Rival's Challenge

Marco scooted her back onto the bed, and pushed her legs apart and lowered his body into the cradle of hers. Holding her breath, Orla felt that thick head push into her body, stretching her, impossibly. Even though she couldn’t have been more ready. She sucked in a breath and felt him thrust a little deeper.

‘You’re so small. I don’t want to hurt you.’

He was. Almost. But not quite. Orla was hovering on the threshold between pain and pleasure. She drew up her legs beside his thighs and said, ‘You’re not.’

Something about his concern and the gentleness of someone so huge made Orla feel quivery inside. She wouldn’t have expected it of him from that first intimidating sight of him in the shadows of the bar.

He thrust a little deeper and the pain flared for a second before being replaced with something more tantalising. Slowly, Marco started to move in and out, his chest rubbing against Orla’s breasts, making their sensitised tips tingle.

Her breath got quick again. She moved her legs to wrap them around his hips and he slid deeper. He still wasn’t in all the way though, and he moved his hand between them, his thumb finding that sensitive clump of cells and rubbing rhythmically against her, making her moan.

And then he slanted his mouth over hers, and as if a dam broke within her, Orla felt something release, and Marco slid deep inside her, touching every single nerve point in her body. Or at least that was what it felt like.

Her legs tightened reflexively around Marco’s lean waist, her body spasmed with a rush of pleasure and as he thrust in and out their tongues sucked and licked and tasted. They were joined at every possible point and Orla truly didn’t know where she ended and he began because it felt for the first time in her life as if she was whole, as if a missing part of her had slid home.

The tempo increased and Orla could feel her body clasping at him with the onset of another orgasm, even more powerful than the last. Their bodies grew slick with perspiration. Orla dug her heels into Marco’s hard muscled backside and with a strangled roar he thrust one final time, the tendons in his neck standing out as they both hovered on the brink of something earth-shattering. And when it hit them simultaneously, it was like a force of nature, sweeping everything aside, obliterating any previous experience in the blinding white heat of pleasure.

Antonio blacked out for a moment. Literally lost consciousness. And then came back to himself within seconds, breathing harshly, his body embedded in Kate’s … held in her tight clasp. He could still feel the spasmodic pulsations of her inner body around his length and extricated himself with a wince of pain and pleasure.

He looked at the woman under him; she was staring up at him with the same stunned expression that he figured was on his face.

He rasped out, ‘OK?’

Silently, she nodded. Her cheeks were flushed, hair a tangle of glorious red around her head. Antonio found it within himself to move so that he could pull the covers over her. And then he said, ‘I’ll be back in a second.’

He stood up, and to his consternation, his legs felt distinctly weak as he walked to the bathroom where he dealt with the protection. He stood at the sink afterwards and looked at himself. His face was flushed too, eyes glittering brightly. But he felt altered in some indefinable way. Which was crazy. It had been sex. Just sex. The hottest sex he’d ever had, a small voice pointed out. Even so, it was just sex.

He’d hooked up with women like that many times before, preferring short encounters with mature, experienced, willing females with no strings attached. This was no different. They hadn’t even told each other their real names, for crying out loud! But it felt different. He rubbed absently at his chest where he felt an ache growing and frowned at himself. Splashing water on his face, he cursed this moment of introspection and went back into the room to see Kate on her side, curled up, facing away from the bathroom. And the ache in his chest intensified. Had he hurt her? She was so small.

He padded over and pulled back the cover, sliding into the bed. He saw her shoulders tense and something in him rejected that. He needed to see her. He put a hand on her shoulder, feeling the delicate bones, and tugged gently. After some resistance, she rolled over, holding the sheet over her chest.

She was pale now, biting her lip. Eyes huge. Antonio felt a punch to his gut. ‘Did I hurt you?’

She shook her head and said in a low voice, ‘No. It’s just … I’ve never … It’s never been like that. For me. So intense.’

Relief made the feeling in Antonio’s gut subside. He couldn’t help a small smile as he automatically reached out to push some hair back from her smooth cheek. ‘Me too.’

She narrowed her eyes then and said with a touch of acerbity, ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

Antonio looked at her. ‘And I bet you say that to all the guys.’

She shrugged a shoulder minutely. ‘Maybe.’

