/> That was the point where her sense of humiliation plumbed new depths because the moment she felt his tongue make a salacious lick of her palm she was lost again. Her eyes closed and her breathing ruptured as that lick sent its sensual message down her arm and through her body, arrowing directly at the very core of her.
‘I can delay my departure for an hour or two, if you want me to …’ he offered.
That stung a different part of her entirely. Her eyes opened, angry fire burning alongside the passion. ‘Only an hour or two?’ she said scathingly. ‘Well, that just about puts your attitude to sex in a nutshell, doesn’t it? One quick fix then you’re off again before the sheets get warm!’
He should have been angry—she’d said it all to make him so angry that he would walk out! But he completely disconcerted her by arrogantly taking up the challenge.
‘You want more than that? A whole night of wild passion, maybe?’
‘You aren’t capable of spending a whole night in the same bed as me!’ she said scornfully.
His eyes darkened. Mia felt real alarm take a stinging dive down the length of her spine. ‘That lousy opinion you have of me really does need amending,’ he said curtly. Suddenly he was standing up, determined fingers already working on the knot to his robe.
‘W-what are you doing?’ she choked. ‘No, Alex …’ she protested huskily, not even trying to pretend that she didn’t know exactly why he was stripping himself.
It didn’t stop him. Her heart began to race, her tongue cleaving itself to the roof of her dry mouth as she watched in a paralysed mix of greedy fascination and mind-numbing horror that magnificent naked frame of his appear in front of her.
The air left her lungs on a short, sharp gasp at the unashamed power of his pulsing arousal. Her eyes moved upwards to clash with the fierce flame in his as he bent to lift the edge of the sheet.
At last she found the motivation to attempt an escape, slithering like a snake to the other side of the bed. His arm caught her before she could get away. It drew her back across the smooth white linen, then turned her so she was facing him.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she reminded him shakily, as if that should be enough to stop him.
It wasn’t. His arm slid beneath her shoulders then angled downwards across her spine so his hand could arch her slender hips towards him. The firm roundness of her stomach was pressed into the concaved wall of his taut stomach. He sighed a little unsteadily, his darkened eyes closing as if this first physical contact he was having with their unborn child was moving him deeply.
Enthralled by his totally unexpected reaction, Mia released a soft gasp. He heard it—felt the warm rush of air brush across his face—and opened eyes which had gone pitch black and seemed to want to draw her deep inside them.
Which is exactly what he did do. He didn’t speak—he didn’t need to. That expression had said it all for him. It was need. It was desire. It was hunger too long-standing for him to fight it any longer.
The last conscious thought she had before he completely took her over was that he’d been right. She can’t resist him, not when he looked at her like that, anyway.
Her eyes began to close, her soft mouth parting as it went in blind search of his. They fused from mouth to breast to hip. It was that easy to give in to it in the end.
For the next few hours they became lost in each other, the world outside with all its complications shut right out.
‘Why?’ Mia asked a long time later when they were lying in a heated tangle of sensually exhausted limbs. ‘When you rejected me the first night we came here.’
‘I promised you I would not touch you again once you were pregnant,’ he replied.
‘You made that promise to yourself, Alex,’ Mia corrected him quietly. ‘I never asked you for it.’
He was silent for a moment, then gave a small sigh. ‘Well, it is now a broken promise,’ he announced, ‘and one I have no intention of reinstating.’
Then he kissed her again, slowly, languidly, drawing her back down into that deep, dark well of pleasure from where she eventually drifted into a sated sleep, her arms still holding him and his still wrapped around her. It felt wonderful—so different from anything they had shared before that it was like a statement of future intent.
Yet when she awoke the next morning he was gone—as usual.
Which meant—what? she wondered grimly. A return to the status quo, with the sex thrown back in to spice it all up a bit?
CHAPTER NINE
SUZANNA was discharged from hospital three days later, and the time that followed went by much too quickly. Time that turned out to be a lot pleasanter than Mia had expected it to be, mainly because Leon’s manner towards her had softened remarkably—though forced to do so, she suspected, by a child who was so very eager to please that even Leon Doumas didn’t seem to have the heart to be anything but pleasant around Suzanna.
And that meant he had to include Mia.
Everywhere the little girl went, her fluffy rabbit, her pens and paper and her computer game went with her. Every night she insisted Mia read a story from her set of books. When in their company, her wistful green eyes followed Leon and Carol around like a love-starved puppy, eagerly waiting to be noticed. When not in their company she talked about them constantly, starry-eyed and happy, so pathetically grateful to the couple for allowing her to come and stay with them that sometimes it brought tears to Mia’s eyes to witness it.
With the resilience of childhood she recovered quickly from her operation, and with the vulnerability of childhood she worried constantly about the moment when she would have to go back to school because she knew that was also the time when Mia would be going back to Greece.