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Unconcerned by such minor mutterings, Joaquin settled her down on him. He spread long graceful fingers to cup her cheekbones and she was lost again. Meeting those beautiful crystal-clear eyes of his, she just wanted to fling herself at him. Her whole quivering body was poised on a wild high. Her breasts were full, their straining peaks almost painfully sensitive. At the heart of her there was the most intense ache.
‘You understand…this has nothing to do with Fidelio,’ Joaquin warned her in a roughened undertone.
‘Kiss me…’ Lucy urged, all shyness put to flight by the agony of eagerness clawing up inside her.
And he did. Slowly and thoroughly and with the sort of smooth sensual expertise that she was defenceless against. Yet she sought no defence. He pried apart her lips and used the tip of his tongue in a teasing darting foray into the tender interior of her mouth. She almost passed out from the fierce surge of excitement he generated. Her hands broke the hold of his so that she could wrap her arms round him.
‘Witch…’ Joaquin husked with sensual fervour, before he took that invitation and possessed her mouth again with wild hot hunger.
Like oil thrown on embers, that hunger set Lucy alight. As he drew her down on to the bed she let her fingers sink into the thick dark strands of his hair. With a growling sound deep in his throat, he rolled over and came down on her. The heat and weight of his long powerful body on hers added a whole new dimension to the experience. With every seeking intimate thrust of his tongue which imitated a far more intimate possession Lucy burned. She was so hooked on that raw, drugging charge of ever-rising excitement she could barely breathe. His hands stroked her breasts, expert fingers teasing at a tender tip, making her moan her response under the onslaught on his mouth, all control abandoned.
A knock sounded on the bedroom door. Lucy didn’t hear it, but Joaquin wrenched himself free of her with shocking abruptness. She felt that, and could hardly have remained unaware of the change in mood when she found herself being unceremoniously dumped back on to the carpet and told to stay there.
She was even more startled then to hear Yolanda, speaking in her own language several feet away. Only then did she lower her spinning head in shaken dismay at her own behaviour. Even as the unmistakable sound of an argument between brother and sister took place at the door, with the brunette’s voice growing ever more shrill and angry while Joaquin’s grew ever colder and steadier, Lucy just sat where she was, staring into space with shocked eyes.
She was still trembling, and deeply conscious of the after-pains of such unbridled passion. That hot greedy craving was still inside her, taking no account of place or person or indeed anything but its own existence. Her body wanted Joaquin Del Castillo. She wanted Joaquin, she adjusted in raw mortification. Until that moment she had never understood just how frighteningly powerful such physical need could be. And how could she blame him for taking advantage of her scantily clad presence in his bedroom? She had just let him…indeed had actively encouraged him to make love to her.
The noisy tap-tap of high heels stalking away penetrated Lucy’s reverie.
‘One down, one to go,’ Joaquin spelt out, bending down to scoop her off the carpet with grim determination.
‘One down…one what?’ Lucy gasped.
‘You’re going back to your own bed!’ His high proud cheekbones scored with dark colour, and his eyes bright and hard as emeralds, Joaquin raked her pink face with angry derision.
‘Of course I am,’ Lucy mumbled, every vowel sound strangulated by an inability to come up with any other response. Even she was prepared to concede that but for his sister’s interruption where she herself was to spend the night might reasonably have been in doubt.
‘Of course?’ Joaquin stressed with stinging scorn as he strode to the door. ‘I can’t believe that I almost fell for that cheap seduction routine!’
‘I…I b-beg your pardon?’ Lucy stammered.
‘Por Dios…you know what you are about with a man…you brought me close enough to the edge!’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’
Having made the return trip to her bedroom in record time, Joaquin dumped her back down on her comfortable bed. She fell back against the tumbled pillows, her caramel-blonde hair spilling round her hectically flushed heart-shaped face, her violet eyes bright with chagrin.
‘There was no seduction routine!’ Lucy spluttered.
