A flash of memory took her back eight years to the feel of his mouth on hers. The feel of his tongue rubbing hers. The feel of his hands spanning her waist. Heat pooled inside her and made her breasts heavy, her legs unsteady. She remembered that after they’d been caught she had been so shocked by her physical reaction to him and so scared of her grandfather’s wrath she’d fallen utterly silent—ashamed of herself for considering one man’s marriage proposal while losing herself in the arms of another. Cruz hadn’t raised one word of denial the whole time and she still wondered why.
Not that she had time to consider that now... He leant forward as if her staying hands were nothing more than crepe paper. His breath brushed her ear.
‘Let me tell you what I remember, gatita. I remember the way your curvy backside filled out those tight jodhpurs. I remember the purple bikini top you used to wear riding your horse along the beach. And I remember the way you used to watch me. A bit like the way you were watching me stroke the mare before.’ His hand tightened in her hair. ‘You were thinking about how it would feel if I put my hands on you again, weren’t you? How it would feel if I kissed you?’
Aspen made a half coughing noise in instant denial and tried to catch her breath. There was no way he could have known she’d been thinking exactly that.
‘Have you turned into a dreamer, Cruz?’ she mocked with false bravado, frightened beyond belief at how vulnerable she suddenly felt. ‘Because really a dream would be the only place I would ever want something like that from you.’
Dreamer?
Cruz felt his jaw knot at her insolent tone. How dared she accuse him of being a dreamer when she was clearly the dreamer here if she thought she could buy and hold onto the rundown estate Ocean Haven had become?
Memories of the past swirled around him and bit deep. Memories of how she had felt in his arms. How she had tasted. Memories of how she had stood there, all dazed innocence, and listened to her grandfather rail at him. He’d been accused of ruining her that night but it was her—her and that slimy fiancé of hers, Chad Anderson—who had tried to ruin him. She and her lover who had set him up for a fall to clear the way for Chad to take over as captain of Charles Carmichael’s dream team.
There’d been no other explanation for it, and he’d always wondered how far she would have taken things if her grandfather had turned up five minutes later. Because that was all it would have taken for him to twist her nightie up past her hips and thrust deep into her velveteen warmth.
His eyes took her in now. Her defiant expression and flushed face. Her rapidly beating pulse and her moist lips where her pink tongue had just lashed them. Her hands were burning a hole in his shirt and he was already as hard as stone—and, by God, he’d had enough of her holier-than-thou attitude.
‘You would have loved it.’ Cruz twisted her hair into a knot at the back of her head and pulled her roughly up against him. ‘Will love it,’ he promised thickly, wrapping his other arm around her waist and staunching her shocked cry with his mouth.
Her lips immediately clamped together and she pushed against him, but that only brought her body more fully up against his as her hands slipped over his shoulders. She stilled, as if the added contact affected her as much as it affected him, and with a deep groan he ran his tongue across the seam of her lips. He felt a shiver run through her and then she shoved harder to dislodge him. He told himself he wasn’t doing his plan any favours by forcing himself on her, but the plan paled into insignificance when compared to the feel of her warm and wriggling in his arms. He wanted her to surrender to him. To admit that the chemistry that had exploded through him like a haze of bloodlust as soon as he had seen her again wasn’t just one-sided.
But some inner instinct warned him that this wasn’t the way to get her to acquiesce, and years of experience in gentling horses rushed through him. He marshalled some of that strength and patience now and gentled her. Sucking at her lips, nipping, soothing her with his tongue. She made a tiny whimper in the back of her throat and he felt a sense of primal victory as she tentatively opened her mouth under his, aligning her body so that her soft curves were no longer resisting his hardness but melting against him until he could feel every sweet, feminine inch of her.
With a low growl of approval he gentled his hold on her and angled her head so that he could take her mouth more fully. When her lips opened wider and her arms urged him closer he couldn’t stop himself from plundering her, couldn’t resist drawing her tongue out so that she could taste him in return.