Her heart was thumping so loudly she was afraid he would hear it and guess that she was a total p
ushover when he got that close to her. The familiar scent of him sent shivers down her spine and warmed the hollow in her tummy, leading to a shower of sharp spiky little longings in an infinitely more private place.
‘I was enjoying the dessert,’ she dared before his sensual mouth could connect with hers.
Eyes gleaming, Alexei threw back his a head and laughed with appreciation. ‘Is this your idea of playing it cool?’
‘Why would I act like that?’ she traded.
‘Maybe because you know how much I want you,’ Alexei husked, rubbing his cheek against the extended length of her throat as he bent her head back. ‘But it won’t work because your heart is racing and I can feel you trembling against me, mali mou.’
As his lean, muscular body shifted against her, she registered the forceful swell of his erection and the heat of her desire intensified. She turned her face under his and found his mouth hungrily for herself and didn’t begrudge the male satisfaction in the growling laugh that vibrated low in his throat. Suddenly all the seething emotion of the past weeks was welling up inside her with explosive effect and the glory of his mouth on hers set her alight.
Stepping back from her, Alexei closed a lean hand over hers and walked her out of the dining room. Her troubled thoughts warred against her intentions. Yet in spite of everything that had passed between them, Alexei had come home to her and he still wanted her. Wasn’t that some cause for celebration? Didn’t that prove that she had more of a hold on her bridegroom than she had dared to hope? But how could he simply ignore the fact that he believed she was trying to palm off some other man’s child on him? She just wanted him with her…but she wanted her son too. She also felt guilty that she had dressed up and dined in state while Nicky was being put to bed for the night by his great-aunt.
‘Shouldn’t we be talking about more serious stuff?’ she asked Alexei abruptly.
As if jolted by a sudden flash of lightning, Alexei swung round to rest silencing fingers against her soft mouth, preventing her from saying anything more. ‘No,’ he breathed harshly. ‘I don’t want to talk about any of it because if I have to stop and think, I would know that I shouldn’t be here with you.’
That blunt admission unnerved Billie and shook her to her very core. Generally, Alexei was decisive, disciplined, tough and immovable regardless of how difficult situations became. He had never got into the emotional aspect of events. But right now she felt rather as if she were trying to deal with a split personality, a stranger. He knew he shouldn’t be here with her? Yet here he was? It was as though he had built a wall between the revelations on their wedding night and the present, spelling out the fact that only his ability to blank out and suppress those revelations allowed him to be with her again now. She gazed up at him with wide green eyes full of dismay and, in a move that suggested that her vulnerable look disturbed him, Alexei lifted her up against him and crushed her berry-tinted lips beneath his with a hungry impatient fervour that put her troubled thoughts to flight.
Billie gasped as Alexei blazed a trail of kisses across her shoulder, tugging the straps down on her dress and burying his face in the warm valley between the full globes of her breasts as he urged her down on the bed. She kicked off her shoes while his fingers slid up her thigh to the narrow band of her thong. In a swift movement, he wrenched the tiny garment off and tossed it aside. Her breath caught in her throat, channelled in urgent gasps of helpless anticipation.
Alexei was standing over her shedding his clothes with a seething impatience that thrilled her. Lean strong face taut, he viewed her with scorching golden eyes. As he cast aside his shirt, he bent down and raised her up to pull her dress off her without unzipping it. She heard the rip of material, for it had been a neat fit. He flicked loose the catch on the balconette bra that had merely acted as an extra line of suspension and, with it gone, she was naked.
‘No, don’t you dare try to cover a centimetre of that beautiful bare flesh,’ Alexei censured huskily, lifting her up the bed to settle her in a pose that concealed nothing from his burning gaze. ‘This is what I wanted from the moment I saw you in the bath earlier. Within seconds I was hotter than hell for you, moraki mou.’
