From Enemy's Daughter to Expectant Bride (12 page)

“My pilot says there should be transmission any time now.” Raiden smoothed back the hair he’d cut short for the first time in his life, in preparation for entering the conservative upper crust of Japanese society. “But you still can’t turn on your phone, since we’re starting our descent.”

Rafael hurled at him an infuriated glance. “Why are you talking when you don’t have something useful to say?”

“Whoa, Numbers.” Raiden grinned, stretching his long legs, the eyes he knew froze people in their tracks twinkling with mischief. “You were the last one, after Richard and Numair, that I thought I’d ever see in this state over a woman.”

“And in this state, I’m liable to do things the Numbers you know wouldn’t. So shut
up,
Lightning.”

Raiden didn’t shut up. Not until Rafael hurled state-of-the-art headphones at his thick skull. He outright guffawed then.

Caring nothing about their descent, Rafael had his phone out and turned on. Hands shaking with inexplicable and all-encompassing anxiety, he accessed his voice mail. There was one from Eliana.

Then the message began.

“Rafael...I—I’ve been in an accident.... They’re taking me to Copa D’or Hospital. Oh, God...where are you?”

A loud clattering noise followed, as if she’d dropped the phone.

Then there was nothing more.

Eight

R
afael lost his mind.

With every heartbeat, he lost it again and again.

Eliana’s phone was out of service. She wasn’t in Copa D’Or, the hospital that was flooded with casualties in the aftermath of the accident.

A dump truck exceeding the allowed height had smashed into a pedestrian bridge, which had collapsed onto dozens of cars in the morning rush hour. Four people were killed. Dozens had injuries ranging from minor to critical. He turned the place upside down looking for her, questioned everyone. No one could report on Eliana’s condition. Or where she’d gone.

Richard believed this meant she was well enough to walk out on her own. But the only thing that mattered to Rafael was that he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t protect her. His men and Richard’s were combing the streets and had already looked in all the places she could be. She wasn’t at her apartment or at her father’s villa in Copacabana or his offices. Neither was her father, who Rafael belatedly remembered was back in San Francisco. And the damn man’s phone was out of service, too.

Long past his wits’ end, he charged over to the last place he could think of. His mansion.

Of her usual haunts, it was the farthest away from the hospital, more than a two-hour drive in this traffic. And there was no reason she should go there with him out of town and with her own apartment only twenty minutes away. But he had nowhere else to try.

Feeling the world crumbling around him, he arrived at his mansion just after dusk. The guards said no cars had come near the gates. And the mansion was empty since he’d given everyone time off while he was away.

He still tore through the mansion roaring for her. Then he exploded into his bedroom...and almost keeled over.

She was on his bed.

Curled on her side with her back to the door, her hair was a wild mass of loose curls rioting across his pillow. Her pastel green skirt suit was ripped in places and smudged in soot and blood.

And she wasn’t moving.

Feeling like he had when he’d had too many brutal punches to the head, he staggered toward her, heartbeats shredding his arteries.

He crashed to his knees beside the bed, terror razing through him.

He couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t discover that she...she...

No.
She was all right. She’d come all the way here. She must just be exhausted from the ordeal....

But she was so still. As if she wasn’t breathing.

Throat sealing shut with panic, his tongue swelled, twisted on butchered pleas. “
Eu imploro, por favor
,
meu amor...
Eliana, I beg you please...wake up.”

Nothing happened. No response. And he knew.

If she didn’t wake up, he didn’t want to live.

With the new certainty, knowing he wouldn’t suffer long without her if she weren’t with him anymore, he finally had the strength to reach out and touch her.

His shaking hand closed over her neck. And before a heartbeat could reanimate him, her heat devastated him.

Warm, hot, and she...she...

She opened her eyes.

“Rafael...”

That tremolo was a thousand volts to his heart, reanimating it after it had shriveled. And he was all over her, his hands everywhere, exposing her flesh, gliding over every inch, making sure all of her was intact, was functioning...was there.

A maddened beast rumbled in his gut at every bruise and graze he found. It dismantled his mind all over again that he’d been unable to prevent her injuries and was now unable to erase them. His lips documented each and every one, tried to soothe and seal them, pouring litanies of regret all over her for failing to do so.

All he could do was have her skin to skin, no barriers for the first time, exposing himself totally for her to take of his power, and for him to absorb her ordeal into himself.

