Kate Walker - One Night in Madrid

‘I doubt if I’ll marry—I suggested it once and decided it was not for me. I’ll not put my head in that noose again.’

The dark, sidelong glance he shot her told her that like her he was thinking of the marriage that had never been between them. Not for the first time she sent up a little prayer of thankfulness that she had never let him see that she knew the real reasons he had ever proposed to her.

‘My father knew that if he was to hope for heirs then he had to look to my sister. At least if he was to have grandchildren while he still had the strength to hold them. Even if I created children—would they come in time?’

‘I’ll pray they do.’

Without thinking she reached out a hand, rested it on Raul’s powerful forearm where the way that he had rolled up his shirtsleeve exposed the tanned skin, lightly dusted with black hair. His skin was warm and smooth under her touch and the feel of hard bone and muscle sent a sensation like an electrical shock running up from her fingertips and along every tingling nerve.

She saw him stiffen slightly, saw his dark eyes flick down to where her fingers rested on his arm and then back up to her face.

‘Alannah …’ he said, just once, soft and low, and he placed the cognac glass down on the table beside him without ever taking his gaze from hers.

A sudden stillness seemed to freeze the air, paralysing her lungs so that her breathing seemed to stop, she even felt her heartbeat slow to a barely there thread of a pulse. It was as if the rest of the world had dissolved into a hazy mist all around her so that just herself and Raul were real, and everything else had ceased to exist.

Those beautiful eyes seemed to have lost all their burning ferocity and instead were deep pools of misty gold. And when he lifted his hand and put it over hers, pressing it down onto his arm, it seemed to happen in slow motion. So did the movement of his head as he lowered it, angling it so that his mouth was aimed for hers.

And Alannah responded without thought, lifting her own face towards his, her lips parting slightly, waiting for his kiss.

‘Alannah,’ he said again, the warmth of his breath kissing her mouth before he did.

WHEN their lips met it was the gentleness that was totally unexpected. After the blazing passion of the night in her flat, this tenderness caught her up in a warm, swirling sea of sensation, almost seeming to draw out her soul with her breath.

Her head was swimming and her hands went up to clutch at his arms for support, and that was her first mistake. The feel of his strength underneath her seeking fingers was both a delight and a danger. A delight because she wanted to touch further, hold tighter, and a danger for exactly the same reasons. She should break away, should move fast, but her thoughts seemed to have slowed down along with her breathing, and she couldn’t get her brain to send the right instructions to her body. Instead it seemed to want to cling, to cuddle, to press closer to the hard, vital heat of the man. And that was her second mistake. Because as soon as she pressed closer it was as if the warmth from his body had spread along her own skin. It seeped into her blood, seeming to melt down her muscles, her bones. And when she swayed on her feet his arms came round her, enfolding her, holding her tight. She was as close as she had wanted to be, clinging as she wanted to be, but in the space of a shaken heartbeat even this close was not enough. His kiss was not enough.

Her arms slipped up around his neck, holding him, fingers caressing the softness of his hair, brushing along the exposed skin at the nape of his neck, kneading the taut muscles she found there. And all the time she was drawing his head down closer, needing the pressure of his mouth to be harder, stronger— more.

He took her parted lips with a skill that had her sighing, the sigh opening her mouth even more to him, letting the slide of his tongue move along the sensitive inner tissues, tasting her, enticing her, seducing her.

If she stood on tiptoe then she could increase the pressure of his mouth on hers in response to the rising heat in her blood, the singing in her nerves. Still holding his proud dark head where she wanted it with one hand, she let the fingers of the other trail down the side of his face, feeling the faint rasp of black stubble under her fingertips as she followed the line of his forceful jaw. She caught Raul’s indrawn hiss of breath and smiled against his mouth as she kissed him again, this time taking her caressing fingers down his throat to slide in at the open neck of his shirt, stroking the smooth, warm flesh she found there, tracing tiny circles in the crisp body hair.

‘Alannah …’ Raul said again but this time her name was a growl of response against her lips.

‘Mmm?’ Alannah sighed, wriggling even closer, pressing herself against him and hearing the beat of his heart kick up a notch under the powerful ribcage.

‘Dios! You devil woman!’ he muttered against her mouth and the hands that had held her held no more. Instead they roved hungrily over her body, powerful fingers curving over and cupping the soft curves of her buttocks, pulling her in even closer to the heated force of his erection.

‘I only ever needed to take one look to want you more than any woman in the world. I still do.’

‘Me too …I want you too.’

Alannah felt the words slip past her guard with a tiny sense of shock. Even when they’d been together, she had never been brave enough or bold enough to admit to her sexual need of this man. Oh, she’d felt it often enough. And she’d shown him in wordless, physical ways, by her responses to his kisses and his caresses, just how much she desired him. But she had never actually come right out and said it in so many words.

She could only imagine that two long years of loneliness, of missing him, missing his touch, his kiss, had driven her into a state of sensual starvation, one in which she no longer had the strength or control to impose any restraint on her tongue so that Raul’s kisses had loosened even the weak grip she had on it.

Raul’s kisses and the very basic, very simple need for human comfort after the loss and misery she had endured so recently. Life was too short, too precarious to be lived at a lukewarm temperature. She’d welcomed the heat of her response to Raul as a way to melt the ice that seemed to have formed around her heart, shutting her off from the world, from all emotion.

Here at least was proof that she was still very much alive—and feeling.

‘You do?’

Her new openness had stunned Raul too. His dark head went back, deep-set eyes narrowing until all she could see was a tiny strip of burning gold gleaming between the thick black lashes that fringed them.

‘Is this the truth?’

Some of her unexpected courage deserting her under the intense scrutiny of that smouldering gaze, Alannah felt hot colour flood her cheeks, her mouth drying sharply so that she could only nod in silent acquiescence. She wanted to look anywhere but into his eyes, unable to meet them and answer the question in them when they were fixed on hers, so she lowered her gaze hastily, meaning to stare at the floor.

Instead she found that her eyes were caught by the broad expanse of Raul’s chest under the fine linen of his shirt. Where he had tugged his tie loose and unfastened a single button at the neck the tanned skin of his throat seemed impossibly dark—burnished almost—in contrast to the immaculate white and the shadow of the black, curling chest hair that showed faintly through it. The memory of how it had felt to smooth her fingertips over that hair, feeling it crisp and springy under her touch, made her swallow hard, fighting the urge to lift her hands to his chest, unbutton his shirt, to know the feeling all over again.