Greek Tycoon, Inexperienced Mistress

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Lindy accepted a couple of snacks and nibbled at them without much appetite while Atreus talked about the meetings he already had lined up for the morning. Even the sound of his voice set up a responsive vibration in her backbone. When she met his eyes she felt as if the ground had vanished and she was in mid-air, in the act of falling from a great height. It was terrifying and exhilarating and, because such excessive sensations were previously unknown to her, she decided that feeling that way around him was wrong and dangerous.

Indeed, as soon as an opportunity offered itself Lindy rose to her feet and smoothed damp palms down over her skirt. ‘I’m very tired. I think I’ll turn in now. Thanks for supper…and the shower was very welcome,’ she added with a warm smile.

And just like that she was gone.

Atreus studied the closed door of her bedroom in amazement and wondered when he had last run into a brick wall put up by a woman flatly refusing to acknowledge or respond to his signals. Never. He was torn between amusement and frustration.

Lindy leant briefly up against the back of the door and tried to be proud of her self-restraint. She had resisted him, the most beautiful sexually compelling male she had ever met. She was still stunned that he had found her attractive. Or had it simply been a matter of her being the only woman available for a little dalliance after a stressful day? Was that her putting herself down again? Whatever, she had no doubt that he had had every intention of their ending what remained of the night in the same bed.

That would have been a very foolish move on her part, she told herself ruefully. The idea of a one-night stand with a man she hardly knew filled her with distaste. On the other hand, a little voice she didn’t recognise murmured inside her head, he might well have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Or was that wishful thinking? She was ashamed of the way her mind was working. She had never planned to be a virgin at her age; it was just something that had happened when a serious relationship failed to transpire. Atreus was pretty much the first man to seriously attract her since those first heady days in Ben’s radius. Of course she was curious about sex, but that was not an excuse to conduct an experiment. If she had been embarrassed when he’d seen her naked in the river, how would she feel meeting him in future if she had shared a bed with him?

With a shudder of reaction at that mortifying thought, Lindy embraced her cautious, sensible self and climbed into bed naked, enjoying the cool feel of the sheets against her bare skin. She had never been so tired in her life, but she still felt very jumpy and found it hard to relax—even though her limbs felt like lead weights on the comfortable mattress. She set her mobile phone alarm to rouse her at eight and mentally counted sheep. Within minutes she was sliding into a deep sleep. Her dreams, however, were very far from being soothing. Too many disturbing memories had been unleashed by the fire, and all her rigorous attempts to suppress those upsetting images while she was still awake had failed to lay them to rest.

‘Lindy…wake up!’ She fought through the barriers of sleep and realised that her shoulder was being shaken.

She sat up with a start, her eyes flying open not on the scary scene which had been unfolding behind her lowered eyelids but on a lamplit and momentarily unfamiliar room. Bewildered, and very distressed by what she had recalled, she only then processed the reality that she was shaking and sobbing.

‘You were dreaming. You’re awake now,’ Atreus asserted, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Bare-chested, he had clearly only paused to pull on his jeans before coming in.

As Atreus entered her field of vision Lindy belatedly acknowledged his presence and stiffened in alarm. ‘Did I wake you up?’

‘You were screaming at the top of your voice. That must have been some bad dream,’ Atreus responded, his attention roaming to the ripe swell of her full breasts which were only just covered by the sheet and resolutely shifting upward again.

A violent shudder rippled through Lindy. ‘Because it wasn’t a dream,’ she shared, on the back of another heaving sob. ‘When I was f-four years old, I was in a house fire.’

Atreus tensed, frowning while he watched the tears drip off her chin and listening to her sniff. She was really crying, and not in a cute way either, for her nose had turned pink and her eyelids were swollen. But there was something extraordinarily touching about her genuine distress, and he closed an arm round her in an abrupt and almost clumsy movement.

It was one of those very rare occasions in life when Atreus felt out of his depth. Being supportive didn’t come naturally to him. He had grown up in a family famed for its reserve and formality. He had been taught to avoid emotion like the plague and he had no close ties with his surviving relatives. He had never had a serious relationship with a woman, and had always walked away when an affair threatened to become complicated.

The warmth of his arm was comforting. Lindy struggled to control the sobs and the tempest of emotion still rising inside her. ‘Afterwards, my mum told me that my dad must’ve fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand and the sofa caught fire. He’d been drinking—my mum was in hospital. I woke up and there was smoke coming under the door and a funny smell,’ she related shakily.

Atreus swore half under his breath in Greek. ‘And yet you went into a burning house to save a cat tonight?’ he breathed, in wrathful incredulity.

Lindy’s mind was still firmly lodged in past events. ‘I tried to go downstairs but I could see something was in flames at the foot. I was terrified, so I started screaming for Dad.’ Her voice cut off, and she twisted and buried her face in the warm living flesh of Atreus’s bronzed shoulder. ‘For a moment I saw him, but until tonight I didn’t remember that I had actually seen him. He was trying to come to me but the fire got him!’ she sobbed brokenly.

