Prisoner Of Passion Page 6

  He expelled his breath in a resonant hiss of exasperation. ‘You are not that naive. I am a man, lying in bed with a half-naked woman on top of me. I’m not a corpse, devoid of all sexual response. But I have no intention of making love to you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ she bit out, rigid as a stick of rock, holding her entire length taut in a fruitless endeavour to lessen the points of contact between them.

  ‘I am fully in control of my sexual urges,’ he extended grittily into her ear. ‘But not my temper, I warn you.’

  ‘I don’t trust you,’ she whispered back with venomous bite, infuriated by the position in which she found herself. ‘I could fall asleep and you—’

  ‘Oh, I do believe you would wake up if I touched you. I believe that I can safely say a woman has never slept through my attentions!’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting! Let me go!’

  He gave vent to something rough and charged in Spanish and moved with an abruptness that took her completely by surprise. Suddenly she was flipped onto her back and Rico was lying above her instead, their positions reversed without warning. Before she could open her startled lips to demand an explanation he took her mouth in a surge of angry passion.

  And what happened next she definitely wasn’t prepared to deal with. As his tongue drove into the moist interior she had already accidentally opened to him she was seized by an explosive wave of excitement. It left her dizzy and stripped of every coherent thought. The intensity of her own response electrified her, opening up another world that was full of unbearable physical temptation. She returned the kiss with a kind of wondering innocence, arching her head back to deepen the pressure, involuntarily greedy and inviting more.

  ‘Por Dios…’ he groaned raggedly, his lean, hard body coming down into abrupt and abrasive contact with her yielding curves where, seconds earlier, he had held himself at a distance. ‘I—’

  Driven entirely by instinct, Bella speared her unsteady fingers into the thick silk of his hair and held him down to her, tracing the shape of his head in an exploratory caress. Touching had never felt so good, never felt so necessary. Entrapped by the discovery and fired by the leaping, unfamiliar energy sizzling along her nerve-endings, she threw herself with natural generosity into the conflagration of their mouths’ second meeting a split-second later.

  Incredible heat rose from deep inside her, making her body shake and quiver with the sheer power of what she was feeling. He pulled her to him as he slid onto his side, his hand curving to the pouting thrust of one full breast, inadequately protected by the thin lace cup of her bra. And then the barrier was inexplicably no longer there, his fingers shaping her naked, sensitised flesh with an expertise that made her gasp. In the darkness she felt him move, and the yearning peak of one engorged nipple was brushed by the tip of his tongue and then engulfed by his mouth.

  Bella moaned, and jerked as though she had been electrified. All she could hear was the rasp of her tortured breathing, the thunder of her heartbeat. Sensation so intense that it came close to torment had her in its grip. She was out of control, sensed it, felt it, knew it, and being out of control was something Bella never, ever allowed herself to be with a man. The shock of that realisation awakened her brain from its slumber, and in panic she wrenched herself free by rolling backwards.

  ‘No!’ she slung at him from between clenched teeth as she hit the hard floor with a force that hurt. Rolling over, feeling the nakedness of her back and breasts in dismayed confusion, she fumbled out blindly to feel the wall opposite the bed and sat there, hugging her knees and shivering as the light went on.

  ‘Madre de Dios…’ Rico hissed, studying her with incandescent golden eyes from the vantage point of the bed. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

  ‘Please return my clothing to me.’ She lowered her eyes and studied her raised knees, embarrassment and an unfamiliar self-loathing assailing her. But still she could see that strong-boned, hard face, brought alive by those astonishingly passionate eyes of his, the lithe, powerful symmetry of his bronzed, beautifully masculine body. Her nails dug into her skin in angry, fearful confusion as she fought to wipe out that unbelievably intense and detailed image.

  Her jacket and her bra landed in a heap beside her bare toes. She skidded upright, twisting away from him, and dug her arms shakily into the sleeves of the jacket, ignoring the bra because he was watching her. She hadn’t even noticed that he had removed both articles while she had been in his arms. It was a small point but somehow it underlined just how far her control and awareness had slipped and emphasised how complete had been his.

