Читать книгу By Request Collection Part 2 - Шантель Шоу, Natalie Anderson - Страница 29

THE ONE WOMAN I have ever planned on marrying is you.

The words pounded against Sadie’s skull, making sense in a literal way, and yet stopping short of any possible sort of reality.

The one woman I have ever planned on marrying is you.

How could Nikos say that when it was so blatantly obviously not true? He had never really meant to marry her in the past, so why should anything be different now?

‘No.’

She shook her head violently, but that only seemed to make the spinning sensation so much worse. It didn’t even free her head from Nikos’s grasp. Instead it seemed to bring her into closer contact with the warmth and strength of that hand, those long, powerful fingers closing over her jaw, firmer but not harder, warm and strong and shocking sensual. Shockingly welcome.

In the middle of all the chaos of her thoughts, the only thing that she could grab hold of was the way she wanted that hand to be there. She wanted to turn her head, her cheek, into the warmth of his palm, and feel the heat of his skin, taste it against her mouth.

And that was the exact opposite of how she thought she should be feeling. The way that she wanted to be feeling. The way that, rationally, she felt it was safe to be feeling.

It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t wise, it wasn’t even damn well rational. But rational was so far from the way she was feeling that she frankly didn’t care.

She only knew that all the time they had been in this room, when he had been standing or sitting so far way from her, she had wanted, needed to bridge the gap between them. Had longed to come close and feel the heat of skin against skin, the pressure of hard bone under cushioning flesh. But it was only now, when he had made the move, that she actually realised that was what she had been feeling.

‘No…’ she tried again, but her voice had no more strength than the first time she had tried the word, less if anything, so that it croaked and broke in the middle as she spoke. ‘You can’t mean that.’

‘Can’t mean what, glikia mou?’ Nikos questioned softly, the words seeming to shiver over her skin.

You can’t have brought me here to—to…’

That word wouldn’t form, and she didn’t know whether it was because she didn’t dare to face it or because of the way his thumb began to move, stroking slowly, delicately, over the angled line of her cheekbone and down the line of her jaw. Her legs were trembling, turning to cotton wool beneath her, and she felt as if the heat from that one small touch was radiating through her body, firing her blood, melting her bones. With a raw, jolting effort, she wrenched her head up and away from it, green eyes blazing into cloudy gold.

‘You brought me here under false pretences!’ she accused him furiously. ‘You conned me—you’ve kidnapped me!’

‘Kidnapped?’

Those beautiful eyes were deliberately wide and deceptively clear, with the look of the devil’s innocence.

‘Kidnapped you, agapiti mou? So tell me—when did I force you, drag you on to my plane? When did I hold you hostage—lock you in your room, imprison you in the house?’

Strolling across the room to the door, he flung it open, gestured to indicate that she should walk past him if she wanted, out of the room, out of the villa…

And she very nearly took the option he offered. It was only as she made a single step forward that the rush of realisation came. He hadn’t forced her in any way except mentally. He had told her that if she came with him to Greece he would let her mother and little George stay in the house that meant so much to them.

‘You may leave any time you want.’

‘No, I can’t—and you know it! You made sure of that from the start. But I also know that I can’t go through with what you have planned. And I really don’t think that you can, either.’

‘Why not?’

His question was so impossibly pleasant-toned that it was obvious the smoothness of his voice was hiding the dark, dangerous bite of something else. Something that Sadie shrank away from and yet was irresistibly drawn towards like a needle drawn to the most powerful magnet. She couldn’t take her eyes from the sexy mouth that spoke those words, couldn’t pull away from the sensual aura of his long, lean body that seemed to reach out to enclose her, holding her fixed as if her feet were nailed to the floor.

‘Because what you said just does not make sense. You can’t possibly want to marry me.’

‘I can if that’s what it takes.’

That had her frowning her total lack of understanding.

‘Takes to do what?’

‘To deal with what is between us.’

‘There’s nothing between us! Nothing at all.’

‘Oh, but there is.’

When had he moved again, coming even closer, those soft boots making no sound on the polished floor?

‘No!’

Sadie’s hands came up between them, trying to push him away. But Nikos simply smiled and curled his fingers around hers, twining them together, soft and warm.

‘There’s this…’

Sadie’s breath hitched in her throat as he lifted her hands to his mouth and pressed kisses on to each finger in turn. Her heart thudded hard in response to each warm, soft pressure of his mouth and she slicked a soft tongue over her own lips, easing the sudden disturbing dryness there.

‘And there’s this…’

Still holding both of her hands enclosed in one of his, he lifted the other to her head, stroking it down softly over her hair until she arched her neck to press herself against the caress, practically purring like a contented cat.

