Paradise Nights: Taken by the Bad Boy

‘I swear I just went to heaven,’ she said, and laughed some more. ‘Am I dead?’

‘You have a pulse.’ He could feel it, intimately. ‘You’re not dead.’ Judging by his returning hardness, neither was he. Yet.

‘What’s that?’ she asked as he stirred inside her.

‘A minor miracle.’ Possibly an opportunity to show her he could be a civilised lover when he put his mind to it. Of course, first he had to find his mind. ‘You did say you wanted more.’

Her lips curved as she trailed lazy fingers up his arms towards his shoulders. ‘So I did.’

‘I aim to please,’ he told her, rolling her over onto her back before setting his lips to the corner of her mouth, the underside of her jaw, the curve of her neck, and then lower still, to a part of her he’d rushed over earlier.

‘Oh, you do.’ He closed his lips over her nipple and bit down gently, and she gasped and arched beneath him as her hands threaded though his hair, urgent and demanding. ‘You really do.’

CHAPTER SIX

PETE BENNETT was both passionate and extremely thorough when he put his mind to it, decided Serena some half an hour later as she stood beneath a lukewarm shower. Pete had showered with her briefly, kissing her senseless beneath the spray, and, cursing her roundly as his body responded to hers again, had made himself scarce.

She watched him through the gap between the shower curtain and the cubicle as he dried off and pulled on his shorts and then his shirt. Such a tough, hard body. Such pleasure to be found from exploring it. He had another scar, in addition to the one on his shoulder. This one was nasty—a couple of centimetres wide running across his lower back. She couldn’t be sure but it looked like a burn of some kind, maybe a rope burn, and she wondered what the hell had been on the other end of that rope to carve a gash that deep. He was a warrior, this man, never mind the façade. Beneath his reckless, charming ways lay the heart of a fighter.

Right this minute her warrior was a very sated man, she’d stake her life on it. His body had been to heaven and back. She knew this because he’d taken her with him. His brain, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have made the trip at all.

She stepped out of the shower and met his gaze in the mirror, hers questioning, his bleak.

‘Light-hearted,’ he said grimly.

‘Yes.’

‘And brief.’

‘Yes.’

‘Civilised.’ His eyes were anything but.

‘You forgot exclusive,’ she told him.

‘I didn’t forget.’ He turned around to scowl down at her, a thoroughly disgruntled dark angel, all the way from the spikes of his midnight black hair right down to his toes. ‘This is a disaster,’ he said as he pulled her closer. ‘You’re a disaster.’ And with a kiss so unguardedly needy she trembled beneath the force of it, he turned on his heel and left the bathroom.

Pete sagged against the bathroom door the minute he closed it, willing himself not to go back in there, willing his feet to take him down the corridor and out of the cottage and to keep on walking, straight down the hill to the village. He needed to think. To regain the balance he’d lost in the arms of a siren.

One step. He dragged his extremely happy body away from the door and took it. And stopped abruptly as he looked up, straight at Nico—at Nico and Sam— who stood beside him.

‘We’re gonna cook the sea bass I caught this morning,’ said Sam. ‘Me and Nico. And we’re inviting Chloe and Serena and you to come and help us eat it for dinner.’

‘Oh.’ He struggled for words, for some sense of normality, a modicum of discretion, while Sam looked up at him hopefully and Nico eyed the bathroom door. ‘How big is this fish?’

‘Big,’ said Sam with a grin. ‘Where’s Serena?’

Not a question he wanted to answer. ‘She’s been downloading the photos she took of you and Nico this morning onto her computer. I think she wants to use one of them for her postcard series. Go take a look. In the sitting room.’

Sam didn’t need any more urging. Nico, on the other hand, stayed right where he was.

The bathroom door swung open the tiniest bit, an inch or so, nothing more, and Pete stepped in front of it, blocking Nico’s view as he reached for the handle and pulled the door firmly closed.

Nico stared at him, studying his wet hair with a narrowed gaze. Pete stared back with not a lot to say. He tried putting himself in Nico’s place. Tried to pretend he’d just caught some poor schmuck coming out of his sister’s bathroom, with every indication of his sister still being in there. What would he do?

Castration seemed like a reasonable option.

Hopefully Nico was of a more civilised bent.

‘You want to explain why that bathroom door suddenly seems to want to swing open by itself?’ asked Nico silkily.

‘Not really.’ But for the sake of discretion he gave it a shot. ‘Could be the wind.’

‘Wind?’ said Nico flatly.

‘Uplift. Downdraft. Air. Wind.’

Nico didn’t look convinced.

‘O-or it could be that the door’s set on a slant and swings open by itself.’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘Pity.’ He was running out of plausible excuses. ‘Maybe it’s possessed.’

Nico’s lips twitched. ‘Nice try.’ But he wasn’t buying it. ‘Serena’s a grown woman,’ he said after a lengthy pause. ‘She makes her own choices. I try and respect that.’

Castration didn’t seem to have entered Nico’s mind. This was a good thing.

And then Nico’s gaze swung from Pete to the bathroom door and his face hardened. ‘Hurt her and I’ll hunt you down.’

Or maybe it had. ‘No one’s going to get hurt,’ he said curtly. ‘Serena knows what she’s doing, and so do I.’

‘Do you?’ Nico rapped on the door with enough force to make it vibrate. ‘Dinner’s at seven. Chloe and Sam are eating with us,’ he said loudly and stalked off.

No sooner had Nico disappeared than Serena stalked out, as fully dressed as a person could get in skimpy white shorts and a pink and lime bikini top. She glared at him, thoroughly miffed about something, possibly his parting shot about her being a disaster, but it was too late to take it back now. Besides, he didn’t want to. ‘What?’ he said. What now?

‘You call that discreet?’

‘Well … yeah. It could have been worse.’

‘How?’ she demanded. ‘Nico knows I was in there; that you were in there with me. How on earth could it get any worse?’

‘Hell, Serena,’ he said, darkly amused by her indignation. ‘Five minutes earlier and he’d have found us naked on the day-bed.’

Chloe arrived shortly after that and added her voice to the dinner invitation. ‘It started with me offering to cook for you all at my place,’ she told them ruefully as she set a big basket on the kitchen bench and turned to look back out the kitchen door to where Sam and Nico were cleaning the barbecue. ‘I’m still not sure how the invitation got turned around to having it here. I hope you don’t mind. I brought the fixings for a salad with me and some bread and wine. Nico says he’s cooking the fish.’

‘I love it when he says that,’ said Serena.