by SR Jones
“No, I’m being sincere. You don’t get on your knees in a place like this.”
“You did,” she says.
I shrug. “Well, I’m used to all sorts of non-too-nice places, but you? You deserve the best. We’re going back to the hotel … and you can suck me like a pro.”
She does deserve the best too, and I need to remember—that’s not me. I’m not the best, not for her; not for any woman.
She shakes her head at me, but her grin breaks through. “You had to ruin it, didn’t you?”
We head back to the hotel at breakneck speed, and as soon as we hit our room, she’s on me. She kisses me, and it’s hungry and powerful.
Then she drops to her knees and looks up at me with those big green eyes. They aren’t innocent, but sparkling with mischief. She undoes my zipper, but not the button, and instead of pulling my pants down, she simply takes me out through the zipper.
“God, your cock is beautiful,” she says on a sigh.
I’m glad she thinks so. She’s staring at it as if she wants to devour it, which makes it, and me, very happy indeed.
Instead, she slurps at me like she’s licking a popsicle, holding me up in her delicate hand as her tongue runs up and down the length of me. Then she sucks the head of me into her hot and wet mouth, and I groan.
Soon she has a rhythm going, and it’s good, but I want more. I grab her hair and wrap it around my fist.
“Let go of me with your hand,” I order. “Just use your mouth.”
She does as I say and moans when I push into her, taking over. I fuck her mouth, using her hair to keep her still as I push in deeper. Her breathing has become erratic, but so has mine.
“That’s it, take me deep, like the good girl you are.” The words are out before I even think about them, and I see the flush hit her cheeks and chest. She gives a small moan, and I know she likes the words.
“You’ll take it all for me, won’t you, my beautiful Maya? Do what I tell you? Because you’re mine.” She gives another moan, the vibrations going straight to my cock, and I start to come.
When I’m done, she leans back on her heels and wipes at her mouth.
“Come here.” My voice is gruffer than usual as I pull her to me.
She stands and comes into my arms. Then we’re kissing again, and it’s off the charts. It’s as if we’re trying to devour one another.
She pulls away after a few moments, gasping. “God, Damen.”
Yeah, I get it.
I try to close it down, bring us back down to earth, because if we let this energy between us run any longer in this moment, we’ll end up fucking. Guaranteed. I take a step back.
“So, the volunteer work.”
She blinks twice, as if coming to. “Erm, yeah.”
“You can go, if it means a lot to you. I’ll go with you, maybe Alesso or Markos too, depending on what other stuff they have on. Maybe you can go once a week while things are as dangerous and not stay overnight? How does that sound? A compromise.”
I could simply say no. It would be within my rights to, because it does cause an extra security risk. It’s a place anyone can get to by pretending to need a room for the night, and if she goes there at a set time and day each week, it makes her easier to target, but it means a lot to her.
“Okay, that will work. A compromise. I’ll only go once a week and won’t stay overnight until this is all over.”
The moment she says ’all over’, I see it, the sadness in her eyes. She should be happy at the thought of this coming to an end, but she’s not; she’s upset. And I feel the same way, because it means our time together will be over, but we can’t think that way. We have to end it. I can’t be what she wants, and she’s too young to tie herself down yet. Maya needs to make mistakes, have a few love affairs, and enjoy some freedom before she settles down.
I determine to make the rest of our time here about seeing what we can before we head back home.
We’re back in Athens, honeymoon over. I failed spectacularly in my bid to take sex off the table, but at least we haven’t actually screwed. Tomorrow, I’ll have to face Stamatis and look him in the eye knowing I’ve been fucking with his daughter. It’s hardly the most sensible thing I’ve done, but I can’t keep my hands off her.
