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‘Enough, Natasha,’ he censured wearily. ‘I did not come out of the womb a week ago so let’s leave the play-acting behind us from now on.’
‘I’m not play-acting!’ Her head shot up on the force of her insistence. All she saw was the flashing glint of his impatience as he reached out and pulled her towards him. Her own arms unfolded so she could use her hands to push him away again, but by then his mouth was on hers, hot, hard and angrily determined. Her fists flailing uselessly, he drew her into his arms and once again she was feeling the full powerful length of him against her body. Without even knowing it happened she went from fighting to clinging to his shoulders as her parted mouth absorbed the full passionate onslaught of his kiss.
There was no in-between, no pause to decide whether or not she wanted to give in to him, it just happened, making an absolute mockery of her agitation and her protests because Leo was right, and she did want him—badly.
This badly, Natasha extended helplessly as he deepened the kiss with that oh-so-clever stroke of his tongue, and she felt her body responding by stretching and arching in sensuous invitation up against the hardening heat of his.
And she knew she was lost even before he put his hands to her hips and tugged her into even closer contact with what was happening to him. When he suddenly pulled his head back, she released a protesting whimper—it shocked even Natasha at the depth of throaty protest it contained.
He said something terse, his eyes so incredibly dark now they held her hypnotised. ‘You want me,’ he rasped softly. ‘Stop playing games with me.’
Before she could answer or even try to form an answer, he was claiming her mouth again and deepening the whole wildly hot episode with a kiss that sealed his declaration like a brand burned into her skin. Her arms clung and he held her tightly against him—nothing, she realised dizzily, was now going to stop this.
And she didn’t want it to stop. She wanted to lose herself in his power and his fierce sensuality and the heat of the body she was now touching with greedily restless fingers. She felt the thumping pound of his heartbeat and each pleasurable flinch of his taut muscles as her fingers ran over them. His shirt was in her way—he knew it was in her way and, with a growl of frustration, he stepped back from her, caught hold of her hand and led her back inside.
The bed stood out like a glaring statement of intent. He stopped beside it, then turned to look at her, catching her uncertain blue stare and leaning in to kiss it away before stepping back again. If there was a chink of sanity left to be had out of this second break in contact, it was lost again by a man blessed with all the right moves to keep a woman mesmerised by him.
He began removing his shirt, his fingers slowly working buttons free to reveal, inch by tantalising inch, his long, bronzed torso with his black haze of body hair and beautifully formed, rippling muscles, which Natasha’s concentration became solely fixed on. She had never been so absorbed by anything. Sexual tension stung in the air, quickening her frail breathing as he began to pull the shirt free from the waistband of his trousers. When the shirt came off altogether, she felt bathed in the heady thrill of his clean male scent. He was so intensely masculine, so magnificently built—she just couldn’t hold back from reaching out to place her hands on him.
And he let her. He let her explore him as if she was on some magical mystery journey into the unknown, his arms, the glossy skin covering his shoulders, the springy black hair covering his chest. As her hands drifted over him, her tongue snaked out to taste her upper lip, but she knew that really it wanted to taste him.
Leo reached up and gently popped the top button of her jacket and she gasped as if it was some major development, her eyes flicking up to catch his wry smile sent to remind her that this undressing part was a two-way thing. He leant in to kiss her parted lips as he popped the next button, and the whole battle they’d been waging with her jacket took on a power of its own as she just stood there and let him pop buttons between slow, deep, sensuous kisses, until there were no buttons left to pop.
He discarded her jacket in the same way he had discarded it once already that day, without letting up on his slow seduction by making her shiver as he trailed his fingers up her bare arms and over her shoulders, then down the full length of her back, making her arch towards him, making her whisper out a sigh of pleasure, making her eyes drift shut in response. Then he just peeled her stretchy white top up her body and right over her head. Cool air hit her skin and the shock of it made her open her eyes again. He was looking down at her breasts cupped in plain white satin, the fullness of their creamy slopes pushing against the bra’s balcony edge. When the bra clasp sprang open and he trailed that flimsy garment away, her hands leapt up to cover her bared breasts. Leo caught her wrists and pulled them away again, his ebony eyelashes low over the intense glow in his eyes now as he watched her nipples form into pink, tight, tingling peaks.
