‘I wouldn’t say I’m phobic about the matter,’ Rafael inserted. ‘Why are you looking so worried? Being careful is part of my nature.’
‘Am I looking worried?’ Amy laughed blithely. ‘Does that sound like a worried laugh to you?’ There, that was more like it! She was here, they had just made fabulous love and every part of her just wanted to carry on enjoying the man next to her while she could.#p#分页标题#e#
‘Did I hurt you?’
‘Hurt me? How?’
‘By wanting to be sure that contraception was in place.’
‘No. No, you didn’t. And why should you have?’ Amy looked at him seriously. ‘I would be worried sick if we had had sex without protection. Men always seem to think that they’re the ones who would be put out if a woman they slept with became pregnant. They never stop to think that the woman would probably be in a much more difficult situation! Do you ask all the women you sleep with if they’re on the pill?’
‘No, because I generally take the matter in hand myself.’ Rafael was beginning to wonder how the conversation had managed to become so prolonged. As always, she was running away with it and somehow dragging him behind her in her wake.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think I mean?’ He leant forward to kiss her mouth and she wriggled away so that she could give him a stern look.
‘Okay. I get the picture. But why are you so afraid of commitment?’
Rafael groaned. ‘Are we going to spend the rest of the night talking?’ he asked. ‘Because I can think of better things to do.’ He gave her a hot, brooding look that sent her pulses racing.
‘Like what?’ Amy asked innocently, moving fractionally closer to him so that she could rub her body against his.
‘I think you know…’
She did and this time they made love languorously, exploring each other’s bodies as the hands on the clock ticked past, rolling night into day and finally, completely sated, they fell asleep wrapped around each other.
Amy woke to find an empty space where Rafael should have been. Immediately she thought about their commitment conversation, which had been abandoned in the haze of making love. She wondered whether he had got cold feet and disappeared back to the safety of his gardener’s cottage.
But he hadn’t.
He strolled in, wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and carrying a tray on which were bagels, jams and cups of frothy cappuccino that he had bought from the nearest café.
‘You should have woken me up!’ Amy squirmed into a sitting position and Rafael watched as her very delectable breasts peeped over the top of the duvet cover. On cue, he hardened in immediate response.
‘You looked too peaceful.’ He deposited the tray on the bed next to her and sat down. ‘Now, before we eat anything…’He snapped open the lid of the small glass jar of jam and dipped his finger in, then he proceeded to coat her nipples with jam while Amy giggled, only catching her breath as he began to suck off the sticky, sweet stuff. He did a very thorough job, licking until her nipples were shiny and everywhere inside her was melting and wanting more of the same attention.
‘There,’ Rafael said. Then he laughed when she adopted a pleading voice and said, with wrenching femininity, ‘Please, sir, can I have some more…?’
‘I think that can be arranged in a minute. For now. Coffee. Bagels. We New Yorkans are very good at bagels. We make the best in the world.’ He tore off a piece and fed it to her. This felt like a holiday to him. He had made a couple of work-related calls on the way to the corner shop and had checked his emails first thing before she had awakened, but aside from that work had disappeared off the radar. And here he was, feeding bread to a woman in what any impartial outsider might have labelled a romantic gesture. Except romance had never been his thing. A night spent with a woman would always involve him leaving at the crack of dawn for work, after bestowing the perfunctory kiss on the cheek to his sleeping partner, if indeed she was still asleep. Usually, like him, she would have been up and raring to go as well. And if it had been a weekend, he might have got up at a more leisurely time, but the new day would have seen him in front of the newspaper, checking on the stock markets, having grabbed a quick bite with his partner. And the quick bite would never have been in bed!#p#分页标题#e#
‘Oh, any old good bread shop can sell a bagel that’s not half bad,’ Amy teased, personally thinking that she had yet to taste anything quite so delicious in her life, ‘and any old person can go along and buy it. The test of the real man is whether he can rustle one up himself!’