Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 2 of 2

man before. And he wasn’t just presentable, he was downright drop-dead gorgeous…

CHAPTER THREE
RAFIQ CARRIED IZZY into the bedroom and laid her down with great care on the bed.
‘This…it is what you want too?’ he was careful to check.
Izzy sat back against the leather headboard, still a little stunned by the speed and mode of her arrival into a more intimate setting. Rafiq was being very direct and of course she understood why it had to be that way. No man could risk a misunderstanding in such a scenario. Even so, colour ran up her face like a banner because the decision she had acknowledged earlier in the kitchen still felt so new and fresh to her; she would sleep with him, finally discover what sex was all about, only, if she was honest, she hadn’t really expected it to happen so fast between them.
‘Yes…this is what I want too,’ she almost whispered, ramming down all her insecurities with ferocious determination because she was convinced that a wildly desirable opportunity with someone like Rafiq was only likely to happen once in her lifetime and she wasn’t planning to squander it. ‘But I’m a little shy, not very experienced,’ she added in cautious warning, in case his hopes were focused on more erotic thrills than she was likely to deliver.
Suddenly, Rafiq felt as though he could finally breathe again. The idea of her walking away, turning her back and rejecting him had been a fear strong enough to freeze him in his tracks because there was something about her, presumably a very sexy something, that totally set him on fire with lust. He wondered if it was those huge blue eyes or possibly that ripe pink mouth or even the crazy copper curls surrounding that triangular face. Perhaps even the reality that shy didn’t turn him off, as her face said she feared, it actually turned him on more. Indeed, it meant that he was much less likely to be taken by surprise by anything she did.
‘That doesn’t bother me,’ he admitted, hitting the buttons to close the blinds on the window and dim the lights even though, by choice, he would have put her under a spotlight, but her comfort, her ability to relax with him, were more important. He kicked off his shoes and vaulted onto the bed beside her. She startled and his flashing smile tilted his shapely mouth again, his hand coming up to frame her face as he lowered his head and tasted her mouth again with all the urgent demand he was struggling to hold back.
Izzy travelled from nervous tension back into a paradise where everything seemed to be about just one perfect kiss because he was one hell of a kisser. In that line, she was plenty experienced, even though no man had ever kissed her and made her very toes curl until Rafiq. It was as if he lit a spark somewhere down deep inside her, a spark that fostered a spread of warmth in her pelvis and made her thighs tighten. Her whole body turned liquid, her breasts swelling inside her bra, the peaks tightening and pushing against the lace.
His lean, long-fingered hands roamed slowly over her, cupping, touching, moulding, and she quivered, heat roaring through her in an almost unmanageable surge. Her hands lifted and found his wide shoulders to explore and then the long sweep of his back, the literal heat of him burning through the silk of his shirt.
‘Take it off,’ he told her.
Izzy went for the buttons, unwilling to break the kissing to look, and she must have been too slow at the task because with an earthy groan he pulled back from her and just ripped off the shirt, buttons flying everywhere.
‘I guess you don’t value your clothes very much,’ she muttered helplessly.
‘Not when they get in the way of what I want, which is your hands on me,’ Rafiq growled, taking that moment to reach down for the hem of her dress and lift it up and over her head.
Disconcerted to find herself so swiftly reduced to her bra and panties, Izzy tensed, lacking the confidence in her body that was required to feel calm beneath his smouldering dark golden gaze.
‘You are so gorgeous,’ Rafiq breathed raggedly. She glanced up at him in stark shock and it was there in his appreciative gaze that he truly believed that.
It wasn’t quite enough encouragement for her to lie back and preen herself like Cleopatra on a ceremonial barge, but it certainly made a difference to the way she generally viewed herself as the plain twin. After all, it had been said within her hearing many times when she was a child because people weren’t careful about making such statements around her, and it was a role she had unconsciously accepted and assumed to be the truth.
Empowered by Rafiq’s statement, however, Izzy went back to taste that wickedly sensual mouth of his for herself and he reacted with flattering enthusiasm, pressing her back against the pillows and kissing her breathless, lean fingers sliding beneath her to release her bra in what she believed to be the smoothest move ever. And then he was curving his big hands to the swell of her full pale breasts, touching, smoothing, rolling and squeezing her achingly sensitive nipples, sending piercing shards of pleasure travelling straight to her groin.
As he drove a thigh between her legs, pushing against the most sensitive spot of all, her entire body jackknifed upward, a muffled cry wrenched from her throat as the excitement rippling through her rose in a blinding, stabbing wave. His mouth travelled down the slope of her neck, kissing a path down to the erect buds, dallying there with lips and tongue and teeth until the breath was sobbing between her lips, and he crushed her mouth under his again, his tongue delving deep, twining with hers, only partially answering the desperate, fevered craving controlling her.
‘You want me…’ Rafiq savoured with satisfaction.
‘Wouldn’t be here if I