Nothing prepared her for the shot of pleasure she experienced when he drew her against him and her breasts met with his hair-roughened chest.
No turning back now, Natasha told herself hazily as the wriggle of doubts faded away to let in the rich, drugging beauty of being deeply kissed. She felt her skirt give, felt it slither on its smooth satin lining down her legs to pool at her feet. Her bra was gone. The thong was nothing. The fine denier stocking clung to her slender white thighs. Her hair came loose next, unfurling down her naked back like an unbelievably sexy caress.
Leo had all but unwrapped her and she’d never felt so exquisitely aware of herself as a desirable woman. When he drew back from her, she reached for him to pull his mouth back to hers. He murmured something—a soft curse, she suspected—then picked her up and placed her down on the bed. Natasha held on to him by linking her hands around his neck to make sure that the kiss did not break. She wanted him—all of him.
‘Greedy,’ he murmured softly against her mouth as he stretched out beside her, and she was! Greedy and hungry and caught in the sexual spell he’d been weaving around her for most of the day.
Then one of his hands cupped the fullness of her breast and her breath stalled in her throat as he left her mouth to capture the tightly presented peak. Sensation made her writhe as he sucked gently, her fingers clawing into the thick silk of his hair with the intention of pulling him away—only it didn’t happen because his teeth lightly grazed her, and soon she was groaning and clinging as the smooth, sharp feel of his tongue and his teeth and his measured suck drew pleasure on the edge of tight, stinging pain downward until it centred between her thighs.
Maybe he knew, maybe she groaned again, but his mouth was suddenly hot and urgently covering hers. And she could feel the hunger in him, the urgent intent of his desire demanding the same from her and getting it when he kissed her so deeply she felt immersed in its power.
Then he was leaving her, snaking upright and trailing the thong away as he did so. Eyes hooded again, dark features severe now, he removed her stockings, then straightened up to unzip his trousers and heel off his shoes while running his eyes over her possessively.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he murmured huskily. ‘Tell me you want me.’
There was no denying it when she couldn’t take her eyes off him, no pretending that she was a victim here when her body responded wildly to the sight of his naked power.
‘I want you,’ she whispered.
It was Natasha who reached for him when he came down beside her again. It was she that turned to press the full length of her eager body into his.
Then he was taking control again, pushing her gently onto her back and rolling half across her. What came next was a lesson in slow seduction. He laid hot, delicate kisses across her mouth, touched her with gentle fingers, caressed her breasts and her slender ribcage, stroking feather-light fingertips over her skin to the indentation of her waist and across the rounded curves of her hips. It was an exploration of the most intense, stimulating agony; her flesh came alive as she moved and breathed and arched to his bidding. When he finally let his hand probe the warm, moist centre between her thighs, she was lost, writhing like a demented thing, clinging to his head and begging for his kiss. And he was hot, he was tense, he was clever with those deft fingers. The new shock sensation of what he was doing to her dropped her like a stone into a whirlpool of hot, rushing uproar.
‘Leo,’ she groaned out.
Saying his name was like giving him permission to turn up the heat. He appeared above her, big and dark—fierce with burning eyes and sexual tension striking across his lean cheeks. He recaptured her mouth with a burning urgency, shuddering when her fingers clawed into his nape. And still, he kept up the unremitting caresses with his fingers, driving her on while each desperate breath she managed to take made the roughness of his chest rasp torturously against the tight, stinging tips of her breasts.
She could feel the powerful nudge of his erection against her. Her tongue quivered with knowledge against his. A flimsy, rippling spasm was trying to catch hold of her and she whimpered because she couldn’t quite seize it.
Leo muttered something thick in his throat, then rose above her like some mighty warrior, so powerfully, darkly, passionately Greek that if she had not felt the pounding thunder of his heartbeat when she sent her hands sliding up the wall of his chest, Natasha could have convinced herself that he just wasn’t real.