‘And this…’

With a gentle but powerful tug, he jerked her close, so that the softness of her breasts was crushed against the hard wall of his chest, her hips cradled against his pelvis. The heat of his body flooded hers, making every nerve tingle into life, the pressure and the closeness making it impossible to be unaware of the swollen evidence of his arousal so close to where an answering need was already beginning to uncoil low in her body.

‘Nikos…’ she murmured, and her voice had changed, softened, the dryness of her throat making it husky and raw.

‘Yes, glikia mou?’

Nikos sounded much the same, his words almost seeming to fray at the edges in the soft roughness of his tone. And, hearing it, Sadie knew that she had used up her ability to speak, her voice totally deserting her as she shook her head slowly, uncertainly. Unable to meet the fierce burn of that golden gaze, she lowered her eyes to look away. But that only meant that she was now staring straight at where their hands were still linked between them, his strong and dark against the paler slenderness of her own.

For a moment she froze, aware of the man who held her with every cell of her body, of the heat and hardness of him that seemed to surround her totally. If she breathed she inhaled the warm musky scent of him. She could see nothing but him. The bulk of his body enclosed hers so that she couldn’t look past him to any other part of the room. And even though he hadn’t kissed her she almost felt that if she ran her tongue over her lips once more she would taste the essential flavour of him.

‘Sadie?’

Nikos’s voice was a warning and an invitation all rolled into one. The same warning, the same invitation that his body held for her. The warning said that if she backed away now then this chance would never come again. The invitation was to all she wanted and more.

Deep in a corner of her mind some tiny shred of common sense cried a warning. But Sadie crushed it down until it was buried completely. She had no intention of heeding it or going along with common sense. This was what she had wanted from that moment in Nikos’s office, and again in the plane on the way to Athens.

Then, the kiss, the caresses had been forbidden to her, because she had believed that he had a fiancée. Now there was no one to come between them, nothing to stop her. And she didn’t want to stop.

The invitation was what she wanted. And the invitation was what she was going to accept.

Slowly, she lifted her head. This time her eyes met his full on and she didn’t blink or look away.

‘All right,’ she said softly, but clearly, angling her head even more so that her mouth was his for the taking. ‘Let’s deal with what there is between us.’

The words were barely out of her mouth before they were crushed back under the pressure of his lips. But where she was expecting hard force, powerful passion, what she actually felt was slow, sensual enticement. The taking of her mouth with knowing skill. The wicked exploration of every inch. The slide of his hot tongue along the division between top and bottom lip, into the crevice at the corner and then back again, probing softly but insistently until she had no option but to let her head fall back and open to him completely.

And as she did so everything took fire. The slow, seductive moments were gone and all was heat and hunger and blazing, stinging passion that had her whimpering underneath his kiss, writhing up against him. Her breasts were crushed against his chest, her hips against the heat of him, and she flung her arms up and around his neck, holding his proud head down and close to her to prolong the kiss.

A kiss that now was no longer slow and seductive but hot and hard and demanding. A demand that she met willingly, gave back willingly. She felt Nikos’s heart kick against his ribcage, lurching into a heavy pounding that she heard echoed in her own bloodstream as the heat of hunger flooded through her. Her hands clutched in his hair, her body writing against his as she felt the burn of his fingers trailing over her naked shoulders, down the length of her spine. His palms clamped over the swell of her buttocks, drawing her closer than ever before.

‘Nikos…’

This time his name was a whimper of need against his mouth. A sound of encouragement driving him on. And she heard him mutter something in raw thick Greek as he adjusted his position, made it possible for him to obey her needy urgings.

She was spun round, lifted from her feet. The next moment she found that she had been deposited on the polished surface of the desk, the skirts of her red dress pushed up around her waist, the smooth wood cool against her legs. Nikos took advantage of her change in position as, one hand supporting her back, the other worked fast and urgently to unfasten the black buttons that held the sides of the dress together. And all the time his mouth followed the path of his hand, imprinting burning kisses over her skin.

The red linen fell away, exposing the creamy slopes of her breasts in the soft blue bra. Nikos’s breath hissed in sharply between his teeth and he lifted his head slightly, one long finger reaching out to trace the outline of the scalloped edge, making her shudder in agonised response.

‘Nikos…’ she said again on a sound of protest, of need, and the shivers came again, harder, fiercer, as he cupped one aching breast, slipping his thumb inside the lacy material, stroking over her breast, circling a tightening nipple until she cried out in shocked response.

That cry was captured in his mouth again, swallowed down as he pulled her closer once more, angling her halfway down to the desk, supported only by the strength of his arm at her back. The heat of the other hard palm burned against her sensitive flesh as he pushed the pale blue cup aside, wrenching the straps of the bra over her shoulder and partway down one arm, imprisoning it against her side.

