‘Oh…Rico?
?that is so comforting to know!’ she spat back in helpless disbelief.
‘I do not think that our lives are in any immediate danger,’ he grated.
‘You also thought that our kidnappers might be out of the country!’
‘Por Dios … pull yourself together! This far you have acted with commendable courage.’
Bella could feel her control unravelling as fast and as inescapably as a cotton reel of thread thrown down a steep hill. ‘Not quite what you expected from me, I gather. Well, I’d appreciate it more if you showed a little human sensitivity, instead of acting like Mr Macho all the time… even when we’re in the middle of a nightmare!’ Her voice rose steeply on the last words, fractured by the sob choking her throat.
‘I don’t think you’d appreciate it if I was sitting here paralysed with fear!’
The sobs she was frantically struggling to suppress overcame her. She bowed her head, ashamed of the weakness, and wrapped her arms round herself. Tears streamed down her cheeks. He touched her damp chin with a not quite steady forefinger and then, with a muttered, vicious imprecation, reached for her, unpeeling her arms and hauling her close.
She needed that contact. She needed that warmth… She needed him. Caught up in the charge of an explosive surge of feeling, she pressed her mouth feverishly to the angular curve of his stubbled jaw-line.
She felt him tense but there was an unstoppable flood of emotion suddenly churning about inside her. Her hands slid up, her fingers shyly splaying across his blunt cheekbones in a wondering caress. As she held him she looked at him with darkened green eyes full of new self-knowledge and a kind of helpless joy that was insanity, but which she couldn’t help. Her feelings were so intense that they consumed her.
‘I don’t trust myself this close,’ Rico breathed roughly.
‘Trust your instincts,’ she whispered, and she dropped her hands, then hesitated in a momentary agony of uncertainty before her fingers found the buttons on her jacket and began to release them.
‘Bella…’
Her pale skin burned under the golden flare of his arrested gaze, but the driving need to give, to share, was far more powerful than the fleeting recall of her own sexual inexperience.
‘This is just you and me,’ she reasoned in a breath of sound as the jacket slid off her shoulders, her slender form quivering with sudden awareness of her own daring. ‘And this is what I want.’
Every poised inch of his lithe, powerful length exuded the raw force of his tension. Bella looked bravely back at him, still clothed, but naked to the world as she had never before allowed herself to be. It was a risk she had to take, a leap of faith, and even though she knew that she might regret her own unquestioning generosity she also knew that she would regret it for the rest of her life if she simply hid behind her own insecurities.
‘Sí…’ He moved with an abruptness then that shattered her—reaching for her, dragging her into his arms, every restraint overpowered by the hunger which blazed in incandescent gold from his fierce gaze. ‘No regrets?’
He wanted a passport to freedom before he even touched her. Pain trammelled through her. She might have turned away then, devastated by the reality of how little he offered and too proud to take on such terms, but he closed his mouth in devouring passion over hers and the ability to be rational was violently torn from her.
He invaded the moist interior of her mouth, his probing tongue a raw, masculine imitation of an infinitely more intimate penetration. She trembled, every physical sense leaping into automatic response. Control was wrested from her without remorse. He unleashed the turbulent force of his desire on her and she drowned mindlessly in the tidal wave of her own shock. It was no slow, gentle seduction which took account of her innocence.
‘You’re a witch, querida…’ Rico groaned. ‘I am no saint to resist such enticement.’
‘Enticement’? Some faint shred of reasoning absorbed the word, shrank from it. But he took her mouth again, made love to it, enveloped her in the staggering surge of her own helpless excitement. He lifted his dark head and she opened her heavy eyes. He had bared her breasts. The pale mounds rose in shameless supplication to his heated appraisal.
‘You are so beautiful.’ He cupped her sensitive flesh with firm hands, his smouldering golden scrutiny raking over her as a flush of pink crept up over her cheekbones.
He bent his head. She watched him, shameless in the grip of her own anticipation and yet so afraid that in some sense she might not meet his expectations.
The tip of his tongue skidded down the valley between her breasts before circling the engorged thrust of one pink nipple. She gasped, her lashes sweeping down, her back arching. Thought was suspended. The erotic tug of his mouth on the sensitised buds was unbearably erotic. Her hands rose of their own volition and speared into his hair, caressing him, holding him to her as the sweet torment of her own arousal plunged her into ever deeper response. In all her life she had never dreamt that such pleasure existed.
She was so hot that she couldn’t stay still. His fingers smoothed over the quivering tautness of her stomach and located the tangle of curls at the junction of her thighs. Her whole body jerked, out of control. Her breath rasped dry in her throat, her thighs parting in a spasm of intolerable need. He laughed softly and covered her mouth again, teasing this time, nibbling and tormenting with devastating expertise.
Instinctively she moved against him, her hips rising. He explored the damp, silken warmth at the very heart of her, every expert caress making her sob with the crazed heat of that intimate pleasure. Lost in the depths of an extraordinary passion, she was at the peak of an intense excitement, tortured by the desperate ache of unfulfilment.
He shifted over her then, ravishing her swollen lips one more time, and then, abruptly, he drew her up to him with impatient hands and plunged inside her. She hadn’t expected the pain that tore at her as he entered her. Her shocked eyes flew wide and she bit her tongue so hard that she tasted blood in her mouth.
‘Madre de Dios!’ Shattered golden eyes held hers, and then his teeth clenched as the momentum of his own desire made him drive deeper still, his swollen shaft forging a path through the tender tissue that had sought to deny him.
‘That hurts!’ Bella panted.
With a sharp intake of breath he stilled, and long fingers knotted painfully into her tumbled hair. ‘I didn’t know!’