Standing up, she reached her hands round her back to unzip her wedding dress.
Halfway out of the garment, she heard the door open. She spun round, words of angry rebuke on her lips at that unannounced entrance. As her gown slithered downward, she arrested its progress by spreading her fingers in a frantic movement. Without it she would have been bare to the waist, for the stiffly boned bodice had made the wearing of a bra superfluous.
Nik was lodged one step inside the door, which still stood ajar behind him.
Her mouth ran dry. Her mind went blank. She just gaped at him.
'I came to ask if you were planning to join me for dinner,' Nik drawled in a curiously hoarse undertone.
CHAPTER SIX
‘Dinner?' Olympia queried shakily.
'In fifteen minutes...' Nik extended.
His attention was one hundred per cent welded to her. And, involuntarily, Olympia returned the compliment. Nik looked sensational, sleek and elegant as a jungle cat and intrinsically exotic. His black dinner jacket outlined his broad shoulders, well-cut trousers shaping his narrow hips and long powerful thighs with a smooth fidelity of fit that came only with the attention of a master tailor and the richest, smoothest cloth.
Exclusive, sexy, intensely male. She couldn't block him out any more. She couldn't drag her eyes from his lean, dark, devastating face. But then all women noticed Nik, turning their heads for a second lingering glance, often staring. His superb bone structure, level black brows and high cheekbones were matched to a- narrow-bridged blade of a nose and a sculpted, sensual mouth that was pure temptation. But it was those molten gold eyes accentuated by the luxuriant fringe of spiky ebony lashes that stopped her heart dead in its tracks.
'Fifteen minutes...’ Olympia repeated unevenly, fighting to concentrate as Nik stepped back and shouldered shut the door with a sharp, definitive snap.
A drumbeat of pulsing tension thundered in the atmosphere. As she collided with those burnished eyes, her every skin cell leapt. She could feel each breath quivering through her, the quickening crazy thump of her heart, the swelling mortifying ache of her breasts stirring below the stiff bodice. In desperation, she tore her gaze from his and lowered it.
'But right at this moment eating has to be the last thing on my mind...'
‘Sorry?' she mumbled, knees trembling.
In the seething silence, Nik elbowed back his jacket, drawing her attention to a part of him she was not in the habit of studying, and to something that the fine tailoring of his trousers could not possibly conceal. The unmistakable thrust of overt male sexual arousal. And that recognition shocked Olympia rigid and sent a boiling blush rushing up her throat into her cheeks. She dredged her shaken scrutiny from him, expecting to feel disgusted, disconcerted even more when instead a sensation of hot liquid heat snaked up between her clenched thighs.
'Theos...you look like a pagan princess,' Nik asserted raggedly.
A pagan what! As she lifted her head, she caught a glimpse of herself in the dressing mirror. She stared at that unfamiliar reflection in astonishment. She had forgotten that her hair was loose. Her mahogany mane tumbled to her waist like a waving curtain, one pale naked shoulder displayed, the other concealed, the valley between her breasts accentuated by her folded arms.
'Look at me...' Nik urged thickly.
And she didn't intend to but somehow she did. The growling edge to his accented drawl sent a delicious little tremor running down her taut spine. She flung her head back and looked, encountering scorching golden eyes. She was stunned by the raw desire she saw there.
'Go...' she framed shakily.
'Do you honestly think that I'm about to sit down to dinner in this state?' Shifting his broad shoulders in a fluid movement, Nik peeled off his jacket and tossed it aside. Long brown fingers jerked loose the knot on his bow tie, unfastened the top button of his white silk shirt. 'Even you couldn't be that cruel—'
'Me...cruel?' Olympia interrupted in a bewildered daze. Although held by his smouldering gaze like a butterfly pinned to a collector's board, she was hugely aware of the tie dropping to the carpet, the shirt buttons being undone.
'Let the light of reality in here. Ten years back, while you played Miss Prim and Proper Prude and brandished your innocence at every opportunity, I was in absolute agony... in the grip of overpowering lust and unable to do anything about it!' Nik's lean, powerful face hardened. 'Did that give you a kick, Olympia?'
