His eyes were blazing and she was dazzled. The rush of adrenalin that was shooting through her was making her feel reckless. ‘How am I looking at you?’
‘As if you want me to kiss you.’
‘I do,’ she breathed before she could stop herself, but oh, she did. She was going out of her mind. Sex was a problem but kissing would be OK, surely, if he was amenable.
‘Well, why didn’t you say?’ he muttered roughly, clamping one hand to the back of her head to bring her forward and then planting his mouth on hers with a speed that suggested he was very amenable indeed.
She didn’t have time or the resources to marvel at that. The inappropriateness of what they were doing didn’t cross her mind once. The heat flooding her body and the desire pounding along her veins were wiping her head of rational thought. All she could do was succumb to sensation.
She moaned and wrapped her arms around his neck, and the kiss deepened and intensified. The muscles of his shoulder bunched beneath her fingers as she ran them over him and this time he was the one to groan.
With an urgency that she would have found flattering had she been capable of thought, Duarte disentangled his hands from her hair and moved them to her waist. He lifted and shifted her and then, hardly aware of what was happening, she found herself astride him. He held her hips and tugged her towards him, and when she pressed against him, his erection rubbing her where she so desperately ached for him, she tore her mouth from his and gasped.
But that didn’t deter him. He simply set his lips to her neck, lingering on the pulse hammering at its base, while she dropped her head back to give him better access and struggled for breath. With one hand he held her close. He slid the other down her thigh, slipped it beneath the hem of her dress and pushed it up.
Any minute now, she thought dazedly as she burned up with want, her clothes would come off, followed by his, and then there’d be more touching and some body parts would want to be in others and it wouldn’t all go wrong for her this time. There’d be no disappointment or despair. There’d be explosions and ecstasy and it would be perfect. More perfect than she could have ever dreamed, and her dreams had been pretty damn good.
But this wasn’t a dream, this was reality. The heat and the desire coursing through her were real, which meant that she could feel passion, she wasn’t frigid. She’d always thought she was a failure in the bedroom because she was unable to experience the kind of pleasure she’d heard was possible, but look at what was going on here. Fireworks. Genuine mini-explosions. For the first time ever.
So what if it hadn’t been her? she thought wildly as he continued to wreak havoc on her skin. She’d only had one lover, her former fiancé, so she had little scope for comparison, but what if the failure had been his? Or maybe it had just been down to simple incompatibility that was nobody’s fault.
She hadn’t given sex another chance after her engagement had ended because, frankly, if she wasn’t going to excel at it, why bother, but could she have missed out on four years of fun and games and even relationships unnecessarily? Need she not have been quite so lonely in all that time?
The questions now ricocheting around her head were huge, breathtaking and utterly overwhelming. On top of the clawing need and delirium, Orla could feel the emotion swelling up inside her, threatening to overspill and quite possibly manifest itself in tears, and that was an outcome she really didn’t want to have to explain, so she wrenched herself away and scrambled off him.
‘What’s wrong?’ Duarte muttered hoarsely, breathing hard as he looked at her with eyes that were glazed and burning.
She swallowed down the lump in her throat and tugged at the hem of her dress, as if covering up might provide some kind of defence against the potentially earth-shattering discoveries swirling around her brain. ‘I need to go.’
‘Do you? Why?’
Because her foundations were rocking and she needed time and space to deal with it. Because the strength of her response to him was scary in its intensity and she was out of her depth here.
‘Because this isn’t appropriate,’ she said desperately, grasping at the only excuse she was willing to give.
‘It feels pretty appropriate to me.’
‘You’re a client.’
‘That’s irrelevant. I want you,’ he said, his eyes dark and compelling. ‘Stay.’
‘I can’t.’
It was one request she couldn’t fulfil. Not right now, at least. She couldn’t think straight. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was totally out of control and it was terrifying.
‘Thank you for the wine,’ she managed, her head swimming and her heart pounding. ‘See you at the conference.’
And then, before she fell completely apart, she fled.
***