LITMIR.BIZ

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What did she know? Absolutely nothing when it came to the morning after the night before.

      And this might feel awkward but she was leaving here with a lot of positives. Her first time had been with a great lover, and she had not disgraced herself by saying anything terminally stupid like, Last night was special—it must mean something to you.

      When Lara emerged from the bathroom, her hair dried to a smooth gloss, the bedroom was filled with the aroma of fresh coffee. She followed the scent downstairs.

      Raoul was standing there, coffee cup in hand, wearing a black robe loosely tied around his hips. It showed a wide vee of hard, golden, hair-roughened chest. Lara struggled to keep her eyes on his strong, angular face, which, with its dark shading of stubble, was only fractionally less disturbing.

      Hauntingly beautiful. From some corner of her head the description of a hero in a novel she had read recently flashed into her head. At the time she had rolled her eyes and given up on the story midway, unable to imagine a real-life man who could be described this way, and unable to connect with the book’s heroine who had walked away from a perfectly good husband to be with him.

      ‘I cried at the end,’ the friend who had recommended it had confided.

      Lara hadn’t cried. She’d lost patience with the heroine long before. She’d thought, Who walks away from everything for an orgasm, no matter how bone-meltingly incredible?

      Lara hadn’t known a lot about orgasms at the time, but she couldn’t imagine anything that would make her give up a stable home.

      And then Raoul had come into her life.

      And soon he would be out again, which was good. Clean breaks were good when it came to uncomplicated sex. Actually, they were probably essential.

      He put down the mug in his hand, his eyes making a sweep up from her feet to the glossy, smooth curls on her head. ‘You found it, then.’

      She touched her face, now clear of the last remnants of make-up from the night before. She felt naked without even a smear of lip gloss to protect her from his dark, bone-stripping stare. ‘Thanks, yes.’

      ‘Help yourself to coffee. I won’t be long.’

      ‘Thanks but I should be going.’ Last night now seemed like a lifetime ago, and the rejection from Mark was a distant dream.

      ‘I’ll take you back to your hotel.’

      Move on...never, ever see this man again...never touch him...never... ‘No, that’s—’

      His voice cut across her. ‘Have you got money for a taxi?’

      She flushed and, gnawing on the soft fullness of her under lip, brought her lashes down in a concealing sweep.

      ‘Exactly.’

      With a flash of defiance she lifted her head, tossing back her red curls. ‘I could walk.’

      ‘And that worked out so well the last time...’

      Recognising that this was a battle she wasn’t about to win, Lara managed a superficial attitude of amusement as she arched a brow and asked, ‘Do all your one-night stands rate taxi service?’

      She was trying so hard and her pretence was painfully transparent. Raoul hid his reaction to the vulnerability he didn’t want to see under an attitude of brusque impatience, and reminded himself that Lucy had once seemed sweet and vulnerable to him too.

      ‘They do if they don’t mind hanging around...’ He arched a brow. ‘Five minutes.’

      * * *

      It was only when she got in the car that she realised she’d forgotten the hotel name.

      ‘I think it begins with a C or maybe a T and I think there was a coffee shop on the corner, no, there was definitely a coffee shop.’

      ‘Oh, well, that makes it much easier.’

      ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. I’m sure the name will come to me.’

      When? he wondered fifteen minutes later when, naming another hotel, he got the same negative shake of her head.

      ‘You’re just confusing me now,’ she accused. Bad enough that even with the top of the low-slung sports car up, in the skin-tight red dress her appearance had still elicited a lot of unwanted attention.

      Raoul had advised her to ignore the horn blares and the calls from pedestrians—the Latin male seemed to have a very extensive non-verbal vocabulary—and then gone on to ignore his own advice, rolling down his window to react with hand signals that had never found a place into the highway code!

      ‘I’m sure now it begins with an A...’

      He audibly ground his teeth. ‘I thought you’d decided it began with a T.’

      ‘Well, a T or maybe...wait, that place there.’ She hit his arm and began to bounce in her seat as she turned to look behind them. ‘I remember that bar with the potted palms outside and the blue squiggly writing on the sign. Turn around...turn around...’

      ‘We’re in the middle of a one-way system. Do you mind sitting still? I’m trying to focus.’ To focus on the road and not the way her breasts were trying to fight their way out of the bodice of her dress. ‘Do you want me to cause a crash?’

      ‘I don’t suppose this is how you planned to spend your day.’

      ‘Dio mio, do not go all humble and apologetic on me.’ He found unreasonable and wilfully awkward much easier to deal with.

      ‘It’s not this way,’ she said as he swung the car down an alley where the walls of the tall buildings almost touched the car on either side. To make things worse he didn’t reduce his speed.

      ‘So how well do you know Rome, then?’

      She flashed him a killer look and compressed her lips.

      ‘It was a shortcut,’ she said in a quiet voice as he drew up outside the hotel.

      Raoul grunted and turned his attention to the building. Like most in the area, it could have done with some TLC; he was not a person who found peeling paint picturesque. ‘You’re sure this is the right place?’

      She nodded.

      ‘Your boyfriend really knows how to treat a lady, doesn’t he?’

      ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ she gritted.

      ‘Has it occurred to you he might have called the police?’ Her wide eyes said it hadn’t.

      She was thinking.

      ‘I hope not! Well, thank you and last night...you were...kind.’ With a swish of silk she left the car, her comment making him feel like a total bastard.

      And maybe he was, Raoul mused as watched her walk up the steps, the sinuous sway of her body in that wicked dress causing several turned heads before she vanished inside the clapped-out-looking building.

      How was the man who’d brought her here and then rejected her going to react when she appeared? Raoul knew how he’d have reacted in that position. He wasn’t a possessive man, but if she’d left him and spent the night with another man he’d have throttled her, or maybe just thrown her on the bed and made love to her.

      And would Lara forgive him? You never knew with women. Some were drawn like magnets to men who treated them badly.

      While he was grimly contemplating make-up sex and wondering if that was what was happening, Raoul was suddenly struck by how extreme his reactions to this woman were. There was no middle ground. Much like her, he reflected grimly, either spitting disdain or melting in submission.

      With a curse he put the car into gear and pulled away from the kerb with a rubber-burning squeal. The last thing he needed at this point was a redhead to distract him.

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