The Notorious Gabriel DiazRuthless Tycoon, Inexperienced Mistress

by Cathy Williams

  Lucy smiled. His eyes glittered with dark, rampant appreciation and she felt a sudden sense of heady power. It was nothing like she had ever felt in her life before. She wanted to throw off the rest of her clothes and let him touch her all over. She remembered how she had burned for him in the bathroom, before she had backed away, and she wanted that burning again.

  Had she really been saving herself for the right guy? Or had she just never been turned on enough actually to make it to bed with anyone? That was the question playing at the back of her mind as he loomed over her before bending down to unzip her trousers.

  ‘I hate these trousers….’

  ‘I know.’ Lucy shot him a sheepish smile and lowered her eyes. ‘That’s why I brought them with me.’

  ‘Did you think that if you dressed badly enough I might be put off wanting to haul you into my arms and carry you off to my bed like a caveman?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked. Unfortunately there’s nothing you could ever wear that would have that effect on me. But I’d still like to see you in a dress….’

  The trousers were now off, and Gabriel’s mouth twitched in amusement at her functional cotton underwear—the sort of underwear that was sold in packets of six from a department store and definitely not the kind that any woman he had dated would have been caught dead wearing.

  She was so damned fresh and innocent that he felt a moment of passionate wanting to lock her away in a tower, where no one could lay eyes on her but him. That sudden rush of unexpected possessiveness took him by surprise and he quickly shoved it away, ruthlessly stamping on feelings he neither wanted nor needed.

  Lucy lay back. She had released her very long hair and it fanned out around her in a blaze of golden blond, startling against the backdrop of the dark silk duvet cover.

  She knew she should be feeling shy, rushing to cover her body, but she wasn’t. The opposite. She felt wonderfully brazen. It was something to do with the way he was looking at her—as if she was a delicate morsel he wanted to devour. It was the most amazing experience, and she smiled drowsily at him.

  She had no idea how beautiful she was, Gabriel thought. His keen eyes noted the dusting of freckles on her collarbone, the tiny mole by her left breast, the perfect delineation of her nipples. Her stomach was flat and smooth and he could see her hip bones. Once again he wondered what he had ever found appealing in heavy, big breasts and sultry, rounded curves. Lucy’s body was slender, but strong from all the outdoor work she did. She led a healthy lifestyle and it showed in her toned, graceful physique.

  He gently began pulling down the unappealing underwear and his breathing became unusually laboured as he took in the dark blond, downy curls slanting between her thighs.

  ‘Look at me when I touch you,’ he commanded gruffly, then gave her a crooked smile that could have melted a block of ice. ‘I want to find out what you like….’

  Lucy imagined that she might like everything he did to her. She was loving the way he was simply looking at her now. She desperately wanted him to be as naked as she was, and yet something deep inside her was telling her that he had deliberately left his trousers on so that he could continue to put her at her ease.

  She sighed as he moved over her, propping himself up on his hands so that he could stare down at her flushed face. When she raised her arms to wind them around his neck he gently but firmly laid them back at her sides, before bending so that he could lavish his attention on her breasts.

  He had died and gone to heaven. Every twitch of her body was an indication of her arousal. It took fierce concentration to keep to what he was doing when he wanted to thrust into her and satisfy the growing ache in his groin.

  He clasped her hands in his and licked the stiffened buds of her nipples, teasing them alternately with his tongue. He was getting more and more turned on by her cries and moans and the way she writhed under him, begging for more, and then gasping that she couldn’t stand it any longer.

  Her nipples were shiny and wet from his mouth and his tongue. Her eyes flickered open as he drew back, and then widened when he reached behind him and gently cupped the feminine mound between her legs before easing his fingers into the slippery moistness that was eagerly awaiting his touch.

  ‘Do you like this?’ He found the aroused bud and teased it with his finger, watched the rosy blush that invaded her cheeks.

  ‘Gabriel…’ she moaned.

  ‘Have you been touched like this before?’ Crazy question, but he really wanted to know—and when she shook her head he couldn’t contain the soaring triumph that ripped through him. On and on he continued to rub that small throbbing peak. He knew just when to ease the maddening caress of his fingers and when to pick up the tempo so that her body began to spasm.

  She could have wept with frustration when he stopped so that he could kiss her stomach, move down to her belly button and then…down to that most intimate of places. She was well beyond any inhibition. She let him ease her legs apart and arched back to accommodate his darting, exploring tongue, which was finding the place that turned her on and lathering attention on it.

  She curled her fingers into his hair and loosened her legs wider. She had never thought her body was capable of being so exquisitely tortured. His tongue against her was sending her spiralling higher and higher, and yet still he wouldn’t let her reach the final climax. She was completely at his mercy, wanting him to take her wholly. She wanted him to fill her and she was shocked at her own driving need.

  She was not at all intimidated when he eventually pulled back and removed the rest of his clothes. She wanted to touch his impressive arousal. She watched as he donned protection, but she hardly had time to scramble onto her elbows before he had resumed his position over her. He nudged at her gently, edging himself into her dampness, telling her not to tense and smoothing over her natural inclination to stiffen up.