To be honest, he’s less of a worry than my own issues. I don’t do love, I don’t do long term, and my background makes me absolutely the worst bet for a long-term relationship going. Still, despite knowing all this, a part of me keeps playing ‘what if’. ‘What if’ it could be different with Maya. ‘What if’ our fucked-upness somehow fits? Her flawed parts and mine making a perfect whole? ‘What if’ I keep her with me, and she’s happy to stay without the hearts and flowers? I doubt the latter will be the case. The girl craves love like I crave control.
She’s sitting beside me now in the chauffeur-driven car Stamatis sent to whisk us through Athens and out onto the road leading to the riviera where Yaya’s house stands.
My house now. I don’t know if I’ll keep it or sell it. Alesso and Markos have a key each, and they’ve been clearing the place up, putting a lot of Yaya’s stuff into storage in the basement for me to go through when I get back. I told them not to touch her room, but to make some of the guest rooms ready for Maya, myself, and them.
The place is worth a fortune these days. If I sell, I’m set for life. I could pack all this in and go travel around the world on a yacht, or do what our Ukrainian friend Andrius did, buy a place on one of the islands and relax into life. Except, I kind of enjoy the rush. I want to work with Stamatis and help him grow the business. He doesn’t do anything I can’t live with, so why not? I don’t get how Andrius can change so much. He’s even given up his goal of getting revenge on one of the mobsters who killed his family.
If anyone has ever been pussy whipped, Andrius is. Then again, he’s not as out as he likes to think he is. I know for a fact that if Allyov decides he needs Andrius’ considerable skills, the Ukrainian will find himself drawn back into the game.
For now, though, he’s playing house on Corfu with the rather delectable Violet.
My mind drifts back to my family home as the car speeds through the night. I don’t want to live there, the place only holds bad memories for me, but rushing to sell it seems a betrayal of Yaya, who despite all the horror that occurred in the lump of stone, still loved the house.
The rush of memories hits me hard, and I need to suck in a stabilizing breath. My mother, her face red on one cheek, right eye blooming into a dark purple flower of a bruise, begging me to stay and spend some time with her. Me, young, angry, sick of the way she let my father treat her, denying her request and storming out.
Then me returning home an hour later to find the police in the living room with my father and Yaya. My father screaming and crying. Something I’d never seen him do. When the police left, my father turned to me.
“Why did you go out? She wanted to spend time with you; you know how she got after we had a … disagreement. She liked to be with you, and you left her. This is your fault. All your fault, you poisonous piece of shit. I can’t believe you’re my blood.”
He’d picked up a heavy decanter from the bar and threw it at me.
Yaya told him if he didn’t calm down, she’d call the police right back to the house. My father had turned on her for a moment, but Yaya didn’t scare easy, and she stared at him, her head high, spine straight, generations of high breeding in her stance and the cut of her high cheekbones. As usual, like all bullies, my father backed down and raced out of the room and up the stairs to his bedroom.
I’d stared at my grandmother, needing to know what had happened, but scared to ask. “Your mother went out, Damen, soon after you did. She went for a walk around the block and got hit by a drunk driver. She’s dead, Damen. I’m sorry.”
She’d started to come toward me, meaning to hold me I think, but I’d backed away, the horror of her words hitting me.
My father, fucked up as he was, had been right
. I was to blame. She’d asked me to spend time with her, and I’d left her upset and hurt. If I hadn’t been such a terrible son, she’d still be alive.
Yaya tried to talk to me about it over the years. She told me that my father had no right to say those things, that he was displacing the blame from where it truly fell—on him. Yaya had begged my mother to leave my father, and a few times she’d tried. They’d thrown him out of the house, but he always came back around with apologies and promises of being better. If she stuck to her guns, the stalking would start. Him showing up wherever she went with her friends, begging her, promising to change. I think he wore her down. Scared her into taking him back because having him in the house seemed better than not knowing when he might appear and start railing at her, demanding her forgiveness and making threats to harm both her and me if she didn’t.
I don’t think Yaya knew the full extent of the hell he put my mother through the times she told him to go. I once heard her tell my mother she needed to grow a backbone and just get rid of the awful man. Her exact words.