  Smooth bastard, she reflected shakily, deciding that you couldn’t know where you were with a guy possessed of that variety of sexual expertise. At least with the ones who grabbed and clutched you got fair warning of their intentions.

  ‘You are behaving as though I attacked you,’ he grated in a furious undertone.

  ‘You started it, I finished it. Let’s leave it there,’ she muttered unsteadily, with her back still cravenly turned to him.

  ‘I did not do anything—’

  ‘That I didn’t encourage you to do,’ Bella completed in a grudging interruption. ‘I know.’

  There was a smouldering silence.

  ‘If you acknowledge that—’ and his accented drawl told her just how astonished he was that she had made that acknowledgement ‘—then why—?’

  ‘My hormones are out of sync… or something.’

  ‘Qué dices…?’ Now he sounded slightly dazed. Bella forced herself to turn around. It took courage. ‘It’s this situation… the proximity, the misleading intimacy, the tension we are both under,’ she offered. ‘I’m sorry I let it go so far but neither one of us can want to wake up in the morning trapped with a sleazy one-night stand we can’t escape from—’

  ‘“Sleazy”?’ he echoed in disbelief.

  ‘Listen, I am the girl whom just a few hours ago you believed to be shacked up with an old guy of seventy.’ Having given the gentle reminder, Bella tilted her chin. ‘And sex without emotional involvement or commitment is sleazy in my book. I don’t know you well enough to say whether or not it would be in yours. But, if you’re like most of the men I meet, you don’t intellectualise much over taking sex where it’s offered. You just do it and you don’t have the sensitivity to feel bad about it.’

  She gave a dismissive little shrug, the absorbing focus of his stunned scrutiny. ‘But that’s OK. I don’t judge men on that. That’s just the way nature programmed you to behave. Survival of the species and all that.’

  His brilliant dark eyes shimmered, his facial muscles stiff with sudden hauteur, a faint but perceptible flush overlying his hard cheekbones. ‘I did not emerge from the primordial soup within recent memory,’ he gritted from between even white teeth.

  ‘Only you don’t think on your feet when you’re in bed with a half-naked woman and feeling randy—’

  ‘I refuse to believe I am hearing this!’

  Bella lifted his jacket, which he had laid across the chair, and began to empty the pockets.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he murmured in a seriously taut tone, his accent thick.

  ‘I’m going to use your jacket as a blanket for an hour and then maybe, when you’ve managed to drop off, I can take up the door-bashing again.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Come back to bed. I will not lay a finger on you,’ he swore icily.

  ‘It’s not a very good idea for us to share that bed right now, Rico. Take it from me,’ Bella muttered feelingly, ‘it would just be asking for trouble.’

  ‘If you are determined to treat me like some sort of lech—’

  She cleared her throat awkwardly and mumbled, ‘No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m simply trying to be sensible—’

  ‘That me!’ he bit out, with audible difficulty, anger and a whole host of other emotions she didn’t recognise fracturing his diction.

  ‘I’d like to…I’d really like to, but I don’t tr
ust me either,’ she admitted in a stifled confession which she felt that, in all fairness, she owed him.

  ‘You don’t trust…? Ah.’ A faint purr of complacency softened his drawl. ‘I thought you didn’t go for dark men?’

  “There’s an exception to every rule… but maybe Dracula could start looking appealing in this set-up’

  He sighed. ‘I have never been so fired in my life. Come back to bed. I promise you…you will be safe as a nun handcuffed to a priest in captivity.’

  Bella sent him a dubious glance. He had slumped back down again, black lashes fanned down on his cheekbones. Exhaustion emanated from every line of his long, muscular body. ‘Go to sleep, Rico,’ she whispered, a strange little arrow of tenderness piercing her. ‘Just go to sleep.’

  ‘I can’t leave you on the floor…’ he mumbled thickly.

