A little thrill ran through her. Oh she was so ready for this. “Okay, touch me. Touch me now. Do it. Feel how wet I am. Taste me if you want,” she said and almost before the words were out, his hand was under her dress, fingertips whisper-soft against her bare mons. She had to force herself to stand there and let him—not because she wanted him to stop but because she wanted to grab him by the lapels of his jacket and order him to do more.
“Open for me, Veronica,” he said and, with a little gasp, she shifted her legs apart. In one sudden, dramatic move, two of his fingers speared into her—and it was as if a switch had been turned in him, so that he started to shake. “Wet as a fucking storm,” he breathed. “I knew it.”
As suddenly as he’d thrust his fingers into her, he drew them back out. “Okay,” he said, rubbing her moisture between his fingers, then bringing his fingers to his mouth, sucking them, eyes closing. Veronica got the impression he was trying to calm himself down, but watching him enjoy the taste of her was making her the opposite of calm.
“What about your underwear?” she said.
His eyes opened. “What about it?”
“I want you to take it off before I get there. It’s called parity. Or let’s put it in money terms, shall we, and call it getting rid of the gender pay gap. What you’re paid, I’m paid.”
He smiled. “That’s my girl.”
“I’m not your girl. I won’t be that ever again. All I want is for your underwear to be off by the time I get to the cottage so I don’t have to rip it off you. Got it?”
“Got it,” he said and held out his hand. “Now seal the deal.”
She put her hand in his. It was as though this really was a deal—a business deal. Except that every sense she had was on high alert and there was a pulse between her thighs that was insisting an hour was too damn long to wait no matter how businesslike it was supposed to be.
And he must have thought so, too, because he tugged her into his arms and crushed her against his chest. “Can you feel what you do to me?”
“Yes.”
“So you want to talk gender pay gap? I’ve had my taste. Now it’s time for yours. What do you want me to do to you?”
She choked down a bubble of hysteria at the thought that in the chapel she’d told herself he’d be shocked if she wrapped her legs around him! This Rafael looked ready for anything.
But she knew what she wanted—what she’d wanted all night—and maybe that would be as much a shock to him as if she demanded he strip naked.
“I want you to kiss me,” she said.
If she thought he’d be disappointed at such a tame request, he quickly proved her wrong, pulling her in more tightly, breathing her in, as he slowly, slowly, lowered his face until he was hovering over her, a mingled breath away, so close...
And then, putting the lie to that slow hover, his mouth connected with hers in a hard, fast swoop. No holding back, no easing in—just his mouth smashing against hers, his tongue surging into her, licking deep and sure, his teeth biting at her lips.
It was everything she’d been missing—but also more. Familiar but also new. The same...yet different. The heat, the taste, the need were all there—but it was more demanding than a kiss from him had ever been. Like a harbinger of something else, something wild and dangerous, to come. She wanted that danger. Needed the wild. Longed to feel the physical need again. Revenge, she reminded herself. That’s what this was all about. Her revenge.
And then what?
The question came unbidden. What would it prove to make him shake with lust for her the way he was daring her to do? What would she gain by trampling over him, making him work for every moan and pant he won from her, making him beg? Suffer? She’d given him every piece of her once, she’d loved him—and she hadn’t been enough to keep him. What made her think she was enough now to inflict any damage on him all these years later?
She pulled away as a shiver shook through her, telling herself it was the drop in air temperature that caused it, not a premonition of disaster.
Catastrophe scale, she said to herself.
But just at that moment she couldn’t think of anything worse than not having him.
Except, perhaps, falling in love with him again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RAFAEL GROANED LONG and loud when he stepped inside the cottage and the seductive scent of vanilla grabbed him by the dick. He had forty minutes to wait until Veronica arrived and each one was going to be interminable with that smell impregnating the air.
He walked quickly through the two downstairs rooms. A spacious living area, which opened onto a pretty garden, and a well-stocked kitchen/dining area with a pay-as-you-drink collection of booze. A flight of stairs—with one squeaky step—led up to two bedrooms. Each bedroom had an array of mismatched, vintage-but-not-antique furniture—a four-poster bed, a bureau, a vanity table with chair, a wardrobe and an armchair—and a very basic attached bathroom.
It was a cute cottage, but so unlike the luxury surroundings Veronica was used to, it was hard to believe she’d opted to work from here for two weeks when she could have checked into a five-star suite in London. Even if she was set on staying on the estate, she could have moved to the sumptuous dower house once Romy and Matt left on their honeymoon.
But what did he really know about her living arrangements? He’d just assumed her place in Manhattan would be like her parents’ glamorous interior-designed penthouse apartment, which he’d visited a couple of times. Maybe with a dash of the timeless elegance of the Johnson “family seat” in Kentucky—site of the mind-bogglingly lavish party thrown for her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary.
Other than that, all he had to go on was that three-bedroom town house they’d shared in DC, and that had been furnished eclectically with a mix of trash and treasure, for all that the house itself belonged to her Vanderbilt-ish parents. Probably because Veronica had insisted that anyone living in the place operate along the lines of mi casa es su casa and add whatever they wanted to the ambience. So Romy’s ancient cookware, Matt’s student-digs couch, Rafael’s tattered collection of vintage Colombian photography and Veronica’s designer bookshelves all jostled for equal space. It worked, too. It just...worked.
