‘Honeymoon?’ she said again.
‘I thought it best not to tell the truth. I said that we had got lost and our car had broken down. Mrs Warwick is a widow living alone. This is a remote place. I wished to minimise any fears she might have about opening her doors so generously and trustingly to complete strangers who look far from respectable.’ As he. talked he was stripping off his clothes.
Bella’s cheeks warmed to a temperature that had little to do with the bath water. Smooth brown shoulders gave way to a muscular torso sprinkled with curling black hair that arrowed down into an intriguingly silky furrow over his flat stomach and then… Embarrassed, she glanced away, but still she saw him before her—the lean, angular hips, the long, powerful thighs, the sleeping promise of his manhood in a nest of ebony curls.
‘You were wearing a ring on your right hand. When I was undressing you downstairs I slid it onto your wedding finger.’
Belatedly she noticed the ring. ‘It was my grandmother’s.’
‘Move over…’
‘Rico!’ Bella twisted her head round and skidded forward towards the taps in a rush, water sloshing noisily everywhere as he simply stepped into the bath behind her. ‘Lord, you’re cold!’ she gasped, all of a quiver as a pair of long, icy thighs closed round her hips from behind. ‘Sorry, I should’ve thought. I’ll get out!’
As she began to get up he reached for her and pulled her back, bringing her down on top of him, anchoring both arms round her. Above her head he laughed sonorously as she went from rigid to trembling and back again. ‘You have so much to learn, gatita mia. I shall enjoy teaching you.’
Bella squinted frantically down at the hands firmly cupping the pouting thrust of her breasts and blushed. Beneath his palms she could feel her nipples swelling and tightening in shameless, instantaneous res
ponse. ‘Rico…?’
‘I have informed my chief executive, Kenway, of our whereabouts. I also spoke to the police. Thanks to Mrs Warwick, I was able to give the exact location of the barn,’ he imparted with sudden harshness. ‘They will stake it out and wait until those bastards come back to check on us again. They will walk into a trap just as we did in that car park. The police will be waiting for them.’
The icy chill in his voice made her shiver. All Bella had thought about was freedom—the luxury of the fire and the bath, the wonderful release from fear to safety. Her world had not yet expanded beyond those things. The intensity of her relief and her continuing exhaustion had combined to blunt and blur her reasoning powers. Rico, she noted, was not similarly affected. He was already grimly anticipating their kidnappers’ capture and punishment.
‘Had they asked for a ransom?’
‘Sí…and the agreed arrangements will continue so that they do not become suspicious. Kenway has been in constant touch with Hector Barsay on your behalf. He will inform him of your release—’
‘How did they know who I was?’ A yawn was creeping up on her. She was lying naked in a bath with a man and she was ready to fall asleep, so complete was her relaxation. She couldn’t believe it.
‘My chauffeur knew your address,’ he reminded her. ‘Had he not, the police might have suspected that you had something to do with the kidnapping.’
‘Me?’ It barely penetrated. Her eyelids felt as if someone had attached weights to them, but she wasn’t so far gone that she was not aware that Rico’s lean, hard length was reacting far more energetically to her proximity. But she didn’t tense, only smiled sleepily. There was something so wonderfully reassuring about being that close to Rico.
‘You’re falling asleep,’ he groaned with more than a hint of incredulity.
She wanted to remind him that she had been up since half past four in the morning, battering doors, posting ‘help’ notes through the container roof, while he had slept until noon, but she couldn’t find the energy. And he seemed to understand for he sat up and pulled her with him, and a minute later she was wrapped in a fleecy towel. Like a child she stood there, dead on her feet, while he patted her dry and pulled something over her head—something crisp and cotton and clean-smelling.
And then she was sinking into a warm bed without even caring how she had got there, sighing with pleasure as every limb relaxed. Voices spoke over her head. The smell of food briefly flared her nostrils but even that couldn’t push back the sleep enclosing her.
In the darkness, a long time later, Bella shifted against a warm, hard body and curved instinctively closer, her hand splaying over a hair-roughened chest, her cheek resting against a smooth shoulder. ‘Rico,’ she breathed sleepily in instant recognition combined with instant contentment, and she would have drifted away again had he not tangled a hand in the mane of her tumbled hair, tipped her mouth up and kissed her.
It was like coming alive when you thought you were dead. Every skin-cell suddenly flamed into red-hot life, a kind of frantic, feverish hunger possessing her. Her response was so intense that it swallowed her alive.
‘Rico…’ She gasped again as he pinned her to the mattress beneath him and kissed her breathless, his mouth, hard, hungry, hot, exciting her beyond bearing.
He freed her and wrenched the nightdress off. In the darkness there was no warning before his mouth closed round the engorged bud of one swelling breast. The sensation hit her with stunning effect. Her neck extended in an arch, a stifled moan torn from her when she felt the erotic brush of his teeth and his tongue as he pulled on her taut nipples. And there was no time for anything, not a single thought, nothing but the raw, driving intensity of need screaming through her veins.
His lips skimmed a tormenting path over the quivering muscles of her belly, his hands parting her thighs, and then he was doing something…something so intimate that she tensed in sudden alarm before the power of simple sensation tore her every inhibition away. And then she was lost again in a hot, swirling fire, conscious of nothing but the incredible, torturous excitement roaring mindlessly out of her control as he employed the same technique on the most sensitive flesh of all.
She was at screaming-point when he moved over her, every shred of physical awareness centred on the ache of emptiness between her thighs. And then he thrust into her and she moaned and arched in one taut movement, her body clenching on a pleasure so intense that she was utterly possessed by it. Her fingers raked down his back in reaction and her teeth nipped at the strong brown column of his throat in instinctive revenge for the ragged laugh he gave vent to.
After that there was nothing but the long, pulsing drive for satisfaction. It went on and on and on. She hit the heights fast, unable to rein back the flood of release, but he didn’t stop. She had barely hit ground level again before the frantic climb back up began, and in all her life she had never felt so controlled, never dreamt she could enjoy that reality so much. And when the second climax whooshed up inside her she was wiped out.
He shuddered above her, every muscle clinching taut, and she put her arms round him, happiness flooding through her like a rejuvenating drug. There was only one thought in her mind as she sank back into sleep. She would never let go of him again.
CHAPTER SIX
‘SOME more tea, Mrs da Silva?’