‘What happened?’ Luiz strolled towards the king-sized four-poster bed and flopped down on it, his hands linked behind his head. His unbuttoned shirt opened to reveal a tantalising expanse of bronzed, muscular chest. This was the pose of the conqueror waiting for his concubine, and it thrilled her.
Aggie shrugged. ‘They were free spirits. I liked it to start with. But I guess I’m not much of a free spirit.’
‘No. You’re not.’ He gave her a slow, lingering smile that made her toes curl. ‘Are you going to continue standing there or are you going to join me?’ He patted the space next to him on the bed and Aggie’s heart descended very rapidly in the direction of her feet.
She inched her way towards the bed and laughed when he sat forward and yanked her towards him. Her laughter felt like an unspoken release of all her defences. She was letting go of her resentment in the face of something bigger.
‘What do you mean?’ Heart beating a mile a minute, she collapsed next to him and felt the warmth of his body next to her. It generated a series of intensely physical reactions that left her breathless and gasping.
‘So you’re not impressed by money. But a free spirit would have taken what I offered—the computer, the extensive wardrobe; would have factored them in as gifts to be appreciated and moved on. You rejected the computer out of hand and agonised over the wardrobe. The only reason you accepted was because you had no more clothes and I had to talk you into seeing the sense behind the offer. And you still tell me you’re going to return them all to me when we get back to London. You criticise me for wanting control but you fall victim to the very same tendency.’
‘We’re not alike at all.’ They were both on their sides, fully clothed, staring at one another. There was something very erotic about the experience, because underneath the excitement of discovery lurked like a thrilling present concealed with wrapping paper.
‘Money separates us,’ Luiz said wryly. ‘But in some areas I’ve discovered that we’re remarkably similar. Would this conversation benefit from us being naked, do you think?’
Aggie released a small, treacherous moan and he delivered a rampantly satisfied smile in response. Then he stood up and held out one hand. ‘I’m going to run a bath,’ he murmured. ‘Your room’s next to mine. Why don’t you go and get some clothes … ?’
‘It feels weird,’ Aggie confided. ‘I’ve never approached an intimate situation like this.’
‘But then this is an intimate situation neither of us expected,’ Luiz murmured. ‘And that in itself is a first for me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It never fails to surprise me just how turned on I get for you.’
‘Because I’m nothing like the women you’ve gone out with?’
‘Because you’re nothing like the women I’ve gone out with,’ Luiz agreed.
Aggie knew that she should be offended by that, but then who would she be kidding? He was nothing like the guys she had gone out with. Mutual physical attraction had barrelled through everything and changed the parameters. Maybe that was why it felt so dangerously exciting.
‘You’re a lot more independent and I find that a turn on.’ He softly ran his fingers along her side. He couldn’t wait for her to be naked but this leisurely approach was intoxicating. ‘You’re not a slave to fashion and you’re fond of arguing.’
Aggie conceded privately that all three of those things represented a change for him, but a change that he would rapidly tire of. Since she wasn’t in it for the long haul, since she too was stepping outside the box, there was no harm in that, although she was uneasily aware of a barely acknowledged disappointment floating aimlessly inside her.
‘You like your women submissive,’ she said with a little laugh.
‘Generally speaking, it’s worked in the past.’
‘And I like my guys to be creative, not to be ruled by money.’
‘And yet, mysteriously, your creative paupers have all bitten the dust.’ Luiz found, to his bemusement, that he didn’t care for the thought of any other man in her life. It was puzzling, because he had never been the possessive type. In fact, in the past women who had tried to stir up a non-existent jealousy gene by referring to past lovers had succeeded in doing the opposite.
‘They haven’t been paupers,’ Aggie laughed. ‘Neither of them. They’ve just been indifferent to money.’
‘And in the end they bored you.’
‘I’m beginning to wish I’d never mentioned that,’ Aggie said, though only half-joking. ‘And if they bored me,’ she felt obliged to elaborate, ‘it was because they turned out to be boring people, not because they were indifferent to money.’ She wriggled off the bed and stood up. ‘Perhaps I’ll have a bath in my own bathroom …’
Luiz frowned, propping himself up on one elbow. ‘Second thoughts?’ His voice was neutral but his eyes had cooled.
‘No.’ Aggie tilted her chin to look at him. ‘I don’t play games like that.’
‘Good.’ He felt himself relax. To have been rejected once bordered on the unthinkable. To be rejected twice would have been beyond the pale. ‘Then what games do you play? Because I think I can help you out there …’
The promise behind those softly spoken words sent a shiver up her spine and it was still there when she returned to his bedroom a few minutes later. She had not been lying when she had confessed that she had never approached sex like this before. Stripped of all romantic mystique and airy-fairy expectations that it would lead somewhere, this was physical contact reduced to its most concentrated form.
The bath had been run. Aggie could smell the fragrance of jasmine bath oil. The steam in the enormous bathroom did nothing whatsoever to diminish the impact of Luiz, who had stripped out of his clothes and was wearing a towel around his waist.
