‘Let go of me...you’re flattening me!’ Leah slung back at him in fury.
‘Maybe you’ll get to like it.’ Nik shifted sinuously above her and meshed one hand into her tumbled hair. He stared down at her for a long, timeless moment. ‘Theos, I am so hungry for you, I ache,’ he muttered raggedly.
Leah’s entire body was an angry pillow of rejection. ‘Go find a bimbo, Nik,’ she urged shakily. ‘At least you won’t have to tell her lies.’
‘I’m not lying. How could I? A man’s body betrays his arousal.’ Sliding a lean thigh between hers, Nik moved against her, shamelessly introducing her to the hard bulge of his manhood. ‘No lie,’ he completed huskily.
Pink starred her cheeks even as an insidious heat flared between her thighs. ‘You’re disgusting.’
‘I want you.’ He buried his mouth hotly in a hollow just below her collarbone.
‘No!’ she whispered frantically, feeling that hot wire of sensation pull tight and reacting in panic.
He lifted his dark head, a blaze of desire in his hot gaze, and then he took her mouth with explosive passion. It was an act of possession, a stamp of ownership blatant in its intent to dominate. And she knew it, fought what he was making her feel with every fibre, but with every kiss, with every sweetly invasive thrust of his tongue, he taught her to want the next. Her hands rose, curved compulsively to the satin-smooth skin of his shoulders, holding him to her.
He rolled over, carrying her with him, and dispensed with her T-shirt by whipping it over her head. He uttered a savage groan as her unbound breasts rubbed against his hair-roughened chest and a split-second later she was lying flat again, his hands shaping the pouting mounds he had discovered.
She shut her eyes, gasping for breath, all reasoning power wrested from her. He found a distended pink nipple with his mouth and she dug her hips into the mattress, her back arching, a wildness she had never known tearing at her. Her heart was racing, her skin damp, every cell firing on red alert. He employed his tongue and his teeth in a grazing torment of a caress, cupping her breasts, sucking at the sensitive buds he had aroused. And she speared her fingers into the depths of his thick, silky hair and moaned with the intensity of the pleasure.
‘You are mine,’ Nik grated in a voice so tortured that she didn’t initially realise that he had spoken in English.
She wasn’t listening anyway. He was apart from her. She didn’t like it. She lifted her head and touched his sensual mouth with her lips and then, more daringly, with the tip of her tongue, unconsciously imitating what she had learnt from him. He shuddered and accepted the invitation with a raw passion that consumed her, his arms banding so tightly around her that she could barely breathe.
They rolled over again, welded together by an increasingly uncontrollable excitement. She heard something rip. It meant nothing to her. She was lost entirely in the heat and the scent and the feel of him. He felt so hot. His scent was an aphrodisiac that sent her senses spinning. Every tiny shift of his lean, muscular body against hers drove her wild, every caress an incitement to a hunger fast reaching fever pitch.
Her breasts had become incredibly sensitive and he played with the tender flesh with every atom of erotic expertise in his repertoire. His fingers flirted with the damp tangle of curls at the base of her taut stomach and she panted for oxygen and then moaned helplessly as his heated exploration roved to the very heart of her.
She couldn’t be still, couldn’t control her own limbs. The wild pulsebeat of desire had taken her over. Her hips jerked up in a rhythm she didn’t know but somehow found, her head thrown back, her slender throat extended. An intolerable ache was building up, making her sob out his name over and over again.
Nik said something in Greek and groaned against her reddened mouth like a man in torment. ‘I can’t wait.’
And then he was there where she most wanted him to be, pushing up her thighs with wildly impatient hands, sliding against the honeyed welcome he had prepared for himself. Her eyes flew wide, passion-glazed sapphire locking with burning jet. She tensed. She could feel him, hot and smooth and hard, suddenly threateningly male. She searched his taut features and saw such a look of vulnerability momentarily etched in those beautiful eyes that her heart lurched. And all of a sudden she wanted him so badly it hurt.
He entered her with a stifled groan, slowly, gently, and the pain she was braced to withstand was merely a fleeting stab of discomfort, quickly past and forgotten under the storm of fiery sensation which engulfed her. Instant meltdown. Every thrust lifted her higher, burning out everything but the feeling, submerging her in the hungry demand of her own need. He moved faster and she wrapped her arms round him, out of control, her heart pounding, her pulses racing, and then it happened, an explosion of white-hot heat flying up inside her, sending her out of her mind with its strength.
