Apollo was wheeling out his entire repertory of foreplay in an attempt to win the fireworks response he had craved from their first kiss. He had never gone so slowly in his life with a woman. He had never had to because usually they were all over him, egging him on to the final act as if afraid he would lose interest if it took too long to get there. He kissed a line down a slender arm and smiled. There was just nothing of her and he would have to be very careful not to crush her. He caressed a tiny foot, flexed the toes, revelling in the novelty of that fragile daintiness. She might be small but everything was in perfect proportion. As he skimmed down her panties he reached up, fingers closing into her golden hair to raise her head and claim her lips again.
A gasp was wrenched from Pixie as he nuzzled her lips with his, brushed them gently apart and then went in for the kill with his tongue and it was as if the top of her head blew off. When Apollo kissed her she literally saw stars and heavenly galaxies. With every caressing, darting plunge of his tongue her temperature rocketed and her still hands finally rose and plunged into the depths of his hair. Finally getting that response energised Apollo’s hunger.
There was so much he wanted to do that he didn’t know where to begin but he knew he wanted it to be an unforgettable night for her. Why it had to be that way with her he didn’t know or care, but then he had always responded very well to a challenge and in many ways Pixie had challenged him right from the start. Unimpressed, cool, indifferent. For the first time in his life Apollo wanted a needy, clingy woman and he didn’t understand the desire or where it was coming from.
He spread her legs and shifted down the bed. Pixie froze as if he’d suddenly put the lights back on. He wanted to do that?
‘I don’t think I want that,’ she told him hastily.
‘You’ll be surprised,’ Apollo husked, ready to rise to yet another challenge and embarking on the venture with a long daring lick that made her squirm and gasp again. Satisfied, he settled in to drive her crazy. He would be the very best she had ever had in bed or he would die trying. Lack of interest would become craving. Coolness would become heat. Unimpressed would become awed.
Apollo touched her with expert delicacy that she knew she couldn’t object to although she couldn’t imagine that he could possibly want to do what he was doing. He slid a finger into her damp folds and she almost spontaneously combusted in shock and excitement and that was nothing compared to the intense feel of his mouth on the tiny bundle of nerves at the apex of her. All of a sudden control was something she couldn’t reclaim because her body had a will of its own. Her hips ground into the mattress below her, her heartbeat thundered and she was breathing so loud she could hear it while the growing tightness deep down inside her was impossible to ignore. She could feel herself, reaching, straining, while the ripples of excitement grew closer and closer together and then an almost terrifying wave of ecstasy gripped her and she was flying and crying out and moaning all at the same time.
‘When you come the next time, I want you to say my name,’ Apollo growled in her ear while her body still trembled in shock from the sheer immensity of what he had made her experience.
‘Never felt like that before,’ Pixie mumbled unevenly.
‘It will always feel like that with me,’ Apollo assured her with great satisfaction as he slid over her, tilting her hips up to receive him, and drove down into her with an uninhibited groan of all-male need.
Pixie jerked back in shock from the sharp pain that assailed her and yelped in dismay.
But Apollo had already stopped. He raised himself higher on his arms to instantly withdraw from her again and folded back at her feet, the sheet tangled round him. His lean, darkly handsome face was a mask of disbelief. ‘You’re kidding me?’
Pixie sat up with a wince because she was sore and way more conscious of that private part of her than she wanted to be. She was still in too much shock to think because she had long dismissed as an old wives’ tale the concept of a first sexual experience hurting and had been entirely unprepared to discover otherwise.
‘A…virgin?’ Apollo gritted in much the same tone of disdain as he might have mentioned a rat on board his superyacht.
Anger began to lace her growing mortification. ‘Why did you have to stop?’ she gasped, stricken. ‘Couldn’t you just have got it over with?’