  He was unbelievably tender, moving slowly, letting her relax. Only when he began pushing harder into her did she cry out, but the instant was lost as sensations began driving through her—wonderful sensations as his manhood pressed into her. He thrust deeper and harder and she melted, abandoning herself to wave upon wave of pleasure until she was exhausted.

  Gabriel was on a high such as he had never known before. He had had lovers who were experienced in the art of doing anything in any position, and yet he couldn’t recall ever having this feeling of soaring satisfaction as he climaxed.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he growled, subsiding against her on the bed. ‘That was…incredible…’

  Lucy sighed and curled against him. She still couldn’t quite believe that she had jumped from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye. The girl who had so resentfully left Somerset was not the girl on this bed now. How had that happened? How could sexual attraction be so persuasive and so instant? How could it drive you in one direction even though your mind was telling you to run fast in the other?

  She rested her hand on his chest and he covered her hand with his, turned onto his side so that he was facing her.

  ‘So…’ Gabriel couldn’t get enough of her smooth, soft, supple body. Her nipple was peeping out at him beneath the crook of her arm and he knew he could have made love to her all over again. But it seemed inappropriate, given the circumstances. Was she sore? Tender down there? His hand itched to tease her slowly back into a state of readiness for him.

  ‘So…?’

  ‘You took a circuitous route to get where I wanted you to be from the start….’

  Lucy blushed. ‘I…I’m not sure how all this has happened…’ she confessed. ‘When I got on that train I thought that if we ended up in bed it would be…’

  ‘A nightmare?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You underestimate the power of sex.’

  Lucy opened her mouth to protest but decided that she didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  ‘So what happens now?’ she asked with a little frown. ‘I mean�
��now that we’ve slept together…does that mean…?’

  ‘That the debt’s been paid?’

  Lucy nodded. She felt a sense of clammy dismay that he might now get rid of her, having had his fill. She suspected that at the back of his mind the challenge of having a woman who had once turned him down had been irresistible. With that challenge no longer there, would he still be driven to sleep with her? It would pay her to remind herself that he could have anyone—why would he choose her when her novelty value had already been lost?

  Her body was already missing the feel of his in anticipation of being told that she had fulfilled her part of the contract.

  ‘Your father did embezzle from my company…and he most certainly would have served jail time—so, no… You might have a little way to go with that deal we made…’

  He ran his hand along her waist and then over her thigh, where his lazy, circular, feathery light touch had the intended effect of making her body liquefy.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you…but you’re not disappointed, are you? You had your chance to bolt and you turned it down…’ It was a richly satisfying thought.

  ‘You’re very egotistical,’ Lucy said truthfully.

  ‘I just enjoy getting what I want—and what I still want for the foreseeable future is…you…’ He slipped two fingers into the dampness between her thighs and kept his eyes firmly glued to hers. ‘It’s gratifying to know that the feeling’s mutual….’

  Lucy knew that she should feel degraded and angry—but she didn’t. In fact, the only thing she felt was turned on. She closed her eyes and parted her mouth as he began to stroke the tight raised bud of her clitoris.

  She was so wonderfully responsive! Gabriel couldn’t conceive that she might consider one night full and final payment!

  She climaxed with soft moans and was embarrassed when she opened her eyes to find him looking at her with a half-smile.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘That wasn’t satisfying for you.’

  ‘You’d be surprised… I’m a generous kind of guy. I like giving pleasure. But right now I think it might be a good idea for us to get showered, and then we can do a little more sightseeing before we have dinner somewhere.’

  ‘I haven’t brought any clothes to wear out.’

  ‘In which case, we can do our sightseeing at Selfridges. Lots of clothes there. I don’t do shopping with women, but I feel I could get a kick out of buying clothes for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t accept that.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘I don’t want you buying anything for me.’ Was that because she wanted to kid herself that she hadn’t been bought? Lucy thought with consternation. Did she want to read more into this than there really was because that way she could make sense of her inability to control her rebellious body?

  ‘There’s not a woman on this planet who doesn’t like having things bought for them.’ He traced the outline of one pert nipple and watched as it tightened and reacted to his touch. ‘You’ll find me a generous lover in more ways than one. For as long as we’re together, whatever you want will be yours.’

  At that moment Lucy imagined that he could have talked her into anything. He had taken her body to places of unimaginable delight. He had made her aware of lust as something wildly beyond control. But somehow the thought of having clothes and jewellery and whatever she wanted bought for her made her feel sick.

  ‘No, Gabriel.’

  Gabriel looked at her, startled.

  ‘When this is all…finished…I don’t want to think that I owe you anything.’

  ‘That’s not what it would be about—’

  ‘It would be—for me. The only time I would ever accept gifts from a guy is from a guy I love.’

  Her mouth was a stubborn line and he shook his head with incomprehension and impatience. From the very start he had seen the advantages of bedding a woman he fancied without any of the complications that usually arose. He had envisaged a relationship based on sex alone, and here she was offering him just the no-strings-attached liaison he wanted. So why was he feeling annoyed?

