The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo

But she’d stepped out of the long shadow the past had cast over her. Taken the hand he’d held out to her, stepped back into life—warm and joyous and passionate. To share it with him.

Share it all with him.

All that their time together could give them...

After their snorkelling Rafael could hardly wait to get her back to the cabana. ‘Time for a siesta,’ he told her, the glint in his eyes also telling her that sleep would not be high on their agenda for a while...

Celeste threw him a teasing glance. ‘Aren’t we going to have lunch first?’

‘No,’ he said, and kissed her to prove his point. ‘You are all I want to feast on,’ he told her, as they gained the cool privacy of the villa and he took her in his impatient arms.

‘And I you,’ she said huskily, gazing up at him, her eyes full with desire.

The desire that was pouring through her. Desire that was like terra incognita—a land she was exploring with a sense of wonder and release that she had never dreamt possible. A land she had thought barred to her for ever.

After so much fear, with Rafael she found there was nothing to fear! Only to embrace and accept and cherish. In this blissful, wondrous present the past had vanished like dark smoke on the wind—the clear, fresh wind that blew off the endless reaches of the vast Pacific here on these emerald isles, these precious jewels set in a cobalt sea.

How simple it had been—how easy! Wonder filled her— and gratitude...boundless gratitude. And desire—oh, rich, rich desire. The passion in her body so long starved now filled her every cell, set her eyes glowing with an ardent flame that fired her with a heat that set her ablaze.

She wound her hand into his hair, pulling his mouth down to hers, her body clinging to his as she kissed him deeply, arousingly.

And he responded. Responded with an urgency that only fuelled her own, that only made her hands fumble in their haste to free them of their clothes, to draw him down with her upon the waiting bed and sate her desire on his strong, sculpted body.

How beautiful that body was! How perfect in its form, its texture and its honed, vital masculinity! She let her hands roam across his muscled torso, knowing every contour, knowing, too, with a delight that enthralled her, just how the touch of his hands, his mouth, the skilfully skimming tips of his fingers, could draw from her sensations she had never dreamt of! And how his surging body could ignite her own, could fuse with hers, melding them as one single flame in which they were consumed.

And afterwards...ah, afterwards she would lie in his loosened embrace, her racing heart slowing, her hands limp on his chest, his hands slackening around her. They would lie together, limbs splayed and tangled, heated and exhausted by passion fulfilled, and she would be cradled against him and know a peace, a happiness, she had never known.

Happiness had set a glow about her, like an inner light within her, thought Rafael, gazing at her now, their heads upon the same pillow. He could see it, rejoice in it. It was there all the time—as they walked through the gardens, as they dined and lunched and breakfasted together, as they lay lazily on the beach or by the pool, even as they glanced at each other as they went out running together in the cool early hours of the newly minted mornings, as they talked and laughed and passed the long, easy days, the clinging, passionate nights.

It was a happiness he felt, too, he knew. Lifting his spirit so that this time with her here seemed to be a time out of the world—a garden of paradise found. But the world, he knew, was waiting beyond the running swell of the seas, and it must reclaim them in the end.

But not permanently. That much he knew. Knew for certain that this time with Celeste had changed him fundamentally.

I want her so much to be the one! To be the woman I want to share my life with! But not the life I know—the one filled with buying and selling and making money and yet more money.