  ‘I’ve slept on a lot of floors in my time.’ She sighed, thinking that no two individuals could have been more different.

  She sat on the chair, wrapped in his jacket, watching him sleep. The exception to the rule, she reflected tautly. Well, you’ve been well and truly rocked off your smug perch this time, Bella.

  She was locked in a container with the only male who had ever managed to penetrate her physical and mental defences. That scared her; that really did scare her.

  Men flocked to Bella like bees round a honey pot but nine out of ten invariably wanted what she didn’t want to give. Being a sex object was no compliment. Either she dated for fun and friendship or she quite cheerfully chose and dated a man who impressed her as having the kind of qualities she would like to find in a husband. There was nothing in between for Bella—no infatuations, no affairs, no regrets. She was determined not to give her heart unless she felt safe and secure.

  And until now passion had left her alone and untouched by any inconvenient cravings. Saying no when lovemaking went beyond a certain boundary had never been a problem for her, and she had always sensibly ensured that she did not give any man the ammunition to accuse her of being a tease. Bella believed in being honest and fair with the opposite sex. It had not crossed her mind that some day a man might touch her and with every fibre of her being she might crave the passion he inspired inside her, and crave it with such intensity that she almost broke the rules she had lived by for so long.

  Rico da Silva had taught her differently. He had shattered her control as easily as a child smashed an egg and with a similar lack of care or regard for the consequences. And did she blame him for that? Neither of them might emerge from this container alive, she thought, with a shiver of fear. When two people were attracted to each other and forced into such intimacy the act of sex might seem a very small thing to share in comparison to that hard reality…

  But Bella was too conscious of her own vulnerability—this strange, new and scary vulnerability that she was feeling. Rico da Silva disturbed her more than any other male she had ever met. He was clever; he was strong; he was unexpectedly candid about his own emotions. And he also attracted her more violently than she had ever believed possible.

  In the dim light she looked at him lying in the bed, and knew that lying in that bed with him would result in a conflagration of passion which she would find very difficult to handle. Yet she also knew that on some dark, deep level inside herself, unexplored until this moment, she wanted that passion very, very badly.

  Why? Their situation, as she had told him? No, it was something more than that. He was so different from her. In every way. And that fact in itself fascinated her. Nowhere did they share anything in common—background, nationality, status, education, income, outlook.

  Rico would have been quite capable of making love to her and forgetting her existence one second after he’d achieved the satisfaction of physical release. Rico was ruthless, single-minded, a sexual predator in this particular tight corner. Rico wouldn’t have felt awkward over the breakfast-table. On his scale it would have been a minor event, unimportant when set against survival.

  But Bella was not half as tough on the inside as she liked to pretend on the outside. Her outer shell of careless insouciance had been formed in the hard school of her childhood—with the slow, painful acceptance that her father didn’t give a damn about her, and that her mother dragged her about in her wake not out of choice but out of necessity, because there was nobody else to take responsibility. And when one day the possession of that child, now grown to an awkward thirteen-year-old threatened to come between Cleo and her latest man Cleo had dumped her on her grandfather, who hadn’t even known of her existence.

  Bella had learnt not to let people get too close. She had learnt to protect her inner self from invasion. On the surface she was open, but inside herself she knew she told nobody anything which mattered. And now she could feel that reserve being threatened, her essential emotional distance coming under attack. Griff hadn’t hurt her, Griff had disappointed her, but she had the horrible suspicion that Rico da Silva had the power to tear her inside out…

  ‘Por Dios, what the hell are you doing?’

  Bella jumped and unsealed her lips from the cold metal, her shoulders and arms aching from the awkward stance she had repeatedly taken up over the past few hours. She teetered on the chair, her legs stiff, and she would have fallen if a pair of strong arms hadn’t closed round her and lowered her down to the floor.

  Rico was staring without comprehension at the line of tins, deprived of their labels, on the table. An incredulous frown was dug between his ebony brows as he abruptly noticed his open wallet, now emptied of the considerable amount of paper money that he had been carrying. One lean hand reached out and snatched at the single rolled banknote still lying there. He opened it up and read the message carefully printed on it.

