Читать книгу Irresistible Greeks Collection - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 60

CHAPTER TEN

NEXT MORNING, LEXI got up early while Xenon was still sleeping, leaving him sprawled out on the rumpled sheets which bore testimony to their long night of love-making. Quietly, she slid a bikini from the drawer and changed in the bathroom before going outside to the vast infinity pool which overlooked the bay.

In the milky, golden light of the early morning, the distant sea glittered like sapphires and everything looked sparkling clean and fresh. Sprinklers had been spraying the flowers overnight so that their petals were still dowsed with tiny droplets of water.

The pool was cool when she dived in but Lexi was glad for the shock to her senses. Shock was good. It brought her thoughts back to the present instead of letting them meander off into a dreamy and unrealistic future. It reminded her that this tryst with Xenon was purely temporary. Well, maybe pure was the wrong word, but it was definitely temporary.

He had been curiously quiet after his sister had left yesterday and had remained quiet all through dinner—politely batting away the conversational gambits of his mother and swirling his wine round in his glass, without actually drinking any of it. He had seemed preoccupied, the way he used to be whenever he had some big problem at work. Mulling things over in that clever brain of his until he had identified the exact cause of the problem and how best to deal with it.

At one point she had asked him if something was wrong and he had looked at her, his blue eyes narrowed with an expression she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, and had said, ‘You tell me, Lex.’

She’d felt uncomfortable then and had lapsed into silence herself and not long afterwards she had excused herself from the table and gone off to bed. And when he had followed her he had seemed reluctant to have any kind of conversation. Instead he had started to kiss her in a hungry, almost angry way and she couldn’t prevent herself from kissing him back and after that it had just rocketed out of control.

But now she couldn’t get that kiss out of her mind, or the explosive love-making which had followed. And she needed to. She needed to forget the slide of his fingers on her flesh and the way his lips sought out her most sensitive places. She remembered the way his head had burrowed in between her thighs last night. She’d put her hand on his hair to stop him because at that moment it had seemed almost too intimate an act, especially when she was trying to distance herself from him.

But he hadn’t stopped. He had just moved his tongue all the way along the trembling skin of her inner thigh and she had let him. He had ignored her little gasp of outraged pleasure when his lips first located that hot and aching little bud. He’d pretended he hadn’t heard her muffled question about whether this was such a good idea. And then she had fallen back against the bed, her thighs parting wide and her fingers clutching at him greedily as she soared up into an intense orgasm which left her body racked with exquisite spasms.

How did he do that? she wondered. Dominating her so utterly and completely and turning her into both a compliant and active lover. She thought how easy it had been to slip back into the physical compatibility which had always been a huge part of their marriage. Yet when she stopped to think about it, even that side of their relationship had never really been equal. He had come to the marriage with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the opposite sex while hers could have been written on the back of a postage stamp. He was the only man she’d ever been intimate with and that had pleased him far more than it should have done. She knew that because he’d told her, in that unashamedly boastful Greek way of his.

She’d once asked him if he would have married her if she hadn’t been a virgin and there had been a momentary hesitation before he had reassured her that, yes, of course he would. But Lexi had never really been convinced by that reassurance. Her virginity was all tied in with Xenon’s desire for a wife-on-a-pedestal. The textbook partner for a fundamentally old-fashioned man.

And she was not that wife. She could never be that wife.

Diving beneath the surface of the pool, she opened her eyes to the bleached blue light as she swam almost an entire length underwater before emerging, spluttering, into the fresh air.

She wondered what would lie ahead when she left here, with Jason’s debts paid off and her whole life in front of her. She had her career and her home, but no emotional security. She wondered if she would ever find happiness with another man or whether she was doomed to become one of those women who always carried a torch for their first and only love. A little like Marina...

Hauling herself out of the pool, she squeezed the excess water from her hair and rubbed herself dry with a giant towel before walking back to the villa.

Xenon was standing in the doorway as she approached, a cup of coffee in hand and an inscrutable expression on his face as he watched her. Wearing nothing but a pair of faded jeans, his big body looked tense and powerful. Sunlight gleamed on the muscular arms and honed torso and Lexi was suddenly filled with an almost unbearable sense of lust. She was going to miss this. Damn it, she was going to miss him.

‘That bikini doesn’t leave much to the imagination,’ he observed drily.

‘You’d prefer to give your imagination something to work on, would you?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

Broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug but none of the tension left them. ‘On what you have in mind to get it fired up.’

She looked straight into his eyes. ‘How about this for starters?’

She pushed him inside and shut the door before taking his cup from him, putting it down with miraculously steady fingers. Then she put her hands onto his bare shoulders and started to kiss him.

His mouth opened instantly. He groaned as she slicked her tongue inside and began to slide it over his teeth. Her fingers moved down from his shoulders and began to explore his bare flesh. They skated lightly over his torso. She could feel the hard muscle which underpinned the silken skin and with her thumb and her forefinger she teased each of his nipples, the way he’d so often teased hers, and she heard his shuddered sigh.

‘Lex—’

‘Shh,’ she whispered.

