eyes looking back at him, and he experienced a wave of fierce protectiveness that was on several levels more shocking than her scream.
‘You really don’t remember?’
‘No, I never do, it’s a night terror. I thought I’d grown out of them.’
‘Not tonight.’
‘I suppose I should have told you.’
She might have meant the night terrors but he knew she didn’t.
‘It might,’ he agreed, ‘have been an idea.’
‘You...it was...thank you.’ She was back on earth, not floating two feet above it, but Lara couldn’t help wonder if it was the same earth...or she the same person.
There you go again, Lara—dramatising. It was sex, not an entry into an alternative dimension. People did it every day.
Of their own volition her eyes slid down his body; the light duvet that now covered them both reached his narrow hips, revealing the golden-toned skin of his flat, ridged belly and broad, powerful chest and shoulders.
The earthy image made her shudder. Her stomach muscles clenched, a stronger version of the delicious little aftershocks that had come in the wake of the crashing release.
‘I know a good cure for insomnia.’ And the darkness in his heart, which he felt receding.
She flashed a mock-innocent smile while inside her heart was hammering wildly. For the first time in her life she understood why people did crazy things for sex. ‘A glass of milk?’
Her smile made him hot. ‘You taste more of strawberries and cream.’ His mouth remaining a fraction of an inch from hers, he whispered throatily, ‘I want to touch you all over this time.’ He feathered a kiss across her parted lips. ‘Taste you.’
She gave a little whimper and whispered, ‘Please.’
It was a plea she made several times during the next hour, as he took her to the brink several times before he finally let her fall over the edge with him.
Utterly drained, but more at peace than he had felt in a week, no, a lot, lot longer, he barely had the strength to roll off her before sleep claimed him. It took Lara a long time to come down from the high she was floating on, and when she did her sleep was shallow and disturbed.
* * *
He woke up to the sound of the shower in the adjoining bathroom. He had barely managed to groggily lever himself into a sitting position and drag a hand through his hair when she appeared. Her freshly scrubbed, shiny face and wet curling hair looking incongruous against the indecently sexy red dress.
‘Sorry I woke you.’ The chirpy voice belonged to the red dress. ‘Hope you don’t mind, but I used your toothbrush.’
‘You can use anything you like but keep the volume down,’ he pleaded, holding his head.
‘Are you hung over?’ Did he even remember making love? She smiled her way through a stab of totally irrational bitterness. For her this one-night stand had been memorable, her first, but that didn’t mean it had any significance for him.
‘No, but I’m human,’ he retorted. ‘Being that cheerful in the morning,’ he concluded positively, ‘is not.’
‘So you’re not a morning person.’
The scowling lines of his staggeringly handsome face melted without warning into a wicked grin as he leaned back against the pillows, hands behind his head, and raised a mocking brow. ‘There are those that might dispute that...’
Her cheeks burning, Lara lifted her chin. ‘I’ll take your word on that one,’ she said, wondering whether he could be any more smugly self-satisfied. Even if his smugness was justified, it was an unattractive trait, and discovering a flaw in this perfect specimen made her feel slightly more cheerful as she moved across the room towards a mirror, combing her fingers through her wet curls.
Watching the gentle sway of her breasts against the red silk as she walked across the room, he felt his lust stir lazily. Actually, not so lazily.
‘I have never slept with a virgin before.’ And it had not been on any list of things to do in the near future.
She swivelled gracefully around, the expression on her beautiful face wary.
‘You’ve clearly got no sexual hang-ups...’ Though she did possess a delicious ability to blush. ‘It’s none of my business,’ he conceded, ‘but why?’
She stood there, poised, he suspected, on the point of telling him to go to hell, when she shrugged and pulled out a stool, sinking with a sigh and a rustle of silk onto it.
‘You know, I’ve been asking myself just that,’ she admitted with disarming candour. ‘I planned to lose my virginity last night, just not with you. I never really thought that casual sex would work for me without the emotional stuff, you know—liking, a connection...but it did quite beautifully, thank you.’
‘Liking...not love?’
Her candid gaze slid away as she got to her feet. ‘I think we communicate on more of a lust level.’
‘I’m assuming there is a man somewhere that came with the emotional stuff wondering where the hell you are.’
If it had been him, he’d have died a thousand deaths through the night imagining all the things that could have happened to her. ‘What were you thinking?’ he growled. ‘You could have met anyone!’
‘I expect Mark is asleep still.’
He reined in the surge of emotion. Sharing casual sex did not entitle him to bad-mouth a guy he didn’t know, although the confirmation that he existed at all had not improved his mood, and he could think of no circumstance that excused a man allowing a woman to wander around a strange city alone at night.
‘Poor guy,’ he said in a voice laden with insincerity.
Lara missed the insincerity but heard the words, and saw a red mist.
She turned slowly, rounding on him with eyes shooting green flames.
‘Poor guy,’ she echoed. ‘Poor guy! He’s a...’ Her mouth closed over a word her mum would have been shocked her daughter even knew, and, teeth clenched, she stalked towards the bathroom.
‘So you’re not planning a kiss-and-make-up session.’ The relief he felt was on her behalf, he told himself. Lara deserved something better.
Lara’s anger faded as quickly as it had sparked into life. ‘I overreacted, didn’t I?’ She covered her face with her hands and shook her head. ‘Mark is a total and utter louse, but the situation is as much my fault as his. If I hadn’t been walking around thinking I’d found my soulmate I’d have seen this coming a mile off.’
‘Your hero fell off his pedestal.’ It seemed suddenly sad that she would learn all too soon there were no heroes. ‘So what did he do?’
She gave a laugh that rang with self-mockery and shook her head. ‘Oh, why not? It’s a bit of a cliché really. I came here with my boss—he asked and I said yes.
‘What I didn’t know was that I was a last-minute stand-in for his girlfriend who couldn’t come, and he’d paid for the room, and he is a bit tight with money.’
It was a fault she’d been prepared to accept when he had still seemed the sensitive man of her dreams.
‘It turns out he asked because he thinks I’m basically easy, actually I think he’s not the only one, not that I care what people think.’
Hearing her fall back on a defence that was only used by people who did care, Raoul was forced to subdue a surge of protective tenderness.
‘And the virgin thing,’ she continued. ‘I think he thought he’d been sold a...what do they call it...?’
‘False