As if he was succeeding, her enervated arms started to cling, her limp body to strain against him until he felt they’d merge. Then her feverish sobs started to make sense.

“My...my driver...was crushed. I—I tried to get him out...but I—I couldn’t...then I was facedown on the ground and they were taking me away.... And I only thought of you...had to reach you...but got only your voice mail...then my phone died...”

His body convulsed around hers, holding her tight as weeping overpowered her, his lips drinking her tears, pledging over and over, “I’m here now. I’ll never leave you again.”

Her hacking sobs became words again. “I—I lost my purse, had only my phone...gave it to the taxi driver as fare. But he said coming all the way here would take him another hour out of his way in the opposite direction, so he dropped me on the main road....”

And he finally found something he could put right. “I’m going to find that driver, and I’m going to make him regret every contemptible act he’s committed in his life.”

Her tears suddenly stopped, her eyes widening with dismay. “No, no...it doesn’t matter....”

“Don’t try to stay my hand, Eliana. This sorry excuse for a man not only took your phone—your only method of communication—in lieu of fare, instead of getting you a charger, but then he left you stranded miles away from your destination, injured and alone. He
will
pay.”

The next second he wanted to bludgeon himself at the way she seemed to shrivel at his aggression, even when it was on her behalf. She was so shaken, felt so fragile, as if she was...

Dread swept him all over again. What if she was hurt internally, something that would manifest gradually...?

“
Deus, meu amor...
I have to take you back to the hospital.”

She resisted when he scooped her up. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“You can’t know that. Some injuries, like concussions, become symptomatic later. You need to be monitored....”

“But nothing even came near me. The half of the car I was in was totally untouched.”

“But the scratches and bruises all over you...?”

“I got those as I tried to get my driver out.”

“But you said you found yourself facedown when they came to take you. You could have lost consciousness.”

“It was just a reaction to the horrific sight of my driver’s injuries, the flood of adrenaline as I tried to extricate him, then when...when he died right before my eyes.”

Helplessness pummeled him again because he knew that he couldn’t rewind those terrible moments, wipe away their memories.

But he could do something else. “Still, a couple of nights in hospital are a must.”

“They aren’t. Apart from my self-inflicted bruises, they gave me a clean bill of health. But even though I miraculously escaped without a scratch, I was just...distraught thinking how I could have died or worse.” Her eyes welled as she clung to him. “I needed to be where I can feel you. Then I found a damaged part of the wall around the estate and entered through it, as the gate was too far and I just had to get to your bed....”

Groaning with raw, gut-wrenching emotion, he pressed her to his heart. “I’m here now,
preciosa.
I found you and I’m never letting you out of my sight again. I’ll keep you safe from now on.
Always.
”

“You can’t stop fate.” Before he could swear he would, she went on, hands trembling over his burning flesh. “When that bridge was collapsing and I thought I’d die, I had only one regret...that I was never with you completely.”

The insupportable thought that her life could have been snuffed out in seconds, that he could have lost her, ravaged him again.

Then she sobbed. “You can’t stop fate, Rafael, but you can have
now.
Let me have you now, all of you. Take all of me and show me how alive you are. Show me how alive I am,
meu amor.
”

Meu amor.
She’d called him my love.

And everything inside him snapped.

He bore down on her, felt her heart beat to the same insane rhythm beneath his, knew she couldn’t bear preliminaries or gentleness, needed him to reaffirm her life ferociously.

Hand bunching in her locks, tethering her head down to the mattress, his eyes captured her streaming ones as he rose between her splayed thighs and pressed his crown to her molten entrance. Then he lunged.

He felt her flesh trying to ward off his invasion, tearing around his advance. Her shriek boomed inside his head as he pummeled through her barrier. Her body bowed beneath him, a deep arch of agony, but her nod was frantic. She wanted him to give her a ravishing, a full possession. He’d give her everything he had.

He withdrew through the clinging ring that clamped him like a vise, then thrust back harder, tore through the rest of her innocence, felt the scald of her blood and submission gush around him, coating his shaft.

Her cries became pain mixed with exultation, ripping through him. They became whimpers of loss as he withdrew until only the head of his erection remained caught in her flesh. Then he powered his unbearably hard length back into her mind-blowing tightness and heat, forging a new path inside her. His alone. His only home.

