Читать книгу Greek Affairs - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 61

SHE was not going to cry, Louisa told herself fiercely as she got off the bed with a quivering stretch of angry limbs. Discovering that she was not very steady on her feet did not help the way she was feeling.

The antihistamines must still be in her system, she assumed as she made her way over to her bags. Squatting by the big canvas holdall, she rummaged inside for something to wear, came out with a little top with thin straps that should not rub her sunburn, found a short cotton skirt, fished out fresh underwear and her soap bag then took herself off to the other furnished bedroom to take a shower.

As she stepped out of the bedroom she spied another holdall standing against the lobby wall. It was a big black expensive-looking leather thing that had Andreas stamped all over it. The urge to give it a good kick almost got the better of her as she stalked past it on her way to the other bedroom.

Then she suddenly stopped to look at the front door as another thought struck her: why wasn’t she stamping and screaming to be taken back to the hotel? The honest answer to that question promised to be so demoralising that she decided not to let it form in her head.

With the grim knowledge that hiding from herself was the fools way to deal with all of this, she stepped beneath the shower and let the stinging spray hitting her tight hot skin punish her for being so weak and gullible.

Standing beneath the shower spray, Andreas waited for the stinging cold water to freeze the nagging ache from his loins. He must have been mad to call a halt to what they had been doing. Perhaps the sexual fog had been a safer place to sink into than trying to deal with issues he’d discovered he did not want to deal with at all. Which said what to him?

That maybe she was right and the sex was all they had left going for them. That it was all they’d ever had?

No. Slamming a hand against the shower dial, he switched the spray from cold to hot and began to wash. He refused to believe that. It would be like admitting that their families had been right about them all along.

OK, then fight your own corner, he told himself. You are supposed to be the man who can talk a whole boardroom of doubters round to your way of thinking, so do it now. Clear your head and deal with the issues that really matter.

Not the sex, though the sex was still the gut-twisting ache it had always been when he was anywhere near her.

Not their interfering families, though they were still going to pay for what they’d done no matter how things turned out between them here.

And then there was that other issue out there still waiting to be dealt with.

Max Landreau.

Snatching up the shampoo bottle he squeezed some onto the palm of his hand.

Did she think he would not recognise the name of the tall, dark, handsome media tycoon? Landreau had a long reputation with women. He collected them as other men would collect stamps! Was she naïve enough to believe he wouldn’t bother to check their relationship out?

Give him twenty-four hours and he would have some answers, but right now, standing here rubbing shampoo into his hair, thoughts of any man being intimate with his wife was threatening to eat him alive.

By the time Louisa stepped back into the hall, the black leather bag had disappeared and the door was firmly shut. Fingering the ends of her wet hair, she hovered for a moment. She wanted to get her hair-dryer, but if Andreas was still there she had no wish to walk in on yet another round of arguments.

In the end she took herself down the steps and into the kitchen. No matter how much liquid Andreas had been pouring into her throughout the afternoon she was still thirsty—and hungry too. Putting the kettle to boil so she could make herself some fresh coffee, she raided the fridge and came out with enough food to make herself a sandwich. By the time she’d done that the coffee was ready, pouring herself a cupful, she even began to relax a little as she took the cup and her sandwich over to the table and was about to sit down when her attention was drawn to the plate-glass window standing invitingly open to the soft golden blush of the late afternoon.

It was just too irresistible. Taking her prepared snack with her she walked outside so she could take a proper look at the view. The house was situated in its own small cove, with the sinking sun now hanging above a glass-smooth ocean. Picking her way carefully over what was still mostly a building site, she made her way to the edge of the shingle beach then paused to glance around.

She did not recognise the spot, though she couldn’t understand why she didn’t when, on her first trip to the island, Andreas had made it his business to take her to every secluded beach there was, even those that could only be reached by the sea. Glancing back at the house, she saw that it nestled gently into a thicket of tall pine trees. It was much bigger when viewed from this position, she realised, its modern frontage a series of plate-glass windows set at different angles to gain the most from the ocean view. One of which must belong to the bedroom she’d been sleeping in, though she’d barely noticed it had a window, she’d been feeling so ill.

Turning around again, she spotted a low, flat projection of rock sticking out of the ground and went to sit down on it to sip at her coffee and eat her sandwich.

The cicadas were busy, the air filled with the scent of olives and pine and the sea. Tucked into a corner of the beach beneath a tree was the bright red jet-ski Jamie had mentioned and—

‘So what do you think?’

The sound of his deep voice from behind her stiffened her shoulders out of their nicely relaxed droop. ‘Am I supposed to have an opinion?'

