THIS WAS WHAT he had been waiting for, the slow burn until the conflagration, because he knew that it would be a conflagration. She oozed sex appeal without even realising it. And she had come to him. He hadn’t been mistaken about those invisible signals his antennae had been picking up and he marvelled that he had ever doubted himself.
Of course, he would have to make it clear to her that this wasn’t some kind of romance, that whatever they did would be a purely physical animal act. They’d had their window for romance once and she’d put paid to that. Romance was definitely off the cards now.
He smiled slowly, his beautiful, sensuous mouth curving as he lazily ran his eyes over her flushed face, taking in everything from the slight tremor of her hands to the nervous tic in her neck, a beating pulse that was advertising what she wanted as loud and as clear as if it had been written in neon lettering over her head.
Him.
She wanted him.
The wheel had turned full circle, and having walked away from him, she was now walking back.
That tasted good and it would taste even better when he laid down his conditions.
‘Is that so?’ he breathed huskily, his erection threatening to hamper movement.
Sophie didn’t say anything in response to that. She read the satisfaction in his gleaming eyes and a primal lust that was so powerful that it easily swept aside any nagging doubt that she might be embarking on the wrong course of action.
He caught the lapels of his jacket and drew her a few inches towards him. ‘There were less complicated ways of getting my attention, Soph...’ he murmured. ‘A simple I want you would have done the trick.’
The fact that he made no attempt to kiss her or touch her acted as an unbearably powerful aphrodisiac. Her heart was beating so fast that it felt as though it was going to explode and she was melting everywhere. She licked her lips and Javier followed that tiny movement with such intense concentration that it made her blood heat up even further.
‘That would have been...too much,’ she breathed. ‘It was tough enough...’ She gestured down to her lack of outfit and Javier half-smiled, remembering how shy she had once been, despite the fact that she had the face and figure that could turn heads from a mile away.
‘Getting into your skimpy little get-up? Let’s go inside. It’s getting breezier out here.’ He kept his distance but the electricity crackled between them. He wasn’t touching her and he hardly dared because one touch and he would have to have her at once, fast and hard, up against a wall.
He didn’t want that. He wanted slow and leisurely. He wanted to explore every inch of the woman who had escaped him. Only then would he be able to walk away satisfied.
Walking towards the house, he really noticed the signs of disrepair which he had failed to see when he had arrived earlier. He paused and looked critically at the façade and Sophie followed the leisurely and critical inspection, marvelling at the damage that had been done over a handful of years.
She longed to reach out and touch him. She longed to link her fingers through his in the same careless gesture of ownership to which she had once been privy. She reminded herself that times had changed since then. This was something quite, quite different.
‘You’re right,’ Javier said drily, stepping back as she pushed open the front door. ‘The place is falling down.’
‘I know.’ Sophie looked around her, seeing it through his eyes. He was now used to the best that money could buy. The apartment loaned to her was pristine, like something from the centre pages of a house magazine. This house, on the other hand...
They were in a cavernous hall. Javier could see that this would have been an enormous and elegant country estate once upon a time but the paint was peeling, the once ornate ceiling was cracked and he was sure that further exploration would reveal a lot more problems.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said gravely and Sophie looked at him, startled.
‘What for?’
‘You told me that penury was harder for you than it ever had been for me and you were probably right. I knew no better and things could only go up. You knew better and the journey down must have been swift and painful. But...’ he tilted his head to one side and looked at her ‘...you coped.’
‘I didn’t have a choice, did I?’ She suddenly felt shy. Should they be heading up to the bedroom? What was the etiquette for two people who had decided that they are going to sleep together? Not in the ‘clutching one another while stumbling up the stairs’ kind of way, but in the manner of a business transaction. At least that was what it felt like—two people putting an end to their unfinished business.
They wanted each other but neither of them liked it.
‘Show me the rest of the place.’
‘Why?’ She was genuinely puzzled.
‘I used to wonder what it was like. You talked about your home a lot when we were...going out. At the time, it had sounded like a slice of paradise, especially compared to where I had grown up.’
‘And I bet you’re thinking, how the mighty have fallen...’ She laughed self-consciously because all of a sudden she was walking on quicksand. This was the man she had fallen in love with—a man who was interested, warm, curious, empathetic... For a minute, the cynical, mocking stranger was gone and she was floundering.
‘No. I’m not,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m thinking that it must have taken a lot of courage not to have cracked under the strain.’
Sophie blushed and began showing him through the various rooms on the ground floor of the house. There were a lot of them and most of them were now closed with the heating off so that money could be saved. When she and Oliver had realised the necessity of putting the house on the market, they had made an effort to do a patch-up job here and there, but not even those dabs of paint in some of the rooms could conceal the disintegrating façade.
The more she talked, the more aware she was of him there by her side, taking it all in. If this was his idea of foreplay, it couldn’t have been more effective, because she was on fire.
Talking...who would have thought that it could have changed the atmosphere between them so thoroughly?
Her nipples were tight and tingling and the ache between her thighs made her want to moan out loud. She could feel him, could feel herself warming to him, and she had to fight the seductive urge to start mingling the past with the present, confusing the powerful, ruthless man he had become with the man she had once known.
When they were through with the ground floor, she gazed up the sweeping staircase before turning to him and clearing her throat.
‘The bedrooms are upstairs.’ She wanted to sound controlled and adult, a woman in charge of a situation she had engendered. Instead, she heard the nervous falsetto of her voice and inwardly cringed.
Javier lounged against the door frame, hoping that it wouldn’t collapse under his weight from dry rot or termites. He folded his arms and looked at her as she fidgeted for a few seconds before meeting his gaze.
‘Why are you so nervous?’ he enquired, reaching out to adjust the collar of the jacket which she was still clutching around her, and then allowing his hands to remain there, resting lightly on her. ‘It’s not as though you haven’t felt the touch of my lips on yours before...’
Sophie inhaled sharply.
She had got this far and now realised that she hadn’t actually worked out what happened next. Yes, on the physical level, terrifying and exciting though that was, her body would simply just take over. She knew it would. She remembered what it had felt like to be touched by him, the way he had made her whole body ignite in a burst of red-hot flame.