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

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.’

CHAPTER NINE

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.

She held his face between her hands as his lips moved expertly over her own, the slow, languid exploration a torment and a revelation. At the first erotic incursion of his tongue into her moist mouth she moaned deep in her throat and opened her mouth to invite him deeper, meeting his tongue with her own.

They kissed with a frantic hunger and all the time he touched her, his hands sliding over her soft womanly curves, dragging moans from her lips.

When he did lift his mouth fractionally from hers it was to rasp, ‘I love your mouth. It is a miracle. You are a miracle…so soft.’ He ran a finger down her throat, his eyes darkening as he felt the deep shiver that rippled through her body. ‘So sensitive to my touch.’

‘You won’t stop, will you?’

She felt the rumble of laughter vibrate in his chest as he pulled her under him and laid her full length on the sofa. There was no laughter in his face as he stared down at her, just a fierce, relentless hunger that tightened the knot of excitement low in her belly.

‘Not any time soon,’ he promised huskily as he lowered his body onto hers. ‘I don’t believe any man could resist you. It is not possible… Madre mia, I have wanted you from the moment I saw you.’

Maggie gasped, her eyes flying wide as she felt the pressure of his arousal against her belly. Her arms slid around his middle, pulling him closer. She was revelling in the amazing feel of his lean hard body against her and pleasurably conscious of the fresh rush of liquid heat between her thighs.

The heat burned between them as they kissed, he touched her everywhere. Maggie slid her hands under the hem of his shirt. She heard him gasp at the touch of her fingers on his bare flesh and would have pulled her hand away but he caught her wrist and, holding her eyes, placed it back on his body, spreading her fingers and saying huskily, ‘I want to feel your hands on me, querida.’

Maggie’s throat was too congested with emotion to speak. She nodded mutely and trailed her fingers slowly across the ridges of muscle on his flat belly.

Rafael closed his eyes, sucked in a breath, then lowered his head and kissed her with a driving ferocity that made her head swim. His mouth still connected to hers, he raised himself off her, unfastened his shirt with one hand and stroked her face with the other, his fingers tangled in her hair.

Maggie opened her eyes just as the fabric parted. Weak with lust and longing she stared, her passion-glazed stare moving hungrily over the gleaming hard lines of his greyhound-lean, muscle-ridged bronze torso.

A deep, sobbing moan was wrenched from her throat. The sound made the hairs on the nape of Rafael’s neck stand on end and propelled him into frenzied action.

Slowed only by the tremor in his fingers, he unbuckled his belt and slid his jeans over his hips before kicking them away.

Kneeling astride her, clad only in boxers—the erotic image, she knew, would be permanently etched in her brain—he began to undress her.

Every brush of his fingers on her hot skin sent shimmies of tingling sensation along her sensitised nerve endings.

As he peeled her bra from her shoulders a deep gasp was wrenched from deep in the vault of Rafael’s chest. His golden skin glistened with the need that drove him as he stripped off her pants, sliding them with tantalising slowness over her smooth thighs.

Suddenly overwhelmed by self-consciousness she gasped, ‘This isn’t me!’ And tried to cover herself.

Rafael caught her hands and pinned them above her head, holding them lightly there with his hand.

‘Look at me.’

Maggie reluctantly turned her head. Without a shred of self-consciousness he divested himself of the boxers she had imagined concealed nothing; it turned out they did. She swallowed and felt her cheeks burn as guiltily she wrenched her eyes higher.

‘This is me, and you are allowed to look, and want and touch. There is no shame, just sex. This is natural and good.’ He had a very poor opinion of the person who had made her feel differently. ‘This is you…and I will look. I will look because you are—’ he swallowed as his glance dropped ‘—Dios mio, your are perfect…so unbelievably perfect.’

He cupped one pink-tipped breast in his hand, drawing the straining point between his fingers, rubbing the sensitised flesh before he lowered his head and applied his tongue to the engorged nub.

Maggie writhed under his touch, her fingers sinking deep into his hair. Her hips lifted as he ran his tongue down the soft curve of her belly, then lower.

As he parted the delicate folds, stroking her, Maggie squeezed her eyes tight closed and cried his name over and over until she could bear no more.

‘This is…please…’

Satisfied that he had brought her to the brink and barely able to control his own driving hunger, Rafael settled between her parted thighs.

His hot, hungry eyes broke through the last shreds of Maggie’s shredded control. Face flushed, dark velvet eyes glazed with passion, she spread her thighs wider and, reaching for him, whispered, ‘Please, I need you inside…’

And then amazingly he was and she had not come close to imagining how impossibly marvellous, how incredible it could feel to have him throbbing hard and hot, filling her.

He registered her incredible tightness and her cry as he entered her and it took a few seconds for his brain to link the two and produce the explanation.

Her body tightened around him and Rafael could no longer resist the temptation to sink deeper into her silky smoothness.

Maggie’s legs wrapped around his hips. It was incredible. She kissed his chest and hung on as each thrust of his body sent her deeper into a blissful delirium.

Above her his face was a rigid mask as he struggled to control himself to give her a taste of the pleasure she had never experienced.

When it hit her, the first wave of orgasm shocked a fractured cry from Maggie. Her head went back and she clung to him as another and another hit her, then exploded into a deep pulse of pleasure that went all the way to her toes. As the wave receded she felt Rafael stiffen above her and shiver as the heat of his release filled her.

Holding her head against his chest, Rafael stroked her dark hair. Their bodies slowly cooled. Maggie lay listening to the beat of his heart slow before she lifted her head and smiled at him.

Rafael did not smile back. He didn’t say a word. He just lifted her up and, draping a throw around them both, carried her from the room and through the silent maze of hallways into a room that was dominated by a large four-poster bed.

He didn’t take her to the bed. Instead he walked into the adjoining bathroom, a massive room of startling decadence with a vast sunken marble bath, armchairs and a carved fireplace with candles set in the grate and along the mantle.

With her in his arms he walked straight into the walk-in shower and switched on the water. As she watched the spray run over his dark face, making his skin glisten, he set Maggie on her feet.

Then still without a word he took the citrus-scented gel from an applicator and began to lather her skin. Gently but thoroughly he washed her, moving his hand in firm circular motions until she tingled everywhere.