He shook the memory away, uncomfortable at how thinking about that house made him feel. When he’d first moved in he’d been so angry about the rent issue. That undercurrent of anger had never left him, so it didn’t make sense that he should feel so...so homesick for the place. Homesick for the way they’d lived and loved, even for the fights they’d had. He wondered if they’d still be together now, living, loving, fighting, if she hadn’t bought that motorcycle.
His dream bike and he’d so desperately wished he could accept it. But when he’d reached for the ring in his pocket, his side of the bargain, he’d caught a flicker of doubt in her eyes and known the bike was a test—a bit like that special look her mother blitzed the girls’ boyfriends with. And what Veronica had said during the fight over the caviar zoomed into his head—that her parents had said he’d have to come to terms with her money or they were going to end up fighting their whole lives. He’d seen his life laid out as a series of tests and fights and capitulations, and he’d known if he was going to have a forever with Veronica, he had first to leave, get his shit sorted, then come back for her—a better man with a better goddamn ring!
All of which he’d intended to say. He’d started strong, telling her he loved her, that he’d love her forever. But all those other words, the important words, dammed themselves up behind a wall of pride. How did you tell someone you were leaving because you wanted too much to stay, and sit, and heel, and beg for her? He’d told her he had something important to take care of, that she should head over to the postgraduation party at Flick’s without him, that he’d meet her there...and left it to Matt to say sorry he wasn’t coming after all, that he needed to get his head straig
ht, that he’d call her when he’d done it.
Test failed. Candidate dismissed. No option to re-sit the exam.
Ah Jesus, enough!
Those days were past.
This was a new era. The rules were set. Two weeks. A business deal. They each knew what they were bringing to the table and what they were taking away.
He checked his watch. Twenty-six minutes until she arrived.
He took off his jacket and his shirt and smiled at the emptiness of the wardrobe as he hung them in there. Veronica always overpacked, which was probably why the prospect of unpacking was so daunting she never did it—at either end. It surprised no one that half the time she couldn’t find what she wanted in the two gargantuan suitcases she always traveled with, and the other half she located things she had no use for.
Rafael, however, was a neat traveler and careful with his things, so even his shoes and socks, once removed, were neatly stored away in their proper places in his suitcase.
Then he dug out the panties he’d stashed in his pocket, which had been burning his leg since she’d walked away from the mausoleum. He spent a minute fighting the temptation to lick them and in the end had to shove them back in his pocket to stop himself. For added insurance, he stripped off his pants and folded them up with those panties still in the pocket, then put them out of sight in his suitcase.
By that time he was sweating from an excess of about-to-be-slaked lust, so he figured a shower was in order—he’d always liked to be fresh and clean before touching her. He whipped off his last item of clothing, the pale gray tee he used as an undershirt, which he folded and placed on the chair.
As he entered the bathroom he found himself assessing the shower dimensions to ascertain if Veronica would fit in with him, and the idea of taking her under the spray made him so horny he decided on a cold shower. Sure, he’d told her to make him beg, but he didn’t want to go down on his knees the minute he saw her!
After an emphatic scrub of every body part beneath a drench of adrenaline-boosting icy water, he concluded the thing about cold showers tamping down sexual desire was a fucking myth, because he was bigger and harder and hornier than he’d been at the beginning.
Fortunately there were only eighteen minutes to wait or he might have given in to the compulsion to jack off. He was even degenerate enough to consider saving time by greeting her at the door stark naked. All very alarming, given he’d planned a languid seduction beginning with a restrained kiss, followed by a ceremonial procession up the stairs to the bedroom, a slow undressing, and an hour of foreplay before the main act.
He grabbed a clean T-shirt out of his suitcase and yanked it on, furious with his body for its treachery. Jeans came next. A pair identical to the buttery-soft pale blue ones she’d never been able to keep her hands off. He couldn’t yank them on, though—he had to zip them up v-e-r-y carefully over his rampant erection. He finger-combed his damp hair then checked himself in the mirror on the vanity.
“You’ll scare the shit out of her if you look at her like that!” he said to his reflection. “Get it the hell together.”
Back downstairs. A glass of wine to help take the edge off, consumed faster than normal, after which he was still too ready, too willing, too aching. But at least there was only five minutes to go.
He stationed himself inside the front door, his ears twitching like a crack-smoking Spock for sounds of her arrival, but those five minutes passed with no sound.
Breathe, he ordered himself. Breathe nice and slow and even. Give or take ten minutes, she’d said; that gave her another five minutes before she was officially late. And if she took longer? Well, so what? He’d been waiting seven years, two months, three weeks and five days for her; surely he could wait another ten, twenty, even thirty minutes.
“Jesus,” he said out loud, tearing his hands through his hair. “Can you hear yourself? Seven years, two months, three weeks and five days? How about adding some hours and minutes and seconds to that tally just to make yourself sound even more pathetic?”
Pathetic. The magic word, obviously, because there it was: the sound of footsteps on gravel.
