‘Don’t you understand?’ she choked. ‘I feel as if I’m betraying myself!’
‘Because you don’t love me?’
‘Or you me,’ she threw right back.
‘We both tried love once,’ he stated brutally. ‘And what did it bring us but a load of pain and heartache?’
‘And you think this is a less painful option?’ she flashed back.
For an answer, his thumb moved on the pulsing tip of her nipple, she sucked air into her lungs on a sharp gasp of pleasure.
His mouth stretched in a glimmer of a satisfied smile. ‘It seems to me,’ he murmured huskily, ‘to be the perfect option.’
And before she
could think to stop him he reached up with his other hand and stripped the sheet from her body.
Naked, exposed, quivering, aroused, she made her eyes plead with him as he took that last vital step which brought him hard up against her. ‘Rafe—’ she managed to gasp out in a last-ditch plea, before his month covered hers.
‘No,’ he muttered. ‘You want this as much as I do.’
‘But it feels wrong!’ she groaned.
‘Where is the wrong in you and I helping each other get through a bad time in our lives?’ he questioned.
Her eyes glazed over with tears of pain—his pain, her own pain; the two were beginning to blur into one now. ‘Was she there instead of me last night?’ she heard herself ask him thickly.
‘No.’ It was utterly unequivocal, his darkened eyes never wavering from her own helplessly vulnerable ones. ‘I can honestly say, Shaan,’ he went on huskily, ‘that Madeleine never so much as entered my head last night. I didn’t want her there. I wanted you there!’
‘But—’
‘No,’ he said again. ‘No more soul-searching.’ And he crushed whatever she had been trying to say to him back into her mouth with the urgent pressure of his lips.
The bed waited. He lifted her onto it, then knelt, straddled across her, while he stripped the robe from his own body.
Her heart slammed once, hard, against her breast as she lay there staring up at him. He was so magnificent to look at—big and lean, dark and tanned, with that curling mat of body hair arrowing downwards to the potent proof of his sex.
Her own senses stirred, that slow, deep, salacious curl of excitement spiralling up from the very pits of her stomach, flooding heat into her flesh as touch-sensitive nerve-ends crowded to the surface of her skin in eager anticipation of his remembered caresses.
He was so aroused!
But then, she realised hopelessly, so was she. There was an alien moistness forming between her softly throbbing thighs that seemed to be begging for his touch.
Unable to resist the need, she let her hands come up, sliding into the thick silken mat of hair at his chest, feeling warmth and life and strength as they travelled slowly upwards until they could reach no further, stilling on the solid mass of muscle at his breastplate. Then, lifting bottomless black eyes up to his, she stared at him in mute surrender.
He accepted it with a growling triumph that put the seal on her fate.
He devoured her then; there was no other way to describe it. He stormed her, invaded her, conquered and devoured her.
‘This is it, Shaan,’ he slurred into the bone-melting aftermath. He was still lying on top of her, holding her trapped by his physical strength and the dynamic strength of his sensuality. ‘This is what we have. Which is a darn sight more than most people have. And if you’ve any sense you’ll try to build on that instead of pining for the unattainable.’
He meant Piers and she knew it. Did that also mean that he was not going to let himself pine for the unattainable?
‘What time is it?’ she said. ‘I’m so dreadfully thirsty.’
It was another surrender. He knew it, she knew it. His mouth came down to take hers once again in a single hard, bruising kiss meant to claim that surrender.
‘Come on.’ He smiled, getting up and pulling her with him. ‘Let’s go and order some breakfast.’