A lightness infused the atmosphere now, dispelling the intensity of a few moments ago, and Antonio growled softly, ‘You’ll pay for that.’

And then the implication of what she’d just said hit him and suddenly the thought of another man touching her made him see red. It made him gather her into his body and clamp his mouth to hers with a feral sound from deep within him. He didn’t want her to think of any other man after tonight. Only him. He wanted to brand himself on her.

With a soft sigh he felt her resistance melt away as their kisses got more and more heated, the fire in their bodies igniting again. The sheet was quickly dispensed with and Antonio drew Kate’s slim supple body over his, spreading her thighs either side of him.

Urgently before he donned protection he asked, ‘Are you too sore?’

Kate had her hands braced on his chest, her arms pushing her small pert breasts together and forward. Everything in Antonio was screaming for release. Already. Again. It made him nervous because he couldn’t remember ever feeling like this before, but he couldn’t think about that now.

She shook her head, tendrils of hair slipping over her shoulders like flames of fire. She moved back, teased him with her body. Antonio put on the protection, his hands uncustomarily clumsy, and then slowly, torturously, exquisitely, brought Kate down onto his aching shaft.

He saw stars as her tight damp sheath took him in. He saw the fierce concentration on her face, their eyes locked. And then she started to move against him and Antonio could do nothing but submit and surrender to the wild ride once again.

When Orla woke up, tendrils of the dawn light illuminated the room in a faint pink glow. Birds tweeted, and through the open curtains she realised there was a terrace outside the bedroom. A very opulent and luxurious bedroom. Not her bedroom. His bedroom.

A Chatsfield bedroom with its signature bespoke furnishings.

It all came rushing back. Along with the realisation that her body ached all over and she was tender between her legs. Very tender. She blushed to think of taking him into her body, how big he’d been. How good it had felt.

Orla held her breath and turned her head. Marco lay beside her; they weren’t touching. His huge body was in a louche sprawl, completely naked. Wide awake now, Orla came up gingerly on one arm, wincing as muscles protested.

They’d made love over and over again. And each time had felt like she was falling deeper and deeper into a vortex of need. Even now, as her gaze drifted over his face, she felt that need rising. In spite of the tenderness between her legs. She’d take that burn again.

A shadow of stubble darkened his hard jaw. He appeared no less intimidating in repose. Just as fierce. Orla’s eyes widened though as she looked down his body and saw a veritable patchwork of scars and marks. There was a bunch of very distinctive circular puckerings of flesh around his pectorals. She mustn’t have noticed them before because it had been dark—she blushed—and she’d been too intent on succumbing to the most intense desire she’d ever felt.

There was a tattoo high on the biceps of the arm nearest her. It looked like a coat of arms. He had the body of an elite athlete … or a warrior. Her impression of last night came back, even more forcibly in the light of dawn, gazing at his scarred body. Literally from neck to knee, there were all kinds of marks—healed cuts, stitch marks. Those mysterious circular shapes.

There was a particularly ugly gash around one muscular thigh that looked as if it had healed badly.

For the first time Orla had a very real sense of just how irresponsible she’d been. Maybe he was some kind of criminal? The thought sent shock waves through her body as she recalled how he’d been hidden in the shadows of the bar. How he’d come over and stopped her from leaving. How easily he’d enraptured her. She’d barely put up a modicum of resistance!

She gazed around the room. Something cold went through her as she took in details. It looked lived in. Books. An old edition of Aesop’s Fables stood out oddly amongst them. Clothes. Paraphernalia. More than an overnight visitor like herself. She’d noticed it last night but hadn’t really taken it in.

The assertion took root. He was living here.

Who was this man? A sense of urgency gripped her now. She had to get away. She’d almost forgotten entirely why she was even in the Chatsfield Hotel. How could she have forgotten? She’d never allowed herself to get so sidetracked from work before.

Ashamed and angry with herself for being so impetuous, so selfish, Orla slid off the bed as quietly as she could. To her intense relief, Marco didn’t move. She was terrified that he’d wake. That he’d open those dark compelling eyes and she’d be lost again. Orla picked up her dress and pulled it on with trembling hands.