‘Like you know so much about it?’ Apollo virtually snarled at her as he vaulted off the bed with the air of a man who couldn’t get away quickly enough from the scene of a disaster. A little warning voice at the back of Apollo’s volatile head was warning him to tone it down but he was genuinely furious with Pixie for wrecking something with her silence that he had been determined to make special. Special…really? Where had that goal come from inside him? Why? He didn’t know but he was still furious about the bombshell she had dealt him when he’d least expected it.
‘Maybe I should have warned you,’ Pixie framed tightly, recognising that he was sincerely annoyed with her.
‘There’s no maybe about it!’ Apollo thundered back at her. ‘I hurt you and how do you think that makes me feel? I gave you every opportunity to tell me and you didn’t.’
‘I thought you’d laugh at me.’
Apollo shot her a narrowed green glance. ‘Do I look like I’m laughing?’
Pixie swallowed hard, her face burning at his raw derision. Clutching the sheet to her bare skin, she felt about an inch high while she watched him striding into the bathroom, over six feet of lean golden-skinned enraged male.
What did he have to be so annoyed about? She hadn’t thought of her body as his business until they got into bed but then suddenly, she registered, it had become his business. Discomfiture gripped her. He was accustomed to experienced women and probably feeling out of his depth after she’d yelped cravenly at one small jab of pain. Really, could she possibly have made more of a fuss? Was it any wonder that he was angry?
Guilt stirring, Pixie slid out of bed and pulled on his shirt, because it was the nearest item of clothing that would cover her. She breathed in the scent of him almost unconsciously and sighed because she had screwed up, made a mountain out of what would probably have been a molehill had she simply been a little more frank in advance. But being frank on such a personal topic was something Pixie had never contrived to be, even with Holly.
As she appeared in the doorway Apollo glowered at her from the shower, standing there naked and unconcerned, water streaming from several jets down the length of his big bronzed body. Pixie stared and flushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I should’ve warned you.’
‘But instead of warning me, you actually lied!’ Apollo condemned emphatically, still struggling to work out why he was so angry when he very rarely got angry about anything. A virgin—very unexpected but scarcely a hanging offence. That she had lied to him annoyed him more because, most ironically, she was the first woman he had ever believed to be more honest than was good for her.
‘I said sorry. There’s not much more I can do,’ Pixie launched back at him a little louder, her temper rising. ‘What do you want? Blood?’
‘Already had that experience with you,’ Apollo derided smooth as polished glass.
And that crack was the last straw for Pixie and she lost it. Her fingernails bit into her palms as her hands fisted and she shot a look of loathing at him that startled him. ‘You’re just reminding me why I don’t like men and why I didn’t warn you,’ she framed jerkily, formerly suppressed emotion surging up through her slight body in a great heady surge.
‘And why would that be?’ Apollo demanded, switching off the water, grabbing up a towel and stalking out of the shower.
‘Because you’re threatening and selfish and mean! I put up with far too much of that growing up!’ she told him in a screaming surge. ‘Men trying to catch me with my clothes off when I was in the bathroom or the bedroom…men trying to touch me places they shouldn’t…men saying dirty stuff to me…’
Apollo had seemingly frozen where h
e stood. Not even the towel he had been using to dry himself was moving. ‘What men?’
‘Care staff in some of the children’s homes I stayed in, foster fathers…sometimes the older boys in the homes,’ she related shakily, caught up in the frightening memories of what she had endured over the years before she’d reached Sylvia’s safe house and then eventually moved towards complete independence. ‘So, don’t be surprised I was still a virgin! Sex always seemed sleazy to me and I’m not apologising for it. Not everyone’s obsessed with sex like you are!’
Listening, Apollo had lost all his natural colour and much of his cavalier attitude. His bone structure was very stark beneath his golden tan. ‘You were abused,’ he almost whispered the words.
‘Not in the strictest sense of the word,’ Pixie argued defensively. ‘I learned to keep myself safe. I learned that what they were doing was wrong. Nobody ever actually managed to do anything but it put me off the physical stuff…’
‘Obviously…naturally.’ Apollo snatched in an almost ragged breath and veiled green eyes rested on her. ‘Go back to bed and try to get some sleep. I won’t be disturbing you.’
