‘Why don’t you sit down for a moment and let’s talk about this?’
He sounded so calm, so reasonable that her mouth actually fell open and she gaped at him in blank bewilderment. Whatever had happened to Mr ‘Of course this is going to happen again’? Was he actually prepared to be reasonable? Or was he just hiding his darker side behind this suddenly civilised veneer?
She had no way of knowing and the truth was that her own thought processes were far from trustworthy. She felt as if she had been at the eye of a tropical storm ever since she had come to Raul’s hotel room, picked up and whirled around, battered by a fury of conflicting feelings. Even now, her body still ached with the hungry passion that had raged through her in the moment when Raul had taken her in his arms and kissed her. The honest truth was that even as she’d collapsed into sated exhaustion from his lovemaking a weak, greedy part of her had already been anticipating something more.
If the knock at the door had never happened, or if it had come a minute or two later, then there would have been no going back. She would have turned to Raul once more and if he had taken her into his arms and kissed her again then she would have gone to him, opened herself to him willingly and eagerly. All it would have taken was another kiss, another caress from Raul to stoke the fires that she knew had only died down, not died away. She knew she would have been incapable of saying no—that she wouldn’t have wanted to say no—and once more Raul would have made her his, stamped his possession on her without a thought.
But the knock at the door had come. It had broken through the burning haze that had filled her mind, snatching her out of the delirium of need and right back into harsh reality in the space of a couple of seconds.
She had waited, shivering in heated reaction, in the bedroom, listening to him dealing with the porter, handing over the case, heard the door shut. Every nerve in her body had still been so alive, so awake that if he had come to her then she still wouldn’t have been able to think. If he had walked through that door right then she knew with a sense of despair that she would have gone straight into his arms, drawn to him like a fragile needle was brought close by the fierce pull of the strongest magnet. She would not have been able to stay away. All he would have had to do was to say ‘Come’, and she would have obeyed. So great was the spell he had cast over her.
But he hadn’t come to her. He hadn’t opened his arms. He hadn’t said ‘Come’. Instead he had paused, picked up the phone and called Carlos.
And suddenly it was as if the bottom had dropped out of her world. Her heart had plummeted, twisting as it went and every last trace of heat had ebbed from her body, leaving her shivering in a very different way.
‘I’ve called him already,’ Raul had said. ‘And told him not to come at the time we originally arranged but to leave it until I called him.’
But she didn’t need him to tell her that. She didn’t care what he had said, or, rather, exactly how he had phrased it. She had heard him through the door. Heard how, once he had got rid of the porter, his first instinct had been to pick up the phone, call his driver. She’d heard the name Carlos, and even if she hadn’t understood the rest of the fast, autocratic Spanish, she had known only too well what was going on.
Because by then realisation had already hit home. And realisation had brought with it a heavy dose of cold reality—the sort of reality that she couldn’t dodge away from, couldn’t avoid, no matter how much she might want to.
While she was still dealing with the aftershocks of the hurricane of feeling that had swept her up, while her body still trembled in stunned delight at the sensations she had experienced and her mind whirled and spun from the force of feeling she had been subjected to, Raul had been calmly and coolly getting on with his life, dealing with the practicalities.
The practicalities of packing and checking out of his hotel room—leaving England, going back to Spain.
And leaving her behind.
Well, what had she expected, poor stupid fool that she was? Had she really thought that there might be more for her than this? That he might actually want more than he had just had—her willing body under his in the bed? Could she really think that once he had made love to her … had sex with her—she forced herself to look at what had just happened as it truly was—even the hotly passionate, wildly fulfilling sex that they had both enjoyed, he would put all his plans on hold, wanting to stay with her, wanting to have her in his future?
If she’d even allowed herself to dream of that then she would have been desperately disappointed. No sooner had he had his way than Raul had called his chauffeur, sorting out the arrangements for his journey back to Spain as if nothing had happened.
Because to him, nothing had happened. Lying alone in that bed, with her passionate responses cooling as rapidly as the sheets that Raul had just left, Alannah had had to force herself to face the real truth. Two years before, when he had believed her worth marrying, even if her value to him had been only that she would be his virgin bride and bear him the children he so desperately longed for, Raul had always held back; always restrained his hungry passion for her.
He would not make love to her until they were married, he’d said, and he’d held to that no matter how hard it had obviously been for him. Until tonight.
If she had needed any proof of how little she meant to him then it had been there in the way he had taken her here, in this bed that she now could no longer bear to stay in but had flung herself out of, grabbing at her clothes and rushing into them in miserable desperation.
She had handed herself to Raul on a plate and he had taken everything she had offered. He didn’t want to want her but he couldn’t stop himself. And as soon as he had had what he wanted he had been making plans to leave. Assuming that what had happened had meant as little to her as it had to him.
And then he had strolled back into the room, large as life and twice as arrogant, assuming something else. Assuming that she would be sitting there—preferably lying there—waiting for him to take up where he had left off. So that he could deal with the problem as quickly as possible and be on his way.
And, fool that she was, she had been waiting. She had stayed in that room, silent and—damn it—obedient to his wishes! No wonder he had thought that he could take what he wanted from her, that she would pander to his every desire. If she had had any sense she would have snatched the opportunity while the porter was at the door to come out of the bedroom, sweep past him and out of the door before he had a chance to protest or complain. And the thought of him trying to explain why a half-dressed woman with no shoes might need to get out of the hotel suite as swiftly as possible brought a certain grim satisfaction to her mind.
‘Why should I want to sit down? And what could we possibly have to talk about?’
‘I have a proposition I want to put to you.’
‘A proposition?’
Alannah eyed him warily. He still looked calm—worryingly so. What had happened to the hotly passionate lover of just a few short minutes before—and the arrogant swine who had declared ‘I don’t have to snap my fingers—just use them to touch you, and you’ll be mine to do exactly as I command’? It seemed that in the space of just a few brief moments Raul Marcín had been at least three different men, if not more. There was the hotly passionate lover, the man who with calm good humour and spectacular arrogance had dismissed her protests as unnecessary and now here, it seemed, was the businessman who had a proposition to put to her. And she had no way of beginning to guess just which of them was the real person.
‘What sort of a proposition?’
Why was she even asking? She didn’t want to spend any more time in his company. It was too upsetting, too disquieting, too dangerous to her peace of mind and her sense of self-preservation. She wanted to get out of here.
Didn’t she?
But just as her mind threw the