He eased between her parted thighs with the firm, nude tautness of his narrow hips and the rounded tip of his desire made that first probing push against her flesh. Feeling him there, understanding what was coming and so naïvely eager to receive it, Natasha threw her head back onto the bed, ready, wanting this so very badly she was breathless, riddled by needs so new to her that they held her on the very edge of screaming-pitch.
So the sudden, fierce thrust of his invasion followed by a sharp, burning pain that ripped through her body had her clenching her muscles on a cry of protest.
Leo froze. Her eyes shot to his face. She found herself staring into passion-soaked, burning brown eyes turned black with shock. ‘You were a virgin. You—’
Natasha closed her eyes and refused to say anything, while his deriding denial that this would be her first time replayed its cruel taunt across her tense body, and the muscles inside her that were already contracting around him.
‘Natasha—’
‘No!’ she cried out. ‘Don’t talk about it!’
He seemed shocked by her agonised outburst. ‘But you—’
‘Please get off me,’ she squeezed out in desperation and pushed at his shoulders with her tightly clenched fists. ‘You’re hurting me.’
‘Because you are new to this…’ His voice had roughened, the hand he used to gently push her hair away from her face trembling against her hot skin.
But he made no attempt to withdraw from her, his big shoulders bunched and glossed with a fine layer of perspiration, forearms braced on either side of her, and his face was so grave now Natasha knew what was coming before he said it.
‘I’m sorry, agape mou…’
‘Just get off!’ She didn’t want his apology. Balling her hands into fists, she pushed at his shoulders, writhing beneath him in an effort to get free, only to flatten out again on a shivering quiver of shock when her inner muscles leapt on his intrusion with an excited clamour that made her eyes widen.
Reading her expression with an ease that pushed a hot flush through her body, ‘You are not hurting any more,’ he husked out, and lowered his head to adorn her face with soft, light, coaxing kisses—her eyes, her nose, her temples, her delicate ear lobes—that made her quiver and squirm and in the end dig fingers into his bunched shoulders and send her mouth on a restless search for his.
‘Oh, kiss me properly!’ she ended up begging.
Her helpless plea was all it took to tip a carefully contained, sexually aroused man over the edge. On a very explicit curse, he moulded her mouth to his. A second later and Natasha was lost—flung into a strange new world filled with sensation, piling in on top of sensation, unaware that the whole wild beauty of it was being carefully built upon by a master lover until she felt the first rippling spasm wash through her. She knew that he felt it, too, because he whispered something hot against her cheek, slid his powerful arms beneath her so he could hold her close, then angled his mouth to hers and began to thrust really deep, increasing the pace while maintaining a ferocious grip on his own thundering needs.
The grinding drag of fierce pleasure began to flow through her body. Natasha whimpered helplessly against his mouth. Knotting his fingers into her hair, he muttered tensely, ‘Let go, agape mou.’
And like a fledgling bird being encouraged to fly, Natasha just opened her sensory wings and dropped off the edge of the world into an acutely bright, scintillating dive straight into the frenzied path of an emotional storm. A moment later she felt him shudder as he made the same mind-shredding leap, while urging her on and on until two became one in a wildly delirious, spiralling spin.
It was as if afterwards didn’t exist for Natasha; pure shock dropped her like a rock through a deep, dark hole into an exhausted sleep.
Maybe she did it because she did not want to face what she’d done, Leo mused sombrely as he sat sprawled in a chair by the bed, watching her—watching this woman he’d just bedded like some raving sex maniac while giving himself every excuse he could come up with to help him to justify his behavior.
A virgin.
His conscience gave him a stark, piercing pinch.
And the guilty truth of it was, he could still feel the sense of stinging, hot pleasurable pressure he’d experienced when the barrier gave. A muscle low down in his abdomen gave a tug in direct response to the memory and he lifted the glass of whisky he held and grimly took a large sip.
The prim persona had been no lie.
She even slept the sleep of an innocent, he observed as he ran his eyes over her. No hint of sensual abandon in the modest curve of her body outlined against the white sheet.
Another slug at the whisky and he was studying her face next. Perfect, beautiful, softened by slumber and washed pale by the strain of the day she’d been put through when she should look…
He took another pull of the whisky, and as he lifted the glass to his mouth, her eyelids fluttered upwards and her sleep-darkened blue eyes looked directly at him.
