And the last thing in the world he wanted to do was terrify her.
He knew he should care that this wasn’t quite the confession he’d expected. That as far as he could tell, Valentina had no intention of telling him who she was. Ever. He knew that it should bother him, and perhaps on some level it did, but the only thing he could seem to focus on was the fact that she was untouched.
Untouched.
He was the only man in all the world who had ever tasted her. Touched her. Made her shiver, and catch her breath, and moan. That archaic word seemed to beat in place of his heart.
Virgin. Virgin. Virgin.
Until it was as if he knew nothing but that. As if her innocence shimmered between them, beckoning and sweet, and she was his for the taking.
And, oh, how Achilles liked to take the things he wanted.
“Are you sure you wish to waste such a precious gift on the likes of me?” he asked, and he heard the stark greed beneath the laziness he forced into his tone. He heard exactly how much he wanted her. He was surprised it didn’t seem to scare her the way he thought it should. “After all, there is nothing particularly special about me. I have money, that’s all. And as you have reminded me, I am your boss. The ethical considerations are legion.”
He didn’t know why he said that. Any of that. Was it to encourage her to confess her real identity to him? Was it to remind her of the role she’d chosen to play—although not today, perhaps?
Or was it to remind him?
Either way, she only lifted her chin. “You don’t have to take it,” she said, as if it was of no import to her one way or the other. “Certainly not if you have some objection.”
She lifted one shoulder, then dropped it, and the gesture was so quintessentially royal that it should have set Achilles’s teeth on edge. But instead he found it so completely her, so entirely Princess Valentina, that it only made him harder. Hotter. More determined to find his way inside her.
And soon.
“I have no objection,” he assured her, and there was no pretending his tone wasn’t gritty. Harsh. “Are we finished talking?”
And the nerves he’d been unable to detect before were suddenly all over her face. He doubted she knew it. But she was braver than she ought to have been, his deceitful little princess, and all she did was gaze back at him. Clear and sure, as if he couldn’t see the soft, vulnerable cast to her mouth.
Or maybe, he thought, she had no idea how transparent she was.
“Yes,” Valentina said softly. “I’m ready to stop talking.”
And this time, as he drew her to him, he knew it wouldn’t end in a kiss. He knew they weren’t going to stop until he’d had her at last.
He knew that she was not only going to be his tonight, but she was going to be only his. That no one had ever touched her before, and if he did it right, no one else ever would.
Because Achilles had every intention of ruining his princess for all other men.
CHAPTER SEVEN
VALENTINA COULDN’T BELIEVE this was happening.
At last.
Achilles took her mouth, and there was a lazy quality to his kiss that made her knees feel weak. He set his mouth to hers, and then he took his time. As if he knew that inside she was a jangle of nerves and longing, anticipation and greed. As if he knew she hardly recognized herself or all the needy things that washed around inside her, making her new.
Making her his.
He kissed her for a long while, it seemed to her. He slid his arms around her, he pulled her against his chest, and then he took her mouth with a thoroughness that made a dangerous languor steal all over her. All through her. Until she wasn’t sure that she would be able to stand on her own, were he to let go of her.
But he didn’t let go.
Valentina thought she might have fallen off the edge of the world anyway, because everything seemed to whirl and cartwheel around, but then she realized that what he’d done was stoop down to bend a little and then pick her up. As if she was as weightless as she felt. He held her in his arms, high against his chest, and she felt her shoes fall off her feet like some kind of punctuation. And when he gazed down into her face, she thought he looked like some kind of conquering warrior of old, though she chided herself for being so fanciful.
There was nothing fanciful about Achilles.
Quite the opposite. He was fierce and masculine and ruthless beyond measure, and still, Valentina couldn’t think of anywhere she would rather be—or anyone she would rather be with like this. It all felt inevitable, as if she’d been waiting her whole life for this thing she hardly understood to sweep her away, just like this.
And it had come into focus only when she’d met Achilles.
Because he was her only temptation. She had never wanted anyone else. She couldn’t imagine she ever would.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, aware on some level that he was moving. That he was carrying her up those penthouse stairs as if she weighed nothing at all. But she couldn’t bring herself to look away from his dark gold gaze. And the truth was, she didn’t care. He could take her anywhere. “I don’t want to disappoint you.”
“And how would you do that?” His voice was so deep. So lazy and, unless she was mistaken, amused, even as that gaze of his made her quiver, deep inside.
“Well,” she stammered out. “Well, I don’t—”
“Exactly,” he said, interrupting her with that easy male confidence that she found she liked a little too much. “You don’t know, but I do. So perhaps, glikia mou, you will allow me to demonstrate the breadth and depth of my knowledge.”
And when she shuddered, he only laughed.
