lifted her hand to her ear and began to speak, her clear voice floating across to the young men, confusing them for a moment. But then one noticed that she had no phone in her hand and the yells began again.
Do not show fear.
A bit late for that, Lara thought. The group had slowly moved until she was surrounded. You should have run when you had the chance, said the voice in her head. Too late now! One tormentor might not have been so bad. She could have dealt with one, talked her way out perhaps, but with several, all egging each other on...?
Aware that her options had been reduced to calling for help and hoping someone would come to her aid, Lara opened her mouth to shout. Only a strangled squeak emerged, but it was drowned out by a new voice, a voice that held an edge of bored irritation.
‘Where have you been? I said outside the casino!’
The youths stopped and swivelled towards him. Raoul raised a sardonic brow and allowed his disdainful glance to drift over them, satisfied they were not going to present a problem. He ignored the flicker of something close to regret—now was not the time to get his knuckles bloody—and instead turned his scrutiny to the luscious redhead. As their glances connected he saw comprehension supplant the shock in her wide-spaced eyes—could that colour possibly be real?—and she didn’t miss a beat before replying, ‘Casino...?’ She shook her head. ‘No, you said we’d go on there afterwards.’
And that smile...!
He’d never understood dedicated enthusiasts who waited for hours in often uncomfortable positions to catch a glimpse of a rare bird. But he would wait for ever to see that smile again, especially as it deepened, revealing a dimple in her smooth cheek. Raoul couldn’t think of a reason in the world not to respond to the challenge in her emerald eyes.
‘And I’m not late, you’re early.’
He watched as she pulled off her other shoe, giving another excellent view of her delicious bottom, and strolled with a sexy sway of her hips towards him. ‘Luckily for you,’ she breathed, ‘I’m very understanding.’ What are you doing, Lara?
God knows! came the answer, but it felt...what? Actually it was hard to put a label on the fizz in her blood. The nearest she could liken it to was champagne bubbles bursting, vastly preferable to feeling like some silly little girl who had run away.
No, you’re just a silly girl who is jumping from the frying pan into the fire! It seems you’re not content with laughing at the face of danger—you have to set a collision course with it!
The racing thoughts slid through her head in the time it took her to fully absorb the man who had decided to be her guardian angel. Not that there was anything angelic about him, unless you were talking the dark, fallen and supremely sexy variety! Her first glance had told her that and even with several feet separating them she had felt the impact on her senses of the sensuality he projected, raw and primal.
A little shudder traced a path down her spine as she realised this wasn’t a case of someone trying to be something—he was something. There was nothing contrived about the maleness, it was simply an integral part of him.
The powerful sexual charge he oozed made it almost irrelevant that he was the best-looking man she had ever seen. Well, not quite irrelevant, she admitted as her eyes travelled the long, lean length of him.
He was tall, very tall with the broad-of-shoulder, lean-of-hip sort of muscular frame usually associated with athletes. He was dressed expensively in a black suit, and a tie of the same colour was looped around his open-necked shirt; the vee of skin it revealed showed the same glowing golden tone as his face, minus the stubble that dusted his jaw and lean cheeks.
The stubble was the same black as his brows, which were straight and thick, one angled in at a sardonic slant above the narrow, heavy-lidded, thickly lashed eyes they framed. His strong-boned face was a miraculous arrangement of planes and angles, razor-edged high cheekbones, high forehead, aquiline nose and a strong jaw.
The only thing that alleviated the overwhelming masculinity was his mouth and the sensual fullness of his lower lip, though any suggestion of softness was counterbalanced by his firm upper lip, which had a hint of cruelty about it.
Her rescuer was doing some looking himself, his expression shielded by his heavy eyelids, but when he reached her bare feet one dark brow hitched higher.
Lara felt a giggle well up in her throat.
Up to that point he’d been making an effort to retain what grip on reality he had left, but the seductive sound she made precluded any return of common sense. He felt as hot as the glorious waves of her hair looked, and it was all he could do not to reach out and touch the flames.
‘Long story.’ She lowered her voice and leaned in closer, placing her hands on his forearms to steady herself. As her fingers pressed through the fabric she could feel the hard, sinewy strength beneath, and her stomach muscles quivered. ‘Would thank you be premature? Are they still there?’ she whispered.
‘A couple.’
Lara wanted to ask how he knew when he’d not taken his eyes off her face, but she couldn’t. Her throat was full, not with tears, but with something else, the same something that was sending intermittent tremors through her body.
They were standing close enough to be taken for lovers, close enough for his nostrils to quiver in response to the scent of her hair. He fought the primitive compulsion to pull her into him, let her feel what she was doing to him.
‘You saved me.’
‘It was a pleasure,’ he said, breathing in that scent.
The corners of her mouth lifted in a rueful grimace. ‘I didn’t handle it very well.’
He watched her smooth brow furrow. There was something quite fascinating about the expressions that flickered across her vivid little face.
‘I lost my temper.’ She bit her lip and tilted her head downwards, looking up at him through the mesh of her lashes. ‘It’s been a...not good day.’
‘I’ve had one of those too.’
It was a connection. The silence could have been companionable, but it wasn’t. The air was charged with a sexual tension so thick that Lara struggled to breathe. She’d never experienced anything like this before.
‘Have I said thank you?’
His dark eyes smiled, the crinkles at the corners deepening. ‘My money was on you.’
‘I was scared stiff.’ She gave a tiny shudder. ‘Well, thank you anyway...?’
‘Raoul. Raoul Di Vittorio.’
‘Thank you, Raoul. I’m Lara—Lara Gray.’ Ignoring the voice in her head that warned she was playing with fire, she tipped her head back; hooking one hand behind his head and stretching up, she brushed his mouth with her soft, pouting lips.
She was about to pull back when his mouth began to move slowly and sensuously over her lips. She kissed him back, not teasingly now, but with a hungry longing she hadn’t felt before. A moan drifted up from her throat as his tongue slid deeper. Afraid she would fall, even more afraid that this would stop, she clutched at his jacket and hung on.
When they broke apart the street was empty.
Lara stood there, gasping for air like someone who’d just run a marathon.
There were so many alarm bells ringing in his head that Raoul could barely hear himself think. What the hell was he doing?
He was forgetting.
He took hold of her hands, releasing the lapels of his jacket from her death grip. As she let go and stepped away from him her face lifted. Her lips, swollen from his kisses, quivered as she ran the tip of her tongue over them and blinked like a sleepwalker on waking somewhere unexpected.
‘Oh, my!’ she whispered.
The visceral stab of lust that lanced through