The nagging tug on his loins became a pulsing burn that made him feel like a sinner.
He lowered the glass, and half hiding his eyes, watched her catch her breath, then freeze for a second before he said sombrely, ‘We will get married.’
Natasha almost jolted right out of her skin. ‘Are you mad?’ she gasped, pulling the covering sheet tightly up against her chin. ‘We have a deal—’
‘You were a virgin.’
As she dragged herself into a sitting position her hair tumbled forwards in a shining, loose tangle of waves around her face and she pushed it out of her way impatiently. ‘What the heck difference should that make to anything?’
‘It means everything,’ Leo insisted. ‘Therefore we will be married as soon as I can arrange it. I am honour-bound to offer you this.’
‘Stuff your honour.’ Heaving in a deep breath, Natasha climbed out of the bed on the other side from where he was sitting, trailing the sheet around her as she went. ‘Having just escaped one sleazy marriage by the skin of my teeth, I am not going to fall into another one!’
‘It will not be a sleazy marriage.’
‘Everything about you and your terrible family is sleazy!’ she turned on him angrily. ‘You’re all so obsessed with the value of money, you’ve lost touch with what’s really valuable in life! Well, I haven’t.’ Tossing her chin up, eyes like blue glass on fire with contempt, she drew the sheet around her. ‘We made a deal in which I give you sex for six weeks until I can give you back your precious money. Show a bit of your so-called honour by keeping to that deal!’
With that she turned and strode off to the bathroom, needing to escape—needing some respite from Leo Christakis and his long, sexy body stretched out in that chair by the bed. So he’d pulled a robe on—what difference did that make? She could still see him naked, still visualise every honed muscle and bone, each single inch of his taut, bronzed flesh! And she could still feel the power of his kisses and the weight of him on top of her and the…
‘You were innocent,’ he fed after her.
Was he talking about her sexual innocence or her being innocent of all of the other rotten charges he had laid against her? Did she care? No.
‘Stick to your first impression of me,’ she flung at him over her shoulder. ‘Your instincts were working better then!’
On that scathing slice, she slammed into the bathroom.
Leo grimaced into his glass. His first impression of Natasha Moyles had been deadly accurate, he acknowledged. It was only the stuff with Rico that had fouled up that impression.
He heard the shower running. He visualised her dropping the sheet and walking that smooth, curvy body into his custom-built wet room. The vision pushed him to his feet with the grim intention of giving into his nagging desires and going in there to join her. This war they were having was not over yet and would not be over until he won it.
Then something red caught the corner of his eye and he glanced down at the bed.
‘Theos,’ he breathed as his insides flipped into a near-crippling squirm in recognition.
Proof that he had just taken his first virgin was staring him in the face like a splash of outrage.
Leo flexed his taut shoulders, glanced over at the closed door to the bathroom, then back at the bed. ‘Damn,’ he cursed, trying to visualise what she was going to feel like when she saw the evidence of her lost virginity, and added a few more oaths in much more satisfying Greek.
Instead of going to join her, he discarded his robe to snatch up his trousers and shirt and pulled them back on. He had no idea where Bernice kept the fresh bedlinen, but he was going to have to find out for himself because the hell if he was going to ask…
CHAPTER SIX
WRAPPED in a spare bathrobe she’d found hanging behind the door, Natasha tugged in a deep breath, then opened the bathroom door and stepped out. Her heart was thumping. It had taken her ages to build up enough courage to leave the sanctuary of the bathroom and her muscles ached, she was so locked on the defensive, ready for her first glimpse of Leo sprawled in the chair by the bed.
It took a few moments for her to realise that she’d agonised over nothing because he wasn’t even in the room. And the bed had been straightened so perfectly it looked as if it had never been used. Even her clothes had been picked up and neatly draped over the chair he had been sitting in.
Had Bernice come in here and tidied up after them? The very idea pushed a flush of mortified heat into her cheeks. Natasha dragged her eyes away from the bed and began scanning the room for her holdall, while wishing that someone had bothered to tell her that she was going to feel like this—all tense and edgy and horribly uncertain as to what happened after you jumped into bed with a man you hardly knew!