  He reminded himself that she was his, that she had come to him of her own free will, and he relaxed.

  ‘We’ll see…’ he murmured. ‘Now, let’s go have a shower—or else I’m going to have to do a bit more than pleasure you with my fingers, and right now I don’t think you’re up to taking me…are you?’

  ‘Maybe not right now.’

  ‘Shame. But by tonight I think we’ll both be ready.’

  ‘Yes.’ She blushed fiery pink, but why pretend otherwise? She might be a little tender now, but already she couldn’t wait for them to be back in this bedroom—for him to be making love to her again…and again…and again…

  CHAPTER SIX

  LUCY WASN’T ENTIRELY sure when lust started becoming something much more dangerously significant.

  She had entered Gabriel’s exotic and rarefied world a little over four months ago. After that first weekend they had established a pattern of weekend visits. On her insistence, she was always the one who made the trip up to London to see him.

  Several times he had asked her to stay over on the Sunday night, and it had taken real effort on her part not to cave in. But she knew, with gut instinct that caving in was something all his women would have done. It was what he would expect of them. She had stood firm, however, because she had her job to consider, and she wasn’t about to start fooling around with that just because Gabriel Diaz crooked his finger and worked his magic.

  Twice he had unexpectedly phoned her at work and told her that he had to see her—that he would drive down, that he couldn’t focus when all he could think about was getting rid of her clothes and taking her….

  She had stood firm on that as well, even though just hearing the urgency in his deep, dark voice had filled her body with a wild, throbbing need.

  ‘I hope you’re not doing this because you think that playing hard to get will hold my interest,’ he had drawled just a couple of weeks ago, when yet again she had antagonised him by telling him that she didn’t want him visiting her.

  Lucy had vigorously denied any such thing. Did he really think she was that silly? There were so many ways he had of reminding her that he wasn’t in it for the long haul. He wasn’t even aware of how glaringly clear he was on the subject.

  On more than one occasion he had told her that he never, ever forgot to use protection because the last thing he would want was to find himself trapped in the unwanted role of father. He had firmly closed the door on all discussion to do with her family. He wasn’t interested in any personal baggage she might be carrying—especially if it involved something as distasteful as a crooked father. That was a side to her of which he wanted no reminders. For him, she existed exclusively in the realms of sex and desire. Anything else was a distraction and an annoyance.

  And yet over time they’d laughed, they’d talked, they’d shared opinions. She teased him about his inability to do anything in the kitchen and he kept trying to buy her clothes—which she refused. She now had a couple more dresses to call her own, and even a pair of boots that were not, strictly speaking, functional. They protected her feet from the cold—and it was certainly getting cold now, as winter began to replace what had been a mild autumn—but with heels at over three inches high walking was often a challenge.

  Should she have been more aware of the signs that what she was feeling went beyond sex? When should it have occurred to her that she was living from Monday to Friday afternoon in a state of barely suppressed excitement at the prospect of seeing him? That this was not healthy? When should she have stopped pretending that good sex was something non-addictive and that it never led anywhere? How could she have been so stupid as not to realise that making love and falling in love were two sides of the same coin? At least for the sort of person she was?

  And now here she was, with the train pulling in to London and a magazine in front of her that was a cruel reminder of how stupid she had
been.

  Lucy had picked the magazine up at the newsstand at the station because she had got there way too early and had forgotten to pack her usual reading fodder for the journey. It was one of those weekly glossies that she never usually read, but she had found herself leafing through it with considerable enjoyment until she came to the centre spread, which was essentially a series of photos taken at the latest prominent society do—in this case the glitzy opening of an art gallery in Canary Wharf. Everyone in the pictures seemed to have a drink in their hand, and were schmoozing with other well-known personalities.

  She hadn’t expected to see Gabriel in those pictures. He wasn’t just in one picture. He was in eight pictures. It was as if the cameraman hadn’t been able to get enough of him.

  As the train stopped and everyone began the unsteady process of gathering their belongings, eager to clear off, Lucy cast a fulminating glance at the magazine she had stuffed in the netting on the back of the seat in front of her. The instant she had seen those

  photos she had determined to put them out of her mind. She and Gabriel were not tied to one another. He was a free man and could do whatever he wanted to do!

  And yet…

  She fetched the magazine back from the resting place to which it had been consigned, hating herself for her masochistic weakness.

  It was cold outside.

  Gabriel had been remarkably consistent in making sure never to arrange anything that might interrupt one of their weekends. Lucy took a pull-along case with her clothes inside and returned to her house with every stitch of clothing still in it. Few women had ever stayed the night with him, he had admitted early in their relationship. She was the exception. Lucy knew better than to take advantage of that by leaving a wardrobe of clothes behind her, and nor did she want to. She had changed from the young innocent he had first met. Now she had a much more highly developed sense of self-protection.

  She glanced at the magazine in her hand and winced. Clearly not that developed, or she wouldn’t now be feeling as though her heart was forcibly being ripped from her body.