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She made a small helpless sound of denial and need, and then she gave in. His mouth moved urgently on hers and her lips parted eagerly, greedily for its possession, her nails digging into the hard muscles of his arms as her need roared through her.
It was last night all over again—only this time they were impeded by two sets of clothes. She had changed back into her own things before supervising the clearing up after the party. Now she was being driven wild by her longing to be as naked and open to him now as she had been the previous evening.
Her fingers clenched spasmodically on his arm, her body gripped by savage shudders of dark pleasure.
She wanted his hands on her breasts, on all of her—his fingers finding her, touching her as they had done last night. Just wanting him to touch her in that way made her go hot and limp with the desire she could feel pulsing inside her. She wanted him there…there—deep, deep inside her, thrusting hard and fast against the possessive hold of her muscles, taking her, satisfying her quickly and mercilessly.
She could feel the open heat of his mouth against her throat as he tipped her back over his arm, moonlight gleaming whitely on her skin as he tugged off her top to reveal her breast, darkly crowned in the night light.
His thumb-tip rubbed against the deep dark pink of her nipple and she cried out—a sharp, agonised sound of primitive female mating hunger.
She wanted him to take her now, here. As quickly and completely, as fiercely and thoroughly as a panting she-creature on heat. She wanted him to fill her, flood her with his own release, and to go on doing so until she was sated and complete.
She reached for the hardness she knew was waiting for her, running her fingers over and over the jutting ridge of his erection, quivering with anticipation. The head would be swollen and hot, the body thick and darkly veined, the flesh tightly drawn over the hard muscle, but still fluid and slick when she touched it.
In her imagination she could already feel the first rub of that engorged head between the lips of her sex, and then against the sensitive pleasure-pulse of her clitoris over and over again, faster and faster, until she was wet and hot with her pleasure. Until she could endure no more and Ricardo finally plunged deep inside her.
As though she had cried her desire out loud to him, she felt Ricardo tugging at her clothes, his hands hard and firm against her naked skin. His mouth found her nipple and drew fiercely on it. She cried out again in a mewling sound of intense arousal.
His mouth returned to hers. She felt as though she had been starving for it, for him, as though she had been waiting all their life to be with him. She felt…
Immediately she tensed, pushing him away, her voice tight with rejection and self-loathing as she told him fiercely, ‘I don’t want this.’
‘Yes, you do. You want this and you want me, and you can’t deny it!’ Ricardo challenged her whilst he fought to control his breathing. And to rationalise what had happened—if he could rationalise it. It was something he had had no intention of allowing to happen at all. But from the moment he had touched her he had been out of control, unable to stop what was happening to him.
Carly drew in a deep, shaky breath.
‘We mustn’t.’
‘We must not what?’ Ricardo demanded. ‘We must not want one another?’
Carly turned her head away from him and shook it in bewilderment. ‘This can’t happen again,’ she told him quickly.
Baffled and frustrated, Ricardo reluctantly let her go. She wanted him, and he certainly damned well wanted her, so why was she behaving like this? One thing he did know was that he was determined that he would have her, sooner or later—and he would prefer it to be sooner.
Thank heavens Ricardo hadn’t followed her to her room. Because if he had she knew that she would not have been able to resist him. And she had to resist him, because she wanted him far more than it was safe for her to do.
Why, though, did she feel like this about him? Why did she want him when she had never wanted any of the other men she had met?
Was it because subconsciously she knew he was different from them? Because the most intimate part of her recognised that, at some primal level, she felt a deep-rooted kinship with him?
Because, like him, she too had known and suffered childhood poverty and the withdrawal, the denial of the love and nurturing, the protection every child should be given as of right?
The wretched squalor and unhappiness of her own early childhood had marked her for ever, as she knew his must have marked him.
Not even Julia and Lucy, who thought they knew everything about her, knew the full truth of the beginning of her life—how she had been found dressed in rags, abandoned in the street beside some rubbish, her pitiful cries alerting a loitering tramp to her existence.
She had been a piece of unwanted humanity, left there to die. Unwanted and unloved, even by her own birth mother. No wonder, then, that her adopted mother had never been able to love her either.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘YOU mentioned last night that you didn’t have any money in your bank account because you’d had to help your parents?’
Carly almost dropped the glass of water she had been drinking. A little unsteadily, she put it down. They had boarded Ricardo’s jet several hours later than Ricardo had originally planned, although he had not give her any reason for the delay, and would soon be landing at JFK airport for their onward journey to the Hamptons.
She looked out of the window, telling herself that it was pointless now to berate herself for letting anger lead her into admitting that she had needed to help them.
‘I…I shouldn’t have said that,’ she admitted uncomfortably. ‘And I wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t made me so angry.’
‘I misjudged you, and I’ve apologised for that. A man in my position becomes very cynical about other people’s motives. Why did you have to give your parents money? Are you an only child?’
‘I…I had a sister…’
Her mouth had gone dry, and she wanted desperately to bring their conversation to an end.
‘Had?’ Ricardo questioned, as she had known he would.
‘Yes. She…Fenella died a…a few months ago,’ she told him reluctantly.
Ricardo could almost feel her resistance to his questions as he registered her words and felt the shock of them, plus his own shock that she should be so composed.
‘I’m sorry. That must have been dreadful for you.’
Carly looked at him.
‘Fenella and I weren’t really related. I…her parents adopted me when I was very young. They adored her, and they were naturally devastated by her death,’ she told him in a guarded voice.
‘But you weren’t?’ Ricardo guessed.
‘We were very different. Fenella naturally was always the favoured child. Adoption doesn’t always work out the way people hope it will.’
Carly looked away from him. It was obvious that she was withholding something from him, withdrawing herself from him, in fact—as though she didn’t want to let him into the personal side of her life. To his own astonishment he discovered that he didn’t like the fact that she was reluctant to talk openly about herself to him. What was it about her that caused him to have this compulsion to learn more? And was it more, or was it everything there was to learn?
His curiosity was merely that of a potential employer, he assured himself.
‘What do you mean, adoption doesn’t always work? Didn’t it work for you? Weren’t you happy with your adoptive parents?’
‘Why are you asking me so many questions?’
Ricardo could almost feel her anxiety and panic.
‘Perhaps because I want to know more about you.’
On the face of it he already knew all he needed to know. But it was what was beneath the surface that was arousing his curiosity. She was concealing something from him, something that changed her from a self-confident woman into someone who was far more vulnerable—and also very determined to deny that vulnerability. He
had a fiercely honed instinct about such things, and he knew he wasn’t wrong. So what was it? He intended to find out. But what would it take to break down her barriers?
He looked at her and watched in satisfaction as, under his deliberate scrutiny, the colour seeped up under her skin.
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he reminded her.
‘No, I wasn’t happy.’ The terseness in her voice warned him that she didn’t like his probing.
‘What about your natural parents?’
Ricardo could see immediately that his question had had a very dramatic effect on her. Her face lost its colour and he could hear her audibly indrawn breath. He expected her to refuse to answer, but instead she spoke fiercely.
‘My mother was probably a drug addict, who died in a house fire along with two other young women. No one knew who my father might have been. I was left to die amongst the rubbish outside a hospital. A tramp found me. I was only a few weeks old. I was ten years old and in foster care when Fenella’s parents decided they wanted to adopt a sister for her, because they were concerned that she might be lonely.’
Ricardo was frowning.
‘They adopted you for their daughter?’
