She should be like a marble Minoan statue. Unresponsive. Cold. But his touch turned her molten.
Send her to hell, but she rubbed against his arousal. He hissed in her ear, dropping his hand to her hip and gripping it tightly. She could feel his racing heart beating against her back.
Only the loud sound of applause cut through the sensuous fog she’d fallen into.
The show had finished.
The crowd was dispersing.
Blinking hard, aware of Greta searching for her, Amy finally managed to make her body obey, grabbed Helios’s hand and pushed it away.
She took a step to distance herself from the security of his hold and drank the last of her mojito.
‘Come back with me,’ he said. For once, there was no arrogance in his voice.
She kept her eyes from his, not wanting him to see the longing she knew would be written all over her face. ‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’
Greta had spotted them and was heading for them, or rather weaving unsteadily towards them.
‘Come back with me,’ he repeated.
‘No.’ She propelled herself down the steps, desperate to be away from him before her vocal cords said the yes they so yearned to speak.
He followed her, grabbing her hand when she reached the bottom step and spinning her around.
She waited breathlessly for him to say something, but all he did was stare at her as if he was drinking her in, his thumb brushing little swirls over the inside of her wrist. The message he was sending didn’t need words.
Tugging out of his hold, she hurried away before she could respond to his silent request.
* * *
Helios pressed a hand to his forehead and growled to his empty bedroom. He’d been back for over an hour and not even his two Long Island iced teas, which had virtually every spirit imaginable in them, had numbed his brain enough to allow him to sleep.
His body still carried remnants of the arousal that had been unleashed by holding Amy in his arms. One touch was all it had taken. One touch and he’d been fit to burst.
If he’d been one of his ancestors from four hundred years ago he would have marched down the passageway, broken down her door and demanded she give herself to him. As he was a prince of these lands she wouldn’t have been allowed to refuse him. She would have had to submit to his will.
But good Queen Athena, Agon’s reigning monarch from 1671, had been at the forefront of the abolition of the law which had allowed women to be little more than chattels for the royal family’s pleasure.
And even if he could he wouldn’t force Amy into his bed. If she came back to him he wanted it to be under her own free will.
He knew she’d returned to the palace. After the fire show she’d disappeared into the throng, and then the last he’d seen of her had been when she’d climbed into one of the waiting palace cars with some of the other live-in staff.
Why was she doing this to him? To them? She was as crazy for him as he was for her, and he struggled to understand why she was resisting so hard.
He knew that she wanted to punish him because he had to marry someone else—if he were in her shoes he would probably feel the same way. The mere idea of her with another man was enough to make his blood pressure rise to the point where his veins might explode.
As ashamed as he was to have done so, he’d got his security team to find out who she’d dined with on Saturday night. Leander Soukis, a twenty-two-year-old layabout from a small village on the outskirts of Resina. How Amy had met this man was a mystery. And there was something about their meeting that ground at him.
Never mind that Leander was five years younger than Amy, when Helios distinctly remembered her saying she couldn’t relate to younger men, he was also a slight, skinny thing, with a bad reputation. He came from a wealthy family, but that counted for nothing—Leander had been kicked out of three schools and had never held a job for longer than a week. Indeed, he was an ideal candidate for his brother Talos’s boxing gym, which he’d opened in order to help disaffected youths, teaching them to channel their anger and giving them a leg up in life.
Why had she gone on a date with him of all people? Had it been her way of proving to Helios that she was serious about their relationship being over? Maybe he should have accepted her resignation rather than let his pride and ego force her into staying. If she was gone from Agon he wouldn’t be lying in his bed with a body aching from unfulfilled desire.
But he knew such thoughts were pointless. Amy didn’t need to be in his sight to be on his mind. She was there constantly.
And he would bet the palace that right at that moment she was lying in her bed thinking of him.
A soft ping from the security pad on his wall broke through his thoughts.