Her only need then had been of comfort and support. It was when she had recovered a little, when she had calmed enough to draw breath, that she became aware of other feelings, sensations she had thought long since dead and now was forced to realise were only buried, just below the surface, waiting only for a touch, a kiss to break through her defences and leave her aching for more.
She’d known she was in danger when she’d felt that sense of loss as Raul had walked away from her in the kitchen when she had been so sure that he was about to kiss her. Loss and disappointment were the feelings of someone who was still tied to this man in spite of all the time they had spent apart, and her determination to put him out of her mind, out of her heart. She didn’t want to be tied to him in any way. She didn’t love him—how could she love a man who had only ever seen her as a body, a brood mare on which to breed the heirs he and his family longed for?
But you didn’t have to love to want—to hunger for a touch, a kiss, to overreact when he gave her one and feel a sense of loss when he denied her the other.
She had vowed to keep her distance. To keep a grip on herself and the feelings she seemed unable to erase along with the love she had once felt for him. And she would have done so. She would have managed that if she hadn’t come out here and seen Raul with the picture frame in his hands, the terrible look of loss and sorrow draining all the colour from his face as he stared down at the photograph of his young sister. The sister he had so recently learned was dead, just like her own brother.
And she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t felt for him and needed to go to him to offer compassion and sympathy, to help him in the same way that he had helped her as he’d held her and let her sob out her grief against the strength of his chest, with his powerful arms closed about her.
That was what he’d done for her—and what she had planned to do for him. But she didn’t have the strength that Raul possessed, the self-control—the indifference—that had kept him firmly distant from her even as he held her close. She had only to touch him and she was lost in a world of sensation where common sense and self-preservation had no place. From the moment she had felt the heat of his skin underneath her fingertips, she had wanted more. The scent of his body was so familiar and yet so alien, clean and faintly musky, touched with a tang of something citrus: intensely personal, intensely masculine—intensely Raul.
The fierce rage that had gripped him when he’d learned the truth had clouded that feeling. Clouded but not destroyed it. And moving close again now had been all that it had taken to reawaken it.
She’d told herself that the kiss was simply one of comfort, a gesture of sympathy, but somewhere deep in her soul she’d known that she was only denying the truth even to herself. And the truth was that she might try to fight against him, against the sensual tug of his physical appeal, the way his body seemed to call to hers, but she couldn’t fight herself. That kiss might have started out as a kiss of compassion, but in the instant that her lips had touched his skin, feeling its warmth and tasting the slightly salt flavour of it against her tongue, she had known that she was lost.
Every moment of loss, of longing, of need that she had ever known, ever felt with this man came flooding back into her mind, sweeping away rational thought with the ferocity and speed of a tidal wave and leaving nothing in its place but the whirling, surging wild waters of desire.
The last thing she heard was that raw, hungry muttering of her own name as his head turned, his mouth taking hers. But from that moment the world and everything else in it faded into the red, swirling haze that was all that was in her mind. Her eyes closed as his mouth took hers, his kiss crushing her lips apart, breath mingling, tongues tangling together. Such was the force of his kiss that she swayed violently and would have fallen if the steely strength of his arms hadn’t come round her, fastening tight and holding her up, clamped hard against the lean power of his body.
‘R-Raul …’ She choked his name in a sound of need, of pleading, huskily hungry—and the only word she could think of; the only thought in her head.
She felt his smile against her mouth. His hands were hard against her back. Big hands, hot hands, heavy hands, fingers splayed out along her spine, burning her skin through the protection of her T-shirt, holding her where he wanted her as he took another kiss and then one more.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he muttered against her cheek.
‘Beautiful.’
Those stroking hands were never still, always moving, always tracing hot erotic patterns over her back, sliding under her T-shirt at her waist, briefly searing over her skin so that she couldn’t hold back a murmur of response as she arched into the caress like a cat responding to a sensual stroke. His mouth was a teasing torment, his tongue like silk against her lips. The thunder in her blood was drowning out all her ability to think.
She wanted … longed … yearned …
She needed more.
She had always wanted more. It had been Raul who had held back; Raul who had said that they should wait. Proud Spanish aristocrat that he was, he had wanted her to come to his bed untouched. He had wanted to know that he was the only man in her life, that only a virgin bride would be the mother of his child.
And that memory was bitter enough to slice through the heated haze that flooded her mind.
‘No …’
Somehow she managed to make her tongue frame the single syllable. Somehow she managed to force her treacherous body to pull back, away from him, away from his kisses, away from his touch. The few steps she managed took her up against one of the armchairs so that she was forced to stop, not quite as far away from him as she had wanted.
‘No …’ She tried again but with little more conviction than the first time. Every one of her senses cried out in harsh protest at the cruel restraint she forced on them. Every awoken nerve demanded the satisfaction she was denying it.
‘No?’
Raul’s echoing of the single word had so much more behind it that it made her flinch to hear it. There was an open scepticism that questioned her denial, a note of incredulity that made it plain he didn’t believe her, and underneath it all there was the rough thread of dark desire—a desire she had thwarted by drawing away. And the terrible thing was that that desire, dark and disturbing and oh, so dangerous, was what was running through her veins, making her shudder inwardly in response to its burning demand.
But she wouldn’t give in to it. Couldn’t give in to it.
‘This isn’t going to happen. This isn’t what I want.’
‘Isn’t what you want?’ His voice lashed at her, filled with a brutal cynicism. ‘Forgive me if I don’t believe you. I don’t think you know what you want.’
‘Oh, but I do!’ Alannah shook her head violently then stopped abruptly as she realised that she was contradicting her words with the foolish gesture. ‘I do.’
‘Then what?’ he snarled viciously, the burn of frustration still there in his voice. ‘What the hell do you want?’ ‘I want—I want …’
Desperately she snatched at the only thing that came to mind. The memory of what they had been talking about. The reason why she had brought him here in the first place.
‘I want you to forgive my brother. I want you to acknowledge that he and Lorena loved each other and—
And …’
Near-panic had got her this far, the rush of need to say something,