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The fire crackled, painting her exposed back in shades of rose and gold, and he wanted to touch her, brush his fingers down her back, feel the warm satin of her skin.
‘Not completely.’ His heart was beating far too fast, the need to touch her almost uncontrollable. He curled his fingers into fists, dug his nails into his palms, trying to master himself. ‘There was a gap in the curtains and the moon shone through it.’
The moon had made her look as though she was carved out of ice and snow that night. Yet she hadn’t been a snow queen. No, she’d been made of fire...
Moonlight outlined the delectable curves of the woman lying in his arms, her back to his chest. She had her head turned away, her cheek pressed to the pillow and she was shivering with desire. His hand traced her side, the dip of her waist and the achingly beautiful curve of her hip. She was so warm, so soft.
He’d had so many illicit fantasies about her and she was everything those fantasies had promised. No, she was more. She was better...
This was wrong and he knew it, and continuing to do this with her when his instinct was screaming at him to stop was insanity. A betrayal of everything he’d told himself he was. Everything he’d worked for up to this point.
But the desire she’d unleashed in him was impossible to deny.
‘Rafael,’ she murmured, arching against him, his name a prayer and a plea.
And he was lost, his control in ashes.
She had come tohim.She had begged forhim. She had risked everything to have one night with him and he would fight God himself if he tried to take her from him.
She wantedhim.Not because he was the Regent, not for his power or his authority or the money in his bank account. Him. Not his brother, the heir, the Crown Prince.
She wanted the Spanish bastard who’d grown up in a rundown one-bedroom apartment in Barcelona. Whom nobody had wanted, not his father and certainly not his mother.
This night between them should never had happened, but he was going to take it. No one would know. No one would ever find out.
It would remain their secret.
He ran his hand down her side, her skin feeling like warm satin, and she sighed, trembling with delight...
‘You said you were angry when you came looking for Matias that night,’ he heard himself say, his hand half lifting to brush the nape of her neck despite himself. ‘What were you angry about?’
She was silent for a long moment and he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she said, her voice husky, ‘I was...angry with you for making me want you. And angry with myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about you, I couldn’t... I was supposed to be marrying your brother and I wanted you out of my head.’ She took a little breath. ‘I thought Matias would help me forget you and I suppose there was a part of me that wanted to punish you.’
A hot, primitive sense of satisfaction gripped him, a strange feeling, tangled as it was with anger and possessiveness and jealousy.
Satisfaction that she wanted him so much she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. Anger and possessiveness and jealousy that she’d wanted to punish him with Matias.
‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ she went on, as if once she’d decided to talk, she couldn’t stop. ‘The betrothal ball was the next day and you’d stopped turning up to our meetings. And I didn’t know why. And I—’
‘You know why,’ he interrupted. ‘I stopped turning up because every night was a constant battle against the urge to touch you. And I was losing.’
She stood so very still, tense in every line. Her breathing was audible and fast, though he could also hear her trying to control it. ‘You were losing?’
He stared at her straight back, at the soft vulnerability of her nape left bare by the ornate curls her black hair had been arranged in.
She had been so sheltered, so innocent. She’d had no idea about sexual chemistry or desire, and he hadn’t wanted her to have to deal with his. What he’d felt for her was so wrong and the only thing he could do about it was to take himself out of her vicinity.
So that’s what he’d done.
‘Yes.’ Telling her this was a mistake, but she’d given him a little piece of truth just before and it didn’t seem fair not to reciprocate. ‘I wanted you more than I’d wanted anything in my entire life. But you were meant for Matias and so I stopped coming. It was easier.’
There was complete silence in the room broken only by the crackle of the fire in the grate.
He wanted to touch her so badly his chest ached.
She turned, her pale face flushed, a blue flame burning in her eyes.
Dios, but she was beautiful when she wasn’t the good, quiet, delicate Crown Princess that Matias had found so dull, when she was the hot, passionate woman. The woman who wanted him every bit as badly as he wanted her.
