The Real Romero(50)
She bit back a stifled gasp as moisture pooled between her legs and a heavy, tingling ache began in her breasts and coursed through her body until she felt hot and uncomfortable in her skin.
It was a physical reaction that was so unexpected and so blindingly powerful that she felt faint. Faint, giddy and slightly sick. She couldn’t remember feeling anything like this when she had been with Robbie. In fact, she couldn’t remember feeling anything like this ever. She was shockingly aware of her own body in a way she never had been before, aware that she wanted it to be touched, wanted the strange tickle between her legs to be alleviated.
She dragged her eyes away from his mesmerising face, mortified at the suspicion that he could see exactly what was going through her head, and even more mortified when she belatedly remembered what he had said about making sure she didn’t start getting ideas.
‘How long before we get, er, to your mother’s house?’ she asked because talking might distract her from what was going on with her body.
A little over an hour. An hour of sitting next to him in the limo, trying hard to rein in her wandering mind. An hour of pretending not to notice the muscled strength of his forearms; the taut pull of his trousers over his powerful thighs; the length of his fingers; the sexiness of his mouth; the way his voice curled around her, tantalising, tempting, as velvety smooth as the finest dark chocolate.
Every confusing sensation racing through her body and running like quicksilver through her head crystallised to demonstrate, conclusively, just how inexperienced she was when it came to the opposite sex. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she couldn’t even rely on good old common sense to point her in the right direction or else she wouldn’t be sitting here, pressed against the car door to create maximum space between them, babbling like the village idiot because it was better than letting any disturbing silences settle between them.
At the end of half an hour she knew more about Madrid than she did about her own village where she had grown up because she had plied him with questions. By the time they were drawing into Salamanca, she could have done a doctorate on the subject.
Not only did his mother have a house in Salamanca but she also had a house in Madrid for those times when she fancied an extended shopping trip to the city, or when she visited friends and wanted somewhere to stay over.
It hadn’t been used in a while because ill health had interrupted her usual routine, she had been told.
‘Relax,’ Lucas told her wryly. She was staring at him, mouth parted on the brink of yet another question. There seemed to be no end to them. He politely refrained from telling her that he had never known any woman to talk as much as she did. ‘You’re not walking into a dragon’s den.’
‘I didn’t think I was,’ Milly lied.
‘Oh, yes, you did. That’s why you haven’t drawn breath since you started asking me to give you a verbal guided tour of Madrid and its surroundings. If we’d been in the car for another hour, you would probably have extended your parameters to the rest of Spain, because you think that talking calms your nerves.’
‘I’m not nervous. We’ve agreed that neither of us has to pretend to be anything other than what we are.’
‘You’re nervous. And you’re the girl who wasn’t nervous when she was plying me with questions about my past. Don’t be.’ He gently tilted her chin away from him, directing her to look through the front window, and her eyes widened at the mansion approaching them. She had barely noticed when the limo had pulled off the main road. ‘We’re here.’
Milly’s mouth dropped open. The low white house with its red roof sprawled gloriously amidst a profusion of shrubs, flowers and trees. The intense blue of the sky picked up the even more intense, vibrant colours of the clambering flowers of every shape and variety, and everything melded harmoniously together into picture-postcard perfection.