The Secret Spanish Love-Child (12 page)

‘Are you telling me that erecting a foot high barrier of cushions is the behaviour of a sane woman?’

‘I just thought,’ Alex replied grittily, ‘that it would be helpful…’

‘Why? I’ve told you I’m not going to ravish you. Besides, it’s not as though we haven’t shared a bed in the past.’

‘That was different!’

Gabriel was finding that hard to concede, considering that his body was reacting in exactly the same way as it had done years ago.

‘I want those cushions back!’ Alex was almost weeping from sheer frustration.

‘Okay.’ Gabriel gave an elaborate sigh and began to slide out of the bed, which elicited just the response he had predicted. A high squeak of alarm as soon as she realised that he was completely naked.

‘Forget it!’

‘Sure?’ He turned to look at her over his shoulder, his face a study in earnestness. She could have thrown her pillow at him. Instead, she made a low, inarticulate sound under her breath and he subsided back into the bed.

‘It’s stupid,’ he said in a seductively unthreatening tone, ‘to make such a big deal about this…’ In the process of getting
back under the covers, he had managed to gain a few inches closer to her. She smelled good. Clean and fresh and soapy. She never had liked perfume of any sort.

Alex looked at him suspiciously. It was hard to read the expression on his face because of the darkness but she didn’t trust him an inch and she didn’t want to. It was hitting her hard that she couldn’t
afford
to trust him. Her anger and her wariness and her distrust were the only weapons she had against the power of his personality. If she abandoned those, where would she be? She shivered whenever he was around and the sound of his voice was enough to induce a maddening meltdown of her nervous system. At least when she was spitting fire, she was keeping him—and
herself
—at bay.

‘And, while I’m about it…’ He lowered his voice a couple of notches and reached out to idly play with her splayed fingers. Alex was barely aware of the gesture. She was mesmerised by the honeyed gentleness of his voice. The silvery moon was touching light fingers across his face and the shadows and angles heightened the beauty that had always had her in thrall. ‘You’re right.’

‘I am? Right about what?’ Her voice sounded pathetically feeble. And he was still doing that playing thing with her fingers although she pretended not to notice because she liked it. It was dangerous but she liked it.

‘Maybe I should have told my parents the whole unvarnished truth. Told them what you want and that they would have no choice but to accept it, but I was…’ for a minute, he almost used the word
weak
but that would have been going too far;
weak
was a word that could not possibly be associated with him and she would never have fallen for that ‘…concerned about their mental welfare. Coping with the wedding being called off and then plunged into what they might have considered an unbearably stressful situation…’

‘Understood.’

‘You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that…’

‘You are?’

‘Of course I am. I can’t think of anything worse than fighting with you.’

Alex had no idea how he had managed to get so close to her. She felt the heat from his body and, when he shifted, the brush of his thigh against hers. Her head was telling her to briskly wind the conversation up but, instead, with a frightening recklessness, she angled her own leg and the shock of nudging him and knowing the extent of his arousal was like being hit with a power surge of live electricity.

Gabriel made no effort to move. Instead, he smiled and murmured ruefully, ‘Just ignore me.’ By which he meant
just ignore my unruly body and the fact that I’m unbelievably hot for you
. How likely was it that she was going to do that? When she had pressed herself closer to him? When she was staring at him with hot, dark eyes and those slightly parted lips that were begging to be thoroughly kissed?

The ice queen with her issues about their past and her high moral principles about their future was melting fast but Gabriel wasn’t going to be the one to make the first move.

But he
did
wonder what he would do if she took him at his word, rolled over to her side and fell asleep. He had discovered a streak of stubbornness in her that had not been apparent the first time round, when she had been gloriously his for the taking.

The prospect of a cold shower was not pleasant.

‘And, while I’m in the mood for wholesale contrition,’ he continued in a voice that whispered over her like a caress, ‘I think it’s important to know that I would have stood by you had I known about the pregnancy…’ Gabriel realised that he
would
have and they would have married and there would have been none of this ongoing nonsense about her asserting
her independence and not wanting to sacrifice her life for the sake of their child. Five years ago, there was no way that she would have turned down an offer of marriage. He could remember her youthful, adoring enthusiasm for him as though it was yesterday.

