Hot Summer Flings: A Spanish Awakening / The Italian Next Door... / Interview with the Daredevil. Nicola Marsh

time she’d felt this way, that he was the first man who—

      Her eyes widened. God, she had to warn him that she hadn’t done this before it went any further, even at the risk of her confession ruining the mood. The possibility of that happening made her hold back, but only for a moment. If he had a problem with her inexperience it was better to know now, not later down the line.

      Rejection later on really would be crushing. ‘Do you remember that night in the car?’ Emilio swore softly under his breath at the reintroduction of the subject.

      Obviously he remembers, stupid, she told herself. He thinks it’s the event that triggered your moral downfall. ‘Well, I know that it looked—’ ‘I remember that that night I came this close …’ he interrupted, bringing his face within a whisper of hers.

      Megan’s eyelids drooped. She could feel the waft of his warm breath on her skin, on her mouth. The thought of confession slipped from her head as lust and longing shuddered through her body. She stared transfixed at the fine lines around his eyes, the gold tips at the end of his otherwise ebony eyelashes. Her heart ached. He was the most breathtaking, perfect thing on the planet and he wanted her.

      ‘This close?’ she parroted, fighting her way through the sensual fog in her head.

      ‘To throttling the bastard,’ he explained matter-of-factly.

      Not following this instinct had taken a large chunk of will power, but the effort had faded into insignificance beside the will power he had needed to tap into to stop himself taking Megan in his arms to comfort her.

      The sight of her standing there, white-faced and shaking, looking so vulnerable and fragile, had awoken every protective instinct he had and some new ones. While she had struggled not to cry he had struggled to keep his distance.

      Emilio hadn’t allowed himself to even touch her.

      He couldn’t. If he had he knew it wouldn’t have stopped at comforting.

      He had been tempted. Dios, but he had been so tempted standing there, fighting against his baser instincts, especially given the status of his relationship with his then wife playing in a loop through his head.

      Little snippets of the beginning of the end of his marriage slid into his head now.

      ‘I understand,’ Rosanna said when she discovered he had removed his things from the room they shared.

      ‘And are relieved?’ he asked, genuinely curious, and taking no satisfaction from her obvious distress.

      Emilio felt a lot of responsibility for what had happened. His mindset when he had entered into the marriage had not differed from how he would enter into any other contract.

      With the benefit of hindsight he could see that this had been a mistake—this wasn’t any contract.

      Mistake number two had been not factoring in the emotional factor, not allowing for the possibility that, despite what she had said, Rosanna needed more than he had been prepared or able to offer.

      What had happened had been inevitable.

      The suggestion made his errant wife look uncomfortable. ‘I wasn’t dissatisfied with what we had. That isn’t why I slept with—’

      Emilio took pity on her. ‘It’s all right, I don’t want a score out of ten, Rosanna, and I don’t want to know his name.’

      ‘I know you don’t. If you’d loved me you would have.’

      ‘I never—’

      ‘I know you didn’t,’ she cut in quickly. ‘He didn’t love me either, but he said that he did, and I needed to hear that even if it was a lie,’ she admitted sadly. ‘Don’t look like that, Emilio. Don’t be sorry for me. I’m not asking you to sleep with me. I don’t expect it, and I do realise that you will need—when you do I won’t make a fuss.’

      ‘So you are giving me permission to have sex with other women?’

      ‘It’s a sensible solution.’

      Cold-blooded and clinical were the words that slid unexpectedly into Emilio’s mind; they were two things that he had been accused of in the past. And mostly those accusations had been justified, so why now did settling for a dispassionate solution make him feel discontent?

      Why did he think it was settling? Settling implied there was a better option. He knew there wasn’t—marriage was by definition flawed, at best a compromise.

      ‘More sensible than a divorce? ‘

      She looked at him, white with anxiety under the perfect make-up he had never seen her without. ‘But you agreed we could make this work.’

      ‘I agreed that a divorce would be messy. I agreed that we make better friends than lovers. I agreed that domesticity is not something I am suited to.’

      ‘You haven’t met anyone?’ she began tentatively. ‘Someone special?’

      The idea amused him. ‘I have met no one I wish to have sex with and, even if I had, I have no desire to leap into another marriage,’ he promised, believing it.

      They left it like that.

      When six months passed and he had not taken up the offer of guilt-free cheating, he did pause to consider the situation. Six months was a long time and he was a man with a healthy sex drive. He recognised channelling his energies, no matter how successfully, into work was not a long-term solution to the problem.

      Did his reluctance to even acknowledge a problem existed stem from the fact he still thought of sex outside marriage as cheating?

      It was not a distaste of cheating that held him in check when he looked at Megan that night and burnt with a primal need to make her his.

      It was the knowledge that following through with his instincts, taking advantage of her at a moment like this would make him no better than the man he had just sent packing.

      The idea filled him with repugnance; for the first time in his life he wanted more than sex. He did not want some sordid hole-in-the-corner affair; he did not want their relationship to be tarnished with his past mistakes. He knew he had to be patient.

      Despite his reputation for infallibility, Emilio had made bad decisions in the past. While he did not advertise that, neither did he agonise over it; he shrugged and moved on.

      But the decision he made that night to be patient had not been one he had been able to shrug away. It had tortured Emilio for two years.

      He never made the same mistake twice.

      Emilio was going to make Megan Armstrong his. He was going to make her forget every man she had ever known. Determination hardened to steel inside him. The need to claim her had not lessened with time, but deepened—she was going to be his.

      He ran a finger down her smooth cheek, smiling as he felt her shudder. He breathed in the fragrance of her hair and allowed the scent of apples to flood his senses.

      ‘I did not warm to the man,’ he explained.

      Megan, deep in the sensual thrall, responded to the wry admission with a vague, ‘Who?’ The warmth of his breath on her ear lobe was sending shivers of sensation all the way down to her curling toes.

      He brought his face close to hers until their noses were almost touching. ‘The clown you were fighting off in the car.’

      ‘I was fighting him off,’ she said, thinking, Kiss me, please kiss me. Every second he didn’t was sheer torture.

      ‘I know.’ He lifted his head fractionally and hooked a thumb under her chin, tilting her head from side to side as he studied the soft curves of her face with an expression of ferocious fascination. ‘I should have throttled him,’ he mused thickly. ‘I really wanted to, but not as much as I wanted to do this.’

      Without warning he grabbed her bottom, his big hands curling