She found her bag. No matter how hard she searched though, she couldn’t find her panties. Marco moved minutely on the bed and Orla’s gaze froze on that huge rangy body. With sick fascination she couldn’t help looking at the most potently masculine part of him. Even in sleep he was awe-inspiring. He moved again and panic took her breath. She had to leave now before he woke. Wrenching her gaze away from the sleeping man, she turned and went to the bedroom door.

Unable to help herself though, she stopped at the door and looked back. A fierce tug of something that felt awfully like regret made an emotion she didn’t like to name rise up within her. Before it could surface she clamped down on it and turned away again and left the suite. It was only as she was walking down the corridor that she realised she’d left her shoes and the belt of her dress behind, along with her missing panties.

Exactly four hours later Orla was tapping her pen impatiently on the thick blotting paper pad that sat in front of her on the table. Her legs were crossed under the thick varnished oak table in the conference room and her leg jigged back and forth nervously. Even though the room was modestly sized, there any comparison to a normal hotel conference room ended. It exuded plush luxury. Everything one might require for a meeting was there, but discreetly tucked away so nothing jarred. Orla’s nose wrinkled. She’d noticed a scent in the air when she’d checked in yesterday but then had forgotten about it when she’d been so effectively distracted.

But now she noticed it again and suspected waspishly that the Chatsfield Hotels must pump their signature scent throughout their premises, thereby increasing the whole Chatsfield experience. It was a smart strategy. Smell was well known to be one of the more powerfully evocative senses, and so by having a scent that linked people’s memories indelibly to you was prime subliminal advertising. She’d looked into it for their own hotels but it would have been too expensive.

The Kennedy Group solicitor checked at his watch again and his counterpart across the table said smoothly, ‘I’m assured that Mr Chatsfield is on his way, and as I’ve said, he regrets keeping you waiting.’

Orla huffed. She just bet he did. No doubt this was part of the strategy to let them know how weak they were and who was the power player here. It didn’t help, of course, that she felt woefully underprepared considering her very out of character sexual adventures last night with a complete stranger who could very well be some kind of underground criminal or a mercenary.

When she thought of all those scars and markings on his body though, she didn’t feel scared so much as … hot.

She imagined her wanton behaviour must be tattooed on her face like a beacon for all to see but she hoped that the effort she’d put into hiding the ravages of the night before had worked. She’d asked her assistant to buy her some shoes on her way over that morning, claiming some feeble excuse that the ones she’d brought wouldn’t go with the dark navy trouser suit she wore.

So now she had brand-new shoes biting into her feet on top of everything else. She put down the pen and fiddled nervously with her white shirt and hoped that the frill detail down the centre where the buttons were didn’t appear too frivolous. She’d been more frivolous in the past twelve hours than in her entire life. And she was not frivolous. Her mother was frivolous. Flighty. Selfish. Orla was hard-working, serious. Frugal.

She’d pulled her hair back into a sleek ponytail and her heavy fringe offered the faint illusion that she could hide behind it.

Just then they heard voices out in the corridor and all the tiny hairs all over Orla’s body seemed to stand up on end for no apparent reason. The door opened slightly and a huge dark shape loomed just out of sight.

Then the door opened fully and a man walked in with another man in tow. A cold seeping horror spread through Orla’s body. Shock knocked the breath out of her chest. She couldn’t believe her eyes. He was striding in now, clad in a pristine three-piece dark suit that hugged his huge muscular frame. His jaw was clean-shaven. He was stupendously gorgeous. Arresting. Sexual charisma was a tangible aura around him.

Orla was dimly aware that her own assistant had straightened in the chair beside her. The unconscious action of a woman in the presence of a virile alpha male. In spite of being in her middle-aged years with a healthy brood of children and a loving husband.

Orla felt a surge of something that made her want to turn to her assistant, one of her best friends, and snarl at her.

And then the man’s eyes fell on the people waiting for him. And one in particular. Her. He stopped in his tracks on the other side of the table. That dark compelling gaze on hers. She saw the shock in their depths before it was quickly veiled.

Her lungs burned because she hadn’t drawn a breath. A million things seemed to lodge in her throat and in her belly: mortification, embarrassment, anger. Shock. Desire.