And then nothing except the sound of his blood roaring in his ears like Niagara Falls.
The footsteps restarted. He counted those hesitant steps, using them as a method of control. One, two, three, four...four...fooour...?
Where the hell were the five, six and seven needed to get her to the damn door?
His fingers stretched with the need to yank the door off its hinges, his unrestrained cock was surging like a wild thing in his jeans, his brain had snap-frozen on the thought that she wasn’t going to come in, even though he knew that was stupid because this was her cottage.
“Fuck it!” he said under his breath and wrenched open the door to find her standing a few feet from the door—gazing at the cottage, as snap-frozen as his brain.
“You’re late,” he growled and came straight for her.
“I had to call my sist—”
And he swooped, kissing the words out of her like some violent bird of prey.
* * *
On the walk from the hall, Veronica had tried to work out how she should enter the cottage and what her first words should be to telegraph that whatever Rafael had said about exorcisms and going hard, the process should nevertheless be orderly and controlled. This was two weeks, not one night. Plenty of time.
But as Rafael barreled toward her with that half-feral, half-anguished look on his face, there was room for only one thought in her head: that she’d been waiting too long for a man to look at her exactly like that.
Two heartbeats—wild and wicked—and he was kissing her. An instant, drenching wetness had her jamming her thighs together—an instinctive reaction.
“Don’t close me out,” against her mouth.
“You don’t understand, I’m so wet, so...wet.”
“Oh God,” he groaned. “God, God!” And he kissed her again, so savagely she had to grab onto his T-shirt to stay upright. “Come,” he said, and took her hand to pull her inside.
Whizzing, stumbling, world-tilting moment. And then she was inside, her back against the door, being kissed once more, his hands cradling her face, then moving to her shoulders—dislodging the strap of her evening purse so that it clattered to the floor—and then down her body.
“Open your legs,” he said, dragging her dress up with one hand and unzipping his jeans with the other.
“Okay, but hurry, hurry,” she said.
He shoved his jeans roughly down. “Okay, hard and fast, no foreplay this first time. Just say yes, say yes. Or...or say no but say it now. Say it in five, four, three, two—”
“Yes,” she cried. “Yes, yes!”
“Fuck.”
And bang! He was all the way inside her. He stopped then and she could feel him throbbing as he kept himself rigid. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Yes, I want this, so do it, do it.”
He pulled out of her, paused for a split second, as though he’d stop himself, but then his hips flexed and he was inside her again. Out, then in. Out, in. Another stop, a garbled cry.
Oh God, he couldn’t stop. She’d die if he stopped. “What?” she asked.
“Esto no me puede estar pasando de nuevo,” he said, panting through the words. “No, no, no.”
She wanted to ask what? What couldn’t be happening to him again? But he kissed her, kept kissing her, over and over, licking into her, lashing at her, deep, drugging tongue kisses, so she couldn’t speak, could barely think. There seemed to be an almighty battle going on inside him, a drawn-tight tension in his rigid body that suggested he was caught between two hells—no heaven in sight. It made her want to hold him closer, to tell him he could have whatever he wanted, that she’d give in to him, give him everything, she would, she would if he’d just tell her what he needed.
But in the end the only word she could find to fit between the breaks in his endless kisses was “Please.” Both surrender and entreaty, as she surged against him.
“Don’t ask, you never have to ask,” he said, and grabbed her hips to move them against him. “Take anything you want, show me how you want me to be.”
As her hips took over the rhythm, he brought his hands up to cup her face again as he kissed her even more deeply. It was as though he were claiming property he’d once lost—and yet whatever he was finding in her wasn’t what he remembered. He wanted more. And so did she, she realized. Even though this was more.
“Go harder, harder,” she said. “It’s driving me mad to want you like this.”
“I want you mad,” he breathed back at her. “I want you crazy for me. I want you hungry and straining and sweating and mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, even though I know you’re not mine. Damn you to hell, Veronica.”
“I am in hell. You put me there, you know you did, and I hate you for it,” she said, the words coming out like angry sobs. “And I hate you more...for making me want you still.”
He gathered her closer than ever, she could feel the tremors running through him—or maybe they were her tremors, but she didn’t know at this point where she began and he ended. There was only the two of them, locked together, taking and giving the way he said it would have to be. No mere acceptance here. She’d expected his passion—it had always been a part of him, the heat and physical need. But this was more. Hotter, harder, laced with an almost palpable need for more and more, as though what she gave would never be enough. It was like a deep, dark despair—and she felt that despair. Her constant companion. The love and hate entwined, the urge to both soothe and punish, to possess and fling away, to end whatever it was between them and yet need it like air. To be alive again...and know it had to end. God help them both.
She threw herself at him, but still he went for more, grabbing one of her thighs, yanking it up his hip, opening her so he could wedge himself inside her just that little bit farther. She gasped and he sucked it right out of her mouth. “This is what I want.” Kiss. Thrust. “Mine. Like this.” Kiss, out, kiss, in. “This is all I want—it is, it is, I’ll make it all.” Kiss, kiss, kiss, and his mouth slid to her neck. “¡Ay, Dios mío! Too fast.”
Getting Even Page 7