Outside, the snow continued to fall. In her room, she had taken a few seconds to stare out of the window and absorb the fact that Mark and Maria, and the mission upon which they had embarked only a few days previously, couldn’t have been further from her mind. When exactly had she lost track of the reason why she was here in the first place? It was as though she had opened the wardrobe door to find herself stepping into Narnia, reality left behind for a brief window in time.
She could barely remember the routine of her day-to-day existence. The school, the staff room, the kids getting ready for their Nativity play.
Was Luiz right? She had always fancied herself as a free-spirited person and yet she felt as though this was the first impulsive thing she had ever done in her life. She had thought him freakishly controlled, a power-hungry tycoon addicted to mastering everything and everyone around him, while she—well, she was completely different. Maybe the only difference really was the fact that he was rich and she wasn’t, that he had grown up with privilege while she had had to fight her way out of her background, burying herself in studies that could provide her with opportunities.
‘Now, what I’d like …’ Luiz drawled, and Aggie blinked herself back to the present, ‘is to do what I was fantasising about when you did your little catwalk in that shop for me. Instead of showing me how you look with clothes on, show me how you look with them off.’
He sauntered out of the bathroom and lay back down on the bed, just as he had before.
Aggie realised in some part of her that, whilst this should not feel right, it did. She would never have believed it possible for either of them to set aside their personal differences and meet on this plane. Certainly, she would never have believed it of herself, but before she could begin nurturing any doubts about the radical decision she had made she told herself that everyone deserves some time out, and this was her time out. In a day or two, it would be nothing more than a wicked memory of the one and only time she had truly strayed from the path she had laid out for herself.
She watched, fascinated and tingling all over, shocked as he drew back the towel which had been modestly covering him, and revealed his arousal. She nearly fainted when he gently held it in one ha
nd.
Luiz grinned at her. ‘So easy to make you blush,’ he murmured. Then he fell silent and watched as she began removing her clothes, at first with self-conscious, fumbling fingers, then with more confidence as she revelled in the sight of his darkened, openly appreciative gaze.
‘Come here,’ he rasped roughly, before she could remove the final strips of clothing. ‘I’m finding it hard to wait.’
Aggie sighed and flung her head back as his big hands curved over her breasts, thinly sheathed in a lacy bra. Their mouths met in an explosive kiss, a greedy, hungry kiss, so that they gasped as they surfaced for air and then resumed their kissing as if neither could get enough of the other. Her nipples were tender and sensitive and she moaned when he rolled his thumb over one stiffened peak, seeking and finding it through the lacy gaps in the bra.
She was melting. Freeing a hand from the tangle of his black hair, she shakily pulled off the panties which were damp, proof of her own out-of-control libido.
Luiz was going crazy with wanting her. He could hardly bear the brief separation of their bodies as she unclasped her bra from the back and pulled it off.
Her nipples were big, circular discs, clearly defined, pouting temptingly at him. He realised that he had been fantasising about this moment perhaps from the very first time he had laid eyes on her. He had not allowed himself to see her in a sexual way, not when he had been busy working out how to disengage her and her brother from his niece and the family fortune. But enforced time together had whittled away his self-control. It had allowed the seeds of attraction to take root and flourish.
‘You have the face of an angel,’ he breathed huskily as he rolled her on top of him. ‘And the body of a siren.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’ Aggie gazed down at him. ‘Aren’t sirens supposed to be voluptuous?’
‘God, you’re beautiful …’ His hands could almost span her waist and he eased her down so that he could take one of those delicate breasts to his mouth and suckle on the hot, throbbing tip. He loved the way she arched her body back, offering herself to him—and even more he loved the way he could sense her spiralling out of control, her fists clenched as she tried to control the waves of sensation washing over her.
He smoothed his hand along the inside of her thigh and she wriggled to accommodate his questing finger. She shuddered when that finger dipped into her honeyed moistness and began stroking her. With her body under sensual attack on two fronts as he continued to worship her breast with his mouth and tease the wet, receptive bud of her femininity with his finger, she could bear it no longer. She flipped off him and lay on her back, breathing heavily and then curling onto her side as he laughed softly next to her.
‘Too much?’ he asked, and she sighed on a moan.
‘Not fair. It’s your turn now to feel like you’re about to fall off the edge.’
‘What makes you think I’m not already there?’
It transpired that he wasn’t. In fact, it transpired that he didn’t have a clue what being close to the edge was all about. He had foolishly been confusing it with simply being turned on.
For an excruciatingly long period of time, she demonstrated what being close to the edge was all about. She touched him and tasted him until he thought he had died and gone to heaven.
Their bodies seemed to merge and become one. She touched him and he touched her, from her breasts, down to her flat belly with its little mole just above her belly button, and then at last to the most intimate part of her.
He peeled apart her delicate folds and dipped his tongue just there until she squirmed with pleasure, her fingers tangled in his hair, her eyes shut and her whole body thrust back to receive the ministrations of his mouth.
He lazily feasted on her silky-sweet moistness until she was begging him to stop. Lost in the moment, he could have stayed there for ever with her legs around him and her body bucking under his mouth.
