Maggie Cox - The Spaniard's Summer Seduction - Under the Spaniard's Lock and Key / The Secret Spanish Love-Child / Surrender to Her Spanish Husband

‘I thought I could become another person just like that.’ She snapped her fingers to illustrate her point. ‘But you can’t… I should have started with a motorbike or a tattoo…with you I was…’ She watched him shake his head in utter confusion but didn’t try to explain—he’d never understand. ‘You’ve got to keep it real and know your limits.’

Rafael, to whom real was fast becoming a dim and distant memory, took the half-full glass from her hand. The scary part was she was still well under the legal limit. ‘And I am not real?’

‘You’re a mistake,’ she admitted. ‘Jumping in the deep end. I wanted to prove to Simon… Millie, my mum…no, myself… ’ She looked shocked by the admission and sat down abruptly. ‘I really don’t know what I was or am doing…a lot of things have been going on in my life just lately.’ And he really wants to know this, Maggie, she admonished herself.

‘Sometimes the past is better left undisturbed.’ He could see how delving into a background, searching for roots, might make a person question their life.

Maggie lifted her eyes, a little bemused by the intensity of his fixed regard.

Did he think she had a past? She almost wished she did have. Either way, she wasn’t about to admit she was actually a blank boring page, especially when it came to men and sex.

God, I don’t want to die a virgin.

She tried to think of a suitably enigmatic response and blurted, ‘But doesn’t the past make us what we are?’ His past had to be littered with glamorous, beautiful women.

‘I like to look forward, not back.’ And when he looked back on tonight, would it be with regret?

Regret that he had resisted the temptation that was driving him slowly out of his mind? Or regret because he had ignored the nagging voice of his conscience?

Did he want her so much because she was out of bounds? he speculated. And why was she out of bounds? What had changed between first seeing her and now? They were two consenting adults—why should they not enjoy each other?

‘What were you thinking when I came in? You looked very deep in thought.’

‘Isn’t that looking backwards?’

‘Touché!’

Her eyes slid of their own volition to the sensual curve of his sculpted lips.

Simon had never made her feel attractive.

The way Rafael had looked at her when they’d met, she had felt more aware of her femininity than Simon had made her feel in four years.

‘You have a very impressive home.’ He was a very impressive man.

‘Are you changing the subject?’

‘Yes.’

He released a laugh. Maggie tilted her head back as he got to his feet, and shuffled to the far end of the sofa as he sat down beside her.

‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Better, but a bit…’ Her voice died to a whisper when he reached across and trailed a finger down her cheek. ‘Near-death experiences will do that.’

She felt intense relief mingled with troubling regret when his hand fell away. ‘I just keep thinking what if I hadn’t met you tonight?’

Was she wondering about the confrontation with her birth mother? For the first time he considered today from Maggie’s point of view.

She might have dreaded the meeting. It might have taken her weeks to work herself up to the moment and, perhaps not fully committed, still wondering if she was doing the right thing, she had stepped back.

Was she regretting it now? Was she wishing she had not allowed herself to be diverted?

‘If you hadn’t brought me there, would those children have.?’ She shook her head.

He watched a visible shudder pass through her body and realised it was another ‘what if’ that was plaguing her.

‘They are fine, you are fine.’ A nerve in his lean jaw jerked as the slow-motion replay of the event in his head reached the moment when he had thought she would not be fine. ‘You can’t live your life thinking what if.’ he continued hoarsely.

Maggie turned her head, their eyes meshed and Maggie felt some of the tension leave her body. She sighed slowly and nodded and said, ‘But what if…?’

He loosed a husky laugh and lifted a finger to her lips. ‘Enough.’

It wasn’t the firm admonition that silenced Maggie, but the confusing combination of sensations that was coursing through her body.

His thumb stayed at the corner of her mouth, his eyes sealed to hers; the air was thick with an almost electrical charge that made it hard for her to breathe.

He leaned into her close, very close, but not touching. Her heavy lids half closed as she swayed closer as though drawn by some invisible thread that connected her to him. ‘Your skin smells.’ He exhaled and she felt his brandy-scented breath on her cheek.

He stopped and she thought, Bad…good? Say something…do something…touch me.

‘It’s late. We should go to bed.’ He had never in his life felt a need so raw, so primal to possess a woman.

She gave a fractured sigh. Her heart rate quickened but her body relaxed. It seemed right. ‘Yes.’

He met her eyes shining with promise and trust and he heard himself say, ‘Perhaps this is not a good idea.’

She felt her smile slide off her face, and flinched as if he’d just thrown cold water in her face. Not water, Maggie, just a reality check. This is what happens when you start thinking you’re irresistible.

She lifted her chin. ‘I am a bit tired.’ She gave an artistic yawn to demonstrate the point, then spoilt the pretence by adding, ‘I’m not drunk, you know.’

‘I know you’re not.’ Scruples, he decided, were very overrated and painful, and what would be achieved by depriving them both of an experience that would, he knew, be pleasurable?

She felt the mortified heat reach her cheeks. To have one man politely excuse himself from her bed was one thing; two. There had to be something seriously wrong with her.

‘This day started quite well, and this may sound dramatic but it really is turning into the worst day of my life. You’ll laugh, but actually I thought…’ She stopped, shook her head. He wasn’t laughing; he was staring at her with a fixed intensity that she was not going to mistake for blind lust. ‘I really do feel like an idiot.’

‘You’re not an idiot.’ He took hold of her elbows and looked down into her heart-shaped face, gazing deep into her liquid dark eyes. ‘But you do have a smudge on your nose…right there,’ he said, kissing the spot.

Do not read anything into it, Maggie… ‘It’s fine—you don’t fancy me…perfectly understandable…look, you’re not the first man to be able to resist me. I’m not going to take it personally. I’m not really—’

‘Shut up!’ He hooked a finger under her chin and he captured her eyes and like a primal blast the blaze of hunger in his drove the air from Maggie’s lungs in one shocked gasp.

She melted, paralysed by a combination of raw lust and desperate longing, unable to catch her breath; her fingers closed around the hard muscles of his upper arms.

‘Do you want to spend the night alone, Maggie?’

Maggie’s eyes closed as he kissed the corner of her mouth, her body twisting and arching as she tried to insinuate herself closer. ‘No,’ she whispered against his mouth. Then she opened her eyes, looked at his lean dark face so close to her own, and said, ‘No!’

He smiled at the defiant declaration, a slow, predatory smile that sent her stomach into a spasm of raw excitement. The tension in the air between them thickened; it shimmered.

‘Neither do I.’

THE raw hunger in his kiss blazed along Maggie’s nerve endings, vaporising any lingering doubts or fears. This was what she wanted, Rafael was what she needed .