Exotic Affairs(104)

Suddenly he stopped dead, tightened his grip on her hand and turned to walk her inside the foyer to what turned out to be a small hotel.

‘Luiz—no!’ she managed to gasp out at last, when the disturbing suspicion of what he was intending began to take horrifying shape in her head.

He completely ignored her. It was as if the devil was driving him. His face was taut, his jaw set, and she felt her cheeks suffuse with hot self-conscious colour as he grimly began negotiating the price of the hotel’s best suite—on an hourly basis.

It was awful, the most embarrassing situation she had ever experienced in her life! The concierge kept on sending her brief but knowing little glances, and she didn’t know where to put herself as Luiz placed a wad of notes on the desk, scrawled his signature in the register, then accepted the key the concierge was holding out to him before turning towards the stairs.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this!’ Caroline choked out as he began striding upwards, pulling her with him.

He didn’t even bother to answer, his expression so fierce that she began to quail inside her shoes as he led her along a narrow landing then unlocked a door and swung her inside.

The hotel was small and very simple; the room—darkened by closed shutters over the window—was nothing more than a bed, a table and a couple of chairs set on floorboards, and there was no air conditioning to help take away the suffocating heat. But by the time he had closed the door behind them she couldn’t have cared less what the room was like. She was out of breath, feeling a nerve-tingling excitement that didn’t go down well with how she knew she should be feeling in a situation like this!

‘What the hell has got into you?’ she demanded, managing to get her hand free at last.

Again he didn’t answer, but then he didn’t really need to, because she knew what had got into him. In fact it was written all over his hard-boned, muscle-locked face!

With a growing sense of awareness she stepped warily away from him, only to watch in a kind of wide-eyed fascination as he shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it aside, then began pulling his shirt off over his head.

The two items landed on a chair. His bronzed torso expanded, then relaxed, as if removing those garments had been a matter of life or death.

Fire and ice, she found herself likening, as she waited breathlessly to discover what was going to come next. The fire was in his passion, the ice the medium he used to keep the other suppressed. It was a dynamic combination, one that set some secret engine she hadn’t known she possessed humming throughout her entire system. She had never experienced anything like it. But it held her completely captivated as she watched the passion melt its way through the ice until all that was left was a blistering intent that began scorching her flesh.

‘Luiz, this isn’t—’ Funny, she had been going to say, but he reached for her, caught her wrists and used them to draw her body against him, then fed them around his neck.

Burning eyes became hidden beneath sweeping lashes as he lowered his gaze to where his fingers began to undo the tiny buttons down the front of her top.

It was all so intense, so very macho that she didn’t know whether she was feeling fiercely excited by it or just plain scared. But she didn’t attempt to get away from him—which was an answer, she supposed. And as his hands brushed the top aside, to reveal the flimsy thin silk bra beneath, her spine arched slightly in feline invitation for him to touch what he had uncovered. Yet when he did touch her he did it in a way that completely snagged her breath. Because it was not the sensually possessive caress she had been expecting. His hands simply needed to touch her like this.

‘Why?’ she whispered. She just didn’t understand this man one iota. He could be so cold, so utterly ruthless with his demands. But this was different. This was—compulsion.

‘I need you,’ was all he said. Then his mouth was crushing hers apart, and nothing else seemed to matter after that. Their clothes disappeared in hurried succession, their flesh coming together in an intoxicating mix of hunger, heat and sweat.

The bed waited, and as they folded down onto its soft mattress the smell of fleshly starched linen came wafting cleanly round them. It was a smell that seemed to make it all perfect, somehow, though Caroline didn’t know why it should.

As time made deep and sensual inroads into the afternoon, without them being aware of it passing, they forget where they were supposed to be going—or maybe they chose to forget. It didn’t seem to matter. It was hot and it was steamy and it was a much more appealing journey, one that explored the senses to the exclusion of none, allowed no room for inhibition. It pretended that this was good and right and absolutely the only thing in the world either of them should be doing.