‘You were waiting for me.’ With brooding intensity, Joaquin stared down at her, eyes a glimmering crystalline flash below lush black lashes. ‘With my kid sister under the same roof…have you no decency?’
In receipt of that continuing appraisal, Lucy was startled to feel her entire skin surface burn with a sensation that was far from being the shame it should have been. Excitement still shimmered in the air between them like a barrier begging to be broken. It was impossible for her to defend herself against his accusation without revealing that she had been using his phone. If she admitted that, he might check out the number and discover that she had called what should have been her own empty London apartment.
‘Obviously not,’ she heard herself confirm, thrilling in the strangest way to that image of herself as a sexually confident and immorally manipulative female.
Goaded by that response, Joaquin came down on the side of the bed and leant over her. ‘So you admit that?’
His brilliant eyes clashed with hers. Invisible sparks seemed to fly up. Her breath caught in her throat. ‘I admit nothing,’ she muttered unevenly, every sense quickening to his proximity.
Joaquin reached out a hand and slowly wound his fingers into a whole handful of her glossy ringlets. His astonishing eyes never left hers for a second. ‘I swear you will not profit by my desire for you, querida,’ he asserted in a dangerous growl.
But even the danger excited Lucy. To be desired was to feel like a seductive stranger inside her own homely skin. Her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lips. She watched his attention drop to the moist fullness of her pink mouth and she trembled. A pin would have sounded like a rock falling in the charged silence which now stretched between them.
‘Oh, dear…I didn’t realise you still needed to be tucked in at night, Lucy,’ Yolanda remarked in dulcet surprise from the doorway.
Joaquin drew back from Lucy and slowly sprang upright. His beautiful mouth quirking with what could have been suppressed amusement, he veiled his gaze and walked out of the room with a cool aside in soft Spanish to his sibling.
‘Buenas noches, Lucy,’ his sister sighed, looking nothing at all like the kid he had styled her as, she cast a martial glance of reproof in Lucy’s direction.
Embarrassed to have been surprised that close to Joaquin, and enveloped in a burning blush, Lucy scrambled under the sheets with a muttered goodnight of her own. But she lay back unable to sleep. In twenty-two years she had never felt so alive as she had felt in Joaquin Del Castillo’s arms. That was a pretty pathetic admission, she decided, reluctantly forced to admit to her own slender experience of men.
At school
she had always been too quiet to interest any of the boys she’d liked. She had been nineteen when she met Steve. She had fallen head over heels for him when he came to work at the library. They had often lunched together and he had seemed to really enjoy being with her. But she had totally misunderstood the precise tenor of his interest and she had been devastated when it had finally dawned on her that Steve was gay. He had thought of her as a friend, no more, and had assumed that she knew that his flatmate was rather more than a friend.
The following year she had met Larry, an engineering student, who had been keen enough to ignore her excuses about not being able to go out in the evening and who had eventually just turned up on the doorstep. Sadly, his interest in Lucy had not been strong enough to prevent him from taking furious offence at her mother’s extremely rude and contemptuous reception. And that had been the end of that.
Little wonder that in Joaquin Del Castillo’s radius Lucy was now becoming painfully conscious of her own naivety. For too long she had been denied the independence to make her own choices in life. Naturally that lack of experience had left its mark. As her mother’s carer she had had to be mature beyond her years, but in so many other fields, she was now discovering, she was still as unsure of herself as an adolescent.
So it was hardly surprising, she reasoned feverishly, that she didn’t recognise the wanton female she turned into around Joaquin. When had she ever had the chance to express that side of her nature? She was a normal flesh and blood woman and it was natural that she should want to…should want to flatten him to the bed and rip his clothes off? She cringed, but that was how she had felt.
But was it also natural that when Joaquin entered the same room her brain went into freefall? Natural that she should totally forget that she was supposed to be pretending to be her sister every time he looked at her or touched her? Was sexual attraction that intense and all-consuming? Or was it just that she had been living like a nun for too long so that she was now, as Yolanda had so succinctly put it, making a total ass of herself around Joaquin Del Castillo?