Downwards her fingers tiptoed, as slowly as she could make them. So slow that it was barely a move at all. She could feel him shift his body impatiently as she finally reached his belt, before moving her hand away as if she had changed her mind.

‘Lex,’ he moaned.

‘I can’t hear you.’

Xenon shut his eyes. He knew exactly what she was doing. She was playing a power game. The same game he’d been playing last night when he’d been trying to work out just what it would take to get through to her. Really get through to her. He swallowed. ‘I’m not going to beg you.’

‘That’s okay.’ She flicked her fingers lightly over his straining crotch. ‘We’re not in any hurry.’

The sustained teasing went on for several minutes before Xenon thought that he might explode. A hot rush of breath escaped from his lips and suddenly begging seemed like the best option in the world. ‘Please.’

‘Is this what you want?’ Her hands moved down to the buckle of his belt.

‘Yes. God, yes.’

‘I think I’d better get these off quickly, don’t you?’

‘Lex—’

‘Shh.’

She began to pull the zip down over his straining hardness and, carefully, her fingers freed him. She heard him groan again before she sank to her knees in front of him and the stupid thing was that the note of vulnerability in his voice just twisted at her heart. Physically, she’d never felt so in control, but emotionally she was only just hanging on by a thread as she slithered down his jeans.

He was very aroused, she thought. And so very big. She closed her eyes as his erection nudged against her cheek. Her hands splayed over his bare buttocks and she pressed her mouth against his hardness, her tongue licking a feather-light trail as it whispered down over his steely shaft.

‘Lex,’ he groaned, his hands clutching the side of her head as she took him deep into her mouth.

She cupped her hand around his balls and stroked them as she began to suck him. He tasted salty and he felt exquisitely hard and Lexi felt the hot rush of excitement flooding through her veins. She could never be the wife he needed but she could still make this powerful man groan helplessly beneath her lips.

She teased him and taunted him; licked him until he muttered something urgently in Greek and she felt the imperceptible change in his body. He tensed. The fingers which were tangled in her hair were now pressing urgently against her head. She heard him draw in a shuddering breath and then hold it as if it were the last breath he might ever take, before he began to convulse helplessly. She heard the low cry he made as that first warm, salty taste of him spurted into her mouth and she sucked on it greedily, as if it were lifeblood.

She waited until he was still and then drew her mouth away, trying to compose herself, but it wasn’t easy.

For a moment he said nothing, just rested his hands on top of her still-damp hair as if he was conferring some sort of blessing. Then he pulled her to her feet before bending to yank up his jeans, wincing slightly as he zipped them up.

But his eyes were serious as he tilted her chin with his hand, capturing her gaze so that she could look nowhere but at him.

‘You’re very good,’ he said.

She licked her lips and she could still taste him. ‘I was taught by the best.’

His gaze followed the movement of her tongue as predictably as a cat watching a piece of dangling string. ‘As an example of how well you’ve learned, you certainly couldn’t have bettered that little demonstration.’

She wanted to say that it hadn’t been a demonstration—but how else would she describe it? Lust, certainly. But not just lust. Lust alone didn’t make your heart pound with a power which made you feel dizzy. Nor did it make you want to touch your lover’s face with a tenderness which might just give away how much you really cared. How much you really loved. Still. Even now.

But none of it mattered. Time was running out. After the christening she would be free to go, because that was what Xenon had told her would happen and he never reneged on a deal.

She managed a smile—a bright beam of a thing which went no further than her lips. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it. It’ll be something to remember me by when I’m gone. And while we’re on the subject—I’d like to get away as soon as possible tomorrow. I’m happy to go back on a commercial flight if that would be less hassle.’

There was a pause. He seemed to be picking out his words with particular care. ‘And what if I said I didn’t want you to go?’

Lexi wrinkled her nose. ‘But we can’t stay here.’

‘I’m not proposing we do. But we can go back to London, can’t we? We can even go to your place in Devon if that’s what you want.’

‘Together?’

‘Why not?’

For a moment, Lexi got a bizarre image of what it might be like with Xenon trying to blend into village life. She pictured him standing in a queue in the little corner shop while he waited to buy a loaf of bread. Playing darts in the local pub. Confused now, she stared at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re suggesting.’

‘I want to make it with you, Lex,’ he said simply. ‘I want to give our marriage another chance.’

‘But we’ve already talked about it. We’ve said everything there is to say.’ Her words sounded miraculously strong but she could see from the look on his face that he wasn’t really listening to them. And maybe this was inevitable. Maybe she needed to expose the one last, weak link which would sever their relationship for ever.

‘No,’ he said and his face was filled with a dark determination which made Lexi’s heart begin to sink. ‘We haven’t talked about how we might heal the past. I saw your face when you held Ianthe yesterday. I saw the sadness in your eyes and I understood what you were feeling. But it doesn’t have to be this way, Lex. We can start again. We can have another baby—’

‘No!’ The word came out more violently than she had intended. She could see that its vehemence shocked him—it even shocked her. ‘I can’t have another baby, Xenon. Don’t you understand? That’s why this marriage could never work then—or now. Because I can’t give you the baby you’ve always wanted.’