‘I am not sharing this bed with you!’
‘What do you think I am—a rapist?’ he growled incredulously.
‘How… do… I… know?’ she fielded with growing fury. ‘You’re not wearing any clothes!’
‘As I have only one set I refuse to go to bed in them. But I am not naked.’ Closing his hand round one of hers, he thrust it down to the hard jut of his hips, splaying her fingers against the band of cloth there to prove his point.
Bella nearly went into orbit at the intimacy of the gesture. ‘How dare you?’ she screeched, snatching her hand back even though she hadn’t been anywhere near the danger zone that she was already outrageously aware of.
He expelled his breath in a resonant hiss of exasperation. ‘You are not that naive. I am a man, lying in bed with a half-naked woman on top of me. I’m not a corpse, devoid of all sexual response. But I have no intention of making love to you.’
‘I don’t believe you!’ she bit out, rigid as a stick of rock, holding her entire length taut in a fruitless endeavour to lessen the points of contact between them.
‘I am fully in control of my sexual urges,’ he extended grittily into her ear. ‘But not my temper, I warn you.’
‘I don’t trust you,’ she whispered back with venomous bite, infuriated by the position in which she found herself. ‘I could fall asleep and you—’
‘Oh, I do believe you would wake up if I touched you. I believe that I can safely say a woman has never slept through my attentions!’
‘Don’t be disgusting! Let me go!’
He gave vent to something rough and charged in Spanish and moved with an abruptness that took her completely by surprise. Suddenly she was flipped onto her back and Rico was lying above her instead, their positions reversed without warning. Before she could open her startled lips to demand an explanation he took her mouth in a surge of angry passion.
And what happened next she definitely wasn’t prepared to deal with. As his tongue drove into the moist interior she had already accidentally opened to him she was seized by an explosive wave of excitement. It left her dizzy and stripped of every coherent thought. The intensity of her own response electrified her, opening up another world that was full of unbearable physical temptation. She returned the kiss with a kind of wondering innocence, arching her head back to deepen the pressure, involuntarily greedy and inviting more.
‘Por Dios…’ he groaned raggedly, his lean, hard body coming down into abrupt and abrasive contact with her yielding curves where, seconds earlier, he had held himself at a distance. ‘I—’
Driven entirely by instinct, Bella speared her unsteady fingers into the thick silk of his hair and held him down to her, tracing the shape of his head in an exploratory caress. Touching had never felt so good, never felt so necessary. Entrapped by the discovery and fired by the leaping, unfamiliar energy sizzling along her nerve-endings, she threw herself with natural generosity into the conflagration of their mouths’ second meeting a split-second later.
Incredible heat rose from deep inside her, making her body shake and quiver with the sheer power of what she was feeling. He pulled her to him as he slid onto his side, his hand curving to the pouting thrust of one full breast, inadequately protected by the thin lace cup of her bra. And then the barrier was inexplicably no longer there, his fingers shaping her naked, sensitised flesh with an expertise that made her gasp. In the darkness she felt him move, and the yearning peak of one engorged nipple was brushed by the tip of his tongue and then engulfed by his mouth.
Bella moaned, and jerked as though she had been electrified. All she could hear was the rasp of her tortured breathing, the thunder of her heartbeat. Sensation so intense that it came close to torment had her in its grip. She was out of control, sensed it, felt it, knew it, and being out of control was something Bella never, ever allowed herself to be with a man. The shock of that realisation awakened her brain from its slumber, and in panic she wrenched herself free by rolling backwards.
‘No!’ she slung at him from between clenched teeth as she hit the hard floor with a force that hurt. Rolling over, feeling the nakedness of her back and breasts in dismayed confusion, she fumbled out blindly to feel the wall opposite the bed and sat there, hugging her knees and shivering as the light went on.
‘Madre de Dios…’ Rico hissed, studying her with incandescent golden eyes from the vantage point of the bed. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’
‘Please return my clothing to me.’ She lowered her eyes and studied her raised knees, embarrassment and an unfamiliar self-loathing assailing her. But still she could see that strong-boned, hard face, brought alive by those astonishingly passionate eyes of his, the lithe, powerful symmetry of his bronzed, beautifully masculine body. Her nails dug into her skin in angry, fearful confusion as she fought to wipe out that unbelievably intense and detailed image.
Her jacket and her bra landed in a heap beside her bare toes. She skidded upright, twisting away from him, and dug her arms shakily into the sleeves of the jacket, ignoring the bra because he was watching her. She hadn’t even noticed that he had removed both articles while she had been in his arms. It was a small point but somehow it underlined just how far her control and awareness had slipped and emphasised how complete had been his.
Smooth bastard, she reflected shakily, deciding that you couldn’t know where you were with a guy possessed of that variety of sexual expertise. At least with the ones who grabbed and clutched you got fair warning of their intentions.
‘You are behaving as though I attacked you,’ he grated in a furious undertone.
‘You started it, I finished it. Let’s leave it there,’ she muttered unsteadily, with her back still cravenly turned to him.
‘I did not do anything—’
‘That I didn’t encourage you to do,’ Bella completed in a grudging interruption. ‘I know.’
There was a smouldering silence.
‘If you acknowledge that—’ and his accented drawl told her just how astonished he was that she had made that acknowledgement ‘—then why—?’
‘My hormones are out of sync… or something.’
‘Qué dices…?’ Now he sounded slightly dazed. Bella forced herself to turn around. It took courage. ‘It’s this situation… the proximity, the misleading intimacy, the tension we are both under,’ she offered. ‘I’m sorry I let it go so far but neither one of us can want to wake up in the morning trapped with a sleazy one-night stand we can’t escape from—’