Greek Affairs: Claiming His Child: The Greek's Million-Dollar Baby Bargain / The Greek Millionaire's Secret Child / The Greek's Long-Lost Son. Rebecca Winters
her body, turning it in his strong, assured grasp, unwinding her from her long skirt until she was boneless beneath him, until her body was a mesh of arousal. His hands smoothed over her, making him master of every portion of her body, easing her thighs apart, long, skilled fingers teasing the delicate folds concealed.
She gasped in pleasure, her head rolling back into the softness of the pillow, lips parting as the breath exhaled from her. She heard him give a low laugh, and then his lips were almost at hers, and he was teasing them with his even as his hand was performing the same office between her thighs, teasing the dewing flesh.
He murmured something to her, but she was beyond hearing, beyond anything but drowning in the sensations he was engendering. She moaned again, fingers clenching into the pillow as his fingers began their skilful, unbearable work. He eased her thighs yet further apart, gained deeper access to her, finding the throbbing nub of her desire. Arousingly he caressed it as her breath quickened to gasping, her body threshing in a flux of desire as he arched over her, his hand sliding away from her, letting the tip of his manhood take its place. Instinctively, blindly, her hands splayed over his hard, taut buttocks, holding him there, and her hips lifted to him in a gesture as old as time. Her mouth was questing against his, her breasts straining against the muscled wall of his chest, her peaked nipples crushed against it.
Fire licked through her. Her body was aflame, aching for his possession. She strained against him and his mouth was lifting from hers, saying something. She knew not what, but there was promise in it, promise and purpose …
Her head threshed from side to side as wave after wave of pleasure broke through her. She cried out, head lifting back, eyes fluttering shut, as her whole being focused on the sensation searing through it.
Then he was driving into her, strong and insistent, thrusting up into her. She heard him cry out above her, felt his body explode inside hers. She cried out with him, the universe burning all around them as their bodies convulsed one within the other. It went on—a tidal wave crashing again and again through her flesh.
Her head fell back again as the final wave died away. Long moments later, he slid his hand up over her throat, his fingers curving up around the line of her jaw to cup her. Slowly, shudderingly, her pounding heart started to ease. Her panting breath to steady. She lay exhausted, shaken, as he released her, gazing blindly up at him. Shock glazed her eyes. The world returned to her, and she realised what she had done.
Had sex with a man who held her in absolute contempt.
A man whom she had more cause to hate than any man alive.
Cold drenched through her, replacing the heat of her sated body with a chill that seemed to go down to her guts, pooling into ice. Disbelief and a dismay so wrenching that it seemed to convulse her stomach choked her lungs.
Oh, God, what have I done?
Her shocked eyes could only stare upwards to the man on whose bed she was lying, whose body was still pinning her, filling her …
For an endless moment the world froze in horror. Only around the edges, like a miasma, it was haunted by the imprint of a quite, quite different emotion—an emotion that had possessed her, consumed her, enveloped her into a world she had never known existed. A world against whose loss now she heard a faint, anguished cry, as if she were losing something incredibly rare and precious, as if the loss of it were unbearable …
But filling her consciousness, spreading through it like an ugly stain, was the overpowering emotion of dismay—and shock and disbelief that she could have done what she had just done. Limp with horror at herself, she could only lie there, all limbs exhausted, staring blindly up into the face looking down at her.
For a moment there was no motion. None at all. Then abruptly, roughly, her body was away from the weight bearing on her. Nikos was striding away, across the huge room, thrusting open the door into the en suite bathroom, and closing it sharply behind him.
For a handful of seconds she could only lie there, still, inert, motionless. Then, forcing her frozen mind to act, she clambered up, urgently scrabbling for her clothes, forcing herself into them with unbearable haste and clumsiness, not bothering with underwear, just winding her top and her skirt around her to cover her nakedness. From the bathroom she could hear the sound of a shower starting. Her eyes flew past the door opposite the French window to the terrace, and she saw the door which surely must lead to the rest of the villa.
She hurried to it, half tripping, heart racing, lungs still choking, and yanked it open, finding herself, to her abject relief, in a service corridor. She didn’t know where she was going but it didn’t matter—she simply hurtled along it, desperately hoping that at this late hour she would encounter no one until she came upon part of the villa she recognised and could navigate to her own guest bedroom from there. Minutes later she was shutting the door and collapsing down on her own bed, shaking like a leaf, her arms wrapped around herself, as if stanching a wound. She started to rock.
Words whipped through her, over and over again, more and more cruel.
What have I done? What have I done?
Nikos stood beneath the pounding water of the shower. Its needles should be knives. Knives to carve into his greedy flesh the punishment he deserved.
How the hell could he have been so stupid? Hadn’t he known—hadn’t he told himself, staring into the mirror above the basin in that very bathroom a handful of days ago, that he was playing with fire? And now what had he gone and done? Knowingly, deliberately fooled himself on the way back to the villa with the kind of self-flattering logic that, had it been a dodgy business proposal, he’d have seen through in an instant. But which, because it was his damn male desire—never thwarted before, never not satiated, whenever and with whoever he wanted—he’d seized on it as if it were legal writ!
His mind sheered away. Sheered away from remembering the moment when he’d realised that not only did he have to take her, right there, right then, but worse—far, far worse—the moment when the world had simply whited out.
It’s never been like that before.
The words formed in his mind as the stinging needles pounded down on him.
Never had the moment of sexual fulfilment been like that—so intense, so overpowering, so consuming that he’d cried out, unable to stop himself.
Until the moment when consciousness had knifed back into him and he’d stared down at her and realised, with harsh, pitiless self-condemnation, that he had just walked over the edge of a cliff.
Angrily his hand fisted, and he thumped it against the wall of the shower stall.
I damn well knew I should have left her alone. I damn well knew it!
But even as the words formed, so did others. Others that made him abruptly cut off the water, grab a towel, and pat himself dry, roughly towelling the moisture out of his hair. Then he cast the towels aside and yanked open the bathroom door.
He knew he should never have touched Ann Turner. He knew he should never have taken her to his bed. Knew he should never have had sex with her.
But he knew something else as well as he strode out of the bathroom.
He wanted her again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE SUN WAS SCARCELY UP, but Ann was lying in bed, wakeful and tormented. She would have to go. Leave Sospiris. There was no other option. She couldn’t stay here now!
I’ll have to think of something—something to tell Ari, Mrs Theakis. Something—anything!
Except the truth. Even as she lay there she felt a semi-hysterical bubble inside her at the thought of Mrs Theakis knowing …
She shuddered in horror, feeling her skin flush.
How am I going to face her? How can I even have breakfast with her—knowing what I did, where I was?
And yet