‘Yes,’ he said fiercely. ‘Absolutely I do. What happened to you was bad, and the guy who took advantage of you was a piece of scum, but it happened a long time ago and you can’t let it write the script for the rest of your life. Sex isn’t wrong, Carly. It’s natural. It’s one of the greatest pleasures in life and you’re missing out on it. Don’t you see that?’
His fierce words were impossible to brush aside and suddenly Carly realised that she felt better for having told him. She felt lighter—cleaner. As if she’d scrubbed years of grime away from her skin and stepped out into the sunlight.
And Luis had been the catalyst for that.
She stared at him. ‘I’m wondering where we go from here,’ she said. ‘Do you think we can we go back to how it’s been before?’
‘Possibly.’ He took one of her hands in his and turned it over, studying her palm as if he was examining her lifeline, and when he looked up again there was a question in his eyes. ‘But I don’t want to. And neither do you. Not really.’
He had lifted his fingertips to her face and was tracing a feather-light path down over her cheek and Carly had to resist the urge to close her eyes, because it felt so right to have him touching her. She swallowed as his thumb moved across the cushion of her bottom lip and suddenly it began to tremble.
‘Luis,’ she said, but it came out in a way she didn’t recognise. As if she was making a protest without really meaning it.
And he smiled, as if he had just won a battle she hadn’t even realised they were having, before lowering his voice. ‘Tell me something, Carly. Are you saving your virginity for the man you will one day marry?’
His blunt question shook her out of her dreamy state and she blinked at him in surprise. ‘That’s a strange question to ask at a time like this.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s exactly the right question to ask because I need to know what’s important to you.’
She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t sure she could answer coherently when his thumb was rubbing her lip like that, but she didn’t want him to stop. ‘Then no. The answer is no. I wasn’t saving it for anyone. It’s not like money you put in the bank. It’s just that I’d never met anyone who—’
‘Makes you feel the way I do?’
His murmured assertion should have sounded unbearably arrogant, but it didn’t. Because that was the truth, too. She shook her head. ‘No.’
He leaned forward and replaced his thumb with his lips, brushing them over hers in a way which made her tremble even more.
‘I want to be your lover, Carly,’ he breathed. ‘I want to show you how to enjoy pleasure, for pleasure’s sake. You have helped heal me—so let me now heal you.’
‘S-sexual healing?’ she questioned unsteadily.
‘If you like.’
She drew her head away from his. ‘It’s...it’s a crazy idea.’
‘Why?’
Why?
A million reasons flooded into her head. Sex wasn’t supposed to be something you just did, was it, like some cold-blooded experiment carried out in laboratory conditions? Sex was supposed to be about passion. A lot of people thought it was only about love.
She looked into the hard gleam of his eyes and suddenly she understood what that journalist had meant when she’d written that article. His face was rugged and beautiful, yes, but his eyes really did look empty. As if you could jump into their black depths and never reach the bottom. And surely only a fool would choose to be intimate with a known heartbreaker like Luis Martinez.
Yet the detached, scientific side of her personality was impressed by his honesty. He wasn’t spinning her lies by making promises he couldn’t fulfil. He was offering to teach her the art of sex.
She imagined turning him down. Of going back to being the woman she’d been before. Carly the invisible. Carly the scared. But she hadn’t felt invisible when he’d kissed her. Or scared. She had felt three-dimensional and desired—properly desired—for the first time in her life. Hadn’t it come as a huge relief to discover that the creep at the party hadn’t destroyed those kind of feelings for ever? That deep down she was still a functioning woman, with a woman’s needs.
And didn’t she want that? Wasn’t it time for her to truly leave the past behind?
‘So how would it work?’ she questioned casually, but maybe her nonchalant tone didn’t fool him because she saw him smile in response. ‘If I were to agree.’
‘I hadn’t actually given much thought to that,’ he said. ‘I thought that might have been a little...presumptuous.’
‘I suppose it might.’ But Carly didn’t care about presumptuous; she just wanted him to begin. She wanted him to kiss her again and make her feel the way she’d done before. She wanted his hands on her breasts and in her hair. She wanted to know what would happen if that low ache deep inside her was allowed to keep building and building...
Letting her eyelashes flicker to a close, she elevated her chin, silently inviting him to kiss her. But his soft laugh made her eyes snap open.
‘Oh, no,’ he said softly. ‘This is not how I intend for your seduction to happen, querida. It will not be here, or now. It will not be fast and furious with us grappling on your bed like a couple of greedy teenagers. It will be a slow and considered feast. A banquet guaranteed to satisfy all the senses, rather than something devoured without tasting properly. I want you to be sure that this is what you really want.’ His lips curved into a slow smile. ‘And when you do, there will be no holds barred.’