Rico rolled over, pinning her body almost protectively beneath his.
She could feel the splintering tension coursing through him and abruptly she closed her arms around him, needing that reassuring contact with every fibre of her being. She felt so small, so frighteningly powerless. They were caught like rats in a trap, wholly at the mercy of their captors.
Her breath rasped in her aching throat as there was another thud, then nothing. The silence dragged past on leaden feet until it seemed to thunder in her straining ears. “He’s gone,” Rico grated.
“How do you know? He could be standing out th-there just waiting for us to make more noise … and then he might come in!” she gasped strickenly.
“I doubt it. I suspect he was only checking on us … but for the moment we keep quiet.”
“Bastard,” Bella mumbled, still shaking like a leaf in a high wind, her face buried in the hollow between his shoulder and his throat.
Her nostrils flared on the warm, musky scent of him, already so reassuringly familiar.
“You imagine you’re coping and then … then they take that away and remind you how it really is!”
“The ransom will be paid, no questions asked—’ ” But maybe the police won’t allow that! ” ” The police are unlikely to be actively involved at this stage. “
“What?” In the darkness her dazed eyes flew wide. Rico shifted and switched on the light where it sat on the chair by the bed.
“My bank will pay up. The police will stand back at this early stage. That is standard procedure. Publicity could be our death warrant. Scared kidnappers get more dangerous…”
Bella met his shimmering gold eyes, absorbed the wry, apologetic curve of his mouth as he released her from his weight and coiled back from her. He had allowed her to believe that the police were out there searching for them because that had appeared to keep up her spirits.
“Oh, God…” she whispered shakily as reality sank in.
“Lo siento, gatita … I’m sorry.”
“I guess if that’s the best approach…”
“At the highest level the police will certainly have been informed of the kidnapping,” Rico asserted.
“But I would imagine that at this point they are merely waiting to see how the situation develops.”
“And if what you euphemistically call ” the situation” develops into tragedy, then they’ll be more actively involved!” Bella could not resist saying.
His jaw-line clenched.
“Don’t talk like that!”
“You want me to maintain a positive outlook when we’re stuck here like sitting ducks inside a metal tomb with some maniac taking pot-shots at us for fun?” A shrill, hysterical edge had entered her voice.
“Every occurrence increases our knowledge of the environment outside,” Rico intoned, staring her down with icy night-dark eyes.
“I beg your pardon?” she said incredulously.
“We’re wasting time and energy with that poker,” he imparted with grim emphasis.
“He would not have fired that gun at this hour of the day had there been the remotest chance of anyone hearing the gunshots.”
“Oh … Rico … that is so comforting to know!” she spat back in helpless disbelief.
“I do not think that our lives are in any immediate danger,” he grated.
“You also thought that our kidnappers might be out of the country!”
“Por Dios … pull yourself together! This far you have acted with commendable courage.”
Bella could feel her control unravelling as fast and as inescapably as a cotton reel of thread thrown down a steep hill.
“Not quite what you expected from me, I gather. Well, I’d appreciate it more if you showed a little human sensitivity, instead of acting like Mr Macho all the time..” even when we’re in the middle of a nightmare! ” Her voice rose steeply on the last words, fractured by the sob choking her throat.
“I don’t think you’d appreciate it if I was sitting here paralysed with fear!”
The sobs she was frantically struggling to suppress overcame her. She bowed her head, ashamed of the weakness, and wrapped her arms round herself. Tears streamed down her cheeks. He touched her damp chin with a not quite steady forefinger and then, with a muttered, vicious imprecation, reached for her, un peeling her arms and hauling her close.
She needed that contact. She needed that warmth. She needed him.
Caught up in the charge of an explosive surge of feeling, she pressed her mouth feverishly to the angular curve of his stub bled jaw-line.
She felt him tense but there was an unstoppable flood of emotion suddenly churning about inside her. Her hands slid up, her fingers shyly splaying across his blunt cheekbones in a wondering caress. As she held him she looked at him with darkened green eyes full of new self-knowledge and a kind of helpless joy that was insanity, but which she couldn’t help. Her feelings were so intense that they consumed her.
