But it wasn’t—it wasn’t! ‘I don’t want—’
‘Oh, you want,’ he refuted. ‘It has been vibrating out of you from the first moment we met. And I would be a liar if I did not admit to feeling the same way about you—so quit the denial.’
‘Sex for the hell of it?’ Rachel sliced back wildly.
‘Why not?’ Capturing her warding hand, he used it to draw her in close. ‘We are stuck with each other for the next few months while this thing plays itself out, so why not enjoy what we do have going here which is not part of the lie?’
‘If I walk out of here dressed like this and tell anyone waiting out there that I changed my mind because you just were not good enough—that should finish it,’ she suggested wildly.
‘Are you telling me that my finesse is in need of practice?’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Since we both know that you seem to be pretty much a natural sensualist, Miss Carmichael, I give you leave to teach me all you know.’
‘What is that supposed to imply?’ Rachel stared up at him.
He grimaced and she didn’t like the cynical gleam that arrived back on his face. ‘Either someone taught you how to give a man unbelievable pleasure or it just comes naturally to you,’ he enlightened. ‘I was attempting to give you the more honourable benefit of the doubt.’
He was daring to suggest that she’d been trained like a concubine to pleasure men—?
First a gift, now a trained whore. Rachel stiffened like a board. ‘How dare you?’ she breathed furiously.
‘Very indignant,’ he commended. ‘But I have just had the life essence squeezed out of me by the kind of muscles I did not know a woman could possess and you kiss like a delightful, greedy, well-seasoned Circe, amore—dangerous, but I’m hooked.’
‘I think this has gone far enough.’ She went to twist away from him.
He spun her back, broke her grip on the shirt front and ran his two hands inside it in a sensual act of possession that claimed her slender waist. Two long thumbs stroked the flatness of her lower stomach and her flesh turned into a simmering sensory mass. When she released an agonised breath he watched the way her pale hips swayed towards him as if they could not stop from hunting out closer contact with the burgeoning jut of his sex.
‘Look at you,’ he murmured. ‘You cannot help yourself. That deliciously damp cluster of curls I can see crowning your thighs is crying out to feel me there again.’
‘No,’ she denied, knowing it was horribly, shamefully true.
‘If I do this …’ he eased her in closer and gently speared a path between her thighs ‘ … your slender thighs cling to me as if your life depends upon it … ‘
And she was clinging. Weak and helpless. He rocked his hips and her arms just lifted, then fell heavily around his neck as she gave herself up to the pure pleasure of it. Her head tilted back, her blue eyes dark and her soft mouth parting and begging for his kiss.
He did not hold it back. He ravished her mouth while other parts of him ravished the soft folds of warm damp flesh between her legs. It did not occur to her that he was as much a slave to what they were generating between them. To Rachel he was just displaying his contempt for her. Toying with her because the humiliation of being made such an easy victim of her half-sister’s messy marriage still stung his ego and he wanted her to pay for making him feel like that.
This was payback—sexual payback. And he meant to make her keep on paying for as long as this thing took to pan out.
She was picked up and tumbled back on to the duvet. He came to lean over her, blocking out the light like a domineering shadow, everything about him so physically superior, strong, mesmerising—overwhelming yet so potently exciting at the same time.
His eyes glinted down at her, his face a map of hard angles built on arrogant sexual claim. She was about to be ravished a second time and the horror of it was that she knew she was not going to say no.
A telephone started ringing with the shrillness of a klaxon. Staring up into his face, tense and not breathing, Rachel thought for several seconds that he was going to ignore the call and continue with what he had started here.
Then his face altered, shutting down desire with the single blink of those long eyelashes, and he took hold of his shirt and grimly closed it across her breasts.
With that he levered himself off the bed, leaving Rachel to sit up and huddle inside the shirt while he went to recover his trousers and this time pulled them on.
He glanced back at her, nothing lover-like about him anywhere now. ‘Get in the bed. Go to sleep,’ he instructed.
Then he strode out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him, leaving Rachel coldly aware that she had just been put in her place.
As the gift in his bed, to use if or when he so desired it.
The telephone went silent. Unable to stop herself, Rachel got up and went to open the door as quietly as she could, meaning to creep down the hall and listen in on the conversation—just in case it had something to do with them.
She did not need to take another step from where she was. The door on the opposite side of the hall was open. He was standing in front of a desk with his back towards her and his trousers resting low on his hips.
‘You think that ringing me at two in the morning will please me, Daniella—?’ His tone did not sound pleased at all.
Rachel continued to hover, watching as his naked shoulders racked up tighter the more that his stepsister said.
‘Daniella …’ he sighed out eventually. ‘Will you give me the opportunity to speak? I am sorry you have been hit by so many telephone calls,’ he said wearily. ‘No, the lady in question is not Elise,’ he denied. ‘She is who she has always been. It is everyone else who made the mistake. ‘
A lie. Another lie. Rachel felt the weight of every single one of them land upon her shoulders.
Raffaelle turned sharply, as if he could sense her standing here. She watched his eyes move in a possessive flow from her face to his shirt, then down her legs. The intimacy in the look conflicted with the coldness now in charge of his features. And she knew that not only had he brought himself under control, but she was now looking at the man she’d first met, undeniably attractive but cynical and hard.
On a wavering grimace Rachel dropped her eyes from him and stepped back into the bedroom. When Elise had picked him to have her rebellious affair with, she had chosen the wrong man, she thought heavily as she closed the door.
Pushing his free hand into his trouser pocket, Raffaelle suppressed the desire to either curse or sigh as he leant his lean hips against the edge of the desk while Daniella continued to yell in his ear.
He was angry with the interfering press, who were taking it in turns to call up Daniella in their quest for more information. He was also fed up because the whole thing was now driving itself like a train with no damn brakes.
And he was achingly bloody aroused and despising himself for feeling like that. Where did he get off, jumping all over a woman—a stranger—like some randy, feckless, uncontrolled youth—?
No wonder she’d looked at him just now as if he had crawled out from beneath a stone. No wonder she had gone back in the bedroom and shut herself away. She knew she was trapped; he knew he was trapped!
‘No, Daniella,’ he grimly cut in to her half-hysterical ranting. ‘It is you who made the mistake two months ago. She was never Elise—have you got that?’
His cold tone alone had the desired effect.
‘You