Atreus was appalled. A dark frown stamping his features, he wrapped his other arm round her shuddering body and held her close. He was thinking about the selfless way she had rushed to the fire at Chantry House and helped out in every way she could. Not by a word or even a gesture had she hinted at what that intervention must have cost her emotionally. ‘You’re a very brave woman, mali mou.’

‘I’m just ordinary.’ Lindy snatched in a sustaining breath and choked back another sob, fighting with all her might to get a grip on her flailing emotions. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying now about something that happened so long ago.’‘

‘The fire at Chantry last night brought it all to the surface again. How did you escape when you were a child?’

‘I believe a fireman rescued me, but I don’t remember it. I was incredibly lucky to survive.’ Her voice petered out in shock as she finally registered that the sheet between them had slipped. Her bare breasts were crushed against his hair-roughened masculine torso. ‘I’m so sorry I woke you up.’

‘You didn’t. I couldn’t sleep,’ Atreus admitted, long lean fingers lacing into the tousled tumble of her dark hair to turn her face up.

Smouldering dark golden-brown eyes assailed hers, and then he brought his handsome mouth down and captured her lips with a piercingly sweet eroticism that cut through her defences like a knife. Breathing in little fractured bursts, Lindy drowned in those hungry, drugging kisses, her body quickening and heating in response. There was a frantic driving edge to every sensation: the stingingly tight sensitivity of her nipples, the tugging pull of dissatisfaction at the heart of her.

Atreus closed his hands round the creamy magnificence of her jutting breasts and moulded them with a husky masculine sound of satisfaction. He used his thumbs to chafe the quivering pink tips until, in pursuit of closer contact, he pressed her back against the pillows and put his mouth to her breast instead.

A gasp was dragged from Lindy, who was reeling in sensual shock from the impact of his lovemaking. The tug of his lips and his teeth, and the brush of his tongue on her tormentingly sensitive nipples, made her squirm while desire flared ever higher and stronger inside her. That she had to struggle even to think straight, however, scared her.

‘We hardly know each other!’ she protested.

‘This is the very best way to get to know me, glikia mou,’ Atreus intoned with conviction

‘But I didn’t want to get to know you!’ Lindy objected, guiltily studying the clinging fingers she had knotted into the springy depths of his black hair.

‘You want me and I want you. Why should that be a problem?’

‘Because it is…I don’t do stuff like this.’

‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Atreus declared with single-minded purpose.

‘You’re not my type,’ she told him in desperation.

‘Why didn’t you say so sooner?’ Atreus levered back from her to gaze down at her with shimmering golden eyes full of enquiry.

Lindy crossed concealing arms over her breasts.

‘I love looking at you,’Atreus confided, stroking an appreciative hand down to the point where her surprisingly small waist segued into the violin curve of her hip. ‘You have the most spectacular shape.’

The intensity of his appraisal convinced her of his sincere approbation and lessened her discomfiture. Without being aware of any prompting to do so, Lindy slowly, shyly parted her arms again, because she was discovering that she really loved the idea of him looking at her and admiring her. Not a single compliment on that score had ever come Lindy’s way. Until that moment her voluptuous curves had been a physical flaw and an embarrassment which she hid to the best of her ability. But, transfixed by the glow of bold appreciation in Atreus’s gaze, she felt like a goddess come to earth to mesmerise mortal man.

‘You looked at the riverbank,’ Lindy accused him.

‘Ise omorfi…you are beautiful…of course I did. The glory of you took my breath away, mali mou.’

He had barely finished speaking before Lindy stretched up and sought his wide, sensual mouth for herself again. She savoured the taste of him like a precious wine, parting her lips eagerly for the erotic plunge of his tongue while she quivered at the clenching tightness of response low in her pelvis. He had ignited a hunger in her that she could not resist.

‘Is this a yes?’

‘Yes…’Lindy whispered, feeling madly daring and sexy for the first time in her life while she defied the voice of restraint and reproach striving to be heard in the back of her head.

The pressure of his mouth on hers was an enticement of no mean order. Her head fell back against the pillows, her neck extending in a soundless sigh as he touched her where she had never been touched before. Little tremors of fierce response assailed her while he teased the honeyed folds of flesh between her thighs. The pleasure was exquisite, but as her excitement grew the pleasure came closer to sensual torture. The more he touched her, the more she wanted, and the less she wanted to wait. He suckled the distended peaks of her breasts and her spine arched, and she cried out as he probed the narrow passage at the swollen heart of her.

She was dimly aware of him removing his jeans and a moment of panic claimed her. ‘Don’t get me pregnant…’ she warned him. ‘I’m not using anything.’

‘That’s not a risk I would ever take,’Atreus imparted, donning protection and hauling her back to him with impatient hands. ‘I want you so much it hurts.’

‘Will it hurt?’ Lindy pressed awkwardly.

A look of bemusement clouded his smouldering gaze. ‘Why should it hurt?’

‘I haven’t done this before…I just wondered.’

Atreus studied her with frowning intensity. ‘I will be the first?’

Her body tingling, her face burning, Lindy nodded.