Yaya told my mother she had connections to the police, and they could keep her safe, but what Yaya didn’t understand was that Father had even more power. He was a senior politician in the ruling political party at the time. He not only had ties in the police that would trump any Yaya could muster with her upper class lineage, but he had ties in much murkier places too. The sort of places where I now play and work. Organized crime.
So the irony is, my father was right. I am a piece of shit like him. I work with the sorts of people he mixed with. And whilst I would never raise my hand to a woman, I let them down, and my past has shown me that can be just as deadly.
These are the reasons I need to try to stop this thing between Maya and me. I can’t give her what she needs. Sooner or later, I’ll let her down, or my work will keep her in danger, trapped in this world. She could leave now. No longer tied to Yannis, Maya could go to America like Stamatis’ eldest son and carve out a new, safe life for herself. She could go to college, make friends, eventually meet a guy and get married.
I want those things for her, but a deeper, darker part of me wants to keep her with me more. I can’t let that part win, because if I do, one day I’ll fail her the way I did my mother. Or I’ll get so emotionally involved that the dark part of me, the poison that resides in the Lambrakis men, will roar to life, and I’ll become the same sort of bastard as my father.
Speaking of the fucker…
As the car approaches Vouliagmeni, my stomach tightens. I’ll have to walk back into the family home I haven’t visited in such a long time. The reason for doing so is to keep Maya safe. This house is infinitely more defendable than either her home or the place the guys and I rent in the city.
The car takes a turn from the main road that follows the ocean and sweeps down a private street with only three houses on it. At the end of the street is a pair of huge, wrought iron gates. A guard house sits outside them, and my stomach twists once more at the familiar sight of old Mr. Afroudakis. He’s been manning the guard box for my yaya for years now.
As our car approaches, he lifts his head, all alertness and formality. How much use he’d be if anything happened is debatable; the man is in his mid to late seventies. I used to tell Yaya she needed better security, but she never listened.
“Mr. Lambrakis.” Mr. Afroudakis tips his cap at me and presses a buzzer opening the gates.
Maya turns to stare at me, her eyes wide. “Lambrakis? As in … the politician?”
The politician being my father, and the reason even younger people know the name of a long dead politician is because of the scandal that hit when it came out my father was beating my mother. It led to him losing his job as Minister for Defense. For a while it was hell, and we were living in a goldfish bowl, but after he got demoted, and Mother soothed the media with lots of interviews about how the accounts leaked to the media by a disgruntled maid simply weren’t true, our family was once more forgotten.
My father had been demoted officially, but he still retained a lot of influence and power within the party and government, but our family’s reputation within wider society had been trashed for good.
“Yeah,” I grunt. “And before you ask, yes, it is that Lambrakis. Did you somehow miss that when we said our nuptials? And, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” she says, holding one palm up to placate me. “I was having a panic attack, by the way, while we were saying our nuptials. And I won’t talk about it. Fine.”
We sweep up the drive, the headlights highlighting the familiar curves and turns, as well as the trees I know like the back of my hand.
When we come to a stop outside the front entrance, I get out and go open Maya’s door for her.
“This is where we’ll be staying for a while. It’s old fashioned inside, my yaya liked it that way, but it’s safer than in the city or at your home.”
She’s staring, her mouth slightly parted. “This is your home?”
“Yes, it is now. Now my yaya is gone.”
“No brothers or sisters?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Oh, Damen.” Her voice is full of sorrow, and I flinch at the pity in her tone.
“It’s fine, don’t feel sorry for me.”
She bites her lip but gives me a dip of her head, Greek body language for okay.
It often confuses visitors when they come here, and what looks to them like a small shake of the head downward is actually a yes, and what looks like a nod upwards, is actually a no. It gets even more confusing because some of us also use more British or American forms of body language too. One minute we might shake our heads meaning no, and the next toss them back, meaning the exact same thing.