Then the bedroom door flew open and she spun to face it with a jerk. Half expecting to find Bernice or one of the maids walking in, she was really thrown into a wild flutter when it was Leo standing there.
He was dressed and she definitely wasn’t. The way his eyes moved over her turned the flush of mortification into something else.
He swung the door shut behind him, then began striding towards her like some mighty warlord coming to claim his woman for a second round of mind-blowing sex and making her more uptight the closer he came. How could he wear that relaxed smile on his face as if everything in his world was absolutely perfect? Had he never felt awkward or nervous or just plain shy about anything?
Not this man, she concluded with a deep inner quiver when he pulled to a stop right in front of her. He gave off the kind of masculine vitality that made her fingers clutch the collar of the bathrobe close to her throat.
‘Your hair is wet,’ he observed, lifting a hand up to stroke it across the slicked back top of her head.
‘Your state-of-the-art wet room has a w-will of its own,’ she answered, still feeling the tingling shock she’d experienced when jets of water had hit her from every angle the moment she’d touched the start button in there.
‘I’ll find you a hairdryer,’ he murmured as he moved his hand to stroke the hectic burn in her cheek. ‘But in truth, I think you look adorable just as you are and if I thought you could take more of me right now I would be picking you up and taking you back to bed.’
Natasha shook his hand away. ‘I wouldn’t let you.’
‘Maybe,’ he goaded softly, ‘you would find yourself with little choice?’
Natasha’s startled gaze clashed with his smiling dark eyes. ‘You would make me, you mean?’
‘Seduce you into changing your mind, beautiful one,’ he corrected, then lowered his head to steal a kiss.
And it wasn’t just a quick steal. He let his lips linger long enough to extract a response from her before he drew back again.
‘Fortunately for you, right now I am starving for real food,’ he mocked her smitten expression. ‘Find yourself something comfortable to put on while I shower, then we will go and eat.’
With that he strode into the bathroom. Arrogant—arrogant—arrogant! Natasha thought as she wiped the taste of his mouth from her lips.
Thoroughly out of sorts with herself for being so susceptible to him, she hunted down her holdall and used up some of her irritation by hauling it up onto the bed and yanking open the zip. For the next few seconds she just stood looking down into the bag with absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what the heck she had packed inside it. She only had this very vague memory of grabbing clothes at random, then dropping them into the bag. Tense fingers clutching the gaping robe to her throat again, she let the other hand rummage inside the bag and pulled out an old pair of jeans and a pale green T-shirt.
Great, she thought as she discarded those two unappealing garments onto the bed. A pair of ordinary briefs—not a thong, thank goodness—appeared next, and she tossed those onto the bed, too. She found another suit styled like the pale blue suit she’d been wearing all day, only this one was in a dull cream colour that made her frown because she could not imagine herself buying it, never mind wearing such an awful shade against her fair skin. Yet she must have bought it or it wouldn’t be here.
Or perhaps this new Natasha—the one clutching a robe to her throat after losing her virginity to an arrogant Greek—had developed different tastes. She certainly felt different, kind of aching and alive in intimate places and so aware of her own body it started to tingle even as she thought about it.
No make-up, she discovered. She’d forgotten to pack her make-up bag or even a brush or comb. A couple of boring skirts appeared from the bag, followed by a couple of really boring tops. Frowning now with an itchy sense of dissatisfaction that irritated her all the more simply because she was feeling it, she finally unearthed a floaty black skirt made of the kind of fabric that didn’t crease when she pulled it free of the bag. A black silk crocheted top appeared next, which was going to have to go with the skirt whether she liked it or not since she did not seem to have anything else like it in the bag.
Only one spare pair of shoes—and no spare bra! she discovered. Sighing heavily, she turned towards the chair where her other clothes were neatly folded, and was about to walk over there to recover her white bra—when Leo strode out of the bathroom.
It was as if she’d been thrown into an instant freeze the way she stood there between the bed and the chair, pinned to the polished wood floor while her busy mind full of what to wear came to a sudden halt.