'A...a kick?' Eyes huge pools of enquiry, she stared back at him, struggling to absorb his assurance that he had found her sexually attractive in those days. That claim ran against everything she had ever believed, and she was paralysed by a sense of sheer disbelief.
'You kept me in a constant state of arousal. I never slept after I was with you. My fantasies about what we were going to do when we got married even embarrassed me!' Nik admitted grimly. 'I wasn't used to going without sex...it was torment; it was seriously painful.'
Olympia just gaped, bereft of all ability to conceal her reactions. 'No...' she whispered in shaken denial. 'No, you couldn't have felt like that—'
'And I don't intend to suffer that way ever again,' Nik incised with husky vehemence as he crossed the room and closed his arms round her from behind. 'Because you want me too, pethi mou.'
'I don't!' she gasped strickenly.
Lowering his arrogant dark head, Nik pressed his sensual mouth to one pale taut shoulder. A streaking dart of fiery awareness flamed through her treacherous body. 'What's the point of lying about the past now?' he murmured intently.
'I'm not lying!'
Nik progressed with wicked expertise from her taut shoulder blade to a highly sensitive spot just below one small ear. Her legs shook beneath her, her throat extending, her head falling back against his chest.
'I need to hear you admit that you burned for me too, that only the fear that I wouldn't marry you or that you might lose your precious inheritance held you back,' Nik continued:
As he nipped at her tender flesh with his teeth Olympia shivered violently, and a muffled gasp broke from her parted lips. What he was doing to her put to flight all powers of reasoning. Her skin felt hot and stretched tight over her bones, and she was mesmerised by their reflection in the mirror. Nik with his proud, dark handsome head bent as she leant back against him for support. It was the stuff of a thousand of her secret teenage fantasies. She watched in trembling breathless excitement as he closed his hands to her crossed arms; his skin was so dark against her paler colouring.
'Olympia...' Nik gritted.
She squeezed her eyes tight shut in sudden shame, fighting for control and intelligence. But still the wave of unbearable heat and temptation beat at her. She was defenceless. For her, at that instant, there was nothing more important than the feel of Nik's lean, long-fingered hands on her, the hard, muscular strength of him, the sinful imagery flickering behind her eyelids.
'You've got it wrong,' she managed to frame jerkily.
'I've got nothing wrong. Ten years ago you played with me.'
There was no resistance in her as he eased her arms apart Indeed she could hardly get air into her lungs. Her lashes lifted and she focused helplessly on the mirror again, watched her wedding gown dip to reveal her bare pouting breasts. Shame and excitement fought for precedence inside her. No man had ever seen her like that before, but then that was not a truth she had ever wanted to boast about.
iTheos...spectacular,' Nik rasped, with every evidence of sincerity.
Momentarily scientific interest overcame her burning self-consciousness. She watched Nik curve his hands to the full straining mounds which she had always despised. However, no such inhibition afflicted Nik. His frank appreciation of her lush curves was unconcealed. His thumbs rubbed in a skilled caress over her engorged pink nipples.
'Nik...' she whimpered between clenched teeth, the current of fiery response shooting to the very heart of her quivering body to leave her boneless and weak.
/> 'Yes...Nik,7 he spelt out with curious emphasis.
With a sure hand he eased her gown from her hips and let it shimmy down into a pool round her feet. Her skin warmed as she saw herself fully revealed in the pale silk stockings, blue garter and bikini briefs which her mother had presented her with. No longer could she watch like an onlooker.
'Definitely worth waiting a decade for, yineka mou,' Nik pronounced with roughened satisfaction. He lifted her up into his arms and tasted her soft mouth with slow erotic sensuality before he brought her down on the bed. 'Now tell me you don't want me.'
And she couldn't, not with her lips still swollen from his, not with her whole body thrumming as if it had a life of its own, craving more of what he had already given her. 'I can't...' she muttered, shattered by the raw power of what she was feeling in every fibre of her being.