He had not built this for them after all—which then fed her the question, who had he built it for? Not liking where that thought was taking her, she took a sip of her drink.

‘If you are genuinely not interested,’ he drawled easily, ‘then by all means continue to be a grouch.'

Then he caught her thoroughly unawares when he came to sit down on the rock behind her, spreading his long legs either side of hers. Warm, tanned, hair-roughened thighs appeared in her vision. For a wildly staggered heartbeat she thought he’d come out here wearing nothing until she caught sight of the edges of a pair of cargo shorts and the short sleeves of a pale blue T-shirt moulding his muscled upper arms as he reached round her to place an ice bucket by her feet, containing an opened bottle of champagne.

The clean, tangy scent of him blocked out the scent of olive and pine and she pulled in a deep breath and arched her spine in an effort to place a distance between the two of them.

‘If the house was one of our new cruise ships we would be breaking the champagne bottle on her hull,’ he said lightly. ‘Since it is a house and not a ship, I thought we would drink the champagne instead.'

Next thing he’d looped his hands beneath her arms and produced two champagne flutes.

‘Get rid of the plate and the coffee cup and take these from me,’ he instructed.

One part of her wanted to get up and walk away from him but another part was still stinging from being called a grouch.

‘This is so romantic.’ She restricted herself to a touch of acid as she gave in and took the glasses.

He ignored her and said, ‘Hold them upright if you don’t want champagne on your skirt.'

Tilting the flutes into an upright position, Louisa watched as he poured champagne until it fizzed and frothed. ‘I don’t think I should be drinking this on an empty stomach.’ She’d barely touched her sandwich.

‘A few sips won’t make you fall flat on your face.’

You can, though, she thought bleakly.

Taking one of the glasses from her, he chinked it against the other one. ‘To us and our new home,’ he said and lifted the glass to his mouth and drank.

Louisa didn’t drink—not to an us that just was not going to happen or the our new home bit. ‘How is it that I don’t remember this spot?’ She diverted the subject.

‘The land has belonged to me since my grandmother died,’ he informed her. ‘But the trees used to come to the edge of the shingle until last winter when a storm brought a lot of them down.'

‘Making the perfect clearing on which to build a house. Lucky you.'

‘Am I not?’ was the very dry reply which came back. ‘I suppose you are now thinking that I called up the storm so that I could clear the land.'

‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ she said, remembering the law prohibiting building on Aristos unless it was to replace old with new.

‘There used to be an old shed where the house stands but—'

‘It blew down in the storm too.’

‘You have become a terrible cynic, Louisa,’ he chided. ‘And here I am, mistakenly thinking that you would find this particular spot so romantic …'

It hit her then, just where it was they were sitting. A stinging sensation shot down the length of her spine and snatched at her breath. ‘It isn’t …’ she whispered.

‘We anchored offshore and swam in,’ he confirmed. ‘I found an old blanket in the hut and we stretched out on the beach in the sun to … dry out.'

Louisa saw it all in vivid Technicolor. Her, lying there in her little pink bikini. Andreas, in his creamy shorts that had such a sexy habit of riding too low on his hips. He’d been teasing her about something—she couldn’t remember what—then the teasing had stopped abruptly when he’d rolled over her and suddenly captured her mouth.

She moved restlessly, not wanting to remember the deep, drugging kisses that had grown more and more intimate, or the soft gasps of their fevered breathing as the whole thing had sunk them both beyond the point of pulling back. She could even feel the pebbles digging into her when she’d finally allowed him the one intimacy she had been holding back from him, hear the roughness of his voice groaning, ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ and her own helpless whisper, ‘You could never hurt me,’ then the full, burning heat of his first powerful thrust.

The muscles around her sex curled then throbbed and tightened, jolting her like a wayward dart to her feet. Behind her she could feel Andreas’s surprised stillness. In front of her the sun was setting like a great ball of flaming heat and her heart was pounding, she was shaking all over, her legs had gone hollow except for the shooting stings of telling heat.

She tried to crush it, to damp it all back down again. It was mad that such an old memory should be this intense. She was no longer that innocent seventeen-year-old giving herself for the first time to the man she loved, she was a mature woman with the bitterness of failure and the tragedy of loss to cool her ardour and she no longer loved him—she didn’t.

The champagne flute was suddenly snatched from her fingers, hard hands spun her about. She looked into glinting black eyes and trembled all the harder when she saw the fierce reflection of her own wild thoughts stamped into his hard, dark face. Her breathing fractured. He roughed out a thick, damning sound then his hands were tightening.

‘No,’ she whimpered.

‘Yes,’ he hissed and wrapped her against him so tightly her head whirled at the raw, hard evidence of his passion as he claimed her mouth with a hot, hunting hunger that hurled the past out there into the sunset and replaced it with the right here and now.