Taken aback, Pixie stared without comprehension at his tight, shuttered expression.
‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’
‘It was only a tiny hurt. I just wasn’t expecting it,’ she muttered awkwardly, but she could see that even that little hurt and the surprise of it had been a complete passion killer as far as he was concerned.
Apollo strode back into the bedroom and she heard him rummaging through the drawers in the dressing room. Moments later he stepped back into view sheathed in tight faded denim jeans and a white linen shirt and, without even pausing to button the shirt, he strode out of the stateroom. So much for their wedding night, Pixie thought wretchedly. Getting into bed he had definitely wanted her, lusted after her, and what had preceded the final act had been fantastic. He had given her an ecstasy she had not known she was capable of feeling. But all too quickly she had blown it…
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHAT WERE THE ODDS? Apollo asked himself as he sat on deck swigging from a bottle of Russian vodka, his black hair blowing back from his lean darkly attractive features, his green eyes very bright. What were the odds that he would end up with a woman who had also been abused? Whose attitude to sex had been inexorably twisted and spoiled by experiences that had happened when she was too young to handle them?
Not only had he hurt her physically, he had also shouted at her. Half a bottle further on, Apollo padded barefoot over to the rail. His wife was a virgin and he had acted like an idiot. Why? He was an arrogant jerk proud of his sexual skill and finesse…why not just admit that? He had been so determined to give her the fantasy and it had gone pear-shaped because she hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him the truth. And how could he hold that against her when throughout his whole thirty years of life he had never told anyone but his father what had happened to him? He knew about that kind of secret; he knew about the shame and the self-doubt and the whole blame game. And even though he had seen slivers of low self-esteem and insecurity and anxiety in Pixie it had not once occurred to him that she too could be something of a victim, just like him.
She had deserved better, much better than he had given her. He had treated her like one of the good-time girls he normally enjoyed, confident and experienced women who wanted fun and thrills in and out of bed and as much luxury and cash as they could wheedle out of him. That had suited him because it left him in complete control at all times. But he wasn’t in control with Pixie and that seriously disturbed him. He was clever, he was normally cool and logical and yet instead of being delighted that his wife had never been with another man he had shouted at her.
And paradoxically he was delighted because something about Pixie brought out a possessive vibe in him and that vibe of possessiveness had lit up and burned like a naked flame the instant he’d married her. Furthermore, since she had had the courage to tell him something as personal as what she had spilled out in her distress in the bathroom, he really did owe her, didn’t he?
Apollo wove his path rather drunkenly back to his stateroom where he tripped over the clothes Pixie had gathered up and left in a heap directly in line with the door. The racket he made hitting the floor and his yell of surprise yanked her out of her miserable thoughts with a vengeance.
Fumbling for the bedside light, Pixie switched it on and stared in wonderment at Apollo sprawled in a heap on the floor. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I got drunk, ‘Apollo informed her with very deliberate diction.
‘After a…a crummy night that makes sense.’
‘Don’t be all English and polite and nice,’ Apollo groaned, raking a hand through his tousled black hair. ‘I wasn’t.’
‘But then you’re not English,’ Pixie parried, marvelling at the vision of her very controlled new husband in such a condition. His green eyes had a reckless glitter that unnerved her a little. Sober, he was a lot to handle. Drunk, he could well be more than she could manage.
‘Never been with a virgin before,’ he confided. ‘I wanted it to be perfect and then it went wrong and I was furious. My ego, my pride, nothing to do with you. I was a…’ He uttered a four-letter swear word.
‘Pretty much,’ she agreed more cheerfully after hearing that he had wanted their wedding night to be perfect, which was a hearteningly unexpected admission when deep down in advance of the bed business she had feared that he would not care a jot. She relaxed her stiff shoulders into the pillows while she studied him and decided that even drunk he was heartbreakingly gorgeous.
