Название: Raul's Revenge
Автор: JACQUELINE BAIRD
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
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They had spent all afternoon in bed and had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep. Now just looking at Raul made her shiver with the rekindling of passion. She reached out a small hand and ran it lightly over his broad shoulder and across his massive chest, her fingers entwining in the surprisingly soft chest hair. She grazed a small male nipple and still her hand moved down.
It was incredibly sweet to have him at her mercy, to let her hand roam lower over the taut, flat stomach, to feel his hard, warm body, to linger over the muscles of his thighs. She lowered her head and kissed him softly, not wanting to wake him, simply to love him freely with her hands and mouth.
‘Woman, behave.’ Raul’s hand grasped her wrist like a manacle and in seconds their positions were reversed. Penny was flat on her back and Raul was looking down into her startled eyes. ‘You’re insatiable,’ he chuckled. ‘I never imagined when I first took you to bed what a sleeping tiger I was arousing.’
‘Tigress, surely?’ she husked, shivering in delight as his glittering dark eyes swept her naked body with a sensuous, knowing triumph. ‘You’re the only tiger around here, with your gold-flecked eyes,’ she corrected him throatily.
‘Grr...’ Raul teased, and, bending, rubbed his unshaven jaw against her soft cheek. ‘Only around you, Penny.’ He lifted his head. ‘You must know I adore you.’
She sighed as his hand trailed across her body to cup one full, round breast. ‘And I you; all you have to do is touch me and you can have m-e-e-e.’ She ended on a moan as he rolled one taut nipple between his thumb and finger, sending arrows of sensation through her ultrasensitive flesh.
‘Much as I would like to take up your offer, I can’t.’ He brushed his mouth briefly over hers. ‘I have work to do if I am to take you to London at the weekend.’
Penny beamed up at him. ‘You mean that?’
‘Yes. I promised and I am a man of my word.’ He rolled over and got to his feet, and she stared at him, her breath catching in her throat.
At that moment she loved him more than life. Raul, her lover, was back. How could she have imagined for a second that she was bored? She would spend her life waiting for Raul if she had to, but she didn’t need to. He was here and he was keeping his promise to take her to London. He did love her. Ava was right; it was only a matter of time before they married.
Her loving gaze roamed over him and a surprised gasp escaped her as he turned and smiled down at her, magnificent in his nudity. Contrary to what he had said, he could not hide his body’s readiness to take up her offer.
‘It isn’t so shocking,’ he said, his voice deep and tinged with laughter as he caught her wayward gaze. ‘My body might be weak but my mind is strong, and I do have some calls to make.’
She lifted her eyes to his. ‘I think you might have got that quote the wrong way around.’ She let her glance slide back down the long, hard length of him. ‘Weak is hardly an accurate description from where I am,’ she joked.
‘Tigress.’ And lips twitching, Raul bent down and brushed a cheeky kiss across the twin peaks of her full breasts. ‘Get up, get a shower and put something pretty on this sexy body that won’t distract me. Then come downstairs, and after we have eaten we’ll talk.’ Swinging on his heel, he walked off.
Penny sighed happily and, turning on her stomach, savoured the lingering scent of Raul and love on the crumpled sheets. She heard him moving around, dressing, but was too sated and lazy to move.
For the next few days Penny thought that life was perfect... They shared breakfast in the secluded courtyard and then Raul locked himself in the study for the morning, but after lunch he was all hers.
They spent an afternoon in the marvellous old city of Granada in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. They strolled hand in hand around the Alhambra palace, built for the Moorish rulers hundreds of years earlier.
Penny gazed in awestruck wonder at the ostentatious luxury. The walls carved with swirls of ornate stucco, the tons of white marble and coloured glass, and the ceilings, hand-carved from cedarwood, designed to represent heaven, almost convinced her that she was already there!
Later, sharing a picnic, which had been lovingly supplied by Ava, in the gardens where the constant splash of running water and dripping fountains lent a pleasant coolness to the air, Penny smiled at Raul’s reclining figure and was convinced. Heaven could not possibly be better...
Singing happily to herself, Penny descended the grand staircase. She had finished the packing, and at nine o’clock the next morning they would be on a flight out of Alicante, arriving in London Friday lunchtime. She had called Amy and arranged to call at the apartment on Sunday, to catch up on the news.
She was dressed in a simple green silk slip of a gown, tiny straps supporting the soft fabric that clung loosely to her lithe body, the hemline ending just above her knees to reveal her long, shapely legs. On her feet delicate wedge-heeled gold and green sandals glittered as she skipped lightly down the stairs.
She had left her blonde hair loose to curl enticingly over her shoulders and down her back because she knew that Raul preferred it that way. She was totally unaware of how stunning she looked. The glow of love had given her fine features an incandescent beauty, her softly swollen lips needed no lipstick, and her blue eyes sparkled with the inner radiance of a woman who knew she was loved.
‘Penelope.’ The voice was harsh.
Penny’s foot hesitated on the bottom step of the stairs; her heart thumped in her breast. Raul was standing in the entrance, elegantly dressed in a dark business suit, the sun behind him outlining his huge frame in a halo of fire. For a second he looked like the devil incarnate. His business meeting must have finished early, she thought inconsequentially.
‘Raul, you’re back.’ She moved towards him, a tentative smile pulling at her wide mouth.
‘Too late, it would seem, to stop your idiocy,’ he drawled scathingly.
‘My idiocy?’ She shook her head, her fair hair floating around her naked shoulders. What on earth was he talking about? Her eyes searched his rugged face and she shivered inside.
‘Don’t play the blue-eyed innocent with me, Penny. I’m too old to be fooled.’ And the contempt in his voice flicked her like a whiplash.
‘Please, Raul.’ She lifted her hand to his chest but he swept her aside.
‘In my study...now.’
She followed him. Noting the tension in his broad back, she chewed nervously at her bottom lip. Something had upset him, but what?
She had barely put a foot in the oak-panelled study before he turned on her, and, slamming the door behind her, he rested one hand on the hard wood and stared down into her confused face. But this was not the man who had left her a handful of hours earlier. His dark eyes were as hard as jet, and as unyielding.
‘What the hell have you been doing, woman?’ he demanded icily.
‘P-p-packing,’ she stammered, СКАЧАТЬ