Bending, he sealed her lips with his, swallowed her gusting breaths and tortured keens as her flesh began to yield to his shaft, sucking him into an inferno of sensation.

The carnality, the reality, the
meaning
of being inside her... It was too much. He needed to give his all to her, to lose himself inside her, to pierce her essence and consume her.

He glided out of her tightness, pummeled back just as she pumped up, impaling herself further on his erection. Pleasure detonated, almost blew out his arteries.

“Eliana—there can’t be pleasure like this, there can’t be. Take it all, Eliana, give it all to me....”

“Yes...Rafael...
yes.
”

She crushed herself against him, catapulting him into a frenzy. He pounded into her now, building in force and cadence, had her voluptuous breasts jiggling beneath him, her trembling legs spreading wider as her core poured more welcome over him.

The heat, the friction escalated until he sensed the heart thundering beneath his might burst with need for release.

Tilting her hips, he angled himself, still unable to sink inside her to the root through the tightness of her untried body. But he adjusted his position, seeking her inner triggers to ignite her release. Until he did.

Shrieking, she shattered around him, her flesh wringing his shaft with convulsions, the flood of her release razing him, its current snapping his sanity.

He detonated inside her, streams of ecstasy scalding through his length, pouring into her womb, his seed mixing with her pleasure in jet after jet of pure culmination.

Everything started to vanish. Only Eliana remained, her being and flesh melting into his....

* * *

Rafael came to with a gasp.

As his senses flickered back, he realized he’d lost consciousness...for the first time in his life. The discharge of fright and craving had been that brutal. It hadn’t been a sudden blackout, but a descent into a realm where he’d merged with Eliana on every fundamental level there was.

He lifted his weight from her cushioning softness on shaking arms. She came to only when he moved, her core involuntarily clutching the hardness that hadn’t subsided a bit, dragging a groan of pleasure from his depths.

Her eyes fluttered open and he saw how red and puffy they were, and the memory of her ordeal twisted his gut.

But when her lips spread into such a smile, as if she’d discovered an exclusive secret, her eyes growing heavy with such fulfillment, it made him feel like thumping his chest.

The next second, the bite of shame at the ferocity with which he’d initiated her doused his self-satisfaction.

She whimpered as he began to pull out. “Stay inside me.”

He stilled. “You must be sore.”

“Oh, I am...magnificently so.” Her silky legs caressed his sides, her heels digging into his buttocks, driving him back inside her. “If I knew just how incredible it would be to be ravished by you, I would have found a way to make you do it to me before. As it was, it took a near-fatal accident to break your resolve.” Her eyes darkened before she made an effort to brighten them. “Being an overachiever in everything, you went and knocked me out with too much pleasure.”

Heart quivering with the enormity of everything that had happened in the past several hours, he said, “You knocked me out, too, and I don’t even have your excuse of being a novice.”

Her eyes widened. “I did?”

“Indeed. I blinked out for the very first time in my life. I never have, even when I got punched square in the face. Richard used to say I have something in my head that doesn’t cut out. It took you to KO me.”

Her look of delight and smugness was worthy of a hundred portraits. It had a chuckle bursting on his lips as his heart expanded with gratitude. That she existed, was whole, and was his—in every way now.

Debilitated with relief, he rolled onto his back, taking her with him, staying inside her as she’d demanded. She enveloped him in intimacy, her hair gleaming waves of silk strewn over his chest.

He traced the exquisite profile pressed over his heart, the velvet limbs entangled with his. Dismay surged again at her bruises, at how much worse it could have been.

He exhaled the excess fright, the mounting guilt. “And to think I once asked if you were a virgin so I’d adjust my approach. Then I realize you are one and I still take your virginity with all the finesse of a plundering marauder.”

She raised his head, eyes urgent. “I needed you, too. I couldn’t bear any more gentleness. I needed you to take me with all your strength, to give me the full ferocity of your life and mine, no holds barred. The pain only made the pleasure almost too much to bear. I think I did die for a while with it.”

His arms convulsed around her. “You will always
live
with it. Live and thrive and be your vivacious, bursting-with-life delight of a self, do you understand?”

She nodded, eyes growing dreamy. “And I want to live every possible second with you inside me.”

“The hard part for me would be
not
being inside you.” He thrust deeper inside her hot tightness.