Loving The Temperamental Adonis
Chapter 279 - 17

Chapter 279: Chapter 17

In fact, he liked everything about her.

He liked her humor, her warmth, and her sensuality. He liked her courage and her honesty and her pride. He liked her smile and the musical sound of her laughter. He liked her face, and her hair, and the way she’d laid her hand on his jaw earlier, when she said, ’I have a feeling you’re a whole lot more than just another pretty face.’

He liked the way her body fit itself to his, and the way her breasts felt in his hands. Liam checked the direction of his thoughts and tipped his chin down, ready to relinquish his hold on her and walk back to the suite. "How many languages was that?" he asked again with a grin.

She lifted her head from his chest, leaned back in his arms, and looked at him blankly for a moment; then she gave him a smile filled with charming chagrin. "I don’t know. I lost count after you said Mandrin."

"Then we’ll have to start over."

"Oh," she said on a choked laugh, and dropped her forehead weakly against his chest.

"But not here," Liam said, amused and flattered by her reaction; then he curved his arm around her waist and directed her toward the villa.

As they walked across the grass, he tried to remember the last time a woman had made him experience such strong, frequent, and repeated transitions from laughter to lust, and frustration to fascination. He couldn’t remember that ever happening to him before. Not him.

The experience was surprising, challenging, and exhilarating. He didn’t want to do anything to diminish it, or the woman who affected him that way, and as he glanced at the open terrace doors, he wondered if it was a mistake to take her to bed in her boyfriend’s hotel room. Then he wondered exactly who he thought that would bother—her? Or him? Or both of them?

The possibility that he might not like the idea of going to bed with her in another man’s hotel room seemed ridiculous, since he’d done similar things in the past without the slightest shame nor regret. He’d even done worse than that by going to married women’s bed when their husbands were out on business trips too busy to satisfy their women. In view of that, Liam decided that his concern was strictly for her sake—until they walked into the suite and they both saw his navy sport jacket hanging on the back of a chair in the living room.

Rayne reacted with a surprised statement of the obvious. "When you left earlier, you forgot your jacket."

"That might have been difficult to explain to your boyfriend," Liam replied without intending to say any such thing. The boyfriend was an off-limits subject under the circumstances, and he couldn’t believe he’d just been foolish enough, or crass enough, to bring him up at such a time as this.

Rayne fell silent for a moment as she imagined the scenario where Max would find a male jacket hanging behind a chair when he returned. But then she thought of the possibility of that not happening because...

"I would have noticed it and..." She began but stopped.

"And what?" Liam inquired, even though that completely compounded his last transgression and made him even more annoyed with himself.

Rayne shot him an uneasy smile and bent down to check on the sleeping dog instead.

Eric’s nose was cool and moist, and he opened his eyes when she touched him; then he gave his tail a feeble wag and drifted back to sleep.

Satisfied, she stood up and rubbed her palms on the sides of her pants. She was trying to think what she would have done with Liam’s jacket, and she wished the subject hadn’t come up because it was making her feel sneaky and guilty about going to bed with him here in Max’s suite, when moments before she’d been happy and excited.

"I guess I would have left it at the front desk in a bag with your name on it."

Liam knew that was a perfectly logical solution, but for some reason, he suddenly found the notion extremely unpleasant—almost as if it were he, rather than merely his jacket, that she would be pulling a bag over and hustling out to the front desk.

"Or I guess I could have put it in the closet and waited for you to phone and tell me what to do with it."

Liam restrained the idiotic urge to ask her if she thought her boyfriend and he wore the same size jacket; then he glanced at the telephone and imagined her boyfriend standing there, answering Liam’s phone call about the jacket or playing back Liam’s voice mail about it.

As he looked at the telephone, it occurred to him that the red message light he’d noticed awhile back was no longer flashing, as it had been earlier. That meant Rayne had already retrieved her voice mail message sometime during the evening.

He glanced at her, half expecting her to be looking at the telephone too, but she was looking at the bed with a decidedly guilty expression, rather than the soft, yielding expression she’d had a few minutes ago.

Although her so called boyfriend wasn’t present in the room, he’d become an uttered obstacle to their unrestrained enjoyment of each other, Liam realized with disgust.

"Is he still planning to arrive tomorrow?" He asked, trying his best to mask his disgust and anger towards a boyfriend he didn’t know.

Rayne shook her head. "No, the day after tomorrow," she said, but their conversation about Max had made her feel so uneasy that she couldn’t look at the bed without feeling despicable about being there with Liam, about to literally cheat on him with another man. Though she’d decided to end her relationship with Max, she hadn’t ended it yet.

Ethically speaking, this wasn’t her hotel room or her bed. Max was paying for them. Decide now, her brain prompted. Decide. Decide.

Engaged in her personal struggle with ethics and logistics, Rayne turned in shock when, from the corner of her eye, she saw Liam shrugging into his jacket.

"Wait. Are you leaving already?" she asked, sounding as stricken as she felt.

He nodded; then he partially dispelled her fears over his reasons by capturing her wrist and pulling her firmly into his arms. He looked amused, not annoyed, she noted.

"But why?" She asked, the slight shake in her voice betraying her fears of him leaving.

"Because," he said amusingly, "something tells me that my little red thinks it’s naughty to sleep with a man in another man’s room."

Rayne’s eyes widened at his acuity, but the way he called her my little red made her heart soar to cloud nine and made her stomach flutter like a million butterflies were doing a happy dance in the pit of her stomach.

To hide her delightful pleasure at the nickname, she cleared her voice and said, "What about what we planned to do?"

"First of all, answer me. Did I guess wrong about the room?" he countered with a knowing smile.

"Not exactly, but—"

"And I believe that if we sleep together on our first date, one of us will regret it tomorrow, thinking it was just cheap, casual sex."

"You mean you?" Rayne asked, a bit stunned, and he laughed briefly.

"No, you."

Rayne thought about what he was saying, and she made no effort to hide the yearning or confusion she felt. "I never realized what a prude I am."

In reply, he slid his fingers through the sides of her hair and turned her face up to his for a demanding kiss that ended on a gruff command. "Get over it by tomorrow."

Rayne tried to think of a clever response but instead said softly, "I’ll try."

Satisfied, Liam dropped his hands and turned toward the terrace doors, seemingly intending to walk outside and around the building again.

"There’s a front door right here, you know," Rayne pointed out.

"If I walk past that bed with you, I’ll have you in it within thirty seconds."

"You’re awfully confident, aren’t you?" she teased.

He tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and said, "Please, just dare me to prove it. Give me one excuse. That’s all I need right now—just one little excuse and my fragile new principles won’t matter."

Rayne wisely decided not to, and he opened his eyes. "I’ll pick you and Eric up at eleven. We’ll take him to a vet in town and spend the day on the island. And the night," he added meaningfully. When she didn’t object, he asked, "Do you like Casinos?"

Rayne looked at the man she’d agreed to spend the night with, despite knowing he was a womanizer who wouldn’t love or stay loyal, and said with a charming smile, "Yes."

He caught her meaning and grinned boyishly. "Then bring a change of clothes for the evening—something very nice."

He turned and disappeared through the doorway.