Flora's Defiance Page 4

  Her fingers slid from his shoulder down onto his shirt front, spreading starfish fashion on the muscular heat of his powerful chest. With a gruff sound in his throat his mouth swooped down on hers again with a dominant force that sent a primitive shiver of delight darting through her slender length. He pulled her back against him and eased a hand below her sweater to cup a small pouting mound topped by a swollen pink nipple. A gasp parted her lips below the marauding pressure of his mouth and his tongue darted deep in the moist interior. The effect of that driving passionate kiss, added to the effects of the blunt masculine fingers toying with the peaks of her breasts was more than she could bear and she sagged against him, her legs refusing to hold her up.

  ‘Come here, querida mia,’ Angelo growled, hauling her up into his arms without further ado and kissing her with passionate fervour.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THIRTY seconds later, Flora’s lashes lifted. She was lying on a bed in a compact cabin. Her sweater had gone and, mortified by the sight of her bared breasts, she raised herself on her elbows ready to call time on the extraordinary event that was unfolding when she focused on Angelo.

  He had already shed jacket and tie and his shirt hung open on a bronzed hair-roughened torso and the flat corrugated planes of his stomach. He looked amazing, every inch a male pin-up worthy of a centrefold. The oxygen Flora needed just vanished from her lungs without warning.

  ‘How did this happen? We shouldn’t be doing this …’ she gasped breathlessly, suddenly thinking about the sister she had lost and mentally squirming away from that painful reminder to take refuge in the present again.

  ’Dios mio … don’t ask me to stop, querida,’ Angelo urged, blue eyes electrifyingly hot and hungry as they collided head-on with hers. ‘I’ve never wanted any woman as much as I want you at this moment.’

  Cheeks burning with self-consciousness, Flora hunched her shoulders and crossed her hands over her naked chest, embarrassed by the insubstantial size of her womanly curves, while her bemused thoughts were already replaying what he had just said. It shook her how good she felt being Angelo’s object of desire and how much she liked the fact that he was unzipping his wellcut trousers with more haste than cool while seemingly unable to drag his gaze from her where she lay on the bed. In truth, she acknowledged in an instant of pure insight, any form of human contact and comfort eased the terrible bleak pain of the realization that she would never see her little sister again.

  ‘You are so beautiful,’ Angelo murmured in a dark deep voice that had a wonderfully distracting effect on her because she was desperate to avoid the desolate thoughts hovering on the horizon of her mind. ‘I’ve wanted you for so long.’

  ‘If you did you hid it well from me,’ she pointed out helplessly.

  ‘I’ve surrendered … I can’t hide it any more.’ Angelo stepped clear of the trousers and her mouth ran dry. Clad in silk boxers that defined more than they concealed, Angelo was an intimidating sight for a woman who was still a virgin. Of course that was not a truth that Flora was eager to brandish. Her lack of experience was more an accident of fate than a deliberate choice, for she had not got close enough to consider intimacy with anyone since her engagement had been broken off three years earlier.

  ‘I’m not beautiful,’ she told him almost defiantly, unwilling to trust him or any man.

  Angelo suddenly smiled and his lean dark face lit up with a brilliance that made her heartbeat pick up speed as he came down beside her on the bed. ‘I think you are and I’m only interested in my own opinion.’

  When he smiled she felt as if she could fly, but Flora had no time for such fanciful thoughts and she was bone-deep stubborn, shrugging off the way he could make her feel to add in a tone of distinct challenge, ‘I’m much too tall for a woman—’

  ‘I’m tall and you’re the perfect size for me,’ Angelo countered, undaunted by her comeback as he joined her with predatory grace.

  Men had always tended to find Flora too bluntly spoken for comfort but Angelo appeared to take that candour very much in his stride. He captured her hands in his so that she could no longer hide her body from him.

  For a timeless moment she lay there while he caressed her wrists with his thumbs, his attention hotly pinned to the stiff crests of her prominent nipples. ‘You have very pretty breasts,’ he husked, intense blue eyes embellished by lush black lashes.

