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He gazed down at her. His expression was troubled but there was so much concern and tenderness in his stare that the fears in her heart evaporated.
This was the Diaz she’d fallen in love with. The gorgeous, sexy hulk of a man capable of such great empathy and tenderness.
Only in her dreams had that tenderness ever been directed at her.
‘I hurt you,’ he said, his voice breaking.
She attempted a smile to ease his self-recriminations. ‘No.’
He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
Without thinking, she palmed his cheek. The sharp stubble made the most vivid contrast to the softness of his hair. ‘I’m to blame, not you. You didn’t know.’
He placed the gentlest of kisses to her mouth before drawing back again. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I forgot.’
‘You…? How could you forget that?’
She stared into the green eyes that had haunted her dreams long before she’d accepted her love for him and, her heart turning over, sighed. ‘Because in my head you’ve made love to me a thousand times.’
Shock etched his gorgeous face. Shock and then new understanding.
And still he didn’t run away. Still he continued to drink her in as if she were the most precious thing in his world.
She ran her fingers over the stubble on his jaw. ‘It’s always been you,’ she confessed in a whisper.
Always had been. Always would be. A love born without rhyme or reason but which had stopped her ever looking at another man.
Hate and love bound on the sides of the same coin.
Her heart had bound itself to Diaz before she’d hit adolescence. Her body had bound itself to him that awful day by his parents’ swimming pool. Her soul had bound itself to him during the long weeks spent together nursing his grandmother.
He lowered his weight onto hers without crushing her and threaded his long fingers through her hair.‘Mi amor…’he breathed before his sensuous mouth came back down on hers in a featherlight kiss. And then another. And another.
He lifted his head to gaze at her again.‘Eres muy hermosa.’At her unspoken question, he breathed in deeply and gave a tortured smile. ‘You are so beautiful. So very beautiful.’ Palming her cheeks, he caressed her lips in another light kiss. ‘I wish I had known. I would have been so gentle and given you the pleasure that should have been yours.’
‘You did give me pleasure,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t know I could feel like that.’
‘And now I will make you feel much more.’ He pressed his mouth to hers again. ‘And this time there will be no pain.’
Gently, his lips parted hers. All the urgency that had gripped them in the hedonistic madness gone, he explored the contours of her mouth with an unhurried seduction, coaxing her responses, lighting the sparks of her desire back into life and opening the gateway to heaven.
If their kisses before had been a fever of combusting lust and desire, this was restrained softness but its effect on her was equally as powerful, and she ran her hands over his back, still barely able to believe that this was Diaz in her bed, Diaz she was touching, Diaz’s naked body upon her, Diaz’s seductive mouth kissing her as if she were infinitely precious to him.
She’d ached for this for so long. Ached for him. Her only hate. Her only love.
And now there was no hate. Only love.
She moaned in protest when he moved his mouth away, a moan that softened into a sigh as his lips caressed featherlight kisses across her jaw, deepening when he flicked his tongue on the sensitive hollow beneath her ears and over the pulse of her throat, shivers flaming through her skin.
Closing her eyes, she surrendered herself to his lovemaking, soaking in his murmurs of Spanish as he worshipped her with his lips.
The sensation in her breasts when he took them into his mouth and circled the taut peaks with his tongue, achingly bringing each one to life, had her mewing and lifting her chest to him in a wanton plea for more, a plea answered with slow, voluptuous strokes of the tongue and grazing bites.
His lips moved languidly downwards, trailing fire over her ribcage and stomach, his hands stroking and exploring, all the sensations making her writhe at the liquid heat burning inside her.
Only when his mouth reached her silken pubis and she realised where he was headed did she tense, would have automatically pressed her thighs together if Diaz hadn’t been lying between them.