From Enemy's Daughter to Expectant Bride (The Billionaires of Blackcastle 1)

Those perfect teeth flashed as he pressed her against his arousal. “You want more.”

“I want you,” she moaned.

“Not as much as I want you. Ah-ah-ah...” He placed a silencing finger on her lips when she started to protest. “You just have to trust me again on this. Now...your promise.”

She pushed out of his arms, trying to scramble off his lap. “I can’t. My brain feels like I was in a collision and I...”

He let her separate them, his face suddenly chiseled from granite. “Are you regretting it?”

“God, no. It was...beyond magical. But...but...”

“It’s too much, too fast.”

She nodded, anxiously probing his reaction. And it felt as if a cool balm had spread over her burning flesh. There was only self-deprecation on his lips, empathy in his eyes.

After the way she’d surrendered to him, another man would have accused her of leading him on, then playing hard to get. A few men had even called her a tease.

But he wasn’t like those men. He was like no other.

She wanted to kiss him for being so wonderful. But a kiss might destroy his control, the only thing that stopped her from getting in over her head. More than she already had, that was.

“It isn’t too much or too fast, not for me,” he said, his voice a dark caress. “Every second with you is how I’ll define perfection from now on. But I will slow down—for you.” He swept her into his arms again and she succumbed on a ragged sigh, sank back into the luxury of his embrace. “But there are so many more intimacies I need to share with you, many untold pleasures. I need to keep kissing and touching and talking to you. So when everyone goes away, you’ll stay.”

“Yes.” Then she frowned. “But what do you mean stay?”

“The night. In my bed. In my arms.”

“I got that. But stay where?”

“Stay here, of course.”

“You’re staying here?”

“I should think so. I own the place.”

And suddenly, all the details she’d missed—in him, in what he’d said, which should have made sense before now but hadn’t—coalesced. Into one big wrecking ball.

It swung into her so hard, it knocked her out of his arms again. “You’re...him?”

Three

Ellie gaped at the man who’d given her her life’s most intense experience. He was...he was...

“I’ve been referred to in some extremely unflattering ways before,” he drawled. “‘Him’ wasn’t among them.”

“I mean you’re...that man?”

“‘That man’ is also not what I want to hear on your lips.”

“God...it’s just... Okay, stop! Let me breathe.” Shaking her head, she splayed her hand on his chest as if to ward him off, but really to steady herself. “You’re...Moreno Salazar?

He took her fluttering hand to his lips. “To you...I am only Rafael.” He punctuated his words by suckling each finger. “You will moan my name into my lips...scream it against my flesh...all through the night.”

She was a molten mass by the time he pulled her other hand, wound her arms around his neck. But she still had to say...something. Anything.

?

?But you said you won’t make love to me.”