THE VALQUEZ SEDUCTION(27)
She smiled brightly as if he had just explained relativity to her after a painfully slow lesson. ‘Exactly.’
‘But why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why me?’
‘I told you before. I like you.’
‘Even though I’m a morally corrupt layabout?’
She gave a tinkling bell laugh that did serious damage to his resolve to send her on her way as soon as he could. It was a champagne laugh. A bubbly, happy sound that made him think of fun and celebration. Her smile was the same—bright and positive, a smile that in full force made the hot Nevada desert sun look dull.
‘I guess lust doesn’t discriminate, does it?’ she said.
It certainly does not, Luiz thought. If he’d known she was going to be this much trouble he would never have asked her to dance, much less come to her rescue.
Maybe that wasn’t strictly true…
He could have no more left her in that corridor than fly to the moon on a paper aeroplane. Daisy was the sort of girl he instinctively wanted to protect. His brother had done a good job on him. Alejandro was the master at the white knight gig; the way he cosseted his wife Teddy was proof of it. Luiz was happy for his brother finding love. He hadn’t thought it would ever happen. But that didn’t mean he was looking for a similar happy ending. He didn’t do happy endings. He couldn’t rely on them. He was all about living in the moment.
And right now he had a hell of a moment to get through.
Luiz strode over to the window to check if any more press had turned up outside the hotel complex. He could feel Daisy’s clear blue gaze studying him from behind. Never had a woman’s presence disturbed him so much. She was sweet and innocent and yet impossibly sexy, a potent combination he had never encountered before. The taste of her kiss lingered in his mouth like a delectable dessert he hadn’t had enough of. His taste buds were zinging, his lips buzzing, his blood thrumming. Last night had been the first time he had spent the night with a woman without making love to her. The need to do so was still thundering in his body. But it wasn’t just the lust that worried him. The spill-all conversation over breakfast… Why had he done that? What was it about her that made him reveal so much about his past?
‘So, what’s the plan?’ she said in an eager voice. ‘What are we doing today?’
He twitched the curtains back across the window and faced her. ‘How many lovers have you had?’
She momentarily sank her teeth into the pillow of her lower lip. ‘Depends what you mean by lover.’
His brows met over his eyes. ‘Have you had sex?’
‘Technically, yes, but not with a human.’
No wonder her old man didn’t let her out without a SWAT-trained security team, Luiz thought. ‘Want to elaborate?’
Her cheeks were a fiery red but her blue eyes were unapologetic as they held his. ‘A girl has the right to pleasure herself if there’s no one else about. You men do it all the time. It’s perfectly normal. A vibrator is good practice for the real thing…or that’s what I’m hoping.’
Luiz was having trouble keeping his jaw off the floor. ‘Are you saying you’ve never had sex other than with a vibrator?’