  Embarrassment claimed her. She could not be comfortable lying there half naked in broad daylight. She shut her eyes tight and wondered what insanity had come over her and then he kissed her again and the insanity came back with a vengeance, blurring all rational thought and inhibition. Nothing had ever felt so sweet or so necessary to her as his mouth. His tongue plunged into the tender responsive interior of her mouth and lit her up inside like a fire. She had not known that much pleasure could exist in mere kissing.

  Her hands sank into his black hair as he nibbled down the cord of her slender neck and began to centre his attentions on her swollen sensitive breasts. His tongue lashed over the tender tips before the graze of his teeth on her delicate flesh made her cry out and tremble while the burn of excitement travelled straight to the moist heat gathering at the heart of her body. He pressed the heel of his hand against the apex of her thighs and she writhed, helpless beneath that pleasure inflicted on the most sensitive part of her. She felt the zip give on her jeans, her hands falling from him as he sat up to remove the garment.

  ‘This is crazy,’ she muttered jaggedly, ‘out of control.’

  ‘I’ve never been out of control in bed before. It’s exciting,’ Angelo confided, pushing up her face with an impatient hand to steal another explosive kiss.

  And when his hard, hungry mouth was sealed to hers, nothing mattered and nothing else existed. He cupped the damp crotch of her knickers and then whisked them off to explore the slick wet folds between her thighs. She was hyper-sensitive there and she dug her hips into the mattress beneath her and little sounds escaped her lips without her volition. Teasing the delicate entrance, he rubbed the tiny bud where all her nerve-endings centred. Drenched in exquisite waves of pleasure beyond any she had ever experienced, she became ever more frantic. A sense of pressure was building in her tummy and a pulsing ache stirred between her legs, making her feel unbearably taut and needy.

  Angelo slid between her thighs. She looked up at him with apprehensive green eyes, reacting to the probing feel of him against her most intimate place. He shifted and sank into her, stretching her hot tight channel with his girth and length. His hungry growl of pleasure masked her hastily swallowed huff of pain as he thrust past her resisting flesh and filled her to the hilt.

  ‘You’re so tight you feel incredible,’ Angelo groaned, blue eyes radiating deep sensual satisfaction as he gripped her hips in hard hands and moved slowly and erotically, acquainting her with the full extent of his power.

  Instinct made her arch her spine and rise up as he withdrew and slammed back into her in a pagan rhythm that made her every sense sing. Her body wasn’t her own any more. Invaded and controlled by his driving urgency and her own need to answer its demands, she was overwhelmed by the thunderously exciting rise of pleasure. The pressure built and built to a nerve-racking high inside her. She squirmed and writhed in the last seconds before an explosive orgasm ripped through her trembling body like an earthquake, sending sweet shards of ecstatic pleasure shooting through every limb.

  Afterwards she was drained and wrapped in a cocoon of exhaustion. He gazed down at her, blue eyes shimmering, and he kissed her again, slow and deep and hungry. Hungry? He was ready to do it again. She wasn’t and was taken aback by his energy. Animation was returning to her brain and suddenly she wanted a magic lamp to rub so that she could leap fully clothed onto the quay beyond the window and run away as fast as her cowardly legs could carry her. What was she doing? Oh, what had she done, what … had … she … done? Bewilderment and shame drenched her in a tidal wave of regret. Her arms were wrapped tightly round him and she w
hipped them off him at supersonic speed and jerked free of his embrace.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she told him shakily. ‘Places to go, people to see.’

  Wincing at that airhead announcement even as it fell from her lips, Flora scrambled off the bed with a haste she couldn’t hide.

  Startled by her abrupt flight from his arms, Angelo pushed himself up on his elbows and rested frowning dark blue eyes on her. ‘What’s up? ‘

  Stark naked, wreathed in blushes and with not the smallest idea where the bathroom was, Flora hovered in horrible confusion. What’s up? she almost screeched back at him. Are you that insensitive that you think this situation, this appalling misstep, could possibly be acceptable?

  ‘This should never, ever have happened. I’m embarrassed!’ Flora gasped, reckoning he needed it all spelled out in simple words so that he could understand normal human reactions.

