Chapter Three #3
She warmed as he drew her closer. She rested her palm on his chest and felt his heartbeat, and a rush of love swept through her, leaving her weak, warm and giddy.
‘I feel like a different person when I’m with you,’ she confessed truthfully. ‘I feel adventurous and I don’t think I’ve ever felt adventurous in my whole life.’
‘You’ve cocooned yourself here, and I understand. You were grieving for your mother, you were hurt from a broken love affair and it felt safe to be here where there’s nothing to stretch you.’
‘That’s true, but it’s more than that. I’ve always toed the line but this feels…different. You’ve brought out a side to me I never thought existed. Have I…have I done that for you as well?’
Rocco remained silent for a few seconds.
He felt lazy and comfortable with her body against his, the smell and feel of her filling him.
He shifted so that he was facing her, her breasts against his chest and his thigh tucked between her legs.
He was Jose Rivero, here in this cottage with this woman in his arms. If the question might have felt intrusive in another life, in this life, the one where the weight of duty no longer existed, the answer was yes. He felt a different man.
For just a second, that fleeting thought was enough to send ripples of discomfort through him. But why should it, he asked himself, when he was going to be leaving in a matter of…?
A couple of days.
Rocco frowned at the tug somewhere deep inside him at the prospect of leaving. There’d been times when he’d almost forgotten why he was here in the first place! When he returned to reality, he would laugh at that and shake his head in disbelief.
‘Brought out a side to me I never thought existed? Now, let me think about that. You’ve certainly brought out a sexual side to my nature I never thought could be so powerful.’
‘You know what I mean. I’m not talking about the sex. When it comes to sex, well, that’s a whole new conversation. I barely recognise the woman who’s happy to walk around without any underwear and wants to be touched whenever and wherever.’
‘You’ve led a sheltered life.’ He grinned but actually found that he loathed thinking about her with the guy who’d later let her down.
‘If I’d been around during your formative years, walking around without underwear would have been the least adventurous streak in you.
’ He thought of her as a young girl, quiet and thoughtful, making sure never to be the centre of attention.
He would like to have been there for her, which was a crazy notion.
‘You have such a big ego, Jose Rivero!’
Rocco winced at the mention of his alter ego.
He heard himself say with rough sincerity, ‘I’ve certainly never done anything like this before.
A cottage in the middle of nowhere, with a woman walking around barefoot in the kitchen cooking meals for me while I pick apples from the trees in the garden. ’
Rocco reflected on his relationships with women, casual and satisfying enough, but nothing like this.
Women he courted, wined, dined and slept with, knowing that he would marry someone whom logic dictated would fit the bill: someone from his own class who understood what came with the job of being his wife.
‘So I’m a first?’
‘In many ways.’
Ella sighed with contentment as he stroked her back, his fingers tracing her spine light and ticklish.
She liked the sound of him telling her she’d been a first. She wasn’t going to say anything about how she felt; she was going to obey the invisible lines she thought were in place because, realistically, he hadn’t once talked about a future.
Did he want more from them? He had worked a steady path into her heart but the residue of disillusionment from the way she and Steve had crashed and burned was still there.
Yes, she had fallen straight into him, maybe against her better judgement, but part of Ella recognised the danger of letting go of all the barriers she had built up around herself.
But the thought of him walking out of her life in a matter of days made her blood run cold.
For better or for worse, she had to find out where things stood between them.
She had to know whether there was a chance he had feelings for her which he maybe hadn’t even acknowledged, because it sure wouldn’t have been part of his plan when he’d arrived at Hailey’s.
‘I can’t think of any woman who’s managed to distract me from work the way you have,’ he said and Ella smiled against his chest.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Work is part and parcel of who I am.’
‘Yet here you are.’
‘Yet here I am.’
‘What happens to your store when you want to go on holiday? I know you’ve told me you have people who can take over, but surely you must relax now and again?’
‘I play as hard as I work.’
‘And yet you’ve never taken this sort of time out?
