glue. Sticking to him all weekend because she was so needy.

Well, she was. Needy, that was. Her whole body felt as if it had been stirred up by his kisses and there was an ache low in her pelvis. And although she knew it would go away, and also knew she would eventually fall asleep, when tomorrow came she would have lost her chance to know what it felt like to have this intimate connection with another person.

It was entirely probable, given the circumstances of her life and her condition that she was going to never have this chance again.

I don’t do regrets.

Well, neither did she. Before she could chicken out Lulu rose up on her knees. In a single move she wrapped her long legs around him and looked at him fiercely.

*

Any arguments Alejandro had against this fell away.

He was a man, not a monk. And Lulu was… She was…

Lowering herself onto his lap, draping her slender arms over his shoulders.

‘I don’t want anything more than tonight,’ she said, and Alejandro found himself at her mercy as her eyes dusted over the top of his bare chest as if mesmerised by him. ‘Just one night—with you.’

She fitted her mouth to his inexpertly and want shuddered through his body.

He caught her face in his hands, because in a moment there wouldn’t be any going back.

‘Are you sure?’ he made himself ask.

She smiled, a dimple winking alongside her mouth as she bent to kiss him again.

He took over then. His tongue made forays along her lower lip, into her mouth, and L