“I don’t trust myself this close,” Rico breathed roughly. “Trust your instincts,” she whispered, and she dropped her hands, then hesitated in a momentary agony of uncertainty before her fingers found the buttons on her jacket and began to release them.
“Bella…”
Her pale skin burned under the golden flare of his arrested gaze, but the driving need to give, to share, was far more powerful than the fleeting recall of her own sexual inexperience.
“This is just you and me,” she reasoned in a breath of sound as the jacket slid off her shoulders, her slender form quivering with sudden awareness of her own daring.
“And this is what I want.”
Every poised inch of his lithe, powerful length exuded the raw force of his tension. Bella looked bravely back at him, still clothed, but naked to the world as she had never before allowed herself to be. It was a risk she had to take, a leap of faith, and even though she knew that she might regret her own unquestioning generosity she also knew that she would regret it for the rest of her life if she simply hid behind her own insecurities.
“S(…” He moved with an abruptness then that shattered her—reaching for her, dragging her into his arms, every restraint overpowered by the hunger which blazed in incandescent gold from his fierce gaze.
“No regrets?”
He wanted a passport to freedom before he even touched her. Pain trammelled through her. She might have turned away then, devast/ted by the reality of how little he offered and too proud to take on such terms, but he closed his mouth in devouring passion over hers and the ability to be rational was violently torn from her.
He invaded the moist interior of her mouth, his probing tongue a raw, masculine imitation of an infinitely more intimate penetration. She trembled, every physical sense leaping into automatic response. Control was wrested from her without remorse. He unleashed the turbulent force of his desire on her and she drowned mindlessly in the tidal wave of her own shock. It was no slow, gentle seduction which took account of her innocence.
“You’re a witch, querida…” Rico groaned.
“I am no saint to resist such enticement.”
“Enticement’? Some faint shred of reasoning absorbed the word, shrank from it. But he took her mouth again, made love to it, enveloped her in the staggering surge of her own helpless excitement. He lifted his dark head and she opened her heavy eyes. He had bared her breasts.
The pale mounds rose in shameless supplication to his heated appraisal.
“You are so beautiful.” He cupped her sensitive flesh with firm hands, his smouldering golden scrutiny raking over her as a flush of pink crept up over her cheekbones.
He bent his head. She watched him, shameless in the grip of her own anticipation and yet so afraid that in some sense she might not meet his expectations.
The tip of his tongue skidded down the valley between her breasts before circling the engorged thrust of one pink nipple. She gasped, her lashes sweeping down, her back arching. Thought was suspended.
The erotic tug of his mouth on the sensitised buds was unbearably erotic. Her hands rose of their own volition and speared into his hair, caressing him, holding him to her as the sweet torment of her own arousal plunged her into ever deeper response. In all her life she had never dreamt that such pleasure existed.
She was so hot that she couldn’t stay still. His fingers smoothed over the quivering tautness of her stomach and located the tangle of cuffs at the junction of her thighs. Her whole body jerked, out of control. Her breath rasped dry in her throat, her thighs parting in a spasm of intolerable need. He laughed softly and covered her mouth again, teasing this time, nibbling and tormenting with devastating expertise.
Instinctively she moved against him, her hips rising. He explored the damp, silken warmth at the very heart of her, every expert caress making her sob with the crazed heat of that intimate pleasure. Lost in the depths of an extraordinary passion, she was at the peak of an intense excitement, tortured by the desperate ache of un fulfilment
He shifted over her then, ravishing her swollen lips one more time, and then, abruptly, he drew her up to him with impatient hands and plunged inside her. She hadn’t expected the pain that tore at her as he entered her. Her shocked eyes flew wide and she bit her tongue so hard that she tasted blood in her mouth.
“Madre de Dios!” Shattered golden eyes held hers, and then his teeth clenched as the momentum of his own desire made him drive deeper still, his swollen shaft forging a path through the tender tissue that had sought to deny him. “That hurts!”