“I told you,” he said in that velvet and whiskey voice that thrilled her deep in her feminine core, in ways she did not dare admit to herself. “You need only tell me that you have reached your limits. You need only say the word.”
There was a moment then, shimmering and tense, when she wavered. When she thought in a brief burst of something darker than mere bluster that she could do it, that she could say the one small word that would end this. As she should. As she knew she should. She opened her mouth to say what she knew she ought to say, what she knew she must say if she was to survive this encounter with this tempting, impossible man.
“Nikos…” she breathed.
The fire in his dark gold eyes flared to a blaze, and his mouth moved into a hard, triumphant curve.
“That is not the word,” he said, satisfaction coloring his low, knowing tone.
But she still did not, could not, say it.
He reached over, and traced the shape of her cheek with one large, confident hand. His palm was too hot, his fingers too clever. Her skin was too sensitive, too raw. But, unaccountably, she felt herself sway toward his hand, not away from it.
“Tell me to stop,” he urged her, his eyes nearly black now with a passion she could not help but feel, humming through her like electricity, making her yearn for things she knew on some deep, primitive level would destroy her.
Giving in to an urge that was so intense it nearly felt like pain, Tristanne reached over and placed her palms against the wall of his chest. Heat exploded through her hands and ricocheted up her arms, searing a path that led directly to her swollen breasts, her aching sex. He hissed in a breath, then let it out in a sound that was too harsh to be a laugh.
“Tell me to stop,” he said again, a taunt, and then he pulled her toward him and fitted his mouth to hers.
The dark sorcery of his mouth, his taste, overwhelmed her. Tristanne forgot everything. He kissed her like they would both perish if he stopped, and she kissed him back as if she believed him. She tasted the warm, tanned skin of his strong neck, let her hands trace the magnificent male architecture of his ridged abdomen, so much heat and power, all of it like warm, hard rock beneath her hands.
His hands dove into her hair, anchoring her head in place so he could tease her lips with his, tasting her again and again, pausing only to whisper words in Greek she could not understand, hot and dark words that inflamed her, made her try to move closer to him, to press against his wicked body with her own.
She felt the room tilt and whirl around her, and realized only as her back met the softest suede, that he had picked her up and laid her down on the sofa. He stretched out above her.
Finally, she thought, as his body came up hard against hers. It was too much and it was not enough, and she could not stop touching him.
“Tell me,” he said roughly, as his hard chest crushed her breasts with a delicious pressure, as her hips cradled his maleness, hard and hot, as she gasped in delight and a kind of sensual terror. “Tell me, Tristanne.”
Some part of her objected, in some dim corner of her mind—how could he still have the presence of mind to taunt her when she was very nearly in pieces? And yet the same deep, feminine part of her that had warned her away from this man knew, now, that her power lay not in words, but in an age-old knowledge that seemed to flood into her as she stared up at his face, so dark and determined above her.
She did not speak. She merely moved her hips in a lazy circle, and had the instant satisfaction of making him groan and grow, if possible, harder against her. He muttered something incoherent, and took her mouth again, his own insistent, demanding.
She met his demands, gloried in them. His hands slicked down the sides of that scandalous dress, tracing the curves he had displayed so unapologetically for all of Florence to see. He moved from her mouth, tracing a searing path down to her breasts, tasting them through the material. Hot, wet heat. Tristanne arched against the delicate torture of his mouth, gasping, as a tremor snaked through her, lighting her up from her sex to the tips of her toes.
His dark eyes caught hers, then, as he reached between them, his movements sure, his gaze like some kind of heat lightning. He pulled the stretchy fabric up around her waist, and then released his own trousers. As if they had done this a thousand times before, as if she knew his moves as well as her own, she wrapped her legs around his hips.
Tristanne felt that mad fever break over her, making her flush with want, with heat, with hunger. She moved against him mindlessly, helplessly. He angled his hips, held her thigh in his strong, commanding grasp, and in one, sure stroke, sheathed himself deep inside her.
She might have screamed. She thought she did—she could hear the echo of it, the force of it, ricocheting through her, the pleasure almost too much, almost too great to bear.