‘My second stepmother beat me with a belt and left me covered with blood,’ Apollo announced out of the blue.
Her jaw dropped. ‘How old were you?’
‘Six. I hated her.’
‘I’m not surprised. What did your dad do?’
‘He divorced her because of it. He was very shocked…but then he was sort of naïve about how cruel women can be,’ Apollo told her as he drank out of the bottle still clutched in one big bronzed hand, lean muscles rippling to draw her attention to the intricate dragon tattoo adorning his arm. ‘He didn’t appreciate that I was the biggest problem in his remarriages.’
‘How?’ Pixie asked, wondering if she should try to get the bottle off him or just close her eyes to it. He wasn’t acting like himself. He might hate her tomorrow for having seen him in such a vulnerable mood.
‘When a woman marries a very rich man she wants to be the one who produces his son and heir but I was already there and the apple of my father’s eye.’
‘By the sound of that beating you got, he wasn’t looking after his apple very well.’
Apollo closed his eyes, black lashes almost hitting his cheekbones. ‘He married my third stepmother when I was eleven. She was a very beautiful Scandinavian and the only one who seemed to take a genuine interest in me. Never having had a mother, I was probably starved of affection.’ His shapely mouth quirked. ‘She would come and visit me at school and stuff. My father was very pleased and encouraged her every step of the way.’
‘So?’ Pixie prodded, sensing the tripwire coming in the savage tension bracketing his beautiful mouth, the warning that all could not have been as cosy as he was making it sound.
‘Basically she was grooming me for sex. She liked adolescent boys…’
‘You were eleven!’ Pixie condemned. ‘Surely you weren’t capable.’
‘By the time she took me to bed I was thirteen. It went on for two years. She took me out of school to city hotels. It was sordid and deviant and I was betraying my own father but…but she was my first love and I was fool enough to worship the ground she walked on. I was her pet,’ he completed in disgust.
Pixie leapt out of bed and darted across the floor to kneel down in front of him. ‘You were…what age?’
‘Fifteen when I got caught with her.’
‘For two years a perverted woman preyed on you.’
‘I wasn’
t even her only one,’ Apollo bit out in a slurring undertone. ‘She’d been meeting up with the son of a local fisherman on the beach. It was his father who went to mine and tipped him off about what she was like.’
Pixie shifted until she was behind him and wrapped her arms round his rigid shoulders. ‘You were just a kid. You didn’t know any better.’
‘I definitely knew it was wrong to have sex with my father’s wife,’ Apollo broke in curtly. ‘I don’t deserve forgiveness for that but he still forgave me.’
‘Because he loved you,’ Pixie reasoned. ‘And he knew his wife was using you for her own warped reasons. I’m so sorry I called you a man whore. You had a really screwed-up adolescence and of course it affected you.’
Apollo reached behind himself to yank her round and tumble her down into his lap. ‘I never told anyone about that before…until you told me tonight about growing up in care with men trying to hit on you or spy on you or whatever,’ he mumbled into her hair, the words slurring. ‘Now I think I need to go to bed before I fall asleep on top of you, koukla mou.’
Pixie got up and removed the bottle while he stripped where he stood and, only staggering very slightly, fell like a tree into the bed. He slept almost immediately and she watched him in the half-light for long minutes, thinking how wrong she had been about him once and how much better she now knew him. Yet with what he had revealed he seemed more maddeningly complex than ever and without a doubt the man she had married in a business arrangement absolutely fascinated her. She brushed his tumbled black hair back from his brow and slid into the other side of the bed, hesitating only a moment before edging closer to take advantage of Apollo, whose natural temperature seemed to be the equivalent of a furnace.
She surfaced to dawn very, very slowly, the insistence of her body awakening her to a sweet flood of sensations. It was still so novel for her to feel such things that she knew instantly it was Apollo touching her and just as quickly she relaxed. Her nipples had tightened into needy little buds and the delicate place where his clever fingers were playing was embarrassingly sensitive and wet.