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

when she was so tiny and he was so much bigger. Involuntarily, he smiled and she rested her fingers against his softened lips and murmured, ‘That’s better. It’s not your fault it hurt, not your fault you’re over-endowed.’
It was involuntary again but Rafiq laughed. ‘And how would you know whether I am or not?’
‘I’m assuming that’s why it hurt, because you weren’t rough,’ she said very softly.
Something about that tone, or possibly it was the worryingly anxious plea in her bright blue gaze, shot every other thought out of his mind. He angled back his tousled dark head and contrived, with admitted difficulty because of the difference in their heights and their still thoroughly joined bodies, to kiss her, the fierce tension draining out of his lean, powerful body as though it had never been.
He had never wanted anything as much as he had wanted her and now it seemed a cruelly appropriate punishment for his conscience that he had taken a virgin as his last sin. Defying that punitive thought, he stamped it down and shifted his lean hips, revelling in the feel of her, the ache at his groin climbing with every tiny movement she made. The hunger and the need burned like a fierce flame through him and he couldn’t resist her. At least that was what he told himself: that she was more temptation than any normal man could be expected to withstand. Only on another level, he knew he wasn’t a normal man, that he was supposed to be stronger, tougher, harder: the guy raised and expected to always do the right thing.
But still he didn’t do it. He surrendered to the overpowering hunger, driving into her again with caution but also with deep physical satisfaction, delighting in the way her eyes clouded over again and her heart-shaped face relaxed to reveal pleasure. Never had he needed so badly to give a woman pleasure and even though the lust riding him was brutally strong, he took his time, measured his pace, watched her for every tiny sign of response.
The heat in her lower body rose again, the flood of excitement unleashing as her heart hammered so fast inside her chest she could barely breathe. Izzy felt ridiculously happy and didn’t know why. Because he had listened to her? Because she had got him out of that grim mood that had promised to wreck everything and transform her adult decision into a big messy mistake to be regretted? She didn’t know—knew only that she had accidentally discovered that her ‘bathroom guy’, as he would be in her brain for ever, had an unexpectedly very serious side to his nature.
Something deep inside her quickened and her body clenched around him as little tremors of blissful excitement mounted. His every movement became all important, stoking the pulses of hot sensation in her pelvis until the fire rose again, throwing her on a wild cry of pleasure into climax again, and she fell back against the pillows, her hand smoothing over the long, damp, satin smoothness of his flexing spine.
‘That was amazing,’ Rafiq said breathlessly, pulling back from her to flop back on the bed beside her, leaving her feeling strangely abandoned.
Lighten up, Izzy, she urged herself ruefully. Stop piling silly expectations on him and then feeling sad when he doesn’t deliver. Nobody had asked him if he wanted to play a leading part in her most romantic fantasies, the fantasies that until that moment she would’ve said were more her twin’s department than her own. Striving to act casual, she watched him vault out of the bed and head into the bathroom, belatedly appreciating that he was disposing of the contraception and marvelling that she had forgotten that practical aspect in favour of wishing for a hug. They were still essentially strangers, she reminded herself doggedly. Maybe hugging was too much too soon…
In the bathroom, his thoughts very far removed from the subtleties of sexual aftercare, Rafiq was wrestling with his essential streak of honesty. He should tell her…but why? Nothing could come of the accident but still…
Rafiq came to a halt in the doorway.
Izzy contemplated him with a helpless smile. There he was, tall and bronzed and naked and beautiful and he had given her a lot of pleasure. She had definitely made the right decision.
‘The condom split,’ Rafiq admitted flatly. ‘But there is no risk involved for you. I have never had unprotected sex and I cannot father children.’
Izzy was shocked by the sheer size of that admission and the hard, shuttered look on his lean, darkly beautiful features as he made it. ‘How do you know you can’t father children?’ she couldn’t help asking.
‘Because I was married for a long time and it didn’t happen,’ he confided tautly. ‘So, no risk involved for you in that field.’
End of discussion, she recognised, shaken that he had been married for what he deemed a long time when he was still seemingly so young. ‘How old are you?’ she prompted helplessly.
‘Twenty-eight.’
So a very youthful marriage that had presumably ended in divorce—not her business, she had to remind herself when other questions threatened to brim from her lips, and she swallowed them back hard to reassure him with her information.
‘I’m on the pill,’ she told him quietly.
Rafiq frowned in surprise. ‘But…why?’
Hugging the sheet, Izzy sat up, copper corkscrew curls springing up like a halo around her flushed face. She wasn’t prepared to tell him the whole truth, not when it revolved around her mother. ‘My sister and I know someone who had an unplanned pregnancy and we never wanted it to happen to us that way, so we chose instead to be prepared for all eventualities.’
‘Are you staying?’ Rafiq enquired, ignoring the explanation that only emphasised to him that they lived in very different worlds, he in a world where pregnancy would have been an unashamed joy but she in one where it would have been an apparent punishment of some kind.
Just being asked that question freaked Izzy out.