A Price Worth Paying(50)

And then he lifted her and he was right there, at her entrance, and she thought her world could end and she wouldn’t care so long as he was inside her first.

She cried out when he pulled her down onto him. She cried out when he pulled back, knowing she’d been wrong. Because she didn’t ever want her world to end. Not when her world made it possible to feel like this.

He pounded into her, angry and insistent, and angrily, insistently she clenched her muscles and hung onto him, only to welcome him back, her need building with each desperate thrust.

‘Do you hate me now?’ he asked, thrusting again, his voice barely a grunt. ‘Do you still hate me?’

Her body was alive with sensation, her senses dancing wildly along a dangerous line that any moment they might teeter off into an abyss, and there was no way she could not answer honestly.

‘I hate you,’ she said, but not because of Felipe or the land or a vow of revenge that was made more than a century ago, but because of what you do to me. ‘I will always hate you.’

He answered with a thrust that threw her head crashing back against the beam. He followed it with another and then another, each one deeper than the first. Each one more desperate, more insistent. Each one building on that screaming tension building inexorably inside her.

He won’t make me come, she told herself, knowing the assault he was capable of, clamping down on that eventuality with all her muscles and all her might. Knowing what was in store if she just let him. I won’t let him. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

And so she fought and resisted and battled against the torrent of sensations he subjected her to and tried to imagine herself back in her tiny flat in Melbourne, where this man and these feelings would be just a distant memory.

But it was too hard a task, too much to ask, with his mouth at her throat and on her lips, his hands hot on her breasts and fingers tight against her nipples and his hard cock thrusting deep inside her. It was all … impossible.

And like a cough suppressed because you were in polite company, but that refused to be suppressed, so that when it was unleashed it was ten times greater than the original would have ever been, her release came upon her with the relentless force of a tornado, picking her up and spinning her effortlessly into its whirling spout, drawing her higher, ever higher in its never ending spiral until she came in a flash of colour and heated sensation and felt herself spat out of the tornado’s spout. She drifted down to the earth, or maybe that was just her legs as he let them down, her fight gone as she rested limply under the weight of his body against hers.

And she hated that he could do this to her—turn argument into a storm, turn anger into passion.

She hated him because he could reduce her to a whimpering mess of nerve endings.

She hated him because she loved him.

Oh God, where had that come from?

She tried to wish the unwanted thought away. She tried to deny it. But the truth of it refused to be wished away or denied. It floated like a balloon let loose, flying high, freed of the shackles that could pull it down.

She loved him.

The concept was so foreign. So unexpected. And yet it explained so much of why she wanted to be with him and why at the same time she feared it so.

She loved him because of what he could do to her and how he made her feel.

She loved him and she hated him because at any moment he would look at her smugly and declare himself the victor of this particular encounter.

Except not this time, it seemed. ‘Mierda!’ he cursed, and pulled himself free, pulling himself away as if she was poison. ‘You’re not on the Pill.’

She blinked, still in recovery mode, not sure why it was an issue. ‘You know I’m not.’

‘I didn’t use protection.’





CHAPTER TWELVE



‘OH MY GOD!’ She was still reeling from her discovery. The last thing she needed was that. She put a hand to her head, recovery mode short-circuited by a panic that unfurled with a vengeance as she remembered another time, another fear that things had come unstuck, even after protection had been used.

But this time there had been no protection. No defence.

Oh God, was she destined to live her life making love to the wrong men, narrowly escaping disaster with one, only to hurtle headlong into catastrophe with the next?

She’d known from the very beginning that having sex with Alesander was a bad idea. Why had he not realised the complications that could result? Had he not realised how serious they could be?