But her other hand was free and could reach out to the buttons on his shirt, wrenching them open with rather less finesse than the way he had dealt with unfastening her dress. She heard the material of his shirt rip slightly, the clatter of a button landing on the table, but couldn’t find it in herself to care. All she wanted was the feel of his skin, hot and silky, hazed with body hair, underneath her questing fingertips. A gasping sigh escaped her as she clawed at his chest, fingernails scraping lightly over the tight buds of his male nipples. Her mouth curled into a knowing smile as she heard a muttered imprecation in his native language, felt his strong body jerk in uncontrolled response.

‘Yes, gineka mou,’ he told her roughly, the movement of his mouth tormenting that achingly aroused tip of the breast beneath his lips, the heat of his breath feathering delight over the sensitised bud, making her writhe in delicious torment on the desk.

She heard the clatter of something—perhaps the pencil pot—being knocked aside, the thud of something landing on the floor, and Nikos’s dark laughter against her skin was just an intensification of all the sensations that assailed her already.

‘You are my woman,’ he repeated. ‘Mine.’

‘Yours.’

It was a whispered echo, one that was choked off on a note of abandoned ecstasy as that hot and hungry mouth found her pouting nipple, sucking it deep into its moist heat and swirling a tormenting tongue around its yearning peak.’

‘Yours!’

She arched up towards him, needing to intensify the sensations, the pressure, and felt his teeth gently scrape the distended tip. For a moment she completely lost herself, almost swooning away in pleasure and only coming back to herself when another new and stunning sensation hit.

Those knowing fingers had reached the heart of her, stroking tormentingly along the fine stretch of fabric between her legs, making her gasp aloud, her one free hand clutching at the fine cotton of his shirt, holding him when she feared he might move away. But all he planned to do was hook his fingers in the sides of her knickers, tugging them down along her thighs to expose her to him more openly. At first it was easy, but when they caught and tangled just below her knees he swore roughly and gave up trying for any sort of finesse. A couple of hard tugs and they had ripped apart at the seams, tossed away in an impatient, careless movement.

His mouth was where his fingers had been, kissing a burning path through the dark curls clustered between her legs, the wicked torment of his tongue swirling over delicate, receptive tissue, making it unfurl and respond like a rosebud opening towards the sunlight.

But she had had enough of waiting, had enough of the sensual agony of anticipation, delicious though it was. Her hands were shaking as she fumbled with his belt, clumsy with need and a desperate urgency. She was making a total hash of things when he laid a restraining hand over hers, and his hot mouth kissed the moans from her lips.

She heard the rasp of a zip and knew a moment of agonising tension, her breath held in her lungs, before he came back to her again. Lifting her so that she was half on, half off the edge of the desk, he opened her legs wide, knees bent, feet braced against the polished wood and moved between them. His mouth took hers again, his tongue probing deep, in the same moment that he used his hands on her hips to lift her, move her, then draw her down on to his hard, heated length.

‘Nikos!’

His name was a long drawn out sigh of pure satisfaction and delight, and for a moment she would have been content to stay like that, close to him, filled with him, abandoned to him. But Nikos was not prepared to stay or wait. Already he was moving, stroking deep inside her, in and then withdrawing almost to the end, before plunging in deeply over and over again. Her hands were around his neck, fingers digging into his shoulders, her mouth moving against his jaw, kissing, licking, nipping at the stubble-roughened skin, tasting the salt of his sweat against her tongue. After only a very few seconds she had lost herself, unable to do anything other than absorb herself into the moment, giving herself up purely to sensation. Mindlessly, blindly, she was moving with him, on him, feeling him inside her, taking her higher, higher, until he finally pushed her over the edge into the blazing, whirling oblivion of total ecstasy.

She heard a voice cry out aloud, and from a distance vaguely realised that it was her own, but she was too far gone to care if anyone had heard. A few seconds later she heard Nikos too give a raw, exultant sound as he followed her, and for a long time after that she knew nothing at all. Only the slow, slow drift back to a form of reality, a sort of return to consciousness, but one that kept floating to and fro, coming back to her and then swirling away again. Taking her into the glowing darkness where all she was aware of was the strength of Nikos’s arms around her, the heave of his chest as he fought for control of his breathing, the thud of his heart underneath the powerful ribcage, the scent of his skin where her head rested, totally limp and spent against his shoulder.

It was a good thing there was the desk here to support them both, Nikos reflected, when some of the thundering haze had left his head and he could finally begin to think again. At least it was there to take some of Sadie’s weight and allow him to prop himself up on it until he recovered. After the onslaught of wild and uncontrolled passion that had taken him—taken them both—by storm, he seemed to have lost the ability to focus, to recognise reality when it came back to him. He felt as if he had been at the centre of some furious whirlwind, snatched out of reality and spun around in a spiralling, blazing typhoon of feeling, then dumped back down on still not quite steady ground again, not knowing which was up and which was down. His arms were shaking, his legs unsteady beneath him, and he still couldn’t manage to get enough air into his raw and aching lungs. He was quite sure that the racing of his heart would never ease so that his pulse rate could return to anything approaching normal.