“Leave the bags, the chauffeur can bring them,” I tell her, wanting to get this moment where I cross the threshold to my family home again over with.
The door opens, and I’m relieved to see Alesso grinning at us.
“Welcome home, newlyweds,” he says with a chuckle.
I dig deep and find a grin of my own to toss back at him, but inside I’m a mess. I have to enter this fucking mausoleum again and stay here for a while, and it will be even worse now that Yaya is gone. Furthermore, I’m worried about Alesso figuring out something has gone on between Maya and me. He won’t be happy. It’s going to put him in a bad position if Stamatis finds out.
Since when did everything become complicated?
Maya steps into the hallway, and her face is a picture. This place rivals Stamatis’ home for opulence. Polished tiles lead the way down the hallway and draw the gaze its length. There’s a bronze statue of a boy to one side of us. A huge, faded, gilt mirror on one wall, and at the end of the hallway, weirdly, a piano. It was Mother’s, and she liked to play there, in the nook where the piano fit perfectly.
To the right of us is an open archway leading into the dining room, from there the tiled floor gives way to polished parquet wood. Beyond the dining room is the kitchen, which is old fashioned and needed ripping out about twenty years ago. To our left is a double door leading into the main living room. The doors are open, and Maya turns to look, her gaze widening. The floor in there is marble tile, with heavy Persian rugs dotted around. Marble pillars stand sentry on either side of glass doors leading to the garden area outside. Uncomfortable spindly-legged chairs and an ornate sofa provide the furniture here. I hated this room, but I loved Yaya, so I didn’t push her to change it. I don’t know how she found comfort on any of the furniture with her aches and pains in the last few years.
The hallway carries on to another less formal living room, a library, and at the far end, another smaller kitchen and a utility room. By the time you reach the second kitchen, you are one story up as the house is built into a steep hill. There’s a door leading to the basement and way out to the pool, although you can reach it via the garden too.
Upstairs are eight bedrooms and five bathrooms. There’s also a toilet and washroom downstairs n
ext to the utility room. In the basement is a double garage, and to one side a room that I turned into a gym many years ago. I wonder if Yaya has kept it that way, or if she did something different with it?
All around me are the tastes of generations gone by. If I ever did lose my mind and decide to live here, I’d rip the whole place apart and renovate every spare inch of it.
“Damen … you’re rich,” Maya breathes.
I shrug. On paper I suppose I am, but it’s not something that interests me or defines me.
“I don’t understand.” There’s something like hurt in her gaze.
Alesso clears his throat. “I’ll leave you guys to get settled. Come find me in twenty minutes, Damen, and I can update you.”
“What don’t you understand?” I ask when my friend disappears up the stairs. “I didn’t tell you because it never came up, and before the fake wedding, it wasn’t any of your business.”
“No,” she says. “It’s not that, it’s … you’re wealthy. You don’t need to do what you do. I believed you had to do it for money. Clearly not.”
“What the hell does it matter why I do what I do?” I ask her, confused, and more than a little pissed. A few sexual encounters and she thinks she gets a say in what I do for a living? This is the reason why I avoid relationships. I’m sure normal people would be fine with their wife wanting a say in whether or not they killed people for the day job. Me … not so much.
“You’re the same as them,” she whispers. “I should have known, ever since I saw you kill that man, the cold way you did it; I knew to avoid you. I knew you were the dangerous one, but I let you charm me.”
I am the dangerous one, and I should be grateful she’s finally getting it, but something else she said has me dumbfounded.
She saw me kill a man? Her words ricochet around in my skull making no sense. When? How?
“Maya, back the fuck up. What do you mean, you saw me kill a man?”
There’s fear suddenly in her green eyes, and it’s aimed at me. “I didn’t … I would never, please don’t tell my uncle, oh God, I’ve never said anything to anybody, I swear.”