  ‘Why should you be embarrassed? What we just shared was amazingly good sex,’ Angelo commented thickly, pushing his powerful bronzed shoulders back against the tossed pillows and surveying her with deeply appreciative sapphire-blue eyes. ‘Come back to bed.’

  Every bit of Flora that wasn’t already blushing took on a scarlet hue. Come back to bed? Whoever had said that men had a one-track mind had not been joking! Through an open door she espied something that looked reassuringly like a plumbing fixture and she sped towards it without further ado, only to discover that she was in what appeared to be a closet lined with pipes.

  The door opened. Angelo looked in at her, alarmingly tall and broad and graphic in the nude. ‘The bathroom is across the passage.’

  Her hands knotted into fists. She was so upset she marvelled that she wasn’t having a heart attack. On the way past the bed again she bent to scoop up her discarded clothes, trying not to wince at the soreness lingering between her thighs. Her first sex ever and she wanted to forget it, she thought in anguish. In the tiny bathroom she washed as best she could. There were no towels, just as there had been no bedding. She had rolled about on a bare mattress with Angelo van Zaal like a cheap slut and the mortification of that unacceptable fact bit deep.

  A knock sounded on the door and she opened it a reluctant crack. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have a country house. I’d like you to spend the weekend there with me,’ Angelo suggested smoothly.

  ‘Was the sex that good? ‘ Flora enquired in a frozen voice that would have chilled a polar bear.

  ‘I don’t do one-night stands,’ Angelo drawled softly.

  Flora was getting desperate. ‘Why don’t you just go back to your office or whatever and leave me here?’

  ‘We’ll talk when you come out.’ There was just the hint of a rougher edge to his tone as if he was finally accepting that she didn’t even want to speak to him, never mind look at him, after the intimacy they had shared.

  At least Angelo hadn’t guessed that she had been a virgin until he touched her, Flora reflected wretchedly as she struggled back into her crumpled clothing in the confined space. Somehow the thought of Angelo van Zaal, with his stable of glossy, sophisticated supermodel girlfriends, learning that she had been a sad twenty-six-year-old virgin struck her as the final humiliation. He would think she had been desperate for a man to show an interest in her and that wasn’t how she was at all. Flora just didn’t have a very high opinion of men and didn’t think that a man was always necessary to a happy life. After her broken engagement she had stopped dating and had concentrated her energy on rebuilding her life.

  As she emerged from the compartment Angelo appeared in the bedroom doorway to direct her back upstairs. She recalled him carrying her to bed and kissing her every step of the way and her pale skin flushed a deep rosy pink. How on earth could she have behaved that way? She was a very private person and she had standards, strict standards. Casual sex was anathema to her and what for him had probably just featured as an excitingly unexpected roll between the sheets with an almost stranger meant a great deal more to her in terms of pride and self-respect.

  Angelo watched Flora dig her feet into her shoes and reach for her coat. She was behaving as if she could not get away from him quickly enough, a reaction very far removed from what he usually received from women in the aftermath of intimacy, and her unashamedly dismissive attitude set his even white teeth on edge.

  At the same time an unusual sense of dislocation was assailing Angelo, as if his world had suddenly been turned upside down and everything felt wrong and out of place. In the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Angelo, always so in control of events and of himself, was in deep shock. He had, after all, just engaged in unprotected sex for the first time in his life. Even the awareness that he did not have a condom had failed to stop him in his tracks. He had gone way beyond the age when he always carried protection, for not since he’d been a teenager had he engaged in an impetuous sexual encounter. Yet he had knowingly accepted the risk he was running and had found Flora so irresistible that he had taken her regardless of all common sense. Those acknowledgements shattered many of the convictions Angelo had long held about his own character. What the hell had come over him?

  ‘Are you using any form of contraception? ‘ Angelo asked flatly.

  Flora’s head flew up, green eyes unguarded and full of dismay as she frowned, following that question back to its logical source only to register that neither of them had considered that possibility at the time. ‘No, I’m not … Are you saying that—?’

