The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo

A fulfilment he could feel her straining against him to attain. Fire filled him. With swift urgency his thigh parted hers and he felt her lift against him. His hands meshed in hers, pressing them down upon the pillows as he took her mouth again, seeking and melding even as their bodies sought and melded.

She cried out—he could hear her—and he gentled instantly, fearing to hurt her. But her hips lifted to him, drawing him deeper. Fire flamed between them, burning fiercer and more fiercely, glowing with the white heat of a passion he had never felt before, an intensity that possessed him, possessed him utterly. He felt her body changing beneath his, felt its heat, its molten fusion with his.

He cried out, deep in his throat, and heard an answering cry from her, and then the living flame enveloped them both, consuming them.

It burned away from her all that she had feared for so long. The purifying flame seared through her, through every atom of her body. And as it ebbed she knew with absolute certainty that everything had changed—for ever.

Wonder filled her—and more than wonder. She clung to Rafael, clung to his sweated body, warm and heavy on her. She could feel his heart racing beneath the hard wall of his chest. Feel hers racing, too. His arm folded around her back, hand splayed over her spine.

He kissed her, his breathing heavy, smoothing back her hair with his hand. His eyes poured into hers. He said something to her in Spanish, which she did not understand. His voice was warm, and rich with emotion.

And then his forehead drooped, his body slackened. The arm around her back loosened. She saw his eyelids close, felt her own grow heavy. And even as sleep swept over him, so it did her, too.

Bodies still entwined, still fused, they lay together.

* * *

‘Ready?’

‘Yes!’

‘OK, let’s go.’

They lowered themselves off the rear platform of the boat into the translucent waters. Adjusting the mouthpieces of their snorkelling gear, they dipped down their heads and started to flap lazily across the surface of the sea, their flippers making their motion almost effortless as they gazed down, entranced, into the ocean beneath them.

She could feel her T-shirt billowing in the water. Wearing it was essential for her pale skin—unlike Rafael, with his natural dark tan. Her gaze wandered from the fish, to him, feasting on his honed, sculpted body, clad only in a pair of hip-hugging swimming shorts.

Emotion speared her. Could she really be here with him, now, in this paradise time together? After all her lonely, solitary years, imprisoned by her past, was it really so simple...so easy?

And yet it was! That was the wonder of it—the miracle. That in his arms she had made herself anew, stepped free of the prison of the past.

So easy—in the end, so miraculously easy...

So easy to be with Rafael, by day and by night, to be with him all the time, separated by nothing—not even the gardens of the hotel. She had moved into his cabana-villa and, whilst she was still insisting on paying her own share for meals and any activities, such as this morning’s snorkelling expedition, Rafael had refused to accept any contribution to his accommodation. It was costing him nothing to share it with her, he’d pointed out with irrefutable logic, and on that issue she’d had to concede.

And so she was here—here, as Rafael had said, for as long as they both could be. She, for her part, had emailed her agency, saying she would not be back yet, and Rafael had ruthlessly cleared his diary of anything other than remote interactions that he could conduct, if necessary, from the hotel’s business centre.

Because Celeste was his priority. Nothing else. Disbelief still washed over him sometimes, to think that she had finally found the courage to trust him—trust him not just with companionship but with passion and desire. For it had taken courage, he knew that. Whatever it was—that ‘something bad’ that she had glossed over—it had scarred her badly, poisoned her badly. Kept her in that lonely state she had been in, separated from all that she should have been free to give herself to.