The plump lips he’d stared at for hours imagining their feel and taste brushed against his in the whisper of a kiss.
For a moment Andreas did nothing but close his eyes and savour what might possibly be the most erotic moment of his life.
Her lips pressed a little more to his, still not fused, tentative but breathing him in, sweet yet sensuous, his loins, already charged, responding as his blood thickened and all his senses sprang to life.
Right at the moment he sensed her nerve failing her, he hooked an arm around her waist and jerked her to him. As he pulled her onto his lap she gave a tiny gasp and he took ruthless advantage of it, sweeping his tongue into her mouth and holding her tightly, primal lust surging through him. Her lips were softer than a pillow and moulded to his perfectly as he deepened the kiss, savouring her taste and the shape of her body pressed so compactly to his, the furnace heating his blood fired to a roar.
Her hands clasped at his skull, her fingers massaging into him, her mouth moving with his own as if they had fused into one entity.
She fitted perfectly into him, he thought dimly, sweeping a hand over her back and then round to stroke her stomach, which pulled in with a spasm at his touch, a moan so faint it could have been the breeze vibrating from her. He slid his hand up and rubbed his thumb on the underside of her breast, felt its softness through the fabric of her dress, but before he could touch any more she jolted and dragged her mouth from his.
Her fingers still clasping his skull, her breathing erratic, kiss-bruised lips parted, she gazed at him with confused heavy-lidded eyes before whipping her hands away and scrambling off his lap.
Looking anywhere but at him, she ran her hands through her hair and straightened her dress.
Andreas swallowed and took in air, the aching weight in his groin making it hard to think let alone speak. Only the heaviness of their breaths and the beats of his thundering heart cut through the stillness of the night.
When she looked at him again some semblance of composure had returned that would have fooled him if her voice didn’t sound so breathy when she said, ‘See? If I desired you I wouldn’t be able to walk away from that.’
Then she turned and walked away from him to the French doors, her head high, her back magnificently straight. Only the tiny missteps she took showed she was as affected by what they had just shared as he.
‘Next time, matia mou,’ he called after her, his own voice hoarse, ‘you will not be able to walk away.’
She didn’t look back. ‘There won’t be a next time.’
‘Do you want to put money on that?’
She didn’t answer.
A moment later she had disappeared into his house.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CARRIE LAY FULLY dressed and wide awake under the covers of the narrow bed, kicking herself for not finding another room to sleep in, one far away from Andreas. If she weren’t so afraid of bumping into him on the landing she would move to another room now. She didn’t need to stay in this one any more. He was hardly going to fire her.
She laughed into her pillow, a maniacal sound that she immediately smothered.
If she’d heard that noise from anyone else she would assume they were mad.
Was she mad? Had all the glorious sun that had shone on her these past two days infected her mind and driven her out of it?
It was as good an explanation as anything, she supposed, to justify her behaviour.
Twenty minutes after crawling under the bedsheets and she still couldn’t get her head around what had possessed her to play with fire like that.
She’d wanted to prove a point to him and wipe that smug grin off his face but it had gone too far. She had gone too far.
His touch…it had scorched her. She could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers and had to stop herself from rubbing her fingers over them. And she could still feel the contours of his body pressed against her. Her blood still felt fizzy, an ache in her loins she’d never known before.
Her brain burned just to remember it. It burned to remember the effort it had taken to walk away. They had been the hardest steps she’d ever taken, fighting her own yearning body.
Her first kiss.
She gritted her teeth and wished she were in a place where she could scream her frustration. She shouldn’t be reliving their kiss, she should be trying to think of ways to get out of marrying him.
Marriage! To him!
And he was deadly serious about it too.
Violet was his trump card. If it were only Carrie’s future at stake she would tell him to stuff it and take her chances. She’d been prepared to lose her job and her freedom before she’d embarked on investigating him, but that recording had changed everything. Andreas was too well known and her professional name too renown for that recording not to be dynamite to the tabloid press. Andreas would probably deliver a copy of it to them himself or upload it onto social media if she refused to go ahead with his plan, and then the whole world would hear him talk of how her sister had tried to seduce him and her affair with James and all those other awful things.