‘A few years older,’ she corrected. ‘Twenty—which to an impressionable sixteen-year-old meant the world.’ She shook her head with disbelief. ‘I was such an idiot.’
‘You were sixteen?’
‘And foolish.’
‘What happened?’
She expelled a soft sigh. ‘I slept with him and I thought it was the beginning of something amazing and special and incredible.’
‘But it wasn’t?’
She shook her head, her expression unknowingly haunted.
‘So what?’ His voice was impatient, but not with her. ‘He what? Broke up with you once you’d slept together?’
Alice swept her eyes shut, the awful, horrible fallout from that weekend something she tried to forget. ‘More or less.?
??
‘Meaning?’
‘Oh, he was a bastard,’ she groaned, blinking her gaze to Thanos’s. ‘He made sure all of his friends knew he’d been my first, that I was bad in bed, inexperienced.’ She shook her head. ‘I thought I loved him, and he... It was a pretty horrifying experience.’
‘Men like that are overcompensating for some personal deficiency.’ The words were snapped from his mouth, disapproval zinging around the room.
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘You are not bad in bed.’
It was so not what she’d expected him to say that Alice laughed, a soft sound, and when she looked at Thanos, she found him staring at her in a way that made her body tremble a little.
‘Anyway, it was an eternity ago. I’m definitely not the same girl I was then.’ She tilted her chin defiantly, remembering how true that was, the leaps and bounds she’d come on since then. ‘He taught me a lesson that I shouldn’t have needed to be taught, but it’s one I’ve never forgotten.’
‘And what lesson is that, Kyria Stathakis?’
Her lips pulled a little to the side. ‘Not to be such a gullible fool.’ The mood between them had shifted; there was an intensity between them and a vulnerability within her that she didn’t entirely like. She pulled her hand away from him, teasing it down his body once more, her eyes holding a silent challenge as they connected to his.
‘I wouldn’t have slept with you tonight if it weren’t for the fact we both know what the boundaries of this are.’
He didn’t move; didn’t speak.
‘I like that you’ve been honest with me. I like that we both have our reasons for knowing this will run its course and we’ll go our own way. I’ve learned not to trust anyone but, somehow, I do trust you, Thanos.’ Her hands curved around his arousal and a throaty breath pushed out of him, lifting his chest.
Thanos wasn’t sure he’d ever had anyone say those words to him. It did something completely foreign to his chest. ‘Why?’ The question was grated out of him, as his ability to think and process were lost in a fog of uncertainty.
‘Because you’re not making any promises.’ She flicked her gaze to his and then pushed up at the same time she pulled the sheet off his body. ‘You’ve been honest with me from the start, and the reason I know you’re telling me the truth is because nothing you’ve said has been designed to get me into bed.’
She straddled his legs and brought her face closer to his arousal, her eyes holding his. ‘I’m here because I want to be.’ It was the last thing she said before she curved her lips over the tip of his arousal, and Thanos lost any ability whatsoever to speak, think or worry.
* * *
As dawn began to crest over the ocean, spreading light and newness into the valley of vines, Thanos pushed out of bed, taking a moment to look back at a sleeping Alice before pulling on some briefs.
Her eyelids moved frantically—a sign of deep sleep and busy dreams—and he smiled a little, wondering if he was in her dreams.
But his smile shifted from his face as he moved from the bedroom back into the lounge area, his eyes falling first to the ottoman, his body hardening as he remembered the frantic, animalistic passion of their coming together, the feeling of absolute, sheer need driving him to her as though everything he was depended on that possession.
But Thanos was no stranger to sexual passion. He liked women. He liked being with women. He made no apologies for his appetite, nor did he need to. Alice was right—Thanos never lied in order to seduce a woman. In fact, he was always at great pains to be blindingly honest with any woman he was interested in.