Crime of Passion

'Where was I?' Rafael prompted. 'Where were you when?' Georgie snapped. Rafael slid fluidly upright. 'Where was I when you were making it very clear that you were not interested?' he enquired lethally.

Georgie's teeth clenched. 'Look, I just want to go back to La Paz and sort out my passport!'

'You are really running scared.' Sensual dark eyes scanned her shrewdly. 'Why is that? Pride?'

'I don't know what you're talking about.' Georgie stepped out of the bath.

He reached for her without warning, curving two powerful arms round her and sweeping her off her feet. 'I won't let you run.'

'Put me down, for heaven's sake!' Georgie shrieked. 'No.'

He stared down at her, golden eyes meshing with violet. Her own heartbeat thundered slowly, heavily through her body, stretching every tiny nerve taut. 'Rafael...'

'You burn for me... you can't hide that,' he told her. 'I see it in your eyes, in the way you move, in the very voice you use when you speak to me.'

'So you attract me... so what?' Georgie dared in des­peration. 'We don't all follow our most basic instincts!' 'But you do... all the time. However, here you will follow your most basic instincts for my benefit alone,' Rafael asserted, settling her down on the bed and dropping down beside her in one powerful movement. 'No strings on either side, no lies, no misunder­standings. We share a bed, nothing more.'

The hectic pink in her cheeks had receded, leaving her pale. He was peeling off his silk shirt to reveal the bronzed breadth of his shoulders and the curling black triangle of hair hazing his pectoral muscles. As though impelled by a force outside her control, Georgie's un­wittingly fascinated gaze lingered and she swallowed hard. On one level she couldn't believe that she was ac­tually in a bedroom on a bed with Rafael. It felt so unreal.

'If you touch me, I'll scream blue murder!'

'What a novel promise,' Rafael breathed huskily, winding long brown fingers into her tangled damp hair as she attempted to sit up and preventing the movement.

'Now just back off before this gets embarrassing for both of us!' Georgie hissed up at him. 'If I scream, your servants will come running!'

'We are alone in the house.'

As he lowered his weight down on to hers, Georgie froze, and stared up at him with darkened violet eyes. 'We can't be...'

'We are.' He bent over her and nipped playfully at her lower lip with the kind of sensual expertise she was defenceless against, the tip of his tongue following gently in the wake of the tiny pain to further inflame. 'I have waited so long to see you on this bed in this room,' he confessed. 'And when it's over, when you're gone, everything will be ripped out and these rooms will be renovated. It will be as though you never existed '

The assurance dug sudden fear into her bones, ban­ishing her momentary loss of concentration. Georgie put up her hands and hit out at him with raw hostility. With a stifled imprecation, he anchored both her hands to the sheet and gazed down at her with incandescent golden eyes, his strong jawline clenching as he absorbed the ap­prehension in her upturned gaze.

'For Dios... why should you fear me?' he demanded abruptly, releasing her wrists.

Trembling, Georgie thrust him away from her and sat up, clutching with desperate hands at the bath-towel's dipping edge across her full breasts. It was a kind of fear he could never have understood, for he would not have believed its source. She was afraid of herself and him. 'I just want you to -leave me alone!' she muttered shakily.

He murmured something soft in his own language and pulled her close. Stiffening, she shivered violently as the towel lurched dangerously downward. 'No!' she gasped, panicking.

"Si...' Rafael countered, choosing to gather her even closer and cover her lips hungrily with his. The towel slipped; she didn't notice, but a tiny gasp was torn from her as her taut nipples were abraided by his hair-roughened chest.

She was electrified by the way he was making love to her mouth. He searched out every sensitive spot and ex­plored it, making the breath rasp in her throat. It felt so good, indeed, it felt so incredibly exciting that she clutched him with her hands, seduced by her own helpless response. As he settled her smoothly back against the crisp white sheet, she was overwhelmed by the sheer welter of sensation that attacked her when he sealed every virile inch of his lean, powerful body to hers.