‘It would never have worked in a million years,’ Alex mumbled, thrillingly tuned in to his proximity even though she was fully aware of the health hazard it presented. ‘Look at Cristobel.’

‘Cristobel?’ Gabriel was beginning to wonder how he could ever have conceived of marrying Cristobel. She seemed like a distant figure belonging to a different and somehow irrelevant life. Still, he didn’t care for her name cropping up in conversation.

‘You would always have wanted someone who fitted the role.’ Alex felt a stab of self-pity and her eyes blurred. ‘I was your time out and you would have gone mad if you’d ended up stuck with me for the rest of your life.’

‘You’re being ridiculous. And don’t put yourself down like that. That
time out
, as you call it…’ this whole confidence exchanging thing was crazy…but still ‘…it felt good.’

‘I’m just being truthful. But it’s sweet of you to say it anyway…’

‘
Sweet?
Since when have I ever been described as
sweet
?’

There was such genuine outrage in his voice that Alex’s lips twitched and she eventually laughed.

‘I would have wanted to have seen you growing inch by inch with my baby inside you,’ Gabriel told her huskily. ‘I would have wanted to have seen the changes in you…’

With that powerful admission, Alex felt that
danger
alert sign flashing frantically in her head go completely off the scales and she drew in a trembling breath.

‘You wouldn’t have liked them,’ she whispered, assuming that if there was one thing certain to put him off, it would be the thought of her getting fatter and fatter by the day until she resembled a beached whale.

‘Did your breasts get bigger?’

Alex stifled a choking gasp. She had edged her leg back but just a couple of centimetres and she knew that he would be hard as steel against her and the thought was an impossible turn on.

‘We…you…shouldn’t be saying stuff like that…’

‘Why not? I wasn’t there with you at the time. It’s only natural that I would be curious about what I missed.’

He made it sound so reasonable but there was nothing reasonable about the way her body was on fire.

‘So…’ he prompted, enjoying the exquisite physical ache of his throbbing erection and his erotic fantasies of her ripe, pregnant body. ‘Did they?’

‘Of course they did,’ Alex mumbled.

‘I have an image in my head…’

Alex moaned softly and her eyelids fluttered.

‘Did you say something?’ Gabriel enquired in a concerned voice.

‘It’s time for us to get some sleep. This arrangement…it’s just not going to work…’

Gabriel ignored that half-hearted protest. ‘Not that your breasts aren’t exquisite the size they are now. Small but beautifully formed.’

‘Please don’t…’

‘Don’t what…? Turn you on…? Because you
are
turned on, aren’t you? I know I am…but I also know that I gave you my word that I wouldn’t touch you and I’m a man of my word…So, if you want to be touched, then you just have to reach out…’

A flare of wicked, reckless craving rushed through her body like a tidal wave, obliterating everything in its destructive path. Common sense, reason, bitterness, resentment…all the things she had been holding on to caved in like a house of cards.

Well, why not? she thought with sudden, furious intensity. She hadn’t been touched for such a long time. No one since Gabriel. She hadn’t even been
attracted
to anyone since him. So what if she had one night of pleasure? It wasn’t going to commit her to an ongoing relationship with him. Things would stand just as they had before! Except she might have got this terrible thing out of her system. In fact, she
would have got
this terrible thing, this awful attraction, out of her system and she would feel a lot more comfortable around him instead of acting like a cat on a hot tin roof every time he came within two metres of her.

‘Just this one time…’ she murmured slowly. ‘Just tonight…’

‘One night of wild passion…’

Alex released a long sigh of relief that they were of the same mind. She missed his grim smile as she obeyed him and reached out to splay her fingers across his flat, hard stomach. She could no longer contain the groan that escaped her lips or the way her hips jerked forward instinctively.

‘I’m not rushing this…’ Gabriel told her thickly, pulling her towards him and grinding provocatively against her so that she couldn’t help but feel the abrasive rub of his hardness against the soft cotton of her loose pyjama shorts.

