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

‘That must have been a shock…discovering you’re adopted.’ Rafael suggested, watching her push the gleaming strands of hair back from her heart-shaped face with both hands, looping it into a heavy bunch before letting it fall down her back.

She shook her head. ‘Not really. I didn’t discover—I always knew I was adopted. Mum and Dad always made me feel special because they picked me.’

‘But your brothers, they are…?’

‘Big surprises, with an emphasis on the big,’ she added with an affectionate grin. She felt some of the tension slip from her shoulders as a mental picture of her younger siblings formed in her head. ‘Mum and Dad thought they couldn’t have children so they were pretty shocked when Ben came along and then, a year later, Sam.’

‘So your real mother?’ he probed, wary of pushing too hard.

Her smile vanished. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she suggested.

Rafael gave a casual shrug and didn’t push.

‘I really envy you being bilingual… Spanish is such a marvellous language and you have an incredible home. I have never met anyone who lived in a castle before.’ She stopped, drew breath, and prayed for the floor to open and swallow her.

She had just taken inane babble to an entirely new level. On the plus side, at least she had run out of breath before she asked him about his heating bills!

No, actually there was no plus side.

‘We don’t have to talk at all.’

The invitation in his smoky, sinfully sexy voice would have been obvious no matter what language he chose to use. Maggie’s breath snagged in her throat. Her eyes fused with his and Maggie’s insides melted.

She reached for the coffee pot and refilled her cup. ‘This is great coffee,’ she enthused.

‘Or we could.?’ Rafael conceded drily.

Maggie, who couldn’t stop staring at his long tapering fingers—she had never looked at a man’s hands and thought about them on her skin, but now she had she couldn’t stop—blurted with incurable honesty, ‘I feel very out of my depth.’ She levelled her candid gaze at his face and wondered how she had ever been mad enough to think a one-night stand with him was a good idea.

‘Once you learn to tread water, depth is not a problem.’

‘I can’t swim.’

‘But you are a very fast learner.’

She blushed and looked at him through her lashes. ‘You’re a passable teacher, but you’re also the sort of man I’d normally cross the road to avoid. You’re not my type at all. It’s crazy, but from the moment I saw you I.’

‘You what?’

Maggie shivered. He had a voice that was the auditory equivalent of having your skin stroked against the deep pile of rich velvet.

‘The moment I saw you I wondered… I wondered what sort of kisser you were.’ And you had to tell him that why, exactly?

Rafael didn’t move, didn’t blink, but she heard the breath leave his lungs in one audible hiss.

She carried on looking at him.

It was said and there was no way she could unsay it. Near-death experiences did not make you braver, they clearly made you more stupid!

‘God, pretend I didn’t say that. I’m embarrassing myself.’ she admitted, not looking at him. ‘I’m embarrassing you.’

‘I am not easy to embarrass.’

Her eyes lifted. ‘I know,’ she conceded unable to take her eyes off his dark face. ‘Not that I’m suggesting that’s a bad thing. It wasn’t a criticism,’ she added hastily, thinking not many people looking at his face would find much to criticise.

Her embarrassed little laugh transmuted into a sharp intake of breath as he left the table and came round to join her.

Holding her eyes, he took her hand and drew her up to him. Placing a hand behind her head, he tilted her face up to him.

‘I too wondered when I saw you how you would taste. I wanted to find out right there in the street.’ And what man would not? How could any man with red blood in his veins resist the combination of warm sexuality, wide-eyed innocence and a body made for pleasure? ‘What would you have done if I had?’

‘Screamed, called for help…?’ she suggested, struggling to inject amusement into her voice and failing totally—her breath was coming in short choppy spurts that made it difficult to breath and impossible to raise her voice above a whisper.

‘And now?’ he asked, running his thumb across the cushiony pink surface of her lips.

She closed her eyes because looking at the flame burning deep in his—a trick of the light, probably—made her dizzy, and said, ‘Are you going to kiss me or torture me?’ She held her arms wide in a come and get me gesture and, eyes still tight shut, tilted her head back in invitation.

‘When you put it like that I see it would be an act of charity to put you out of your misery.’ The fever in his blood as he looked down at her made him shake—literally shake with need.

She tensed in anticipation of the plundering pressure of his lips; the light touch on the corner of her mouth took her by surprise.

Maggie’s eyes flickered open. They were still open, welded to the silver gleam in his, as he increased the pressure slightly as his tongue followed the curve of her mouth, leaving a damp trail.

The heat and frustration inside Maggie mounted as she noticed just how ragged her breathing was.

‘How was that for you?’

‘You know your way around a mouth. Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me yet,’ he breathed against her mouth.

So I would get a good score, hmm?

His wicked grin flashed as he took her face between his big hands.

‘That was not a kiss, that was merely the beginning…foreplay. I love the way you blush… I love your skin.’

‘There is only so much foreplay, Rafael, a girl can take.’

The touch of his warm lips as they claimed her sent a tide of heat through her body. Rafael’s arms slid around her body, pulling her close into him. Maggie’s arms curled around his neck as she raised herself up on tiptoe and leaned into the male hardness of his lean body, excited by the leashed hunger that made him shake.

The excitement spiralled at the first sensual stab of his tongue into the warm, moist recesses of her mouth. She moaned with need and kissed him back, her hands bunching into fists as she grabbed the fabric of his shirt.

‘I’m so sorry, darling, I had no idea.’

Maggie jumped away from him as if shot. Blinking as she struggled to clear the sexual fog in her brain, she stared. For some reason the star of a top American detective series was standing in the doorway.

CHAPTER ELEVEN