Achilles carried her across the top floor, all of which was part of his great master bedroom. It took up the entire top level of his penthouse, bordered on all sides by the wide patio that was also accessible from a separate staircase below. The better to maintain and protect his privacy, she thought now, which she felt personally invested in at the moment. He strode across the hardwood floor with bold-colored rugs tossed here and there, and she took in the exposed brick walls and the bright, modern works of art that hung on them. This floor was all space and silence, and in between there were more of those breathtaking windows that brightened the room with the lights from the city outside.
Achilles didn’t turn on any additional light. He simply took Valentina over to the huge bed that was propped up on a sleek modern platform crafted out of a bright, hard steel, and laid her out across it as if she was something precious to him. Which made her heart clutch at her, as if she wanted to be.
And then he stood there beside the bed, his hands on his lean hips, and did nothing but gaze down at her.
Valentina pushed herself up onto her elbows. She could feel her breath moving in and out of her, and it was as if it was wired somehow to all that sensation she could feel lighting her up inside. It made her breasts feel heavier. It made her arms and legs feel somehow restless and sleepy at once.
With every breath, she could feel that bright, hot ache between her legs intensify. And this time, she knew without a shred of doubt that he was aware of every last part of it.
“Do you have anything else to confess?” he asked her, and she wondered if she imagined the dark current in his voice then. But it didn’t matter. She had never wanted anyone, but she wanted him. Desperately.
She would confess anything at all if it meant she could have him.
And it wasn’t until his eyes blazed, and that remarkable mouth of his kicked up in one corner, that she realized she’d spoken out loud.
“I will keep that in mind,” he told her, his voice a rasp into the quiet of the room. Then he inclined his head. “Take off your clothes.”
It was as if he’d plugged her into an electrical outlet. She felt zapped. Blistered,
perhaps, by the sudden jolt of power. It felt as if there were something bright and hot, wrapped tight around her ribs, pressing down. And down farther.
And she couldn’t bring herself to mind.
“But—by myself?” she asked, feeling a little bit light-headed at the very idea. She’d found putting on these jeans a little bit revolutionary. She couldn’t imagine stripping them off in front of a man.
And not just any man. Achilles Casilieris.
Who didn’t relent at all. “You heard me.”
Valentina had to struggle then. She had to somehow shove her way out of all that wild electrical madness that was jangling through her body, at least enough so she could think through it. A little bit, anyway. She had to struggle to sit up all the way, and then to pull the T-shirt off her body. Her hands went to her jeans next, and she wrestled with the buttons, trying to pull the fly open. It was all made harder by the fact that her hands shook and her fingers felt entirely too thick.
And the more she struggled, the louder her breathing sounded. Until she was sure it was filling up the whole room, and more embarrassing by far, there was no possible way that Achilles couldn’t hear it. Or see the flush that she could feel all over her, electric and wild. She wrestled the stiff, unyielding denim down over her hips, that bright heat that churned inside her seeming to bleed out everywhere as she did. She was sure it stained her, marking her bright hot and obvious.
She sneaked a look toward Achilles, and she didn’t know what she expected to see. But she froze when her eyes met his.
That dark gold gaze of his was as hot and demanding as ever. That curve in his mouth was even deeper. And there was something in the way that he was looking at her that soothed her. As if his hands were on her already, when they were not. It was as if he was helping her undress when she suspected that it was very deliberate on his part that he was not.
Because of course it was deliberate, she realized in the next breath. He was giving her another choice. He was putting it in her hands, again. And even while part of her found that inordinately frustrating, because she wanted to be swept away by him—or more swept away, anyway—there was still a part of her that relished this. That took pride in the fact that she was choosing to give in to this particular temptation.
That she was choosing to truly offer this particular man the virtue she had always considered such a gift.
It wasn’t accidental. She wasn’t drunk the way many of her friends had been, nor out of her mind in some other way, or even outside herself in the storm of an explosive temper or wild sensation that had boiled over.
He wanted her to be very clear that she was choosing him.
And Valentina wanted that, too. She wanted to choose Achilles. She wanted this.
She had never wanted anything else, she was sure of it. Not with this fervor that inhabited her body and made her light up from the inside out. Not with this deep certainty.
And so what could it possibly matter that she had never undressed for a man before? She was a princess. She had dressed and undressed in rooms full of attendants her whole life. Achilles was different from her collection of royal aides, clearly. But there was no need for her to be embarrassed, she told herself then. There was no need to go red in the face and start fumbling about, as if she didn’t know how to remove a pair of jeans from her own body.
Remember who you are, she chided herself.
She was Princess Valentina of Murin. It didn’t matter that seeing her mother might have shaken her. It didn’t change a thing. That had nothing to do with who she was, it only meant that she’d become who she was in spite of the choices her mother had made. She could choose to do with that what she liked. And she was choosing to gift her innocence, the virginity she’d clung to as a badge of honor as if that differentiated her from the mother who’d left her, to Achilles Casilieris.
Here. Now.