He finally thrust into her only after he was wearing protection. Putting it on, he found that his hands were shaking. He kicked off the last slither of duvet that remained on the bed and she opened up to him like a flower, her rhythm and movements matching his so that they were moving as one.
Aggie didn’t think that she had ever felt so united and in tune with another human being in her life before. Her body was slippery, coated in a fine film of perspiration. His was too.
They climaxed and it was like soaring high above the earth. And then, quietening, they subsided gently back down. She rolled onto her side and looked at him with pleasure.
‘That was …’
‘Momentous? Beyond description?’ God, this was nothing like what he had felt before! Could good sex do this to a man? Make him feel like he could fly? They had only just finished making love and he couldn’t wait to take her again. Did that make sense? He had made love to any number of beautiful women before but he had never felt like this. He had never felt as though he was in possession of an insatiable appetite, had never wanted to switch the light on so that he could just look …
‘I want to take you again, but first …’ Luiz felt an urgent need to set a few facts straight, to reassure himself that this feeling of being out of control, carried away by a current against which he seemed to be powerless, was just a temporary situation. ‘You know this isn’t going to go anywhere, don’t you?’ He brushed her hair away from her face so that he could look her directly in the eye. So this might be the wrong time and the wrong place to say this, but it had to be said. He had to clear the air. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think …’
‘Shh. I don’t think anything.’ Aggie smiled bravely while a series of pathways began connecting in her brain. This man she loathed, to whom she was desperately attracted, was a man who could make her laugh even though she had found him overbearing and arrogant, the same man who had slowly filled her head and her heart. It was why she was here now. In bed with him. She hadn’t suddenly become a woman with no morals who thought it was fine to jump into bed on the basis of sexual attraction. No. That had been a little piece of fiction she had sold herself because the truth staring her in the face had been unacceptable.
‘I’m not about to start making demands. You and I, we’re not suited and we never will be. But we’re attracted to one another. That’s all. So, why don’t we just have some fun? Because we both know that tomorrow it all comes to an end.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
AGGIE spent the night in her own bedroom. Drunk with love-making, she had made sure to tiptoe along the corridor at a little after two in the morning. It was important to remind herself that this was not a normal relationship. It had boundaries and Luiz had made sure to remind her of that the night before. She wasn’t about to over step any of them.
She heard the beeping of her phone the following morning and woke to find a series of messages from her brother, all asking her to give him a call.
Panicked, Aggie sat up and dialled his mobile with shaking fingers. She was ashamed to admit that her brother had barely registered on her radar over the past few hours. In fact, she guiltily realised that she had been too focused on herself for longer than that to spare much thought for Mark.
She got through to him almost immediately. The conversation, on her end, barely covered a sentence or two. Down the other end of the line, Mark did all the talking and at the end of ten minutes Aggie ended the call, shell-shocked.
Everything was about to change now, and for a few seconds she resented her brother’s intrusion into the little bubble she had built for herself. She checked the time on her phone. Luiz had tried to pull her back into bed with him before she had left in the early hours of the morning, but Aggie had resisted. Luiz was a man who always got what he wanted and rarely paused to consider the costs. He wanted her and would see nothing wrong in having her, whenever and wherever. He was good when it came to detaching and, once their time together was over, he would instantly break off and walk away. Aggie knew that she would not be able to, so putting some distance between them, i
f not sharing a room for the night could be termed putting distance between them, was essential.
So they had agreed to meet for breakfast at nine. Plenty of time to check the weather and for Luiz to catch up with emails. It was now a little after eight, and Aggie was glad for the time in which she could have a bath and think about what her brother had told her.
Luiz was waiting for her in the dining room, where a pot of coffee was already on the table and two menus, one of which he was scanning, although he put it down as she hovered for a few seconds in the doorway.
She was in a pair of faded jeans and a blue jumper, her hair tied back. She looked like a very sexy schoolgirl, and all at once he felt himself stir into lusty arousal. He hadn’t been able to get enough of her the night before. In fact, he recalled asking her at one point whether she was too sore for him to touch her again down there. He leaned back in the chair and shot her a sexy half-smile as she walked towards him.
‘You should have stayed with me,’ were his first words of greeting. ‘You would have made an unbeatable wake-up call.’
Aggie slipped into the chair opposite and helped herself to some coffee. Mark and his news were at the top of her mind but it was something she would lead up to carefully.
‘You said you wanted to get some work done before you came down to breakfast. I wouldn’t have wanted to interrupt you.’
‘I’m good at multi-tasking. You’d be surprised how much work I can get through when there’s someone between my legs paying attention to …’
‘Shh!’ She went bright red and Luiz laughed, entertained at her prurience.
‘You get my drift, though?’
‘Is that the kind of wake-up call you’re accustomed to?’ She held the cup between her hands and looked at him over the rim. She had kept her voice light but underneath she could feel jealousy swirling through her veins, unwelcome and inappropriate.
A Tempestuous Temptation Page 12