  “‘Help. Were in the container”,’ he said out loud.

  ‘I took the labels off the tins and tore them up and wrote on them first,’ she explained. ‘Then I pushed them through the biggest airhole. Then I had to blow to make them move. I’m hoping that some of them made it down onto the ground, or that there’s enough of a draught out there to take them off the roof. If anyone comes in they might notice them. That was when I thought of seeing what you had in your wallet—’

  ‘Had being the operative word.’ Rico studied her with intent, narrowed dark eyes.

  ‘Sorry…but a rolled-up twenty-pound note is far more likely to be noticed than a torn piece of label off a tin,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Sí…’ Still staring at her, he pushed long fingers somewhat unsteadily through his luxuriant hair and handed her the final note. Bella got back on the chair and posted it up into the world outside their prison. ‘I should have thought of this…’ he murmured tautly, gravely.

  ‘You think you have the monopoly on ideas around here?’ She laughed wryly. ‘It’s a far-out hope that someone will innocently walk in here, pick up one of those notes and release us—’

  ‘But not impossible. It’s a clever idea.’

  ‘Not if the ground out there is already littered or covered with debris, but who knows?’ Oddly embarrassed by his level of scrutiny, she turned away. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’

  ‘I think I owe you breakfast. You let me sleep for hours.’ He caught her wrist to examine her watch and groaned in disbelief. ‘It’s after twelve…almost lunchtime! Why didn’t you wake me?’

  ‘Relax. I did a lot of poker-bashing on and off.’ Bella flexed aching muscles, but she was horrendously conscious of those cool fingers still anchored to the tender inner skin of her wrist. ‘You slept through it. You needed the rest. I think whatever drug they used on us was still pretty much in both our systems until we could sleep it off. Where did you find that poker anyway?’

  ‘Stuffed behind the stove—an oversight on their part.’ His oddly abbreviated speech was matched by the blatant intensity of his continuing appraisal. His lashes dipped, showing only a glimmer of a pure, glinting gold, and he breathed in almost jerkily.

  Her mouth ran dry, her heartbeat acce
lerating in a sudden, alarming surge. The atmosphere was thick with explosive tension. It had come out of nowhere and inexplicably, although her brain screamed at her to move away, her feet were welded to the floor in front of him. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. A pulse-beat of awareness vibrated between them. It was so powerful that it drained her of self-will.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said in a rather high-pitched voice, fighting for concentration, desperate to break the silence. ‘It’s more likely that we’re in a warehouse than a barn. This container wasn’t plumbed in with water just for us. Those fitments in there have been in situ for years. This place has been used maybe as an office… or some sort of permanent site hut, I reckon… What do you think?’ By the time she reached the end of that question she was spitting out words so fast that they ran into each other.

  He wasn’t listening. He muttered something rough and yet soft in Spanish, and just as suddenly reached for her. As possessed by that terrifying strong need to physically connect as he was, Bella made no demur. Lost in the slumbrous demand of his golden gaze, she was mindless. He took her mouth with a hunger that burned like flames of fire over her unprotected skin.

  And yet she craved that fire, needed that fire as she needed oxygen to live. Her hands gripped his broad shoulders, loving the heat of his flesh through the fine shirt. She pushed against him as he crushed her to him, her breasts flattened to the hard wall of his chest, already heavy with a sensitivity and an anticipation which he alone had taught her to feel. Her body remembered him with every newly awakened sense.

  His mouth on hers was a source of unbearable pleasure. She was inflamed by it, driven with incredible speed to a pitch of desire strong enough to make her legs tremble and offer only the most fragile support. Every stab of his tongue intensified the drowning excitement that was fast claiming her. She kissed him back with an intensity of response that utterly controlled her, her hands sliding under his unbuttoned shirt, smoothing wonderingly over the flexing muscles of the satin-smooth skin of his back.