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‘I should warn you, Mateo...’
‘Shh.’ Mateo placed a finger over her lips and smiled. ‘Don’t say a word. We’re going to have fun and that’s it. If you want to tie me to the bed posts and have your wicked way, then I’m more than willing to give it a go, but there’ll be no pressure on you to do anything at all you don’t feel comfortable doing.’
‘How do you do that?’ Maude whispered.
‘What?’
‘Make me feel so at ease.’
‘There’s no need to be nervous. What’s happening between us is perfectly natural.’
He led the way this time and she fell into step with him, her hand around his waist, his slung across her shoulders, two people at home with one another, their bodies in sync.
‘Haven’t you ever been here before?’ he asked. ‘By which I mean, in a place where you just can’t fight the pull of sexual attraction?’
‘I...’ Maude thought of Colin and struggled to recall his face. She certainly had never felt this way with him. What she’d felt back then had been gentler and a heck of a lot more polite. This...this...was like being thrown into the eye of a hurricane, catapulted this way and the other, in the grip of something so powerful all you could do was go along for the ride. ‘Not really,’ she admitted.
‘Not even with the university chap you were in love with?’
‘That was ages ago.’ Maude marvelled that he had zeroed in on just what had been going through her head. But somehow admitting that this was a first for her, when she knew that it would hardly be a firstforhim, stopped her from telling him the blunt truth. Instead, she laughed and said wryly, ‘I’m guessing that being overwhelmed by lust isn’t exactly a first for you?’
Why did that hurt?
They were outside his bedroom door.
Mateo paused, hand on the door knob, stilled by her laughing, teasing remark.
Was this just more of the same for him? Mateo had never been a shrinking violet when it came to the opposite sex. He enjoyed women and women enjoyed him. But had he ever been knocked for six like this by any woman? He didn’t think so and he frowned because that made no sense.
In passing, he noted that she hadn’t expanded on the ex from way back when. Had he been her one big love, leaving a scar that no man had ever been able to smooth over? When Mateo thought about that he felt a stab of something, but he’d never been a jealous guy, so surely that couldn’t be it?
This was too much introspection. There was a reason he didn’t go down that road. Nothing good ever came from dwelling on things you couldn’t change or looking for answers where none were to be found. He’d spent a childhood trying to find out why his mother had walked out on him, and of course there’d been no answers to be found. Since then, he’d accepted the futility of a task like that. He’d learned his lessons and that was the important thing.
‘No more talk.’ He purred, pushing open the door and stepping aside for Maude to precede him into the bedroom.
A cool breeze blew through a bank of floor-to-ceiling doors that opened out onto a private black-and-white-tiled patio that housed casual seating. The bedroom was twice the size of hers, and hers was enormous.
She looked around her and he smiled at the direction of her gaze.
‘For when I’ve worked through the night here and couldn’t be bothered to use the main offices downstairs.’
She was looking at an impressive desk that sat in its own sectioned space surrounded by a bookcase to the back and a bank of hand-made teak cabinets to one side.
‘Do you ever stop working?’
Mateo shot her a slashing, sexy smile that turned her legs to jelly and he strolled towards her.
‘You’re about to find out.’ He played with the lobe of her ear, eliciting a sigh of capitulation, before tracing the outline of her mouth with his finger, then his tongue, before picking up kissing where they had left off.
Maude wound her arms around his neck. She was a tall, well-built woman and yet, mysteriously, he made her feel ultra-feminine and protected. His arms were bands of steel. When her hands slid to feel him, softly exploring over his shirt, she felt hard muscle and sinew.
The heat and damp between her legs made her squirm. Maude, who had spent so long single-mindedly pursuing her career, was an innocent when it came to the opposite sex. She’d genuinely had no idea that she could be so overtaken by desire that she could barely keep a thought in her head.
He tilted back her head and trailed hot kisses along her neck, one hand coiled into her hair, the other sliding along her side, dipping into her waist and skimming over her thigh.
They staggered to the king-sized bed and Maude fell back on the softest of silken covers, immediately propping herself up to watch as Mateo reached for a remote, pressed a button and activated the smooth glide of shutters across the open windows, blocking out the light and plunging the room into cosy semi-darkness.
He didn’t head for the bed—not yet. Instead, he stood, his back to the windows, hand on the zipper of his trousers resting there and teasing her so that she wanted to yell at him tohurry up.