He heaved his big body up and then lowered his head, plundering her soft mouth with his lips, liking the way she moaned and sighed as he continued to kiss her. He had the crazy feeling that he had spent the past five years starved of
significant sex which, he told himself, had to be a load of rubbish because he hadn’t been short of beautiful women in the interim.

He curled his fingers into her short hair and tilted her head so that he could trace a hot trail along her slender neck with his mouth. He hadn’t forgotten what she liked, what turned her on. She was sensitive behind her ear and just there, along her shoulder blades…

He smiled with satisfaction at her little whimpers of pleasure as he retraced that familiar territory.

‘You feel exactly the same as they you…’

‘You surely can’t remember what I
felt like
,’ Alex protested, her eyes fluttering open to stare at him with drowsy heat.

‘You’d be surprised what I remember about you,’ Gabriel told her truthfully. ‘For instance, I seem to remember that you like me paying a lot of attention to your breasts…’ He shot her a wolfish smile as she blushingly looked away. ‘Believe me when I tell you it was never any hardship…’ He pushed up her vest to expose her body and had to close his eyes briefly to control the shudder of rapturous pleasure that slammed into him.

Her breathing was rapid and shallow and her skin was dewy moist and flushed. The feel of her long body was silky smooth under his fingers. He wanted to turn the lights on so that he could stare at her and fill his eyes with the sight of her body. He didn’t. He figured that that would be one sure-fire way of ruining the atmosphere and that was the very last thing he wanted to do.

‘I think your breasts are a little bigger, actually.’ He cupped them expertly and then rolled his thumbs over her swollen, tender nipples. ‘I wonder if they taste the same…’

The verbal foreplay was driving Alex crazy. She moaned softly and felt wild and wanton as she arched upwards, inviting
him to satisfy his question. He had always made her feel wild and wanton. He had taken her virginity and taught her how to be proud of her passion. It was all coming back now and she could indulge herself because it was going to be just for one night. He had promised and somehow that had eradicated all sense of wrongdoing.

‘Would you like me to taste them…?’ Gabriel circled one pouting disc with his finger and smiled with hungry satisfaction when she ordered him to stop teasing her. ‘But I
like
teasing you and you haven’t answered my question…’

‘Yes! Please…’

She gasped with pleasure as his mouth found her nipple and he sucked hard, tugging it into his mouth and caressing it roughly with his tongue until she was squirming and writhing. She was making up for years of celibacy but she didn’t want to hurry the pace. She didn’t want it to be over. But the way he was taking his time, moving from one thoroughly ravished nipple to the other, was driving her out of her mind. Did he know how much he was turning her on? She opened her eyes and looked at him and a slow smile curled his beautiful mouth.

She ran her fingers lightly along his broad shoulders, like a blind person tracing patterns of Braille, enjoying the feel of his defined muscle.

He, in turn, parted her legs with one hand and, still looking down intently at her flushed, averted face, slowly slid his finger to explore her ripe wetness, testimony to her arousal. He watched her moan and toss under his exploratory touch, as he rubbed her clitoris with the flat of his fingers and felt it softly throb under his touch.

When her movements became more uncontrolled, he regretfully cupped her firmly, bringing her down before she could tip over the edge.

There was the whole night to play with, though…She badly wanted to touch him. He knew that. And she would. In due course.

Right now…He lowered his big body and his mouth replaced his fingers as he stroked that sensitive bud with his tongue, rasping it over and over and pinning her hand down when she would have tugged him away.

‘No…Gabriel…
stop
or I won’t be able to control myself…’

Gabriel looked up just long enough to say, ‘I don’t want you to, my darling. We’re in no rush and I want you to climax beneath me…’

A shudder of uncontrolled pleasure, yearning and desire rammed into her heated body and she let herself go, her body taut and then quivering as she was rocked by an orgasm that seemed to last for ever.

Gabriel waited for her to surface and then he kissed her tenderly on her lips and stroked her cheek with one finger.