“Including the basement and attic space, yes.” Our gazes collide, and she quickly looks away again.
Coughing my throat clear, I wander around, my spinning mind starting to make me dizzy. She’s a sports therapist. How the hell can she afford this place? My eyes home in on a collection of photographs across the way, neatly arranged on a console table. My feet are carrying me over before I can stop myself, my curiosity out of control.
There are at least a dozen pictures, all Raya in various places across the world. She’s in front of the Louvre doing a cartwheel, she’s in front of the White House doing a handstand, she’s outside a temple meditating. I smile, completely struck by the beauty shining from her in every picture, by the potency of her happiness. In every picture, she’s beaming, whether she’s looking at the camera or not. And then my smile fades as I see the final photograph. I move forward without thought, taking in the couple standing in the clouds at the top of a mountain. Raya and a man.
My shoulder jars as she passes me swiftly, taking the picture and laying it face down. I flinch at the brief contact.
“There’s a gym through here and a sauna and Jacuzzi.” She gets on her way, leaving me motionless by the console table, my eyes passing between Raya’s back and the picture that I now can’t see.
My frown is too deep to hide as I follow her down a narrow corridor, emerging into a well-equipped gymnasium. “Do you work out mu—” My arm brushes hers as I enter, the heat burning away the remaining words of my question. I swallow hard, flicking a look at her. She’s not looking at me, but she’s holding her arm where I just touched her.
“Not really.” She nods through to another room. “The spa is through there.”
I force myself to the doorway, scanning the white-tiled space. “All maintained and working?” I ask, battling to bring us back to business.
“Yes.” She backs out of the room, turning on her bare feet. “I’ll show you the other floors.”
How on earth am I going to manage another four floors? “Six bedrooms?” I ask, following her back down the corridor and up the stairs from the kitchen. Her cropped trousers give me a perfect view of her slender ankles, my eyes placing that spreader bar there again.
“Seven,” she says over her shoulder. “All doubles, five with en-suites. But first the lounge and the formal dining room.”
It doesn’t matter how hard I try; my mind is way too occupied by Raya to pay close attention to the house I’m here to value. I barely register the grandeur, hardly absorb the exquisite luxury surrounding me. There is only Raya.
This woman radiates sex. She’s cryptic. She is temptation personified, and it’s a constant struggle not to grab her and kiss her. Or to tie her down and get the information my annoying head is demanding. I can’t take my eyes off her. Can’t dampen down the constant flow of questions. She’s like a magnet, pulling and pushing me away.
My heart is pulsing in my ears by the time we make it upstairs, my restraint bending every time our eyes meet. It’s going to break soon. I can see a replay of last night rolling in her dark eyes, her mind clearly not focused on giving me a tour, her hands shaking every time she points something out, her breathing labored when she talks to me.
When we enter the first bedroom, I make a point of ignoring the bed. In the second bedroom, I do the same. By the third bedroom, I’m crying inside. By bedroom four, I’m starting to shake with the resistance it’s taking to ignore the fact that I have her in a house alone with seven fucking beds all screaming at me to mess up the perfectly made covers. Bedroom five I barely step foot in. Bedroom six I simply poke my head inside, and as I back up, I collide with Raya and jump out of my skin, feeling panic beginning to set in. “Sorry!” I blurt.
“My fault.” She rests her hand on my forearm, and a heat like no other burns my bloodstream. Our eyes meet. My hunger turns into starvation—starvation for her, for skin-on-skin contact. To get in her mind. But all that defies her request for remaining emotionless. And I know for sure I don’t need this complication in my life. My feelings right now are simply because of an aching cock and a misplaced hunger for answers to questions that I wish would fuck right off. I don’t trust women, and I definitely shouldn’t trust this mysterious, cagey woman. But is she fighting the gravitational pull that’s distorting everything, too? My God, I need to leave. Now.
I start to head for the stairs, feeling the walls closing in around me, but as I pass bedroom seven, my urgent pace grinds to a stop and I’m drawn inside. The world stops happening and I inhale, smelling her on every surface in the room. Once again, my reason abandons me. The bed, the clothes she had on last night lying on the back of a pink suede armchair, her heels kicked off at the side. The burning ache within me amplifies, and my head swims with the memory of every second I had her restrained and at my mercy. But somehow, now I realize that it was entirely me at her mercy. Just like now. This woman is stirring something in me.
I hear the light pad of her bare feet on the thick cream carpet and slowly cast my eyes to the side. She’s looking at me. Reading me. Absorbing me. What is she thinking?
“Fuck.” I breathe, and before I can rethink my intention, I’ve seized her and plastered my chest to hers, forcing her up against a nearby wall.
Our mouths, only an inch apart, fight for the same air. Reaching up to her face, I trace the line of her cheekbone, her gaze seeping into mine. My world stills, like those moments of frozen time when you can see with perfect clarity every tiny thing before you. When you can appreciate its beauty and marvel at the details.
I raise my forearms and rest them on the wall on either side of her head, caging her in, my body pushing into hers a little bit more. “Your eyes,” I whisper, searching them as she searches mine. “They were alive when I had you in that room.” That’s what was missing when I first saw her at the bar. Life. Perhaps even purpose. “You didn’t just want what I could give you. You wanted me. You want me now, too.” I can’t ignore the blinding sparkle in her gaze. They’re alive.
She nods as she breathes heavily in my face. “You were supposed to be cold.”
“Did I make you forget?”
“Yes.”
“Then I did half my job.” My eyes scan her face, taking their time. “Can you forgive me for failing on the other half of our deal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I was at Hux to avoid the complications of feelings. To get lost for a while without worrying about trust. I had planned on being just as cold and emotionless as I requested, but I couldn’t. Not with you. You weren’t supposed to be so amazing.”
“The sex?”
“No. Just…amazing. You…” She swallows and looks away, forcing me to nuzzle her face back toward mine.