And there was absolutely nothing to be ashamed about.
Valentina was sure that she saw something like approval in his dark gaze as she finished stripping her jeans from the length of her legs. And then she was sitting there in nothing but her bra and panties. She shifted up and onto her knees. Her hair fell down over her shoulders as she knelt on the bed, swirling across her bared skin and making her entirely too aware of how exposed she was.
But this time it felt sensuous. A sweet, warm sort of reminder of how much she wanted this. Him.
“Go on,” he told her, a gruff command.
“That sounded a great deal like an order,” Valentina murmured, even as she moved her hands around to her back to work the clasp of her bra. And it wasn’t even a struggle to make her voice so airy.
“It was most definitely an order,” Achilles agreed, his voice still gruff. “And I would suggest you obey me with significantly more alacrity.”
“Or what?” she taunted him gently.
She eased open the silken clasp and then moved her hands around to the bra cups, holding them to her breasts when the bra would have fallen open. “Will you hold it against me in my next performance review? Oh, the horror.”
“Are you defying me?”
But Achilles sounded amused, despite his gruffness. And there was something else in his voice then, she thought. A certain tension that she felt move inside her even before she understood what it was. Maybe she didn’t have to understand. Her body already knew.
Between her legs, that aching thing grew fiercer. Brighter. And so did she.
“I think you can take it,” she whispered.
And then she let the bra fall.
She felt the rush of cooler air over the flesh of her breasts. Her nipples puckered and stung a little as they pulled tight. But what she was concentrating on was that taut, arrested look on Achilles’s face. That savage gleam in his dark gold eyes. And the way his fierce, ruthless mouth went flat.
He muttered something in guttural Greek, using words she had never heard before, in her blue-blooded academies and rarefied circles. But she knew, somehow, exactly what he meant.
She could feel it, part of that same ache.
He reached down to grip the hem of his T-shirt, then tugged it up and over his head in a single shrug of one muscled arm. She watched him do it, not certain she was breathing any longer and not able to make herself care about that at all, and then he was moving toward the bed.
Another second and he was upon her.
He swept her up in his arms again, moving her into the center of the bed, and then he bore her down to the mattress beneath them. And Valentina found that they fit together beautifully. That she knew instinctively what to do.
She widened her legs, he fit himself between them, and she cushioned him there—that long, solid, hard-packed form of his—as if they’d been made to fit together just like this. His bare chest was a wonder. She couldn’t seem to keep herself from exploring it, running her palms and her fingers over every ridge and every plane, losing herself in his hot, extraordinary male flesh. She could feel that remarkable ridge of his arousal again, pressed against her right where she ached the most, and it was almost too much.
Or maybe it really was too much, but she wanted it all the same.
She wanted him.
He set his mouth to hers again, and she could taste a kind of desperation on his wickedly clever mouth.
That wild sensation stormed through her, making her limp and wild and desperate for things she’d only ever read about before. He tangled his hands in her hair to hold her mouth to his, then he dropped his chest down against hers, bearing her down into the mattress beneath them. Making her feel glorious and alive and insane with that ache that started between her legs and bloomed out in all directions.
And then he taught her everything.
He tasted her. He moved his mouth from her lips, down the long line of her neck, learning the contours of h
er clavicle. Then he went lower, sending fire spinning all over her as he made his way down to one of her breasts, only to send lightning flashing all through her when he sucked her nipple deep into his mouth.
He tested the weight of her breasts in his faintly calloused palm, while he played with the nipple of the other, gently torturing her with his teeth, his tongue, his cruel lips. When she thought she couldn’t take any more, he switched.
And then he went back and forth, over and over again, until her head was thrashing against the mattress, and some desperate soul was crying out his name. Over and over again, as if she might break apart at any moment.
Valentina knew, distantly, that she was the one making those sounds. But she was too far gone to care.
Achilles moved his way down her body, taking his sweet time, and Valentina sighed with every inch he explored. She shifted. She rolled. She found herself lifting her hips toward him without his having to ask.
“Good girl,” he murmured, and it was astonishing how much pleasure two little words could give her.
He peeled her panties down off her hips, tugged them down the length of her legs and then threw them aside. And when he was finished with that, he slid his hands beneath her bottom as he came back over her, lifted her hips up into the air and didn’t so much as glance up at her before he set his mouth to the place where she needed him most.
Maybe she screamed. Maybe she fainted. Maybe both at once.
Everything seemed to flash bright, then smooth out into a long, lethal roll of sensation that turned Valentina red hot.
Everywhere.
He licked his way into her. He teased her and he learned her and he tasted her, making even that most private part of her his. She felt herself go molten and wild, and he made a low, rough sound of pleasure, deeply masculine and deliciously savage, and that was too much.
“Oh, no,” she heard herself moan. “No—”
Valentina felt more than heard him laugh against the most tender part of her, and then everything went up in flames.
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