Modern Romance - The Best of the Year. Miranda Lee

dressing himself, sheathing that amazing body again.

      When she was dressed he said coolly from behind her, ‘Shall we go?’

      Sam steeled herself and turned around to see Rafaele looking hardly rumpled, his hair only slightly messy. She knew she must look as if she’d just been pulled through a hedge backwards. The tang of sex was in the air and it should have sickened her, but it didn’t. It made her crave more.

      ‘Yes,’ she said quickly, before he could see how vulnerable she felt.

      * * *

      Rafaele burned with recrimination as he negotiated his car out of the factory in the dark with Sam beside him, tight-lipped. His recrimination was not for what had happened; he’d do that again right now if he could. His recrimination was for the way it had happened. He’d behaved like a teenage boy, drooling over his first lay with finesse the last thing on his mind.

      When she’d asked him just now if he believed her, his reaction had been knee-jerk and not fair. He was already repeating history with bells on, and he knew he wouldn’t have the strength to resist her even if he wanted to.

      It had been a miracle that he’d had the control to make sure Sam had come first—but then he recalled how ready to explode she’d been when he’d just touched her with his fingers. Just like that he was rewarded with a fresh, raging erection and had to shift to cover it in the gloom of the interior of the car.

      He’d taken Sam on his desk. He’d only ever let one other woman get to him at work—the same woman. Until he’d met Sam his life had been strictly compartmentalised into work and pleasure. That pleasure had been fleeting and completely within his control. As soon as he’d laid eyes on her, though, the lines had blurred into one.

      He could still remember the cold, clammy panic that last weekend four years ago at finding himself waking in his own bed with Sam wrapped around him like a vine. Far from precipitating repugnance, he’d felt curiously at peace. Until he’d realised the significance of that and that peace had been shattered. He’d postponed an important meeting that weekend to spend it with Sam. He’d even turned off his phone. Had not checked e-mails. He’d gone incommunicado. For the first time. For a woman.

      It had been that which had made something go cold in his chest. Realising how far off his own strict path he’d gone.

      Even now he was aware of that, but also aware of Sam’s slim supple thighs in her black trousers next to him. Albeit slanted away, as if she was avoiding coming any closer than she had to in the small, intimate space.

      Dio. If she was his he’d make her wear skirts and dresses all the time, so that all he’d have to do would be to slide his hand— If she was his. Rafaele let the car swerve momentarily and very uncharacteristically as that thought slid home with all the devastation of a stealth bomb.

      He could feel Sam’s quick glance of concern and imagine her frowning.

      ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, and regained control of himself. He could see from the corner of his eye that Sam had crossed her arms over her breasts. She was so tense he fancied she might crack in two if he touched her.

      Her silence was getting to him, making his nerves wind tight inside him. He wanted to provoke her—get her to acknowledge what had just happened. What it possibly meant to her. Was the same round of unwelcome memories dominating her head?

      Injecting his voice with an insouciance he didn’t feel, Rafaele asked, ‘Don’t tell me you’re already regretting what happened, cara.’

      She snapped at him, ‘Is it that obvious?’

      Rafaele’s mouth tightened in rejection of that, despite his recent thoughts. ‘It was inevitable and you know it. It’s been building between us from the moment we saw each other again.’

      He glanced at Sam and their eyes met. A jolt of electricity shot straight to Rafaele’s groin.

      She hissed at him, ‘It was not inevitable. It was a momentary piece of very bad judgment. You were obviously feeling frustrated—maybe it’s because you’ve been forced to move to the suburbs so you can’t entertain your mistress.’

      Rage was building inside Rafaele and he responded with a snarl, ‘I don’t have a mistress at the moment.’

      Sam sniffed. ‘Maybe not, but I’m sure there’s been a number in the last four years.’

      And not one of them Rafaele could remember right now. But if he was a painter he could paint Sam’s naked body with his eyes closed. He recalled seeing Sam bite her lip and how he’d let slip ‘I’ve missed this.’ He’d also told her that no one had come close to her in four years. Then he’d all but admitted that he’d used other women to try and forget her. His belly curdled.

      He ground out, ‘Are you expecting me to believe that you’ve been celibate for four years?’ He glanced at her and saw her go pale in the gloom. ‘Well? Have you?’

      Sam stared straight ahead. Stonily. ‘Of course not. There was someone...a while ago.’

      For a second Rafaele only heard a roaring in his ears. He saw red. He almost gave in to the impulse to swerve the car to the kerb. He’d fully expected her to say of course not, and his own hypocrisy mocked him. But, he told himself savagely, he hadn’t given birth to a baby.

      He was aware that irrational emotions were clouding his normally perfectly liberal views and it was not something Rafaele welcomed.

      ‘Who was he?’ he bit out, knuckles white under the skin of his fingers on the wheel. Just the thought of Sam even kissing someone else was making him incandescent.

      ‘He was a colleague. He’s a single parent too...we bonded over that.’

      Rafaele felt as if a red-hot poker had been stabbed into his belly. In a calm voice, belying the strength of his emotions, Rafaele said, ‘You were a single parent by choice, Samantha. You are not a single parent any more.’

      Rafaele struggled to control himself. He wanted to demand Sam tell him more—how many times? Where? When?

      As if sensing his intense interest, Sam blurted out, ‘It didn’t amount to anything. It was just one time. We went to a hotel for an afternoon and to be perfectly honest it was horrible. It felt...sordid.’

      She clamped her mouth shut again and Rafaele realised he was holding his breath. He let it out in one long shuddery breath. His hands relaxed. Even though he still wanted to find this faceless, nameless person and throw him up against a wall.

      From the moment Sam had stepped into his office earlier he’d been on fire. The culmination of weeks of build-up. The inferno inside him had been too strong to ignore. Feeling Sam in his arms, her mouth under his, opening up to him, pressing herself against him... He’d been thrusting into the tight, slick heat that he’d never forgotten right there on his desk before he’d even really acknowledged what was happening. He’d been in the grip of something more powerful than his rational mind.

      They hadn’t even used protection. Sam was the only woman that had ever happened with, and the result of that was probably being put to bed right now. He looked at Sam again and saw that she was still pale, a pulse throbbing at the base of her neck. She’d uncrossed her arms finally and her breasts rose and fell a little too quickly, giving her away. They were stopped in traffic and he reached over and took her hand, gripping it when she would have pulled away.

      He forced her to look at him and her eyes were huge. Rafaele saw something unguarded in their depths for a split second, but then it was gone and he crushed down the feeling of something resonating deep inside him. The jealousy he felt still burned in his gut.

      He wanted to hate Sam for ever appearing in his life to disrupt his ordered and well-run world. A world where nothing had mattered except rebuilding Falcone Industries and ensuring that he would never be ruined like his father. Sam had jeopardised that for a brief moment in time and now it was happening all over again. But he found that he couldn’t hate her for that any more because Milo existed. And because