‘There will be no separate bedrooms this time, no locked doors,’ Duarte spelt out, sending the zip rasping down on his chinos, angling his narrow hips in a slight movement that she found inexplicably but hugely sexy.
Her fair skin coloured up hotly on that straying thought and, dredging her eyes from him in severe embarrassment, she focused on the edge of the linen sheet already neatly folded down by a maid in readiness for an occupant. Two occupants, she reflected, her brain moving at a tenth of its usual capacity. Duarte was going to make love to her. It occurred to her that saying ‘no’ was still an option and that she really ought to say something.
‘I really don’t want this,’ Emily told him.
‘Just who are you trying to kid?’
Aghast at that blunt comeback, Emily blinked in dismay and was betrayed into a sudden upward glance. Duarte surveyed her in flagrant challenge, sardonic amusement gleaming at her shaken expression. He stood there naked and magnificent, his hard shaft fully erect.
‘You are not chained to the bed but you’re not running anywhere. Why?’
For a timeless moment, she simply stared at him, seriously wrongfooted by that enquiry. Throwing her a look of irredeemably male logic, Duarte came down on the bed and reached for her so fast, she gave a stifled gasp of fright.
‘Let me tell you why,’ he urged, knotting long fingers into her tumbled red-gold hair as he brought her up against his hard muscular chest. ‘I can turn you on just by looking at you!’
Crushed into the unyielding strength of him yet forced to maintain an eye contact that she would have done just about anything to avoid, Emily felt as if she was fighting for her last ounce of pride. ‘No…not any more—’
He tugged her head back, shimmering eyes scorching down into hers. ‘So what was that little demonstration of total surrender on the jet, then? One last fling?’
Her whole body was already reacting to the steely contours of his with insidious little quivers of heat and a drowning weakness that was even more dangerous to her self-discipline. The fresh warm scent of him was in her nostrils with every breath she drew, achingly familiar, achingly erotic. ‘You…you took me by surprise—’
‘Nâo te acredito… I don’t believe you,’ Duarte derided, his breath fanning her cheek and then his hot hard hungry mouth claiming hers with a raw assurance that made denial impossible.
It was a shattering kiss, full of explosive demand. His tongue stabbed into the tender moist interior of her mouth and plundered the sweetness with an invasive force that made her heart hammer as fast as if she’d run a three minute mile. She trembled beneath that onslaught, her hands clenching, nails biting into her palms as she attempted to withstand the raw sexual enticement of his expert mouth on hers. But the little kernel of nagging heat he had already awakened low in her belly was too seductive. She started shifting in his grasp, pushing into him in a helpless surge and all the time, Dear heaven, I want him, want him, want him, was running like a charged mantra through her mind.
‘Indeed, belief would be a great challenge,’ Duarte husked, ungenerous in victory as only a rogue male can be—and then he did something that truly shook her. Taking her hand, he curled her fingers round his bold erection. ‘That’s more like it…’
He felt like hot steel sheathed in silk. Her hand shook a little and her face burned scarlet at being asked to do what she had previously only done in darkness and beneath concealing covers. But an undeniable excitement gripped her and she stroked his hard masculinity, feeling the inexorable surge of answering heat between her trembling thighs.
In response, he caught her back to him and mated his mouth to hers with ferocious hunger. Then he drew back from her when she was clinging to him. Her hands dropped from him and she was disorientated by the sensation of her breasts coming free from her bra without her having had anything to do with it. She glanced down at herself to see that the front fastening had already been undone. Even as she whipped up her hands to cover herself, Duarte was ahead of her, imprisoning her fingers in his own, forestalling her.
‘Stop it…’ she gasped, embarrassed by the sight of her own bare flesh because she felt that she could not compare to other women with the small pouting swells crowned by rosy distended nipples.
Duarte used his superior strength to flatten her back on to the bed and stared down at her with hot hungry eyes of appreciation. ‘You can’t hide the evidence of your own desire,’ he breathed, lowering his head to capture a swollen, throbbing tip between his lips.
Her entire body jerked, for she had always been almost unbearably sensitive there. Her hands flexed within the hold of his and he released them but she dug her fingers into the sheets beneath her instead. Excitement was like a damburst inside her, pressure building up with every second and she could not withstand her own intense need to be touched. A low keening sound was torn from her as he tormented the rosy crests with the kind of skill that drove her absolutely wild. So somehow they got to the stage where he was holding her down purely to keep her still and her hands had, seemingly without an input from her, risen to lace into his luxuriant black hair, urging him on in helpless writhing yearning.