The Housekeeper's Awakening

Gently rubbing at the moist panel of fabric, he carefully pushed her down on the bed and then drew away from her.

‘Stay right there,’ he commanded unsteadily.

Her voice trembled. ‘You think I’m in any fit state to go anywhere?’

‘You are a woman who constantly surprises me,’ he said drily. ‘So I wouldn’t care to make a wager on that.’

Carly watched as he tugged the clothes from his body with an impatience which seemed charged with extra urgency, though his hand was completely steady as he placed a condom on the locker beside her phone.

She had expected to be daunted by the sight of seeing Luis completely naked and aroused and ready to make love, but she wasn’t. The truth of it was that her starved and eager body felt nothing but relief as he finally dropped his boxer shorts to the floor and joined her on the bed. She could feel the rough hair on his chest squishing against her bare breasts as he kissed her. His hand skated down to her hips, his fingers slipping beneath the elastic of her panties, before sliding them down over her knees.

He kissed her breasts and he kissed her belly. He touched her intimately until she was writhing with pleasure and a hunger which had become all-consuming. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like Carly any more—she felt like... Her head tipped back. She felt like a woman. A real woman, and suddenly the inequality of their experience didn’t matter. Greedily, her fingers explored his body in a way she’d wanted to do for so long. So very long. She touched the angled bones and honed muscle. She skated her fingers over the silken surface of his skin and then she dragged her lips from his, grazing them along his jaw, before finding the warmth of his ear.

‘Please,’ she whispered, barely conscious of what it was she was asking for.

‘Please, what?’ he murmured, his fingers moving down to part her moist labia so that she jerked with pleasure. ‘This?’

She supposed she must have nodded or said something, or maybe it was obvious just from the eager way she clung to him how much she wanted him. She felt him reach out for the condom and the tearing open of the foiled package sounded unnaturally loud to her highly sensitised ears. She knew a moment of trepidation as she felt him prepare himself, but then he was moving over her and she could feel the engorged tip of him pressing against her.

She looked up into his face and the weirdest thing was that the look which passed between them seemed like the most intimate thing which had happened so far.

‘Luis,’ she whispered.

‘It may...hurt a little,’ he said, his voice doing that soft and unsteady thing all over again. ‘I don’t know. I’ll do my best to make sure it doesn’t.’

And then he was easing himself into her. Slowly. Deliciously. Filling her as if her body had been nothing but an empty space, just waiting for him to fill it. It didn’t hurt like the books and the stories sometimes said it did. There was a moment of acute discomfort—but then it was gone. And that was the moment when pleasure began to swamp out trepidation and doubt and every other negative feeling and replaced them all with satisfaction, and joy.

He moved inside her. He coaxed her and teased her. He made anything seem possible. At first she thought the shimmering of something hovering on the edge of her understanding was a flicker of something impossible. But when it happened again she began to stiffen with fear that she might somehow miss it. Like closing your eyes when you were looking at a rainbow and when you opened them again it was gone.

‘Relax, querida,’ he murmured as he made another deep thrust inside her.

Perhaps it was the ‘querida’ which took the fantasy one stage further, which made her believe that anything was possible. She was poised on the brink of something magical, reaching out for something which kept slipping beyond her reach...and then suddenly it was happening. Her body was contracting and it was all about everlasting rainbows as Luis tipped his head back and gave a helpless kind of groan.

And Carly’s body seemed to splinter into a million beautiful pieces.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CARLY COULDN’T SLEEP, and in the end she gave up trying.

Slowly, she got out of a bed which was still rumpled and scented with the unfamiliar smell of sex. Looking down, she saw the indentation of the second pillow; tangible evidence that for the first time in her life she had not slept alone, and she felt her skin shivering with pleasure as she remembered.

She had slept with Luis.

She had given her virginity to the Argentinian playboy with an eagerness which was making her blush even now.

Scooping mussed hair back from her face, she laid her palms over her hot cheeks. Because not very much sleeping had taken place, had it? It had been one long night of discovery.

She swallowed, remembering how nervous she’d been. How she’d been fretting and pacing in her bedroom, too scared to go down to supper. But somehow he had made it all okay. He had come to her room and started kissing her and, instead of being some big deal, it had just seemed to happen. As if it was all perfectly natural and normal, just as he’d said it should be. She had made love with Luis Martinez and he seemed to have enjoyed it just as much as she had done.

Supper had been forgotten and it had been almost ten when he had pulled on his jeans and brought back some of the neglected food from the terrace. They had eaten grapes and slithers of mountain cheese in bed, and he had opened a bottle of wine called Petrus and given a small smile when she had pronounced it ‘really nice’.

And he had gone to his own room just as dawn had begun to filter through the sky in streaks of red and gold. Bending his dark head, he had kissed her and told her it would probably be easier if he wasn’t there in the morning.

He was right about that, too. She knew that. It was nothing but stupidity which made her wish that he’d stayed all night; a flicker of yearning which she knew was dangerous and pointless. So she forced herself to concentrate on the practical instead, which she was good at. She told herself that no way would he want his staff to know how he’d spent the previous evening and she couldn’t think of anything worse than Simone discovering him leaving her bedroom, looking tousled and unshaven. Something like that would only make her own position more difficult...though she hadn’t actually given a lot of thought as to what was going to happen now.

Now that Luis had taken her as his lover.

Padding barefooted into the bathroom, she pulled on the fluffy robe which was hanging on the back of the door and knotted it tightly at her waist. She certainly wasn’t going to do the whole guilt trip—not with herself and not with him. Even if it never happened again, she would always be grateful for the way he’d made her feel. He had set her free from the past. He’d made her realise that she was capable of experiencing the same kind of pleasure as anyone else.