And Sadie was in no better state than he was. In fact, she seemed barely conscious, her head dropped on to his shoulder, her breath scorching his skin as she too struggled to breathe normally. Her whole body sagged against him, limp as a marionette with its strings completely snapped in two, nothing to hold her upright. And the only noise in the room was the raw, unsteady sound of their breathing, that and the faint splash of the waves coming in to shore out beyond the open window, where ordinary everyday life was going on as normal, oblivious to the wild and sensual storm that had raged inside the villa.

But they could not stay shielded from reality for ever. Sooner or later life must start again. Someone might come in. They had to collect their thoughts and return to normality, for the time being at least.

And then they would have to face the repercussions of what had just happened here.

He for one would have to face the fact that he had stupidly, blindly, rashly rushed into this without a thought, without a moment’s consideration for common sense or practicality. Or even, Thee mou, even safety.

He had just had sex with the woman he had hated for the past five years, a woman he had learned the hard way not to trust. And he had done it without even the use of a condom to protect him now and against the future. He hadn’t paused to think about such things but had been totally at the mercy of his body, his libido, as lust-crazed as a newly horny teenager—and every bit as mindless. Both of them had been wildly out of control, responding in such a white hot fury of desire that any weak attempt at a rational thought had been burned away, reduced to ashes in the blazing conflagration they had lit between them.

And the worst, the most stupid thing of all was that he would do it again at the drop of a hat. Even now, with his breathing barely back under control, his pulse-rate still far from normal, she only had to move and he could inhale the clean, fresh scent of her skin, overlaid with some delicate flowery perfume, or feel the brush of her soft hair against his cheek and the heavy throb of blood would start to rise within his body. If she sighed, exhaling warm breath against his shoulder, so that it slid in to caress the skin at the open neck of his shirt, then he was still tempted to turn and take her in his arms once more, to kiss her hard and strong. Kiss her until their senses woke again, fought off the lassitude of satiation, destroyed all rational thought, and the heated hunger and yearning took possession of them once more.

She would go with him too. He knew that without thinking. Knew that he had only to touch her and both of them would go up in flames, the most basic, most primitive parts of their natures responding to the instinctive demands of their bodies.

And that would be the most damnably stupid way to behave imaginable.

He had to get a grip and fast, before things got completely out of control.

‘Sadie…’

At first he found that his voice wouldn’t work and he had to clear his throat and try again.

‘Sadie.’

This time she heard and lifted her head, slowly and with difficulty. Her eyes, still hazed by the storm that had assailed her, the explosive climax that had erupted like a volcano in her slender form, blinked and tried to focus, almost but not quite succeeding.

‘We need to talk—’ Nikos began, then broke off as the sound of the phone ringing broke through the silence, tearing apart the atmosphere that was rich with the heavy clouds of sensuality and jolting them back to the real world in a second.

Automatically Nikos reached for it, lifted the receiver.

‘Yes?’

Hearing his father’s voice, he knew that he had no alternative but to deal with whatever Petros had on his mind.

‘I have to take this,’ he said to Sadie. ‘And I may be some time.’

She looked as if she needed the time anyway. How could they talk when she was so clearly not yet capable of doing so? Besides, he would prefer to have some time to collect his thoughts himself. Decide just where he was going to go from here.

But first he had to deal with his father. And if Petros discovered who was with him—if Sadie spoke or gave herself away—then they would be back on the terrible old treadmill of the family feud before he could stop it. That had complicated his relationship with Sadie once before. He was not about to let it happen again.

‘Go and clean yourself up…’

His eyes swept over her dishevelled state, the red linen dress hanging open heavily crumpled and creased, her bra half on and half off, and her knickers discarded in two separate tiny pieces on the office floor. Stooping, he picked them up and dropped them into her hand while she was still clearly gathering her thoughts.

‘But…’ she began, but Nikos shook his head, hunching one shoulder to hold the phone between it and his ear as he turned her and propelled her firmly towards the door.

‘Take a shower—or maybe swim in the pool. I’ll come and find you when I’m ready. What?’

The sound of his father’s voice drew his attention back to the phone conversation.

‘No,’ he said, in response to the older man’s enquiry as to whether the person he was with should take priority over him. ‘No one important. Nothing that can’t wait.’

It was only when the door slammed closed behind Sadie that he realised that he had spoken in English. Even when talking to his father.