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‘I’m a person, not a something!’ Suzy hissed censoriously. ‘I already agreed that I would try to model for you. At no cost! There was no need for you to go behind my back and invest in the pub!’
‘Set aside my financial investment in your father’s business,’ Ruy advised. ‘It is nothing to do with you, except insofar as it means that you can now stop worrying about your father’s security.’
In a passion of confusion and incredulity, Suzy folded her arms and spun away from him. ‘Nothing will convince me that you had a sincere interest in buying a share of the pub!’ she shot at him.
Ruy shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘I’m not trying to convince you. I don’t have to justify what I’ve done, but I would make the point that your father is very happy with his side of the bargain and even more relieved to know that Percy is out of both your lives.’
Suzy’s slender hands knotted into fists. ‘Damn you!’ she snapped at him, because every time she thought she had him on a weak spot he leapt away and put her there instead. ‘You drive me insane!’
‘And your passion lights me up,’ Ruy confided in a raw undertone, needing to touch her almost as badly as he needed to paint her, flexing his long fingers and coiling them up again, rigid with the tension of unsated arousal.
Never before had he been with such an emotional woman. He had learned to repress his own emotions. He slept with women who had no drama to irritate him and he could not begin to explain or understand what it was about Suzy’s volatility that made her so very desirable. That trait, that essential fire in her, should have been a turn-off and yet, it wasn’t. She was not his type, categorically not his type, but when she went toe to toe with him, fists knotted, eyes shimmering in challenge like polished malachite, pink pouty lips parted to display little pearl-like teeth, it turned him on so hard and fast that the zip of his jeans bit a pattern into his throbbing flesh.
‘Your control, your coldness, has the opposite effect on me,’ Suzy confided tautly. ‘It makes me want to shake you up.’
‘Success...major success on that score,’ Ruy purred with an emphasis that seemed to glide down her rigid spine like caressing fingers.
Suzy’s knees wobbled a little. ‘We really are oil and water,’ she muttered uneasily.
‘No, we’re more like a conflagration,’ Ruy husked, stalking closer, suddenly seeming to snatch all the oxygen out of the air she needed to breathe. ‘And it’s a fire I don’t want to put out because, like any man, I love the burn, querida.’
‘I’m shouting at you. You can’t change the subject in the middle of an argument,’ Suzy told him loftily.
‘That’s the look I want when you lift your chin...just like that.’ Ruy angled up her chin with a fingertip, let it slide back down the cord of her neck to her clavicle, where it lingered. ‘And you look at me like you’re a queen and I’m a filthy peasant. No woman has ever looked at me like that.’
‘You have the most wildly extravagant imagination,’ Suzy remarked unevenly, stepping back a few inches, the skin of her neck tingling, tenderly aware of that light touch, so very different from Percy’s harsh, careless grip on her arm, her elbow or her shoulder. Her shoulders met with the wall. She had honestly believed that Percy didn’t know his own strength. How naïve had she been in believing that that occasional roughness was simply masculine, careless and unintentional?
Her gaze locked to Ruy’s lean dark features and something sweet and yet almost painful clenched low in her pelvis and for the first time she recognised what was happening to her body. She regretted that she had got halfway through her twenty-second year before experiencing normal sexual attraction. The race of her pulse, the hammer of her heart, the sudden tightening of her nipples as well as the dryness of her mouth held her fast because she had never felt anything that powerful before and she was remembering that kiss, that brief but glorious adrenalin rush.
Dark golden eyes welded to hers, Ruy stalked slowly closer and her heart raced so fast it felt as though it were thumping at the foot of her throat. He reached for her and if he hadn’t reached for her she reckoned that she would have shamelessly grabbed him.
‘You want this?’ Ruy breathed in a driven undertone, easing her closer, one hand braced on her hip, the other braced against the wall behind her.
‘I want...you,’ she heard herself say and she didn’t know where the words came from, only that it was a truth so new to her that she had to say it, had to share it.
‘Gracias a Dios,’Ruy groaned above her head, crushing her mouth under his with an urgency that shook her to her very depths. His mouth contrived to communicate everything she didn’t have the words to express and the explosive effect of his hunger meeting hers set her on fire.
It took a while in that passionate exchange of kisses for Suzy to notice that he was extracting her from her sweater and for a split second she stilled, checking with herself that that was all right. And because it was Ruy, because she was so worked up that she was wound up tighter than a spring, it was fine. She was a big girl now, she reminded herself abstractedly, not a teenager keeping a handsy first boyfriend within acceptable limits. Yes, she could take her clothes off now, of course she could.
‘Of course, you would have to have the boots on.’ Ruy sighed, lifting her up into his arms and bringing her down onto the side of the bed, crouching down lithely at her feet to remove her boots. ‘I love these boots. You’re going to wear them in the studio for me when you pose—’
‘Am I?’ Amusement softened Suzy’s gaze as she stared down at him, spearing her fingers into his black luxuriant hair, smoothing it back from his brow, admiring the dark slashing brows and the ridiculously long ebony lashes framing his gorgeous eyes. Absently she wondered what she had thought about before she met him.
‘In a wedding dress...but not the one you put on for him,’ he asserted, tossing aside the boots and gently pushing her back to embark on the zip of her jeans.
‘You have the most crazy imagination.’ Suzy sighed.
‘I’m not an imaginative man.’
‘But you’re an artist. You’ve got to be imaginative,’ Suzy told him, sensing that for some reason he was in denial of that reality. ‘I mean, imagining me posing in my boots and a wedding dress...how eccentric is th...that?’ She stammered to a halt as, with one hard yank, he succeeded in tugging the jeans down her long slender legs.
‘But that’s not imagination, that’s the reality of how I saw you in the woods,’ Ruy argued, lifting her dangling legs up onto the divan and coming down beside her. ‘We’re talking too much... I don’t talk in bed—’
‘Tough,’ Suzy whispered, touching a fingertip to his slightly reddened lips. ‘Two people here, two votes, not just one...you just revel in being bossy, Ruy.’
He hauled off his sweater and leant over her, shimmering dark golden eyes alight as flames against his bronzed complexion, the corner of his mouth hinting at a smile. ‘Maybe a little.’
‘I should’ve run like hell when you told me about buying into the pub,’ Suzy remarked with sudden anxiety. ‘Maybe you’re one of those controlling guys, who tries to own a woman.’
