JENNIE LUCAS - One Night in Madrid - Spanish Billionaire, Innocent Wife / The Spaniard's Defiant Virgin / The Spanish Duke's Virgin Bride

‘Don’t you dare!’ Raul broke in on a roar of fury. ‘You know it wasn’t like that.’

‘Do I? Do I really? So tell me, Raul, just what was it like?’

‘You wanted it as much as I did.’

‘Wanted. You’re right there, Raul. The word is wanted. Past. I might have wanted—wanted you—but you made one big mistake. You gave me time to think … time to have second—and third, and, believe me, fourth—thoughts about this. And I came to the conclusion—the only wise, the only sensible conclusion—that I do not want anything more to do with you. I should never have come here—I would never have come here if it hadn’t been for your damn phone and I’ve given you that back—so now it’s goodbye, and this time it’s for ever!’

Hell and damnation, no! Rejection of everything she said was like a red haze in Raul’s mind. It couldn’t stop now. Not like this. This wasn’t going to happen again. She wasn’t going to walk out on him all over again, not when he had just rediscovered that sensual satisfaction—the deepest, most perfect satisfaction—that he only ever found with her.

He’d tried to find it elsewhere—tried for two long, frustrating years. And no woman had ever even come close. He would do anything, pay any price, resort to any blackmail, just to have this woman where she belonged—in his bed.

‘You’re not leaving.’

‘No? Just watch me.’

She flounced past him, tossing that glorious red hair as she did so. He knew from the flashing, sideways, wary look she gave him that she expected him to try and grab at her, hold her back, so he derived a dark satisfaction from wrong-footing her, instead leaning back against the wall, folding his arms across his chest and watching her, waiting a nicely calculated moment.

‘Don’t you think that you’d be better off with something on your feet?’ he drawled at last, just in time to stop her halfway across the room.

‘What?’

Alannah stopped dead, half turned back, then looked down at her bare feet, pale against the deep burgundy colour of the carpet.

‘Where—?’ she began, but Raul ignored her and cut across her indignant question.

‘And were you really planning to walk through the hotel—and all the way back to your flat—dressed, or perhaps I should say undressed, like that?’

As he spoke he let his cool gaze slide from her angry face and down over her body, lingering deliberately at the spot where three buttons were missing and the front of her dress gaped wide over the lace of her bra.

She looked a total mess, Alannah admitted, while he … well, his clothes were faintly crumpled from their time on the floor and on anyone else that should have looked untidy, even messy, but somehow on Raul they had a very different effect. He looked ruffled, relaxed—and real. Light-years away from his normal smooth, sleek, business-suited self—and very, very sexy. It was impossible to look at him, at the expanse of broad chest exposed by the still unbuttoned shirt, and not think of how just a short time before she had lain with her head pillowed on that chest, the crisp dark hairs tickling her cheek as she heard his breathing slow, the thundering of his heart gradually ease as he too recovered from the wild ferocity of their lovemaking.

Gasping in shock, she felt the hot colour flood her cheeks as she grabbed at her dress again, pulling the pieces back together as closely as she could. But holding it there meant that she had no way of opening the door. And she still had to find.

‘Where are my shoes?’

Close to something like panic, she scanned the room, searching for any sign of the pale leather pumps she had worn on her way here. She couldn’t see them anywhere.

‘Raul …’

‘Alannah …’

He levered himself up from his position against the wall, and she watched warily as he came towards her slowly.

‘Why don’t you sit down for a moment and let’s talk about this?’

He sounded so calm, so reasonable that her mouth actually fell open and she gaped at him in blank bewilderment. Whatever had happened to Mr ‘Of course this is going to happen again’? Was he actually prepared to be reasonable? Or was he just hiding his darker side behind this suddenly civilised veneer?

She had no way of knowing and the truth was that her own thought processes were far from trustworthy. She felt as if she had been at the eye of a tropical storm ever since she had come to Raul’s hotel room, picked up and whirled around, battered by a fury of conflicting feelings. Even now, her body still ached with the hungry passion that had raged through her in the moment when Raul had taken her in his arms and kissed her. The honest truth was that even as she’d collapsed into sated exhaustion from his lovemaking a weak, greedy part of her had already been anticipating something more.

If the knock at the door had never happened, or if it had come a minute or two later, then there would have been no going back. She would have turned to Raul once more and if he had taken her into his arms and kissed her again then she would have gone to him, opened herself to him willingly and eagerly. All it would have taken was another kiss, another caress from Raul to stoke the fires that she knew had only died down, not died away. She knew she would have been incapable of saying no—that she wouldn’t have wanted to say no—and once more Raul would have made her his, stamped his possession on her without a thought.

But the knock at the door had come. It had broken through the burning haze that had filled her mind, snatching her out of the delirium of need and right back into harsh reality in the space of a couple of seconds.

She had waited, shivering in heated reaction, in the bedroom, listening to him dealing with the porter, handing over the case, heard the door shut. Every nerve in her body had still been so alive, so awake that if he had come to her then she still wouldn’t have been able to think. If he had walked through that door right then she knew with a sense of despair that she would have gone straight into his arms, drawn to him like a fragile needle was brought close by the fierce pull of the strongest magnet. She would not have been able to stay away. All he would have had to do was to say ‘Come’, and she would have obeyed. So great was the spell he had cast over her.

But he hadn’t come to her. He hadn’t opened his arms. He hadn’t said ‘Come’. Instead he had paused, picked up the phone and called Carlos.

And suddenly it was as if the bottom had dropped out of her world. Her heart had plummeted, twisting as it went and every last trace of heat had ebbed from her body, leaving her shivering in a very different way.

‘I’ve called him already,’ Raul had said. ‘And told him not to come at the time we originally arranged but to leave it until I called him.’

But she didn’t need him to tell her that. She didn’t care what he had said, or, rather, exactly how he had phrased it. She had heard him through the door. Heard how, once he had got rid of the porter, his first instinct had been to pick up the phone, call his driver. She’d heard the name Carlos, and even if she hadn’t understood the rest of the fast, autocratic Spanish, she had known only too well what was going on.

Because by then realisation had already hit home. And realisation had brought with it a heavy dose of cold reality—the sort of reality that she couldn’t dodge away from, couldn’t avoid, no matter how much she might want to.

While she was still dealing with the aftershocks of the hurricane of feeling that had swept her up, while her body still trembled in stunned delight at the sensations she had experienced and her mind whirled and spun from the force of feeling she had been subjected to, Raul had been calmly and coolly getting on with his life, dealing with the practicalities.