Bedding His Virgin Mistress

Ricardo frowned. Surely no one could manufacture the level of fury Carly was showing? But he wasn't simply going to give in.

'But obviously somehow you managed to find some money?'

'Yes, but not by selling my body, as you so obviously would like to think.'

'No? How, then?' The cynical disbelief in his voice infuriated her.

'If you must know—not that it is any of your business—I pawned my watch,' she told him flatly.

Ricardo discovered that a sensation akin to the slow, measured drip of ice being fed straight into his blood stream was creeping up over him—a mental awareness that somehow he had got something very important spectacularly wrong.

He couldn't remember the last time anyone had wrong footed him, and the knowledge that it should be Carly who had done so sparked off inside him a very dangerous cocktail of emotions. He looked down at her bare wrist and then back at her face.

'You said your parents needed a loan? Surely you could—'

'I don't want to talk about it.' Carly cut him off quickly.

Ricardo frowned. Surely the kind of woman he had assumed her to be would have been only too eager to make much of the glow of virtue accruing to her from such selflessness. But Carly was turning away from him, quite plainly agitated and anxious to change the subject.

Why? Ricardo wondered. What on earth could there be about something as generous as lending money to one's parents to spark off the hostility and fear he could see so plainly in her eyes?

She was starting to walk away from him. He looked down at her wrist again, and then back at her face.

He had always trusted his instincts, and right now those instincts were insisting that Carly had been telling him the truth. Therefore he was guilty of seriously misjudging her. And his body was telling him that, no matter what she was or what she had done or not done, he wanted her.

He strode towards her, catching hold of her arm.

Immediately her whole body tensed, and she demanded fiercely, 'Let go of me.'

'Not yet. You aren't the only one who takes their moral responsibilities seriously. I obviously owe you an apology.'

Ricardo was actually apologizing to her? He certainly needed to, she reminded herself angrily. And she needed to apologize to herself, for being so stupid as to actually still want him.

'Yes, you do,' she agreed coolly. 'But I don't want it.'

She watched his stunned disbelief give way to male anger.

'No? But you do want me, don't you?' he taunted softly.

'No,' she began, but it was already too late. He pulled her hard against him and bent his head to take her mouth in a savagely intimate kiss before she could object. And, of course, the moment his mouth touched hers, her own helpless response betrayed her. She tried to pull away but he held on to her, and her eyes widened as she saw in his eyes the same hunger she knew was in her own.

She made a small helpless sound of denial and need, and then she gave in. His mouth moved urgently on hers and her lips parted eagerly, greedily for its possession, her nails digging into the hard muscles of his arms as her need roared through her.

It was last night all over again—only this time they were impeded by two sets of clothes. She had changed back into her own things before supervising the clearing up after the party. Now she was being driven wild by her longing to be as naked and open to him now as she had been the previous evening.

Her fingers clenched spasmodically on his arm, her body gripped by savage shudders of dark pleasure.

She wanted his hands on her breasts, on all of her— his fingers finding her, touching her as they had done last night. Just wanting him to touch her in that way made her go hot and limp with the desire she could feel pulsing inside her. She wanted him there...there—deep, deep inside her, thrusting hard and fast against the possessive hold of her muscles, taking her, satisfying her quickly and mercilessly.

She could feel the open heat of his mouth against her throat as he tipped her back over his arm, moonlight gleaming whitely on her skin as he tugged off her top to reveal her breast, darkly crowned in the night light.

His thumb-tip rubbed against the deep dark pink of her nipple and she cried out—a sharp, agonised sound of primitive female mating hunger.

She wanted him to take her now, here. As quickly and completely, as fiercely and thoroughly as a panting she-creature on heat. She wanted him to fill her, flood her with his own release, and to go on doing so until she was sated and complete.

She reached for the hardness she knew was waiting for her, running her fingers over and over the jutting ridge of his erection, quivering with anticipation. The head would be swollen and hot, the body thick and darkly veined, the flesh tightly drawn over the hard muscle, but still fluid and slick when she touched it.

In her imagination she could already feel the first rub of that engorged head between the lips of her sex, and then against the sensitive pleasure-pulse of her clitoris over and over again, faster and faster, until she was wet and hot with her pleasure. Until she could endure no more and Ricardo finally plunged deep inside her.

As though she had cried her desire out loud to him, she felt Ricardo tugging at her clothes, his hands hard and firm against her naked skin. His mouth found her nipple and drew fiercely on it. She cried out again in a mewling sound of intense arousal.

His mouth returned to hers. She felt as though she had been starving for it, for him, as though she had been waiting all their life to be with him. She felt...

Immediately she tensed, pushing him away, her voice tight with rejection and self-loathing as she told him fiercely, 'I don't want this.'

'Yes, you do. You want this and you want me, and you can't deny it!' Ricardo challenged her whilst he fought to control his breathing. And to rationalize what had happened—if he could rationalize it. It was some thing he had had no intention of allowing to happen at all. But from the moment he had touched her he had been out of control, unable to stop what was happening to him.

Carly drew in a deep, shaky breath. 'We mustn't.'

'We must not what?' Ricardo demanded. 'We must not want one another?'

Carly turned her head away from him and shook it in bewilderment. 'This can't happen again,' she told him quickly.

Baffled and frustrated, Ricardo reluctantly let her go. She wanted him, and he certainly damned well wanted her, so why was she behaving like this? One thing he did know was that he was determined that he would have her, sooner or later—and he would prefer it to be sooner.

Thank heavens Ricardo hadn't followed her to her room. Because if he had she knew that

she would not have been able to resist him. And she had to resist him, because she wanted him far more than it was safe for her to do.

Why, though, did she feel like this about him? Why did she want him when she had never wanted any of the other men she had met?

Was it because subconsciously she knew he was different from them? Because the most intimate part of her recognized that, at some primal level, she felt a deep-rooted kinship with him?

Because, like him, she too had known and suffered childhood poverty and the withdrawal, the denial of the love and nurturing, the protection every child should be given as of right?

The wretched squalor and unhappiness of her own early childhood had marked her forever, as she knew his must have marked him.

Not even Julia and Lucy, who thought they knew everything about her, knew the full truth of the beginning of her life—how she had been found dressed in rags, abandoned in the street beside some rubbish, her pitiful cries alerting a loitering tramp to her existence.

She had been a piece of unwanted humanity, left there to die. Unwanted and unloved, even by her own birth mother. No wonder, then, that her adopted mother had never been able to love her either.

CHAPTER SEVEN

'You mentioned last night that you didn't have any money in your bank account because you'd had to help your parents?'

Carly almost dropped the glass of water she had been drinking. A little unsteadily, she put it down. They had boarded Ricardo's jet several hours later than Ricardo had originally planned, although he had not give her any reason for the delay, and would soon be landing at JFK airport for their onward journey to the Hamptons.

She looked out of the window, telling herself that it was pointless now to berate herself for letting anger lead her into admitting that she had needed to help them. shouldn't have said that,' she admitted uncomfortably. 'And I wouldn't have done if you hadn't made me so angry.'

'I misjudged you, and I've apologized for that. A man in my position becomes very cynical about other people's motives. Why did you have to give your parents money? Are you an only child?' had a sister...'