Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 1 of 2
to last forever. She held him deep as they drew out each caress and kiss. It imbued the act with something emotive and profound, until she was shaking under the intensity of this exquisitely powerful joining. A single press of his lips to the point of her shoulder became her world. She traced his crooked lips with her fingertip and it was the most exquisite kiss of her life.When a frantic desperation closed her fist in his hair, trying to hang on to something she couldn’t grasp, he caught that hand and pressed it to the mattress, linking his fingers through hers.
Then he began to move. For real.
By that time, she was pure, liquid desire, steeped in arousal. The impact of his hips became something so beautiful and pure that the burn of tears hit her eyes again, these ones of veneration. Jubilation.
She loved him, she acknowledged, as the last vestiges of self-possession left her. She loved him with every fiber of her being.
But as the little death of climax overtook her and she faced the fact that nothing was eternal, most especially this brief paradise she had found with him, she felt something break inside her, and her tears squeezed between her lashes to track her cheeks.
CHAPTER NINE
JAVIERO EXTRICATED HIMSELF carefully from Scarlett’s sleeping form.
Waking her to say goodbye would be the decent thing, but she had been up in the night and had come back to make love with him again, wordless and so intense he still felt like she’d stolen a piece of him.
He wouldn’t have touched her again if she hadn’t reached for him. He was still disturbed by the way she’d wept after their first lovemaking, which had followed that atrocity of a dinner with her sister. Given his turmoil after that, he wouldn’t have touched her at all. He’d been feeling riled and newly suspicious.
Was she a master gold digger and he the ultimate fool?
Whether she had set him up or not didn’t change the fact they had a son. But did they have a future?
If he could keep her at arm’s length, he would have done that by now, but she exerted this damned pull on him. He’d resisted it as long as he could, and then she’d taken apart his control piece by piece—which added to the grate of discontent in him.
Then she had cried afterward.
He’d hated himself, feeling like an animal even though she swore he hadn’t been too rough. She had mumbled something about hormones and fallen asleep, then reached for him again a few hours ago.
She hadn’t cried that time. She hadn’t said anything but his name, and that had been a cry of ecstasy while her body had quaked in climax beneath him.
Why had she wanted to make love again? Because they were a potent combination? Or because she wanted to keep him in a sexual stupor so he wouldn’t ask too many questions about her situation with her family?
He didn’t want to deconstruct their lovemaking or her motives and, most of all, wanted to avoid considering how powerfully their lovemaking had impacted him. He was left feeling knocked off his foundation. The entire night, from the first touch of her lips against the scar on his chest to the tender joining an hour ago, had been conducted behind his firewalls. He’d run the gamut of emotions from anger at her and himself, to suspicion and disgust, with impatience and hurt ego following. They all terminated in a greedy desire he hadn’t been able to resist.
Then pleasure. Such intense, prolonged pleasure laced with concern and possessiveness and a strange bleakness afterward because he still didn’t think he could trust her.
Which meant these doors inside him that she’d blasted open had to be sealed shut, with her on the outside.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he held his head in his hands, trying to pinpoint how and where his defenses had been breached so he could repair them. He wasn’t one of those throwbacks who refused to feel anything at all, believing tears made a man weak and love was a lie. He respected the power of emotions, though, especially their ability to devastate and manipulate. Between his parents’ backstabbing intrigues and his bitter rivalry with Val and the loss of his grandfather, he had learned to be judicious about allowing anyone near his heart.
His son had slid right in, of course, and he didn’t regret that at all, except that Locke had created a massive vulnerability in him, and now he was much more cautious about letting Scarlett in. It would be years before his son was old enough to betray him, but she could turn on him at any moment. He didn’t want to believe she would, but nor did he want to trust her completely and find out the hard way he’d been imprudent to do so.
He dressed and went through to say goodbye to his son. Locke was sleeping and Javiero told the nanny to let Scarlett sleep as long as possible. She would be annoyed with him for it. She pumped so Locke could take a bottle when they went out, but thought it fostered better attachment if she fed him herself as much as possible.
She was a devoted mother. He couldn’t dispute that. He also couldn’t shake the “Sugar Daddy to Baby Daddy” accusation her sister had dropped.
As he left, he experienced the same tug in his heart at leaving her that he felt at leaving his son, which told him how necessary this small separation was. He needed time to put his defenses firmly back in place.
* * *
Three days later, Scarlett braced herself, then started down the stairs to the small office Javiero had arranged for her there at Casa del Cielo. It shouldn’t feel like a gauntlet—or a green mile to an execution room—but Paloma was invariably in the main lounge or otherwise taking note of her every move.
Scarlett didn’t have the energy to bear up bravely in front