“Madre de Dios…” Rico hissed, studying her with incandescent golden eyes from the vantage point of the bed. “What the hell are you playing at?”
“Please return my clothing to me.” She lowered her eyes and studied her raised knees, embarrassment and an unfamiliar self-loathing assailing her. But still she could see that strong-boned, hard face, brought alive by those astonishingly passionate eyes of his, the lithe, powerful symmetry of his bronzed, beautifully masculine body. Her nails dug into her skin in angry, fearful confusion as she fought to wipe out that unbelievably intense and detailed image.
Her jacket and her bra landed in a heap beside her bare toes. She skidded upright, twisting away from him, and dug her arms shakily into the sleeves of the jacket, ignoring the bra because he was watching her. She hadn’t even noticed that he had removed both articles while she had been in his arms. It was a small point but somehow it underlined just how far her control and awareness had slipped and emphasised how complete had been his.
Smooth bastard, she reflected shakily, deciding that you couldn’t know where you were with a guy possessed of that variety of sexual expertise. At least with the ones who grabbed and clutched you got fair warning of their intentions.
“You are behaving as though I attacked you,” he grated in a furious undertone.
“You started it, I finished it. Let’s leave it there,” she muttered unsteadily, with her back still cravenly turned to him.
“I did not do anything—’ ” That I didn’t encourage you to do,” Bella completed in a grudging interruption.
“I know.”
There was a smouldering silence.
“If you acknowledge that—’ and his accented drawl told her just how astonished he was that she had made that acknowledgement ‘—then why?”
“My hormones are out of sync … or something.”
“Qud dices…?” Now he sounded slightly dazed.
Bella forced herself to turn around. It took courage.
“It’s this situation … the proximity, the misleading intimacy, the tension we are both under,” she offered.
“I’m sorry I let it go so far but neither one of us can want to wake up in the morning trapped with a sleazy one-night stand we can’t escape from—’ ‘ ” Sleazy”?” he echoed in disbelief.
“Listen, I am the girl whom just a few hours ago you believed to be shacked up with an old guy of seventy.” Having given the gentle reminder, Bella tilted her chin. “And sex without emotional involvement or commitment is sleazy in my book. I don’t know you well enough to say whether or not it wOuld be in yours. But, if you’re like most of the men I meet, you don’t intellectualise much over taking sex where it’s offered. You just do it and you don’t have the sensitivity to feel bad about it.”
She gave a dismissive little shrug, the absorbing focus of his stunned scrutiny.
“But that’s OK. I don’t judge men on that. That’s just the way nature programmed you to behave. Survival of the species and all that.”
His brilliant dark eyes shimmered, his facial muscles stiff with sudden hauteur, a faint but perceptible flush overlying his hard cheekbones.
“I did not emerge from the primordial soup within recent memory,” he gritted from between even white teeth.
“Only you don’t think on your feet when you’re in bed with a half-naked woman and feeling randy—’ ” I refuse to believe I am hearing this! “
Bella lifted his jacket, which he had laid across the chair, and began to empty the pockets.
“What are you doing?” he murmured in a seriously taut tone, his accent thick.
“I’m going to use your jacket as a blanket for an hour and then maybe, when you’ve managed to drop off, I can take up the door-bashing again.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Come back to bed. I will not lay a finger on you,” he swore icily.
“It’s not a very good idea for us to share that bed right now, Rico.
Take it from me,” Bella muttered feelingly, ‘it would just be asking for trouble.”
“If you are determined to treat me like some sort of lech—’ She cleared her throat awkwardly and mumbled,
“No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m simply trying to be sensible—’ ” Trust me! ” he bit out, with audible difficulty, anger and a whole host of other emotions she didn’t recognise fracturing his diction.
“I’d like to … I’d really like to, but I don’t trust me either,” she admitted in a stifled confession which she felt that, in all fairness, she owed him.
“You don’t trust…? Ah.” A faint purr of complacency softened his drawl.
“I thought you didn’t go for dark men?”
“There’s an exception to every rule … but maybe Dracula could start looking appealing in this setup.”
He sighed.
“I have never been so tired in my life. Come back to bed.
I promise you . you will be safe as a nun handcuffed to a priest in captivity. “
Bella sent him a dubious glance. He had slumped back dowr again, black lashes fanned down on his cheekbones. Exhaustion emanated from every line of his long, muscular body.
“Go to sleep, Rico,” she whispered, a strange little arrow of tenderness piercing her.
“Just go to sleep.”
“I can’t leave you on the floor…” he mumbled thickly. “I’ve slept on a lot of floors in my time.” She sighed, thinking that no two individuals could have been more different.
She sat on the chair, wrapped in his jacket, watching him sleep. The exception t the rule, she reflected tautly. Well, you’ve been well and truly rocked off your smug perch this time, Bella.
She was locked in a container with the only male who had ever managed to penetrate her physical and mental de fences That scared her; that really did scare her.
Men flocked to Bella like bees round a honey pot but nine out of ten invariably wanted what she didn’t want to give. Being a sex object was no compliment. Either she dated for fun and friendship or she quite cheerfully chose and dated a man who impressed her as having the kind of qualities she would like to find in a husband. There was nothing in between for Bella—no infatuations, no affairs no regrets. She was determined not to give her heart unless she felt safe and secure.
And until now passion had left her alone and untouched by any inconvenient cravings. Saying no when lovemaking went beyond a certain boundary had never been a problem for her, and she had always sensibly ensured that she did not give any man the ammunition to accuse her of being a tease. Bella believed in being honest and fair with the opposite sex. It had not crossed her mind that some day a man might touch her and with every fibre of her being she might crave the passion he inspired inside her, and crave it with such intensity that she almost broke the rules she had lived by for so long.
Rico da Silva had taught her differently. He had shattered her control as easily as a child smashed an egg and with a similar lack of care or regard for the consequences. And did she blame him for that? Neither of them might emerge from this container alive, she thought, with a shiver of fear. When two people were attracted to each other and forced into such intimacy the act of sex might seem a very small thing to share in comparison to that hard reality. But Bella was too conscious of her own vulnerability—this strange, new and scary vulnerability that she was feeling. Rico da Silva disturbed her more than any other male she had ever met. He was clever; he was strong; he was unexpectedly candid about his own emotions. And he also attracted her more violently than she had ever believed possible.
In the dim light she looked at him lying in the bed, and knew that lying in that bed with him would result in a conflagration of passion which she would find very difficult to handle. Yet she also knew that on some dark, deep level inside herself, unexplored until this moment, she wanted that passion very, very badly.
Why? Their situation, as she had told him? No, it was something more than that. He was so different from her. In every way. And that fact in itself fascinated her. Nowhere did they share anything in common—background, nationality, status, education, income, outlook.
Rico would have been quite capable of making love to her and forgetting her existence one second after he’d achieved the satisfaction of physical release. Rico was ruthless, single-minded, a sexual predator in this particular fight corner . Rico wouldn’t have felt awkward over the breakfast-table. On his scale it would have been a minor event, unimportant when set against survival.
But Bella was not half as tough on the inside as she liked to pretend on the outside. Her outer shell of careless insouciance had been formed in the hard school of her childhood with the slow, painful acceptance that her father didn’t give a damn about her, and that her mother dragged her about in her wake not out of choice but out of necessity, because there was nobody else to take responsibility. And when one day the possession of that child, now grown to an awkward thirteen-year-old threatened to come between Cleo and her latest man Cleo had dumped her on her grandfather, who hadn’t even known of her existence.
Bella had learnt not to let people get too close. She had learnt to protect her inner self from invasion. On the surface she was open, but inside herself she knew she told nobody anything which mattered.