The Chatsfield solicitor was standing now and saying, ‘Antonio, I’d like you to meet Orla Kennedy of the Kennedy Group, her solicitor Tom Barry and her assistant, Susan White. Miss Kennedy, I’d like you to meet Antonio Chatsfield and his assistant, David Markusson.’

Orla was dimly aware of the people either side of them both standing to reach across the table to shake one another’s hands. She was paralysed. Her mystery lover was Antonio Marco Chatsfield. The eldest son of the notorious Chatsfield family. She had read up on him prior to this meeting. Ironically he was almost the only one of whom there were no recent photos as he’d been in the army and then the secretive world of private security for years.

If he’d joined the regular army Orla might have seen pictures. But he hadn’t. He’d joined the famed and mythic French Foreign Legion and had served with them for seven years. It was where one entered and assumed another identity. Highly secretive and closed to the outside world. Effectively Antonio Chatsfield had been a ghost until his recent return to the family fold.

But he was no ghost. He was very solid and very real and he was looking at her now and waiting for her to do something. Orla’s brain felt sluggish with shock.

Her assistant, Susan, discreetly nudged her with her foot, under the table. That physical contact seemed to jolt Orla out of her fog and she stood up and put out her hand, her training and innate manners dictating the automatic moves of social training.

After shaking hands with his assistant, her hand was clasped in his much bigger one—tightly—and the fire of his touch seemed to explode the memory box open in Orla’s brain and body. She was barely able to hold back the onslaught of a thousand lurid images: writhing underneath him, sobbing, panting, gasping. Clenching her legs tighter around his hips, begging him to go deeper, harder.

‘Miss Kennedy,’ he said in that deep voice. His eyes had darkened to black and Orla imagined she could see veritable sparks shooting her way. Something in her hardened as she pushed down those images to a deep place of personal shame. She gripped his hand back just as tightly.

‘Mr Chatsfield.’

He didn’t let her go. He drawled, ‘It’s funny but I could have sworn we’ve met somewhere before.’

Hot mortification threatened to swamp Orla but she refused to let it rise. If her eyes could have killed, he’d have been vaporised on the spot. She gritted out, ‘Believe me, Mr Chatsfield, we’ve never met. I think I would have recalled it, as your family are so memorable.’

Antonio Chatsfield’s eyes flashed at that none too subtle barb and his hand was so tight on hers now that Orla could feel her bones grind together. She bit back the need to cry out. And then abruptly he released her. Orla wanted to cradle her hand to her chest but didn’t, not wanting to show him a moment of vulnerability.

There were two of them who’d conspired to pretend to be someone else last night. He had no right to lambaste her silently for it, or allude to it in front of these people.

He said with a deceptive lightness which surely had to be meant only for her ears, ‘I must have been mistaken, then, because the woman I’m thinking of is called Kate.’

Orla’s face paled even more when she saw the curious look of her assistant from out of the corner of her eye as she sat back down. Her second name was Kate. They’d both used their second names. It wasn’t even funny.

CHAPTER THREE

THE MEETING PASSED in a blur, with much of the discussion revolving around complicated legalese talk between the solicitors. In those instances Antonio sat back in his chair and regarded Orla steadily, forcing her to try and glare him out, refusing to be intimidated. She had nothing to be ashamed of, she assured herself stoutly. She always ended up looking away first though, as those eyes brought her back in time to only a few hours before and she couldn’t halt the lurid images from taking over.

He positively radiated hostility and at one stage Susan leant close and said sotto voce, ‘What’s up Chatsfield’s nose? I’d heard he was charming … but he’s looking at us as if we’re something he found on the bottom of his shoe.’

Not us, Orla replied silently, just me. And the more he sent out those silent vibes, the angrier she got.

The Chatsfield solicitor was looking at everyone around the table now. ‘Well, it would appear as if everything is in order for us to begin negotiations regarding a potential takeover of the Kennedy Group.’

Orla saw the smallest of smirks play around Antonio Chatsfield’s mouth and something inside her blew up. She stood up and put her hands on the table and stared straight at him. ‘With all due respect, I disagree. From what I’ve seen here today I’m not sure that I want to continue discussions of a possible takeover by the Chatsfields.’

Orla heard her assistant and solicitor gasp simultaneously. She felt quivery with rage inside. He was playing with her, punishing her. She hated this feeling of vulnerability and exposure.

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