  ‘This—what just transpired between us,’ Angelo extended with a shift of fluid brown hands that was very Mediterranean and non-verbally eloquent, reminding Flora that her sister had once mentioned that he had had a Spanish mother. ‘It was out of character for me.’

  ‘And for me,’ Flora muttered numbly, tying the belt on her coat and pulling it tighter than was comfortable, desperately needing to keep her hands busy.

  ‘I didn’t stop to think of consequences. We had sex without protection, which was very foolish of both of us. However, I have regular health checks and you need have no fear of disease. But—‘

  Flora was already settling aghast eyes on him and she said shakily before he could continue, ‘Obviously there’s still a risk that you might have got me pregnant.’

  ‘Let’s try to be optimistic. We only had sex once and for all that we know one of us could even be infertile. We’ll have to hope that the odds are in our favour,’ Angelo breathed with deliberate cool, convinced that since he had never before tempted fate he would surely get away with it. He refused to even consider the alternative because messy situations like unplanned pregnancies had no place in his perfectly organised life.

  Flora was stunned by his optimistic outlook, for she was much more prone to worrying that any moral mistake automatically attracted a punishment.

  ‘As it’s obvious that you don’t want me to stay,’ Angelo remarked silkily, one lean brown hand resting on the door, ‘I’ll leave you here to sort through those boxes.’

  Flora had dug her hands into her pockets. ‘Right. Okay,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I’d like to see Mariska again before I leave Amsterdam.’

  Cool blue eyes rested on her anxious face. ‘You’re welcome to visit her whenever you like.’ He reached into his pocket to withdraw a pen and write on the back of a business card. ‘This is my home telephone number if you want to make arrangements with Anke.’

  Flora studied the card he handed her with fixed attention, reluctant to look at him again. The atmosphere was so raw with unspoken tension that it squeezed at her nerves and her ability to breathe normally.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ Angelo drawled.

  Immediately, Flora braved her demons to glance up at him. ‘That’s not necessary,’ she told him woodenly.

  ‘We need to stay in contact for Mariska’s sake,’ Angelo contradicted. ‘I will also seek reassurance that you are not pregnant. When will you know? ‘

  Flora reddened at that very personal question. ‘Mind your own business! ‘

  A
ngelo dealt her a stony look shot through with reinforced steel. ‘If you conceive my child, it will be very much my business, querida.’

  As soon as he was gone, having told her where to leave the key when she was finished, Flora shed her coat again and embarked on the first box. Mariska in mind, she set Julie’s diaries and photographs to one side along with a rather battered teddy that her sister had once kept on her bed. There was not much else to be conserved aside from a few cards exchanged between Willem and Julie and some inexpensive costume jewellery that she thought her niece might one day like to look at. She studied the photo of Willem and Julie on their wedding day, so young, so happy and full of innocent hope, and a flood of tears overwhelmed her. She wept until she was empty, and although her throat was sore afterwards, she felt much better for having vented her emotions. She then made use of the phone number that Angelo had given her and organised a time to visit that afternoon and see Mariska.

  In the little bathroom she splashed her swollen eyes with cold water and thought she looked an absolute sight. She still could barely credit that she had had sex with Angelo van Zaal. Were there more of her sexually adventurous father’s genes in her than she had ever realised? She would not let herself use the euphemism ‘making love’, for she was still hard pressed to explain exactly how she had ended up on that bed with Angelo, engaging in the intimacies she had avoided sharing with other men. While she had always experienced a strong buzz of attraction in Angelo’s radius, it had never occurred to her that it might have the power to get so out of hand. Evidently all it had taken was for her emotions to get equally out of kilter for the proverbial weak moment to have made nonsense of her moral outlook on life.

  She had dropped her guard while she had sought forgetfulness from the unhappy present. Even worse, she had become intimate with a man she didn’t even like, a man who had always held her at arm’s length and treated her with cool indifference. No matter how she looked at what had happened she felt that she had let herself down badly and could not imagine ever meeting Angelo van Zaal again without suffering severe embarrassment.