He shut the door behind them, then came up to her.
He touched her hair with his hands. Not stroking, simply drawing his fingers lightly back from her temples. That same quivering sensation that had shivered through her when he had touched her nape, her earlobe, her throat, shimmered through her again.
His hands were cupping her chignon now, drawing out one by one the pins that held it. He let them fall to the floor, indifferent to their fate. Long fingers loosened her hair, threading through it until the coils unwound and layered down her back.
Something was happening to her. It was that same sensation again but more, like tiny ripples of water, merging together into larger ripples.
He was speaking—indistinct words. It was Spanish, but none that she could understand. His voice was low. There was a husk in it. She could feel his breath softly on her neck. He had moved the heavy fall of her hair to one side, smoothing it across the material of her dress.
His fingers were at the top of her zip, and with a sudden swift glide he pulled it down the length of her spine, using both hands to part the material. His hands were flat on her bare shoulderblades. The heat in them burned like a brand.
He is branding me. Branding me as his possession.
She felt the breath rise in her throat. The ripples were spreading, growing more and more. Quickening.
The tips of his fingers threaded under the straps of her bra and she realised that not only was the zip of her dress undone, but the clasp of her bra as well. Silently he pushed the material of her dress, the straps of her bra, down over the cusp of her shoulder.
Then, with the same pressure on her shoulders, he turned her around to face him.
She lifted her eyes to him.
His were narrowed, lit with a dark intensity that seemed to pierce her, deep and penetrating.
Again that slicing sensation knifed through her, but now it was a thousand times more potent.
He lifted a hand from her shoulder, and lightly, very lightly, ran the backs of his fingers down her cheek.
She felt weakness flood through her, and that shimmering, shivering sensation again. But she couldn’t move. Was trapped utterly in the rippling, emotions cascading through her.
She went on gazing at him, unable to move. Helpless. Helpless with sensation.
Slowly, very slowly, she watched his mouth lower to hers.
She tasted of cool water on a hot day, like scented nectar. He opened her mouth and drank deep from the sweet well.
She did not respond, simply stood there as passive as she had been as he’d stroked her, and for an instant a biting emotion went through him. A low, viscous anger.
Did she really think that she could simply offer him her body as if she were a puppet? Did she really think that she could stay uninvolved while she bought her precious stately home for the price of her body in his lowly hands?
Those hands pressed against the bare skin of her back, folding her into him. His kiss deepened.
For an instant, a moment longer, she still resisted him, and then, as if every bone in her body had suddenly melted, she responded.
Triumph surged through him! She could not stay uninvolved! No, she would be trembling in his arms, clinging to him—aching for him, for his possession!
And he would possess her all right! Dios, but he would possess her. She would be his—entirely, consumingly.
He tasted her mouth one last time, then drew back.
He wanted to see all of her.
Portia was drowning, drowning in sensation. The ripples which had been widening suddenly swirled into a white whirlpool, sucking her down.
For an instant, when he had first bent to kiss her, she had felt paralysed, her heart surging into her throat. And then as his kiss deepened the whirlpool of sensation had flooded through her.
He was kissing her as she had never, ever been kissed before. She had never responded like this before. The kiss he had given her at the art gallery had been as a gentle stream. This was a drowning whirlpool, extinguishing everything around her. Nothing else existed except the touch of his lips, his tongue.
And then, just as suddenly, when time had stopped and all meaning, his mouth moved from hers.