The Real Romero(65)

                ‘You should stop looking at me like that,’ Lucas said huskily and Milly half-closed her eyes.

                ‘Like what?’ she breathed.

                ‘Boring girl-next-door types don’t look at men the way you’re looking at me...’

                Milly reached out and tentatively touched his cheek, and was blown away when she realised that that was what she had been longing to do since...for ever. She let her hand linger there, feeling the roughened stubble on his chin, while her heart carried on beating like a sledgehammer inside her.

                ‘No,’ Lucas said shakily. ‘Come on. Carlos is waiting.’

                And he meant it. However tempting she might be, he wasn’t going to make love to her. No way. The prospect enticed and, yes, frightened him in equal measure. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It disturbed and unsteadied him. It smacked of a loss of control.

                ‘I’m going to put you to bed as soon as we’re back.’ He was dismayed when she nodded and nestled against his arm. She smelled floral, clean, young.

                ‘So, tell me what vices you’re going to give me,’ Milly encouraged, at once sleepy and yet never so wide awake. She felt alive to everything: to the scent of him; to the rough feel of the linen jacket he had flung on before leaving the house; to the way his chest rose and fell as he breathed. ‘I’ve always thought it must be nice to have a few vices.’

                Lucas wasn’t doing much thinking at all. He cleared his throat, shifted, failed to budge her...knew that he didn’t want to anyway, not really. The key thing was that he wasn’t going to make a move on her.

                ‘Not a cry I’ve often heard,’ he remarked drily.

                ‘I guess you heard what I was telling your mother about Robbie...having a crush on him. He was so cool when he was young.’

                ‘And now less so,’ Lucas reminded her shortly. ‘A loser, in fact.’

                ‘I bet you think that everyone’s a loser compared to you,’ Milly murmured, wriggling so that she could tilt her head and look him directly in the eye.

                Her breath caught in her throat and her racing heart slowed, along with time, which seemed to stand still altogether.

                Her kiss took him by surprise, reaching up on tiptoe as she did, and it was so sweetly, disarmingly innocent; the gentle, tentative probing of her cool tongue a breathless, feathery flutter against his lips..

                He shuddered and stifled a groan. ‘This isn’t part of the deal,’ he muttered unsteadily.

                ‘I know. But remember those vices I wished I had? One of them was to just...let go, not take guys so seriously...’ She traced the outline of his jaw, could sense him wanting more against his will and that filled her with a heady sense of power. When he pressed a button so that opaque glass separated them from Carlos, she smiled.

                So the big break-up was going to start tomorrow. And then, in a heartbeat, she would be back in London, back to reality... But, right now, this was her reality and why shouldn’t she grab it with both hands? If he pushed her away and stormed off in revulsion, then so be it, but deep inside she sensed that he wouldn’t do that.

                ‘You see them and you what...? Want to marry them?’

                ‘I see them and I start wondering how they would fit in on a long-term basis.’ Which was pretty badly in every case thus far, few though those cases had been. ‘Sort of, “hi, how are you? What are your thoughts on big families...?”’ She felt him shudder and laughed. ‘I know. You’re horrified. I bet you’d run a mile if a woman asked you a question like that. I mean, you gave your heart away and you got burned, right? So you’re not up to giving it away again.’