Passionate Protection

'I won't let you leave me,' he muttered throatily against her skin. 'You are mine, Jessica, and mine alone. Dios, the torment I have suffered seeing you smile at my brother, my aunt—anyone but me! You cannot know how I have longed to see you look at me with love, how I have hungered for you to want me as I want you—not simply for the pleasure our bodies find in one another, but with your heart and soul!'

She was unbearably moved, unable to deny the conviction in his voice, the emotion in his eyes as they searched her face as though willing a response.

'You love me?' Jessica asked uncertainly, still not fully able to accept.

'Do you doubt it?' He smoothed her hair back off her forehead, and she could feel the heated shudder of his body as she touched him. 'I wanted you from the first,' he told her softly. 'I hated you at the same time because of what you were. Or what I thought you were.'

'I thought you despised me,' Jessica told him. 'You were so cold, so distant.'

'Because I daren't let myself be anything else. All the time I was giving myself reasons why I shouldn't, all I wanted to do was to take you in my arms and make you admit that no man could give you the pleasure I could. I hated Jorge because he had been your lover, and when you threatened to stay in Seville and see him. I couldn't understand why he had stopped wanting you. I thought if he saw you again, he would do…'

'And so you concocted that tale about needing a designer to save him from me,' Jessica supplied dryly.

Sebastian smiled grimly. 'Nearly right, only it was because I wanted to keep you away from him and with me,' he supplemented. 'And then he arrived and my whole world was turned upside down. You weren't the girl he had met, you were someone else; someone about whom I knew nothing. Someone who might have a lover or a boy-friend in the background whose claims on you I couldn't destroy. And then Jorge gave me the perfect weapon. People were talking about us, he told me. He was concerned for you. I knew my aunt and Pilar intended to come and see you. I must admit I hadn't quite intended that we should be discovered as we were… some things cannot be controlled,' he added with a wry mockery that brought vivid colour to her skin, 'and you were so sweetly responsive I forgot why I had come to your room and remembered only how much I wanted you… loved you,' he amended softly, 'because by then I did, although I was loath to admit it even to myself.'

'But when you married me you were so distant I thought you hated me!'

He cupped her face and looked at her sombrely. 'Why didn't you tell me you were a virgin? Was it to punish me, to make me suffer?'

Jessica didn't understand what he meant.

'I tried to,' she told him huskily, 'in the car on the way back to the hacienda, but you told me how relieved you were that I didn't need "initiating" and after that I just couldn't…'

'And so instead you make me suffer a thousand torments, hating myself for what I have done to you. It was bad enough when I simply thought I was forcing you into a marriage you didn't want. There was desire between us and I hoped that in time it might grow to something else. When I discovered that not only had I robbed you of your freedom, but that I had also taken from you the right to give your body and sweet innocence to the lover of your choice, I hated and despised myself…'

'You were so cold,' Jessica whispered, 'so distant, and so hateful.'

'Because it was the only way I could stop myself from taking you in my arms and making love to you again and again,' Sebastian told her whimsically. 'I wanted you so much, I had to erect a barrier between us for your sake. I wanted to get down on my knees and beg your forgiveness, kiss every inch of your beautiful, precious body and promise you that never again would it know pain, but to do so would be to inflict my desire and love on you again, and I told myself that was something I would never do.

'We both know how long my resolve lasted,' he added wryly, adding with a frankness that half shocked her, 'Your sweet cries of pleasure on that second occasion have haunted my nights like a siren song ever since.'

'You made me sleep on my own,' Jessica accused, still not daring to believe that it was true and that he loved her.

He smothered a groan. 'My sweet love, it was torture, but I had no alternative. I had promised myself that I would set you free, that it was wrong of me to hold you to our marriage. I couldn't forgive myself for taking your innocence when you didn't love me, and when I discovered you were to have my child…'

'You were so cold towards me I thought you didn't want it,' Jessica interrupted bleakly. 'Then Pilar came and told me that you wanted me to leave, and…'

'And you already believed that I had turned my back on my daughter,' he finished for her. 'Oh, Jessica, I can't tell you what it meant to me to think you carried my child! I longed fiercely to keep you here with me, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't,hold you on so fragile a thread. I'm a proud' man, as you have so often said, and my pride would not allow me to constrain my wife to stay with me only for the sake of our child.'

'But if she loved you…'

He cupped her chin, his eyes dark with emotion. 'If she loved me—if you loved me,' he corrected huskily, 'I would never let her go. When I saw that building and knew you were in it… If you had died then life would have had no meaning for me,' he told her simply.

'You risked your life for us,' Jessica said softly. 'I…'

'Do you think I would have let anyone else near you?' he demanded with a ferocity that surprised her. 'When everything a man holds of value in his life is in danger of course he trusts no one but himself to remove that danger. When you told me to take Lisa, even though I knew you were right, you'll never know what it cost me to go, leaving you there, possibly facing death.'

'And you'll never know how I felt, seeing you disappear,' Jessica told him softly, 'wanting you so badly… and then you were so cold, putting me in that bedroom when all I wanted was the warmth of your arms, your…'

'My…?' he questioned teasingly. 'Go on, querida, you are just about to get to the interesting bit, I think?'

'Your… body against mine,' Jessica admitted hesitantly, laughing at her own shyness. 'Oh, Sebastian,' she sighed ecstatically, 'I fell in love with you almost straight away, despite all those dreadful things you said to me!'

She frowned as Sebastian suddenly released her, picking up the piles of clothes from the bed and depositing them on a chair.

'What are you doing?' she asked anxiously. 'Sebastian…'

'I thought you wanted to be in my arms,' he reminded her with a slow smile, 'to feel my body against yours? Is that not right, querida?'