Page 85 of Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride

Gently rolling her onto her back, he came with her, untangled his fingers from hers and began to touch her face in the self-same way. But the kiss began to alter, subtly at first, then with a deepening of sensuality that quickened the senses.

Linking her hands around his nape, she held him, and his touch begin to drift on a gentle exploration of her throat, her shoulders, and finally the satin-smooth slopes of her waiting breasts. As he brushed a caress across tightly budding peaks she gasped her response into his mouth. One of his hands began to dip low over her ribcage, and as she arched in response to his so-light caress he reached up, caught hold of one of her own hands and fed it onto his body.

It was a command for her to match his movements. She remembered it from the last time they’d come together like this. Luiz had been her tutor in the art of arousing a lover. What he made her feel, he wanted to feel; what he did to her to make her go wild with pleasure, he expected her to do to him.

But that had been seven years ago, and seven years of abstinence had made her unsure of herself. Her fingers fluttered uncertainly against his hair-roughened breastbone, found one small tight male nipple and began a tentative rolling of it between thumb and finger which had him groaning thickly. He wrenched his mouth from hers so he could string a line of heated kisses across her cheek and down her throat until he found and fixed on one of her own tightly drawn peaks.

She cried out. It was such a wildly exhilarating sensation. He muttered something she didn’t catch, ran his hand down her body, lifting eager nerve-ends to the surface of her skin as he did so, then caught hold of the hem of her nightdress and deftly slipped it up and over her head.

With the silk gone, his fingers began tracing the sensitive flesh along her inner thigh. Her mouth fixed on his shoulder; his returned to her breast. She could feel the heat of him, the burning, burgeoning power of him, pulsating against her hipbone.

His hand was beginning to trail ever further upwards, and she knew that if he touched her where he intended to go next then he would expect her to touch him the same way. But—

‘Luiz…’ she breathed, needing something—reassurance maybe, or even a reprieve. She wasn’t really sure.

‘Shh,’ he commanded, deep, dark, tense with arousal.

Did he think she was about to call a halt to it all? she wondered. But that was as far as it got—a question forming inside her head—before he literally sent her toppling over the edge as, with needle-point accuracy, he located the very life-force of her.

It threw her into a paroxysm of gasps and whimpers. No warning, no mercy. She hovered precariously on the very edge of orgasm, and as if he knew it Luiz uttered a soft curse, caught her mouth again with a hard, hot, urgent kiss that mimicked what he was doing to her. Then he was covering her body with his own and positioning himself so he could enter her with a sure, sleek thrust.

Delicate tissue unused to this kind of intrusion tensed on a moment’s protest at his potent demand. Then she sighed softly, slowly relaxed the tension out of her thighs so that she could draw him in deeper. He responded with a husky groan. After that it became a powerful example of intimacy at its most intense level. Mouth close to mouth, breast to breast, hip to taut hip, they began to move as a single entity. Her hands clutched at his silk taut back while his held her possessively beneath him. Her breath shivered from her parted lips to mingle sensually with his. And with her eyes captured by the burn in his everything else was temporarily forgotten. Past betrayals, present mistrusts—nothing else seemed to matter but what they were feeling.

And feel it they did—together—together so perfectly that when her breathing grew shorter and her body more anxious he knew the exact moment she was about to leap, and drove them over the edge with a fierceness that was completely soul-shattering.

Afterwards, when it was eventually over and Luiz lay heavy on top of her with his face buried in her throat, there was even something perfectly shared in the way neither seemed able to move or speak. Nevertheless, Caroline was glad of the darkness to hide away in when Luiz did eventually find the strength to move. Rolling onto his side, he took her with him, holding her with arms that gave her no room to escape.

‘You’re mine now,’ he said, and that was all.

Caroline didn’t even bother to answer. For it didn’t take genius for her to work out that she had always been his, even during seven years of never setting eyes on him.

CHAPTER SIX

THE next time she woke it was to find a voile-defused daylight eddying around her. She was alone, she realised, lying sprawled naked on her stomach once again, amongst a sea of tumbled white linen, with her arm thrown out in a way that told her exactly what it had been thrown across until that warm male body had slid stealthily out from beneath it.

Her heart performed a dramatic flip, the memory of the previous twenty-four hours enough to hold her still with her eyes closed tight while she tried to come to terms with knowing just how easy she had been for him.

It was scary. Because even as she coped with the inevitable clutches of shame that knowledge brought with it, she was also aware of a gentle pulsing deep inside that was warm and soft and infinitely sensual as delicate muscles searched for the silken force which had given them so

much.

‘Luiz…’ she breathed, then wished she hadn’t, because even whispering his name was a sensual experience.

I should hate him, she told herself. I want to hate him for doing this to me again. No wonder it all felt so very scary.

A light tap sounded on the bedroom door then, jolting her into a sitting position in the middle of the bed. She had just managed to scramble a white sheet around her nakedness when the door came open and a young woman appeared carrying a breakfast tray.

She was smiling shyly. ‘Buenos días, señorita,’ she murmured politely. ‘Don Luiz instructed me to waken you in time to meet him at the hospital at noon.’

Noon. Hospital—her father! Oh, dear God, how could she have forgotten him as thoroughly as she had? She was about to leap from the bed in panic when the little maid added, ‘El señor also say to tell you that your papá is well, and will be discharged later on today.’

And as Caroline sat, needing long seconds to take this reassuring information in, the girl walked forward and put the tray down on a small table, then turned to enquire if there was anything else she wanted.

‘Er, no—thank you,’ she answered politely. But as the young maid walked back to the door, a sudden thought hit her. ‘Did el s?nor leave the address of the hospital?’ she asked. ‘Only I forgot to make a note of it in the panic last night.’

‘He has placed Señor Martinez at your disposal,’ the maid explained. ‘He will know where he is to drive you.’

With that she was gone, leaving Caroline to wonder just who Señor Martinez was. The maid seemed to think that Caroline already knew.

---