“Wh-what for?”
His breath caught. She had understood, yet answered in English. Cultured, American English. And she sounded as shaken as she looked. Her voice was a soft, sultry caress, made to moan enchantments in his ear, against his flesh, in long, pleasure-drenched nights.
“For coming when I summoned you.”
She blinked, as if emerging from a trance. “Summoned me?”
She obviously took exception to his choice of words. He wanted to tease her, say that she had obeyed his summons. But he couldn’t talk—he needed to make that first contact. Holding her gaze, he reached out and cupped her cheek.
His breath hissed out as her flesh filled his palm, as he absorbed its texture and heat. She trembled in his grasp, pouring molten steel into his erection. Then her eyes darkened into burning coals and singed away his control.
Two urgent, stumbling steps had her back to the wall, plastering her between its unyielding barrier and his. Hot resilience cushioned his aching hardness and ripped a rumble from his gut. Her echoing gasp filled his lungs with her scent. A hint of jasmine, a mist of pheromones, a gust of compulsion. Hunger writhed inside him until he could no longer bear not tasting her.
Holding her stunned eyes with his, he hovered over her trembling lips for one last anticipation-laced moment. Then he obliterated the distance between them.
A spark arced between their lips, making him jerk up. Her eyes displayed shock, too; her lips trembled with it. But the rise and fall of her breasts was that of excitement, not distress. Then arousal seeped into her eyes, weighing down her lids, and made her lips swell, as if he’d already ravished them.
She wanted this. Wanted him. Like he wanted her.
And he didn’t want just a kiss anymore. He wanted everything.
They’d exchanged two sentences—phrases—and he knew nothing about her. But this would follow no rules. The passion that had exploded into existence between them obliterated any.
He would take her first. As she wanted him to. Everything else would come later. Satisfying this overpowering hunger was the most important thing now. The only thing that mattered.
He bent, swept her up in his arms. She only gasped and went limp against him, her eyes enormous orbs of surrender.
Triumph and elation fueled his strides to his study. Kicking the door shut, he put her back on her feet and pressed her against it. Her feverish eyes assured him this was exactly what she wanted. Everything with him. Now.
“Sim, beleza, sim...tudo comigo...agora.”
And he crashed his lips on hers.
Ellie was drowning. In pleasure. The pleasure of this man’s kisses. The man she’d met only minutes before.
But it was okay to drown. Since this had to be a dream.
In the waking world, it was unthinkable for her to lose her head at the sight of a man, let alone her sense of self at his touch. Perfect pleasure like this couldn’t possibly exist. Not for her. She was the last woman on earth to get zapped by attraction at a literal hundred paces. And then came this man. He was what proved this must be a dream. He couldn’t be real.
No real man could have compelled her like this. Even the way he’d materialized out of the darkness had been unreal.
One thing explained all this. She must be dozing off in her car, lost in the most outrageously erotic dream ever.
Which figured. After two days of continuous work, exhaustion had been another reason she’d hated having to go to that ball. She’d been asleep on her feet by the time she’d dragged herself home at three to throw on “something appropriate,” then driven to that mansion in Armação dos Búzios, the “Hamptons of Brazil.” The damn place was over two hours away. And she’d been lost an extra half hour before finding it.
After she finally did at six o’clock, she had memories of valet parking and walking through the ingeniously landscaped, multilevel gardens into the splendid, four-level edifice sprawling over what she thought was no less than ten thousand square feet. Outside, each spray of indirect illumination enhanced every white-painted arch, column and molding in its neo-Renaissance architecture, giving it the grandeur of a temple or cathedral. Inside, the pervasive, festive lighting came from an abundance of all-crystal chandeliers and antique brass lampadaires, giving the Portuguese-French–style gilded interior the feel of a fairy tale. Then she’d reached the ballroom, which was right out of one.
She remembered pausing at the threshold, wrestling with her dislike for crowds, then finally walking in since braving it was preferable to being subjected to more pleading.
Then as she’d kept to the periphery, avoiding the forced gaiety, she’d felt as if she was hit by lightning. Her eyes had jerked to the bolt’s origin. And she’d met his gaze.
As her heart had stumbled like a horse on ice, he’d raised a hand made of elegance and power, and beckoned.
Breath hitching, she’d looked around to see who he was beckoning to. Once sure he was actually motioning to her, she’d had no thought of resisting. He’d kept receding, and she’d kept moving toward him, no volition involved. Then she had been within touching distance, and nothing had remained in her stalled mind but...wow. Wow.
Even at five-foot-ten with four-inch heels, she was dwarfed by him. Besides his towering height, his shoulders, torso and arms were daunting, his waist and hips narrow, his thighs formidable. And his legs went on forever. And that was what she could see through his slate-gray suit. She couldn’t even imagine what his body would look like out of it.
But one thing she saw clearly. His face.
Ruthless planes and stark angles composed his forehead, nose and jaw. His cheekbones slashed so sharply against his polished teak skin, she felt she could cut herself on them. His lips were sculpted from decadent sensuality. Put together, his features were a standard of male beauty no one would ever come close to measuring up to. Not in her eyes.
But what captivated her went beyond his physical endowments and sexual magnetism. It wasn’t even those stormy eyes, surrounded by lashes as raven-black as the layers of his vital hair, and slanted to the same mysterious angle as his dense eyebrows. It was the entity that looked back at her through them.
Then he’d thanked her, for coming when he’d summoned her.
The dark spell of his voice hadn’t stopped annoyance from registering at his arrogance. Even when nothing else could describe the way she’d walked to him as if in thrall. Then he’d cupped her cheek and the world disappeared.
Nothing was left but his touch, and the building urge for something...more. And he gave her more. Like a hungry panther, he backed her against the wall only to hover over her lips, tantalizing her with the dizzying scent of his maleness and desire.
She started trembling, fearing her heart would stop if he didn’t kiss her. Then he did. And that intensity between them manifested into a literal spark, zapping what remained of her coherence. She looked up into his eyes when he jerked away, confessing her helplessness. And a change came over him.
As overriding as his approach had been up till that point, there’d been restraint in it. But now his eyes explicitly said there’d be none from this point forward. He wouldn’t stop at a kiss. He wanted more. Everything. Then he told her just that.
Yes, my beauty, yes. Everything with me. Now.
On some level, she realized this was insane. But when he swept her up into