His hands on her body felt hard but remote. Rejecting? Had she got it wrong? Had she misunderstood? Had he merely been pretending before that he wanted her?
He had set her free, and she had no option other than to walk ahead of him to the lift foyer door.
Ricardo followed her and activated the lift. Within seconds they were stepping out of it into his own private entrance foyer, and within seconds of that he was opening the door to his apartment.
‘Dolores and Rafael are away for a family event,’ he told her.
Carly nodded her head. Disappointment was a cold, sick, leaden lump weighing down her body. It struck her how ironic it was. Had someone previously suggested to her that she would find herself in this kind of situation, the feelings she would have expected would have been shame and humiliation, rather than the gut-wrenching sense of disappointment she actually did have.
All those years of silently, determinedly telling herself she had a right to her pride had obviously not made as big an impression on her psyche as she had believed.
They were in the large square hallway. It was nearly eleven o’clock. She turned away from Ricardo, intending to make her way to her suite and the sleepless night she suspected lay ahead of her.
‘This way.’
His fingers closed round her bare forearm and immediately her flesh reacted in a burst of over-sensitivity and raised goosebumps.
This corridor was unfamiliar, its walls hung with what she suspected must be priceless pieces of modern art. At the end of it was a pair of double doors. Ricardo opened one of them without releasing her.
Silently she walked through it into the darkness that lay beyond. Ricardo let her go, and she heard the quiet snap of the door closing.
She could feel him standing behind her, and waited for him to switch on the lights, but instead he turned her round, his hands gripping her upper arms.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Now. Now you can tell me that you want me.’
His voice was a raw sound of out-of-control male need.
A thrill of shocked delight exploded inside her. She could feel herself shaking with excitement as he pulled her into his own body and took her mouth with explicit sexual hunger.
Her response to him rolled over her like an eighty-foot wave, swamping her, picking her up and taking her bodily. She had no defence against it, nor did she want one.
His tongue, seeking and demanding, thrust hotly between her lips without any preliminaries. Her small sob of pleasure was submerged beneath his own sounds of overriding need. His hands were on her body, tugging down her top, pushing aside her bra.
Carly moaned as his hands grazed her nipples, and then moaned again more sharply when he took one between his thumb and forefinger and began to tease it into hard, tight, aching need. Without knowing she was doing it Carly ground her hips against him, mimicking the hard thrust of his tongue between her lips.
‘Don’t,’ he cautioned her thickly. ‘Do you want me to completely lose control and take you here?’
Getting her back here without touching her had strained his self control to its limits. And now…
‘Yes,’ Carly told him quickly, feeling the words catch against her throat. ‘I want you to take me, wherever and whenever you want—but most of all I want you to do it now. Now! Ricardo, now!’
Did she realise that she had just destroyed the last shreds of his control, what her hungry, half-moaned words were doing to him?
‘Now?’ he repeated.
His eyes, accustomed to the darkness, showed him the pale glimmer of her breasts. He stroked his forefinger round one nipple and watched her whole body surge with pleasure. He could feel the muscles locking in his throat. He bent his head and took the tight sexual flowering of her desire for him into his mouth, savouring the sensation of the smooth swell of her breast before running his tongue over her nipple, all the time trying to hold onto his sanity, to stop himself from pushing her up against the wall and tearing the clothes off her so that he could have the pleasure of sinking as deep inside her as he could get.
Carly could hear someone start to moan, but it took her several seconds to recognise that she was the one making the noise. She felt as though she were on a long slide, unable to stop herself from plunging into her own pleasure. Not wanting to stop herself.
Reluctantly Ricardo released her nipple, his fingers immediately returning to enjoy its arousal.
‘How do you want it?’ he demanded softly. ‘Do you have a favourite position? Do you want to take care of the condom issue or shall I?’
Carly looked at him and took a deep breath. ‘I think this is when I should tell that I don’t have very much previous experience,’ she announced carefully.
‘What?’
She couldn’t tell whether the harshness in his voice came from anger or disbelief.
‘What does that mean?’
Carly swallowed, and then said in a small voice,
‘Actually, I’m afraid it means that I haven’t…There hasn’t…I’m still a virgin.’
‘What? You’re joking, right?
Carly shook her head.
He released her abruptly and stood back from her, looking at her for what felt like for ever.
‘I can’t think of one single reason why the hell you would be a virgin.’
‘Actually, there are several,’ Carly responded with dignity. ‘For one thing…Well, I don’t suppose the opportunity has been there at the right time or with the right man,’ she hedged.
Her revelation was the last thing Ricardo had expected. If she had kept to her virgin purity until now why was she, to put it crudely, offering it to him on a plate? Did she think he would feel some sort of moral responsibility towards her? Was that it? Was she setting some sort of trap for him? Would she try to use emotional blackmail to turn mere physical intimacy into something more?
If he had any sense he would send her back to her own room, right now, but somehow, in some way, a part of him was actually responding to what she had told him with a primitive surge of male possessiveness. It actively liked the thought of the sexual exclusivity of being her first lover, of knowing that the sensuality he would imprint on her would remain with her throughout her life, that if the experience he gave her was truly pleasurable then she would treasure it all her life. And she would not be comparing him to anyo
ne else. Was he really that vain? That insecure? Ricardo grimaced to himself, knowing that he wasn’t.
‘You damn sure don’t act like a virgin,’ he told her grimly.
Probably because when she was around him she didn’t think that she was. Mentally, in the privacy of her own thoughts, the intimacy she had with him had gone well beyond the bounds of virginity.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you?’ Carly offered.
Ricardo looked at her with incredulity.
‘Don’t you think it would have been obvious? Especially given the kind of intimacy I’d planned to—’
He saw the excitement begin to burn in her eyes and he cursed himself for the way his body immediately responded to it.
‘Are you sure this is what you want? An affair that—?’
Carly stopped him. ‘I don’t want an affair. I just want to have sex with you.’
‘Just sex?’ Ricardo questioned, not sure that he believed her.
‘Yes. But of course if you’d rather not…’ she added lightly.
No one gave that kind of challenge to Ricardo.
‘You’ll cry “enough” before I do,’ he told her against her mouth.
He was barely brushing her lips with his own, a feather-light touch that, as Carly quickly discovered, made her hunger for more. Her own lips clung to his, willing him to part them with his tongue as he had done before, and a shudder of visible pleasure gripped her body when finally he did so, thrusting the seeking point of his tongue deep and hard within the warm softness of her mouth.
His hand cupped the back of her head and his tongue plunged deeper, twining with her own. She could feel the heavy slam of her heart as it banged against her ribs—or was it his?
He was holding her right up against him, so close that she could feel his erection. And she wanted to feel it. And not just to feel it—she wanted to see it, touch it…experience it deep inside her.
She felt weak and dizzy with arousal, her whole body shuddering with pleasure when Ricardo cupped her breast and then slowly circled his fingertip around her nipple. Lazy delicate circles that were driving her insane. She sucked in a deep breath and felt the corresponding tightening low down in her body. Unable to stop herself, she reached out and touched the hard ridge of male flesh, mimicking Ricardo’s caress as she circled the head of it with her fingertip and then traced its whole shape through the fabric of his clothes. It felt thick and strong. Her fingers trembled and so did her body.