A high-voltage smile of extraordinary sexual power tilted his beautiful mouth and it was just as if he lit a fire inside her. In a flash Billie went from feeling hideously awkward in her unadorned skin to lying back in quivering readiness and acceptance. He wrenched off his silk boxers and came down to her. All rock-hard muscle from his magnificent torso to his flat stomach and long powerful thighs, he was hugely aroused. He brought her hand to the virile shaft rising from the thick dark curls at his groin.
Feeling the pound of the pulse at the heart of her and the moisture there, she closed her fingers round his hard male heat and watched his thick dark lashes sweep down with an uninhibited sensual pleasure that sent the blood pounding at an insane rate through her own veins. With a new boldness she drew him down to her and used her mouth to caress his straining masculinity.
Within the space of a minute he pulled back from her. ‘I can’t take too much of that,’ he confided, his dark deep accented drawl rough with erotic meaning. ‘I want to be inside you too badly.’
And he touched her then with infinite skill, his thumb teasing her swollen bud and making her release an abandoned little cry and shiver even as a lean finger probed the slick wetness of her lush opening. As her hips bucked in a movement as old as time he entered her all too willing body with a single driving thrust. Her spine arched and her teeth clenched on the extraordinary tide of sensation as his engorged length stretched her tight inner depths.
‘You feel like hot silk,’ Alexei ground out, rising over her while gliding into her tender flesh with strong, stirring strokes that fuelled her growing excitement to ever greater heights.
He wanted to make it last but her sheer abandonment to pleasure and the frantic urgency of her movements pushed him to the edge very quickly and created a chain reaction. As Alexei surged into her with ever greater power, it was too much for Billie and she soared into a convulsive orgasm, writhing and crying out with the bittersweet pain of release. While she was still struggling to surface from the incredible intensity of that climax, Alexei’s magnificent body shuddered over hers in the grip of the same overwhelming finale.
Afterwards, Billie felt emptied and adrift, totally shattered by the intensity of what she had just experienced. But this time, Alexei did not pull away from her, making her feel alone and uncertain at a most vulnerable time. Still trembling from the explosive force of his own release, he kept her in the circle of his strong arms and kissed her brow in a surprisingly gentle salutation.
‘Alexei…’ she whispered softly in acknowledgement, her body surrendering to her exhaustion, her eyes sliding closed.
‘You’re worth going to hell and back for,’ he murmured with growling carnal satisfaction. ‘Nobody has ever given me that much excitement, moraki mou.’
And Billie drifted off to sleep in his arms, happier than she had ever dreamed she might be after that awful nerve-racking two weeks apart from him. The sex was amazing, she was willing to agree, but that tender kiss and his relaxation with her in the aftermath meant a great deal more to her. She wondered if she would ever fully understand the man she loved. He was so complex, volatile and in every respect unpredictable. And on that frustrated acknowledgement she sank into the deepest sleep she had enjoyed in many weeks.
She awakened, befogged by drowsiness and bewildered, to the bright light of an island morning. Alexei, fully dressed, was standing over the bed.
‘Is there no end to your deceptions?’ he demanded of her in savage condemnation.
Astonished by that attack, Billie pushed herself up clumsily against the pillows, suddenly conscious of her nudity and holding the sheet to her breasts. Running trembling fingers through her wildly tousled red hair to rake it back off her face, she mumbled, ‘What are you talking about? What’s wrong?’
‘This…this is what’s w
rong!’ Alexei bit out rawly, flinging a newspaper down on the bed for her to look at. ‘You and Damon Marios holding hands on my private beach!’
Her face stiff with shock, Billie glanced down at the page and froze, her skin turning clammy, her throat closing over. It was not the best photo she had ever seen and it seemed to have been digitally enhanced for clarity, but it did show her and Damon on the beach, clearly engaged in intent conversation, her hand in his, her face turned up to his. She was dismayed to recognise that even though her dialogue with Damon had been entirely innocent of even flirtation the photo was misleading, as was the closeness of their bodies.