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Already he was on edge over his inability to stop thinking about bedding Saffie. That little incident in his study and her calling a halt to it had grated, but uninhibited fumbling in the back of his limo only attested to how badly she affected his control.
With superhuman effort, he eased her away.
Her lips were swollen, beautifully bruised, slick and ripe for another tasting. He hardened painfully, his manhood demanding satisfaction of the most carnal kind with an insistence he hadn’t experienced in a long while.
He wanted to have her, to give and receive pleasure, to hear her cry out in that husky voice that set his body aflame.
And the fever of it bewildered him in the extreme.
At his continued perusal, a blush suffused her face. The force with which he wanted to trace that heightened colour with his tongue had him setting her back in her seat.
Meu Deus. Where was the care he’d vowed to take? Where was the reminder that this kind of dangerous blind lust was how he himself had come into being? That, like his father, one time hadn’t been enough. That Pueblo had given into his baser urges repeatedly until Joao had been created? And then and only then had the man who sired him selfishly slithered away from his responsibilities?
Não, he wouldn’t slip down the same path.
For the rest of the journey, he directed his gaze out of the window, stared blindly at the water taxis and boats sailing the Huangpu River as he fought to bring his body back under control.
He exhaled in relief when the driver pulled u
p to the hotel entrance a few minutes later. He alighted, helped her out and strode quickly for the private lift that serviced his suite.
She didn’t speak on their way up.
And he, Joao Oliviera, the man who’d talked himself out of more tricky situations in his precarious youth than he could count, was inarticulate in the grip of unrelenting lust.
He laughed grimly to himself, then even that amusement evaporated when he found he couldn’t take his gaze off the racing pulse at her throat. Or her very delectable backside and swaying hips as she exited the lift, the train of her dress caught up in one hand.
Pelo amor de Deus...
He dismissed the hovering butler when they entered the suite, and turned to her, but Saffie got there first.
‘This needs to stop,’ she announced, her chin raised. ‘We have to find a way to be civil without this...thing between us.’
He clenched his jaw. ‘I agree.’
‘You do?’
He should’ve been pleased at her quickly disguised disappointment. But the need to reverse his own statement almost as soon as he’d uttered it pulled him up short.
He’d fought for her to stay his right hand so he could show Pueblo once and for all that he was more than worthy of the name he’d wished to deprive him off. That he was miles better than any Oliviera. That if he chose to change his name tomorrow, the world would bow to whoever he reinvented himself as.
That if he ever had a child of his own he would—
The alien thought, springing from nowhere, froze him in place.
Doce paraíso!
Why? And why now when even abstract thoughts of children had been dismissed with chilling rejection in the past?
Was it Saffie? Had the thought of his assistant flouncing off to create a family at some point in the future crept insidiously into his own subconscious, pushing him to question his own mortality and legacy?
Impossível.
‘Joao? Are you all right?’
He throttled back his scowl. ‘I don’t want any distractions to jeopardise the Archer deal. Lavinia might have been bowled over by the event tonight but we need to capitalise on the advantage, especially in Brazil.’
She dropped the train of her dress, eyes that were more green than blue tonight assessing. ‘Because your father will be there?’ she probed.