‘S’agapo...s’agapo.’ Nik drove into her violently and then shuddered with the force of his own release.
Blissfully pliant, still floating gloriously slowly back to earth, Leah snuggled into him as he slid onto his side, every quivering curve glued to him. She pressed her lips to a muscular brown shoulder, nostrils flaring at the musky damp scent of him. The light went out. Silence fell. Leah wandered over the edge of complete exhaustion into sleep, sprawled on top of him.
CHAPTER FIVE
NIK’S VOICE, talking Greek...but she was in bed. Her feathery lashes shot up, revealing startled sapphire-blue eyes. Her arrested attention fell on Nik. He had his back turned to her. He was standing at the window, one lean hand occupied by a mobile phone. Shock rolled over her in a debilitating wave. A Technicolor replay of the events of the night before sizzled through her brain, not a single X-rated second deleted.
And she couldn’t explain how it had happened. That was the most appalling discovery of all. One minute she had been screaming at him in fury, the next...? As she stiffened below the crumpled sheet, unfamiliar muscles complained and a faint ache intimately reminded her of the explosive passion which had flared up between them.
Hot colour burnished her cheeks. Had Nik not still been physically present, she would have believed it was all a dream...a nightmare, she amended with a shudder. She rubbed at her temples, vaguely conscious that her head was sore, her throat slightly raw.
Join the bimbo fraternity, she told herself with sudden fury. But join at the bottom of the class.
The average bimbo had a certain native cunning, knew where she was going and how. Leah had fallen at the first major hurdle. She had finally got up the courage to leave Nik, had felt good about that decision, indeed had felt empowered by it...and then he had brought her down on this bed and kissed her and inexplicably the balance of power had swung violently back to the enemy; for he was the enemy. Anyone capable of reducing her to this level was definitely the enemy. As she moved her head on the pillow, it swam.
Her tortured gaze rested on him, on the angle of his well-shaped dark head, the breadth of his shoulders beneath the fine cloth of his jacket, the jut of his narrow hips as he dug a lean hand into the pocket of his tailored trousers and splayed his long legs. And she was shattered by just how much she liked looking at him, how familiar every gesture was, every fluid change of stance. Pain traversed her tight features. She knew then how it had happened.
She had blocked out Nik’s attraction, blocked out the hunger, blocked out every thought of him. Self-preservation had taught her to do that. But all along that attraction had still been there, a sexual craving denied and buried and made all the more dangerous by that suppression. It was that same craving which had escaped and betrayed her in Nik’s arms. Given the opportunity, she had grabbed him...just as he had always said she would.
Hot moisture lashed the back of her eyelids but she wouldn’t let the tears fall. She really didn’t feel well but that was no good reason to give way to such weakness.
Nik turned and strolled across to the bed. He was too much of a predator not to smile, his sensual mouth curving with self-satisfaction as h
e looked down at her. He couldn’t even hide it. He settled down on the edge of the mattress, lustrous dark eyes tracking over her intently. ‘It’s a beautiful morning.’
She could hear the wind lashing the rain against the windows.
‘In Athens,’ he added softly, lifting a hand and skating a finger along the taut line of her lower lip. ‘And if you tell me you’re not coming— No, don’t you dare tell me that,’ he warned as her lips began to part. ‘Not after last night.’
‘That was just sex,’ Leah bit out, a heady flush staining her skin.
His smile merely grew in brilliance as he lowered his dark head. ‘Never just sex,’ he reproved huskily. ‘Fabulous, wonderful, incredible sex. If the jet wasn’t on stand-by, I’d still be in bed.’
Her teeth gritted. ‘Yesterday, I left you—’
‘Theos mou! And today we are closer than we have ever been. Life is so unpredictable,’ Nik pointed out with immovable self-assurance. ‘Think of this as the first day of our marriage.’
‘That is the most nauseating suggestion I’ve ever heard!’ Leah snapped, goaded beyond bearing. ‘I don’t want to go to Athens.’
Nik slid upright. ‘But you will. My family are all gathering to meet you at my mother’s home. I don’t care if I have to drag you kicking and screaming all the way to the airport,’ he delivered with sudden harshness, his strong jawline clenching. ‘To be blunt, agape mou, you made your decision last night!’
‘You did it deliberately!’ Leah gasped.
‘Yes.’ The unvarnished affirmative was like a slap in the face. ‘Now why don’t you get dressed? I instructed your maid to pack for you. I assume that what you have here wasn’t planned with Greece in mind.’