Hot Summer Flings: A Spanish Awakening / The Italian Next Door... / Interview with the Daredevil

‘So does wanting a woman so much you can’t think of anything else, so much that you can’t function!’ he growled, jerking her roughly towards him until they stood thigh to thigh.

They were so close now that Megan could hear his heartbeat, or was that her own? His hands had moved to the small of her back, leaving her own trapped between their bodies. She might have struggled to work out where he ended and she started, except he was harder … much harder. The muscular thighs she was pressed against had as much give as oak-tree trunks.

Shaking her head to clear the dreamy, light-headed sensation, she forced herself to recognise the abrupt rise in her core temperature for what it was: a hormone rush—God, a hormone avalanche!

She struggled hard to inject a note of humour into her response. ‘Your concern for your fellow man does you credit, but I promise to behave and never wear pink lipstick again.’

‘I have no concern for them.’ Emilio dismissed the mental well-being of one half of the population with an expressive sneer. ‘And,’ he added, gritting out the words with force, ‘I don’t want you to behave.’

‘You don’t?’ she whispered.

His glittering eyes held hers. ‘Not at all,’ he confirmed in a deep smoky voice that sent shivers of anticipation down her spine.

Emilio wanted her to misbehave—with him.

She said it twice in her head and it still didn’t seem real. Did she even know how to misbehave in the way he clearly expected? Her eyes drifted to his gorgeous, incredibly sexy mouth and suddenly her lack of experience felt less important as need swelled inside her, tightening into a hard fist of hot desire in her belly.

Emilio was the one man whom she had always been prepared to sacrifice her principles for. She had frequently told herself she was lucky he had never asked her to. That way, she had reasoned, she had no regrets—what she also did not have, but had not previously acknowledged, were no memories.

Now he was standing there, not asking directly but sending some pretty explicit messages, unless she had disastrously misinterpreted his thinly veiled comments and the gleam of sexual intent in his eyes was a figment of her overheated imagination.

She checked. That gleam looked real. It felt real, she thought as a fresh shiver rippled through her body. At that moment it hit her that it was real; she wasn’t dreaming.

What am I doing?

Belatedly Megan’s self-protective instincts kicked in and her head dropped forward, causing her hair to fall in a silky screen around her face.

Space, she told herself. I need space and I need not to say, Take me!

Do not say it, Megan!

She bit down on the shameless words. She remained dumb but couldn’t put the space plan into action as her feet remained nailed to the floor.

She felt the sweat trickle down her back and realised with horror that if anything she was leaning into him, not pulling away. Her body just wasn’t listening to what her head was telling it.

Her body had its own agenda!

And to make the situation even more unbearable her brain might have closed down but her senses were painfully alert. Being this close to him, being able to smell him, feel the heat coming off his body, was physically painful.

She started shaking like someone with a fever. The intensity of the need pounding through her terrified her. It was utterly and totally outside her experience.

Had he noticed? Of course he had. The knowledge that she was trembling with sheer lust would presumably confirm his conviction she was a bed-hopping tart.

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_cea5b373-012b-5a97-9ee8-1c5efa76c115)

‘WOULD you like to not behave with me?’

This time the invitation left no room for misinterpretation.

Megan felt vulnerable, exposed and excited all at the same time. ‘It really isn’t that simple.’ A person standing on the brink of a precipice stepped back; they did not jump—so why was every atom in her body screaming, Jump?

‘It is.’ There was no trace of uncertainty in Emilio’s voice.

But then why would there be uncertainty in his voice? This was simple for him: he felt an attraction and he acted on it. He had no moral dilemma, no trust issues, no deep fear of having his heart broken.

‘Has someone hurt you, Megan?’

His question triggered her self-protective instincts.

‘No. There are no great dramas in my life.’

He looked unconvinced by her response, but was quickly distracted. ‘Your skin is so soft,’ he said, looking at her mouth. ‘And I have dreamed of your mouth.’

She lifted her head and groaned. ‘It’s not even dark! ‘

Emilio threw back his head and laughed. The deep, attractive sound lowered the sexual temperature but the respite was brief. A moment later he was looking at her, his teeth bared in a white, wolfish grin, and the expression of predatory intent written into every line of his lean face as he looked down at her sent the sexual temperature zooming off the chart!

‘Are you a lights-out girl?’

She was a good-book-and-a-mug-of-cocoa girl, but even had she felt inclined to confess this Megan doubted he would have believed her.

‘While I agree darkness has an allure,’ he continued in the same deep, seductive, throaty purr that made the downy hair on her neck and arms rise and the skin they covered tingle. ‘It breaks down restraints and frees up the imagination.’

Megan, whose imagination had broken free of all her own restraints, her eyes sealed to his, began to pant softly. She couldn’t seem to draw enough air into her tight, aching chest.

‘I find visual stimulus very—’

With a cry she pulled her hands out from between their bodies and clamped them over her ears, closing her eyes and yelling, ‘We weren’t talking about your sexual predilections!’

A static silence followed her outburst. Megan stood there with her eyes tight shut, knowing she had pretty much blown her I’ve-been-here-done-this-got-the-T-shirt card!

‘No, we were talking about yours.’

At the quiet but firm correction her eyes flickered open. She angled a wary look at his face and immediately felt her defences crumble as she read tenderness mingled in with the driven hunger in his lean face.

‘I would like to know what pleases you.’

The answer did not require much thought and Megan felt her knees give as the truth emerged uncensored from her lips. ‘You!’

Heat flared hot in Emilio’s eyes in response to her whispered admission.

Megan could not understand a word of the flood of liquid, passionate Spanish that flowed from his lips, but she listened raptly, observing with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension the smile of gloating male satisfaction that curved his sensually sculpted lips.

‘I don’t know what you just said, but—’

He cut her off, which was possibly just as well because Megan hadn’t the faintest idea what she wanted to say. What sort of but was appropriate after you’d just told a man that he virtually embodied your sexual fantasies? There was actually no virtual about it—he did!

‘I said I intend to please you,’ he promised thickly.