Where do you go when you want to unwind?
I understand how you’ve had to be focused on your job if you’ve had to build something from nothing.
Working for yourself is always going to be a big ask—not much time to relax if you know that a week off might mean less money in the bank. ’
‘Times aren’t quite that hard for me,’ Rocco murmured uncomfortably.
He flushed as the reality of who he was collided with the person she thought he was…
and yet this wasn’t game he was playing.
For a moment in time, while he was here with her, he truly felt a different man—carefree and reckless, without the layers of control that, by definition, restricted a lot of his responses.
It wasn’t going to last, of course. Reality was something he could never ditch, not that he would ever want to do that.
‘And when it comes to the sort of things I do to unwind…’
‘No gym.’
‘You remembered. No, that sort of regime doesn’t suit me. I do get away now and again, but this is the first time I haven’t been overly concerned about checking in to see what’s happening at…er…work…’
Skirting around the truth heightened his discomfort, and instead he told her with surprising honesty, ‘I’ve always been a very controlled person, even in my relationships with women. You…bring out a different side to me. Now, what’s happening about food? We could venture out and eat somewhere.’
‘I’ve already started doing something for us to eat.’
‘Sure you don’t want to be wined and dined?
’ Rocco thought about how satisfying that would be—to take her out somewhere fancy, to impress her.
Was this the road his uncle had travelled, step by step, until he couldn’t get off it?
Had his problems started with an infantile desire to impress a woman unused to the seductive aphrodisiac of extreme wealth?
This lack of self-control was so unlike him that he struggled to dismiss it as just a reaction to being in the unique position of a woman not knowing his worth.
His mind continued to play with the fantasy of her in his private jet, sitting in one of his many cars or being taken to one of his villas—one in Tuscany, one in the Bahamas and another on the outskirts of Madrid.
He looked around him at the quaint, rustic furnishings. The wooden beams on the ceiling matched the timber of the four-poster bed: old, weathered and gnarled. The windows were fiddly but, when they were open, the scent of the countryside poured into the bedroom, fragrant and heady.
There was no en suite. The one bathroom had an old-fashioned shower and a bath with clawed feet, as deep as a swimming pool. Filling it, which they had only done once, was a procedure that had to be commenced at least half an hour before they even thought about getting in.
This was a place the twenty-first century hadn’t quite decided whether to visit or not. And now Rocco could say, hand on heart, that his enjoyment of it was every bit as complete as his enjoyment of any one of his splendid, eye-wateringly expensive places scattered across the globe.
He frowned as he quickly replayed the many confidences they had shared, bit by bit, and the way he had relaxed in her company, so that now she felt familiar to him.
He barely recognised the man who had opened up in ways he’d never done before.
She’d awakened in his arms in the morning, warm and smiling, and there had been dreamless times at night when they had made love, both half-asleep, their movements slow, languorous and incredibly sensual.
Rocco was alarmed now at how natural everything seemed with her.
‘This is perfect,’ he heard her say, all the while trying to analyse the road he had travelled down so quickly it was shocking.
‘Let’s stop talking,’ he growled, hand straying to part her thighs then cupping and rubbing the wetness between them until she was moaning softly and sighing, her body moving against his hand while she did some exploring of her own.
He slipped his finger inside her, then his hands and fingers caressed her until her soft moaning became the guttural groans of a woman on the point of orgasm.
‘Not so fast,’ he purred silkily when he knew she was on the verge of tipping over the edge.
‘Please…’
‘I love it when you beg, querida…but I need to be inside you…’ He fumbled, found the packet of condoms and was vaguely startled by the quantity left when it felt as though they’d made love a thousand times over the past few days. He was losing his touch in a million different ways.
He cleared his head and found his sweet spot, the place where niggling thoughts ceased to exist, found the comfort of touch.
‘We don’t have much more time together.’ The words had to be spoken; he knew that. Yet, they cut deep inside him. ‘Let’s make the most of it…’