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

‘Also there is no point trying to hide from me in a bed this small.’

The bed was vast but she let it pass. ‘I wasn’t trying to hide,’ she protested.

He arched an ironic brow, making her eyes slide guiltily from his.

‘I was cold.’

‘Cold?’ Emilio laid his hand possessively on the soft feminine curve of her stomach. Megan started and trembled at his touch, shifting restlessly under his hand, but not wanting it to go away.

‘You do not feel cold to me.’ He leaned across her, sealing his mouth to hers as he kissed her, and he ran his hands down the silky skin of her thighs, wresting a whimper from her throat.

‘Not cold at all.’

Eyes closed, her head fell to one side as he began to nuzzle her neck.

Emilio’s head lifted, but his eyes remained riveted on her raspberry-pink thrusting nipples, wet and gleaming from his recent ministrations, dark against the milk-pale skin of her perfect breasts. With the utmost reluctance he clenched his jaw and tore his gaze free of temptation.

‘We have things to talk about,’ Megan heard him say with some unease.

She opened her eyes. ‘I thought you were a man of action, not words.’ Would the challenge successfully divert him?

It didn’t. Emilio saw through her tactics. ‘Nice try,’ he admired sardonically. ‘And I am tempted,’ he admitted with a smile that made her heart flip. The smile was absent as he added in a voice stripped of the sexy smokiness, ‘But we will talk. Your economy with words and my actions could have hurt you.’

He stopped and moved a hand across his face. She was shocked when his hand fell away to see his face contorted in a grimace of self-loathing.

‘Did hurt you,’ he added sombrely.

Megan was shaken by the dark anguish she saw reflected in the shadows of his incredible eyes. ‘No …’ she protested. ‘No, you didn’t.’ The memory of the moment of pain had already faded, supplanted by the incredible pleasure that had followed.

The muscles in Emilio’s brown throat stood out corded with tension as he dragged a hand jerkily across the surface of his dark hair, making it stand up spikily in front.

It was, she decided, a good look on him, but then any look was good on Emilio. God, but I am so besotted.

‘Do not lie to me, Megan,’ he rasped throatily as he caught her jaw between his long fingers and angled her face to him.

Megan struggled to judge his mood; his enigmatic expression gave nothing away. ‘I’m not—’

‘You have never been with a man before.’ The shock still fresh in his mind, Emilio struggled to frame the words. ‘It was your first time.’

If he pursued the theme too far Megan knew there was a real danger of her revealing more than was sensible.

The last thing she wanted was Emilio knowing that she had only been a virgin, not because she was virtuous or even that she had major hang-ups about sex, but because … God, how could she admit, without sounding incredibly old-fashioned, that she’d made a choice early on not to have sex outside marriage?

Megan had simply never been able to imagine being intimate with a man she didn’t have a strong emotional connection with.

The man she slept with would be the man she fell in love with, and as the only man she’d ever fallen for had been married she had accepted it might never happen and she was fine with that, or so she had told herself. There was more to life than sex and there were few things worse in life, it seemed to her, than sex with the wrong man.

There had been a lot of wrong men for her mother, a parade of ‘uncles’ whom Megan could recall appearing and disappearing at intervals. The eternal optimist, Clare Smith had always embarked on a new relationship believing it was the one, only to end up crushed and heartbroken when things fell apart.

As she got older and recognised the destructive pattern Megan, not sharing her mother’s optimism, had begun to dread seeing a new man appear. Some of the youthful anger she felt had been aimed at her mother; she wished very much now she had been more understanding.

‘Why do you need a man?’ she had yelled. ‘Why can’t I be enough? ‘

The stricken look on her mother’s face had stayed with her and she had never had an opportunity to retract it. Her mother had slipped off a crowded pavement at rush hour and under the wheels of a passing bus.

A hissing expletive left Emilio’s lips as, face dark with wrath, he stared at her, the muscle in his lean cheek spasmodically clenching and unclenching.

He looked ready to implode.

Megan struggled to respond to the blunt statement of her virginal status without blushing and failed. ‘Guilty as charged,’ she joked in an attempt to play the subject down.

Megan bit her lip. So much for lightening the mood!

‘You think this a joke?’ he grated. ‘Your first time should be special.’

Megan stared and thought, And he thinks it wasn’t?

‘I may not have used the word,’ she told him in a voice that shook with the emotions she was struggling to suppress, ‘but if you’re talking special as in unique and outstandingly brilliant, I do seem to recall saying something along those lines, quite loudly actually.’

‘You’re blushing, all over.’ The discovery appeared to distract and amuse him, though a moment later he was looking darkly sombre once more as he picked up a theme that Megan found acutely uncomfortable.

‘Your first time only happens the once, and … and I …’ His face contorted with a grimace of self-disgust, he broke off and dragged a hand down his jaw. Hearing the sound in his head, he felt as if he’d never be able to forget her sharp cry. His voice dropped as he accused, ‘You wept.’

Silently, and he had held her shaking body and felt like a total animal.

Megan laid a tentative hand on his shoulder; his muscles felt rock-hard and rigid. ‘It wasn’t because you hurt me,’ she protested, stunned by his reading of the situation.

‘If I had known—’ His jaw clenched; the knowledge that he had hurt her felt like a blade sliding between his ribs. ‘But how could you be … Why?’

Megan groaned and scanned his face. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’

He looked at her as though she had just announced she was actually a Martian. ‘Let it go!’ He’d waited two years for that moment and when it had happened he had blown it! When he thought of the way he had … ‘Por Dios! I think you owe me an explanation,’ he announced grimly.

Her eyes slid guiltily from his. I’m yours and I love you. I actually pretty much always have, was a fairly accurate summing-up of the situation, but she doubted it would go down too well.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that you—?’

Her voice tight with humiliation, Megan cut across his incensed demand. ‘You didn’t seem all that interested in conversation at the time.’

The line of colour across the angle of Emilio’s cheekbones deepened as their glances clashed. Even now the air between them hummed with a sexual tension that was almost tangible. Despite the intensity of their lovemaking it had not even taken the edge off his hunger for her.

He did not need reminding that his actions had been ruled by his own selfish carnal desire, a carnal desire that after two years of denial had been stripped to its primitive and most basic form.

It had been a point of pride with Emilio that he had never been a victim of his hormones. He had certainly never lost control in bed before, and now the one time he should have shown restraint with a woman, when he should have been gentle, he had snapped. His relentless, ravenous need for her had made him utterly blind to her inexperience until that last moment.

There must have been clues? How had he missed them? Missed the opportunity to make her initiation special.

‘And you were not acting like a virgin,’ corrosive shame made him retort defensively.