And her surrender to it was so fast she groaned and quivered, despising herself even as the sensual claim of his tongue between her lips sent a burn of pure sensation spearing right down her front and she was kissing him back as if there would be no tomorrow, fighting to get her arms free from his crushing embrace so she could throw them around his neck.

He saved her the trouble by scooping her up in his arms to begin carrying her back to the house. This kiss didn’t ease up as he picked his way over the rough ground and entered the kitchen with the sure-footedness of a man arrogant enough to be that confident in himself.

Only when they entered the bedroom and he let her feet slither to the floor did a brief glimpse of sanity return and she wrenched her mouth free. ‘What happened to sorting out the issues?’ she said on a shaky last-ditch attempt to redeem herself.

‘I was wrong.’ Deft fingers dealt with the zip holding her skirt up. ‘This needs dealing with before we can hope to discuss anything else with cool sense.'

‘The sex, you mean.’ The skirt slithered to the floor around her feet. ‘Whenever did it not take priority between us?'

As he was about to relieve her of her top something hard flashed across his features. ‘Don’t ever tell me again that what we had between us was just sex! What we had down there on the beach that just tied you up in sensual knots simply recalling it was special. And if it wasn’t for your sunburn I would be ravishing you again out there on those same damn pebbles to remind you how special it was!'

‘Even special sex is still just sex, Andreas.’

‘Is it?’ Her top came off over her head. ‘Then, yineka mou, let us have sex.'

She’d walked herself right into that one, Louisa acknowledged helplessly as with a lithe dexterity he manoeuvred her onto the bed, his kiss already making good its declaration as he followed her down, ravishing the tender interior of her mouth.

And it just went on and on until she was dizzy with it, her fingers agitatedly kneading the thick, muscular shape of his shoulders trapped inside his T-shirt until it wasn’t enough.

‘Take it off,’ she said, dragging her mouth free, her urgent fingers already searching out the edge of the shirt so she could push it up.

Snaking upright he did as she bade him, leaving her spread out on the bed while he stripped off his clothes, watching her watch him as each new inch of sleekly honed, fabulous flesh was exposed to her soft, dark, hungry blue gaze.

He had the strong-boned, handsome face of an arrogant Greek emperor and the body of an Olympian athlete, she observed breathlessly. So big, so lean, so beautifully presented she couldn’t prevent her limbs from enacting a sensual squirm of invitation as he stripped off the shorts to reveal his full formidable strength.

‘I should have locked you up in a box years ago,’ he muttered as he looked down at her lying there like a golden offering. ‘When did you get to be so blatant about what you want?'

‘You taught me,’ she said and watched his response flare like lightning in his eyes as he came back to her.

‘As long as it was only me,’ he growled.

There was a single split-second when Louisa wanted to pick up that comment, then he was burying his mouth in her creamy throat and the moment was lost in the hot, deep, sensual journey of his mouth anointing her skin with warm, moist, gliding kisses on his way to her breasts. She released a soft cry and arched beneath him as he claimed a tight, rosy nipple, fingernails biting into his nape as he suckled and teased with his tongue and his teeth until she could bear the pleasure of it no longer and grabbed at his hair to pull up his head.

His eyes were as black as midnight, his skin the colour of sun-warmed bronze, smooth and sleek and sensationally tight.

‘Tell me what you want,’ he demanded.

‘You know,’ she groaned, running restless fingers over him and loving the way he flexed and shuddered then took the other breast like a marauding pirate, raiding the eager pink tip until she writhed like a wild thing beneath him. Then he came back to raid her mouth, one set of long fingers searing into her gold silk hair to keep her still while the other set stroked and teased in a torment of expert caresses until he reached the soft, springy curls at her thighs. The kiss broke as he delved deeper, his dark eyes intense on her as he watched her whole length stretch out on a sensation-packed sigh.

He aroused her with smooth, slow, expert patience until she was swollen and wet and he was trembling, a long, sleek mass of passionate male holding her trapped by his weight and the knowing stroke of his fingers as she fought what he was trying to make happen to her. He delved deep into her warm gasping mouth, he suckled the soft fullness of her lower lip. He moved with her and on her, every powerful inch of him playing its part to drive the whole thing on. The tight peaks of her breasts throbbed to his kisses. She scored her nails into his back and into his hair, she gripped the bunched muscles in his arms, latched hungrily on to a taut, muscled shoulder and ran hunting fingers down between them to capture the hard, jutting column of his sex.

‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘please …’

He shuddered on a wave of violent pleasure yet still he held it—controlled it and her, stretching out the fabulous torture until with a suddenness that took her by surprise, he came between her thighs and, on a whispered hot curse, thrust his full length into the morass of sensitised flesh she had become.

No part of her missed out on the glory of it. It swept through her in a wild, heated shimmer from her hair roots to the tips of her toes. No part of him missed out as she moved with him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her legs wrapped round his waist. His hands were kneading her hips and her buttocks, his mouth hot with urgency as he suckled her lips. When her explosive cry came with the first rippling wave of climax he let the helpless sound spring around the room and watched with fiercely possessive, glinting black eyes as she lost herself in its screaming-pitch power. Then he joined her, a long, sleek assembly of rippling male muscle taking the reward for his patience in those final grinding surges that spurred her own pleasure on and on.

Afterwards was like floating above the planet, Louisa didn’t even feel the need to breathe. Yet he was hot and heavy on her, a golden-skinned weight still experiencing the aftershocks of what they had shared with his strong arms wrapped around her and her legs still wrapped around him.

It felt like an age before he released his grip on her and levered himself up, tender fingers combing the damp strands of her hair from her face. ‘Now that,’ he kissed her softly, ‘was a lot more than just sex …'

Opening her eyes, Louisa looked into the cavern-darkness of his and quivered out a rueful smile. ‘In a dominant-male kind of way.'

An ebony silk eyebrow lifted. ‘You preferred me to be subservient?'

Lifting her hand, she let her fingers trace the silk arch as she slowly shook her head. She loved the way he took such masterly control of her. He knew that. She loved the way, when he finally surrendered his own control, he did not hold anything back.

‘Then why the pensive look?’ he questioned.

‘Because,’ she said, only to stop and frown while she tried to decide what the because actually was.

Drifting her eyes over his face, unaware of the stretching silence, Louisa tugged in a breath then wished that she hadn’t when that old familiar scent of his loving curled through her senses. Andreas, she thought bleakly, her first lover, her only lover. The man she had spent five long years trying hard to forget, yet, as she lay here with him heavy on her, she had to ask herself now how she had managed to exist so long without him when it had taken hardly any time at all to bring them back to this point.

‘Not sure you enjoyed it?’

The silken purr in his voice brought her eyes into focus to discover that his had narrowed, the darkened softness of sensual satiation gone from his face.

‘You know it was fantastic,’ she told him drily.

‘No.’ He shook his dark head. ‘You still look uncertain, so I think we had better try again, only slower this time—perhaps draw out the agony a bit longer until you beg me even more?'

Louisa tensed beneath him. ‘I did not beg!’ she objected.

‘You begged,’ he repeated, ‘but clearly it was not good enough to stop you from going wherever it was you just wandered off to.'

‘I did not wander off anywhere,’ she denied in exasperation. ‘What’s the matter with you, Andreas? You never used to be unsure of your mighty prowess!'

The corners of his mouth flexed. ‘Perhaps I’m losing my touch—'

‘I think you’ve gone crazy!’

If the black jealousy burning a hole in his chest was crazy then that, Andreas decided, was what he was.

He knew what it was that was bothering him—Max Landreau, Andreas thought grimly. Had Louisa been daring to think about Landreau while she lay here beneath him looking all pensive and bleak? Had she been comparing the old lover with the new?

Louisa gave a push at his chest. ‘Let me up,’ she instructed, stunned by how quickly he’d turned the most amazing loving of her life into another battle—and all because she’d let herself think!

‘Not a cat in hell’s chance.’ He caught hold of her hands and pinned them to the bed.

‘I don’t like you in this mood,’ she gasped, wriggling beneath him.

‘You love me in this mood,’ he drove her back onto the pillows with the bruising hot pressure of his kiss, ‘dominant and primitive and giving you no options. A few days of this and you will be so much my woman again you won’t want to wander off anywhere.'

Her eyes widened. ‘What do you mean—a few days of this?'

‘Well, you are not exactly fighting to get away from me …'

It was a taunt that hit right at her pride and her ego because she wasn’t trying to get away—not from this villa, not from this bed … not from him.

Chagrin turned her sparking eyes a deeper shade of blue.

‘I am going to love watching you fight the next battle with yourself when the ferry comes back in …'

It took a few seconds for his meaning to click then she sparked all over again. ‘If you’re daring to think I’m going to stay on here with you after this week then—'

Too late—too late, she thought as he crushed the protest from her lips and the breath from her body. Heat flared in the pit of her abdomen as thirty seconds later and true to his dominant promises he was sinking her right back down into the whole hot, sensual quagmire and to fight him she knew she had to want to, but she didn’t.

It was her biggest crime, though she chose not to recognise it.