He stared down at her with a raw, sexual hunger that burned through clear to her bones. Heat flooded her in a blinding surge. A hard thigh sank between hers and she quivered violently, the fevered pulse-point of desire thrumming ever higher inside her.

'You see...' Rafael muttered thickly. 'And I haven't even begun yet.'

As he buried his mouth in a tiny hollow below her fragile collarbone, he let his thumbs rub expertly across her thrusting pink nipples. She jerked, an involuntary moan torn from her, and he lowered his head to employ his mouth and that wickedly knowing tongue on those unbearaby sensitive buds. He drove her crazy. Sensation like white-hot lightning licked at every nerve-ending and she twisted and gasped in helpless excitement. She was in thrall to a dark enchantment of the senses and the most extraordinary pleasure.

Her fingers dug into the thick silky depths of his hair and tightened as he sucked a swollen nipple into his mouth. 'Rafael... oh, God, Rafael...' she moaned, out of control and burning up.

Through passion-glazed eyes she focused on him, the darkness of his head against her pale skin, the gold of his hands shaping her treacherously responsive flesh. Her palms moved restively over the satin-smooth muscles in his shoulders and then her fingertips drove into his hair again as her heavy eyelids slid down. There was an ache between her thighs, an absolutely unbearable ache. Her teeth clenched. She wanted, needed...

He slid up and twisted a hand painfully into her hair as he devoured her mouth again, bruising her lips but answering her every unspoken need. She kissed him back with wild passion, trembling all over, lost in the depths of her own excruciating excitement. He moaned some­thing raggedly in Spanish, cupping her cheekbones, meeting that passion with a savager

y that dominated, drove, demanded...

'Tentadora...bruja,' Rafael groaned, and then he tensed ever so slightly.

At first Georgie didn't hear the faint buzzing some­where in the background. Rafael's fingertips were roaming through the damp tangle of curls at the apex of her thighs and she was on a knife-edge of tormented pleasure, quivering skittishly, unable to stay still as he suddenly crushed her mouth beneath his again. And then, with quite paralysing abruptness, he released her and sprang off the bed.

'Rafael?' she mumbled.

"The phone,' he grated.

'What phone?' And then she heard it, buzzing away somewhere like an angry bee.

'My private line—it must be an emergency. Dios,' Rafael swore, shooting her a torn-in-two glance of dark smouldering hunger and incredulous frustration.

Georgie only managed to focus on him as he strode back out of the bathroom, retrieving a mobile phone from his dinner-jacket. And then she got the full effect of Rafael, stark naked. Her lower lip dropped as she stared, for she had no recollection of him removing the rest of his clothes. Sheer shock grabbed her by the throat. Gulping, Georgie took in his uninhibited stance several feet away, not a centimetre of his magnificent golden ohysique concealed from her. Her gaze wandered on a compulsive journey of its own and absorbed with frank alarm her first sight of a rampantly aroused male. She reddened to the roots of her hair.

'One minute... I promise you, querida,' Rafael mur­mured with erotic emphasis as he surveyed her with blatant male anticipation.

Georgie hauled the sheet over her shamelessly ex­posed flesh. She started to shake. Aftershock. I am wanton, she thought in a sudden agony of self-reproach. Desire still ached inside her and she was too honest to deny the fact. Rafael had told her that they didn't even need to like each other and she had refused to believe that. But Rafael, veteran of many more such encounters than she, had known better.

From below her lashes, she watched him turn away from her, sounding oddly taut and then breaking into an apparently animated flood of Spanish. You are everything he called you, a nasty little inner voice in­sisted. She buried her burning face in the pillow. No, she wasn't. Who had ever heard of a promiscuous virgin? But with Rafael her blood ran hot enough to burn her alive. Although right now that same blood was freezing in her veins, because she realised how very close she had come to surrendering her body to a male who despised her.