One Night in Madrid. Kate Walker

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      ‘Thank you,’ Alannah said again and the hand that touched his moved very slightly, her thumb stroking over his skin.

       ‘De nada.’

      Her kiss was unexpected. It was light, soft, delicate. Just a press of her lips against the side of his cheek, nothing passionate or sensual in it. There, and then gone again. But the feelings it sparked off were far from gentle, far from light.

      They were hot and needy and yearning for more.

      After the storm of anger, of rejection and blind fury—fury at her brother, the driver of the lorry she had talked of, at fate—there was another storm building inside him now. One of heat and fire—and a hunger he couldn’t stamp down. From feeling dead, lost, empty he began to be warm, vital, alive, sensation and need stinging along every nerve path, bringing his senses startlingly, explosively awake.

      He felt sure she must sense it, feel it in the tension in his body, hear it in the changed pattern of his breathing.

      ‘Alannah …’

      His use of her name was thick, rough, his voice raw and thickened by the sensual fire that flared within him. He suddenly found that he had had enough of stillness, of silence. He wanted to assert light in the face of darkness, heat in the face of cold … Life in the face of death.

      Turning his head, he caught her lips with his, snatching his hands free to clamp them at the back of her skull, fingers threading through the softness of her hair, twisting to hold her just where he wanted her as he took her mouth with all the ferocity of the need he couldn’t control. His blood throbbed at his temples and heat pounded between his legs, making him so hard so fast that it was almost painful. And as Alannah’s mouth opened under his he felt the red haze of desire flood his mind, driving away the memories he couldn’t bear to remember.

      This was what he wanted—to forget—to stop himself from thinking—to lose himself in fierce, mindless response—in fierce, mindless sex. And this woman had always been able to make him forget about anything but her.

      To make him think only of her and the wild, blazing fires they built between them.

      ‘Alannah …’ he said again but this time her name was a whisper of seduction against her lips as he drew her breath into his own lungs. ‘Alannah, querida …’

      Alannah, querida. The words seemed to swirl around inside Alannah’s head, taking her thoughts with them as sensation after sensation fizzed through every cell in her body, obliterating logic or control, and only leaving awareness and need.

      She should have known that it was a mistake to come close to Raul like this. Should have known that her own memories, her weakness where he was concerned, the sensual burn that he seemed to be able to awaken in her simply by existing, would only risk putting her into his power if she broke through the careful invisible barriers she had tried to put between them ever since the moment she had first seen him in the hospital room. She had weakened then and all but thrown herself into his arms, but the storm of weeping that had overtaken her had driven every other thought from her head.

      Her only need then had been of comfort and support. It was when she had recovered a little, when she had calmed enough to draw breath, that she became aware of other feelings, sensations she had thought long since dead and now was forced to realise were only buried, just below the surface, waiting only for a touch, a kiss to break through her defences and leave her aching for more.

      She’d known she was in danger when she’d felt that sense of loss as Raul had walked away from her in the kitchen when she had been so sure that he was about to kiss her. Loss and disappointment were the feelings of someone who was still tied to this man in spite of all the time they had spent apart, and her determination to put him out of her mind, out of her heart. She didn’t want to be tied to him in any way. She didn’t love him—how could she love a man who had only ever seen her as a body, a brood mare on which to breed the heirs he and his family longed for?

      But you didn’t have to love to want—to hunger for a touch, a kiss, to overreact when he gave her one and feel a sense of loss when he denied her the other.

      She had vowed to keep her distance. To keep a grip on herself and the feelings she seemed unable to erase along with the love she had once felt for him. And she would have done so. She would have managed that if she hadn’t come out here and seen Raul with the picture frame in his hands, the terrible look of loss and sorrow draining all the colour from his face as he stared down at the photograph of his young sister. The sister he had so recently learned was dead, just like her own brother.

      And she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t felt for him and needed to go to him to offer compassion and sympathy, to help him in the same way that he had helped her as he’d held her and let her sob out her grief against the strength of his chest, with his powerful arms closed about her.

      That was what he’d done for her—and what she had planned to do for him. But she didn’t have the strength that Raul possessed, the self-control—the indifference—that had kept him firmly distant from her even as he held her close. She had only to touch him and she was lost in a world of sensation where common sense and self-preservation had no place. From the moment she had felt the heat of his skin underneath her fingertips, she had wanted more. The scent of his body was so familiar and yet so alien, clean and faintly musky, touched with a tang of something citrus: intensely personal, intensely masculine—intensely Raul.

      The fierce rage that had gripped him when he’d learned the truth had clouded that feeling. Clouded but not destroyed it. And moving close again now had been all that it had taken to reawaken it.

      She’d told herself that the kiss was simply one of comfort, a gesture of sympathy, but somewhere deep in her soul she’d known that she was only denying the truth even to herself. And the truth was that she might try to fight against him, against the sensual tug of his physical appeal, the way his body seemed to call to hers, but she couldn’t fight herself. That kiss might have started out as a kiss of compassion, but in the instant that her lips had touched his skin, feeling its warmth and tasting the slightly salt flavour of it against her tongue, she had known that she was lost.

      Every moment of loss, of longing, of need that she had ever known, ever felt with this man came flooding back into her mind, sweeping away rational thought with the ferocity and speed of a tidal wave and leaving nothing in its place but the whirling, surging wild waters of desire.

      The last thing she heard was that raw, hungry muttering of her own name as his head turned, his mouth taking hers. But from that moment the world and everything else in it faded into the red, swirling haze that was all that was in her mind. Her eyes closed as his mouth took hers, his kiss crushing her lips apart, breath mingling, tongues tangling together. Such was the force of his kiss that she swayed violently and would have fallen if the steely strength of his arms hadn’t come round her, fastening tight and holding her up, clamped hard against the lean power of his body.

      ‘R-Raul …’ She choked his name in a sound of need, of pleading, huskily hungry—and the only word she could think of; the only thought in her head.

      She felt his smile against her mouth. His hands were hard against her back. Big hands, hot hands, heavy hands, fingers splayed out along her spine, burning her skin through the protection of her T-shirt, holding her where he wanted her as he took another kiss and then one more.

      ‘You’re beautiful,’ he muttered against her cheek.

      ‘Beautiful.’

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