Unbidden, the word whispered from her lips. “More.”
Demetrios groaned. More. Yes. He would give her more. He would give her everything, take everything. He brought her closer, slipped his hands up her throat, felt the urgent pulsing of her blood, cupped her face and lifted it to his.
Samantha leaned into him, wanting the feel of him against her breasts, her belly, her thighs. He slid his hands down her shoulders and she trembled at the rough brush of his fingers against her bare skin, moaned when he gathered her tightly in his arms.
Her hands lifted, wrapped around his neck, and he knew she was surrendering herself to him, to the night, to passion. He bit lightly at her bottom lip, then soothed the tiny hurt with his tongue. She tasted of rum and sugar, of heat and desire, and he groaned again and fell back against the wall, taking her with him, sweeping his hand possessively down her body. He cupped her breast, swallowed her cry as the silk-covered nipple rose against his palm, curved his hand around her hip.
“Matya mou,” he said thickly, turning so that their positions were reversed and it was she who leaned against the gazebo. He moved into the vee of her legs and she arched against him, moved against him, and he knew he was as close to losing himself as he had ever been in all the years since he’d left boyhood behind.
“Wait,” he whispered, but she was touching him, sliding her hands under his jacket, tearing at his shirt so that the studs popped free and fell to the ground. He caught his breath at the feel of her cool fingers against his skin, and he clasped her wrists in one hand while he stepped back and tried to regain his sanity, but she gave a little whimper of distress that fueled his hunger. He understood her need. It was the same for him, the urgency to touch and taste that was almost pain, but he would not permit himself such a total loss of control. He could wait. He would take her where there was privacy, where there was a bed, a place to be alone.
He brushed a light kiss on her swollen mouth and wound his fingers through hers.
“My room,” he said, but she shook her head wildly.
“No. Not in the house. I can’t—I don’t—”
She didn’t want to run the risk of seeing people. God knew, neither did he. “The stables,” he said, and before she could reply, he led her from the gazebo towards the outbuildings.
“Wait,” she said, just as he had moments before, and he thought she had changed her mind, thought what he would do if she had, but she stopped only long enough to kick off her shoes. He scooped them up and they ran through the damp grass side by side. She was laughing softly, and he stopped, swung her into his arms and kissed her.
A cloud hid the moon, leaving the sky touched only with the fire of the stars, but Demetrios knew his way. There was a small office just off the stables. He and Rafe had sealed a deal in it. It was not elaborate. A desk. A chair. A couch. An old leather couch. Not big, but big enough for a man and a woman to make love.
He would take her there, undress her, sink into the lushness of her mouth, into the heat of her body. With the first frantic hunger eased, he would hold her in his arms, caress her. The crowd would thin, the party would end, and they would go to the house then, to his room, lose themselves in each other through the long, hot Brazilian night.
The stable was dark and pleasantly scented with horse and leather. An animal snorted as the door swung shut behind them.
Demetrios drew Samantha towards the office at the rear of the building.
“Demetrios?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said thickly. She knew his name? He didn’t know hers. He thought of asking, but what did it matter at this moment? Instead, he took her hand, brought it to his erection. “Feel what you do to me, o kalóz mou.” He heard her breath catch as her fingers curled over his hardness.
“Feel what you do to me,” she said, and she lifted his hand to her breast.
Her silk-covered nipple, hard as a pearl, pressed against his palm. He groaned, kissed her deeply, savoring the sweetness of her mouth while he drew her down onto the couch and gathered her into his arms. She moaned, pressed fevered kisses to his jaw, wound her arms around his neck and, for a heartbeat, the frenzy within him eased. He felt a sudden need to hold her, just hold her, to learn the sweet secrets of her body before slaking his desire.
“Tell me your name,” he said softly. “I want to know—”
Impatiently, she moved against him, moved again, and he was lost. He slid his hand along the warm, exposed flesh between her breasts and her navel, eased his hand under the waistband of her trousers, down and down, groaning at the first brush of silken curls, capturing her mouth with his when she cried out…
Lights blazed on in the stable. The woman in his arms froze. “Oh, God,” she said in a frantic whisper, and her sinuous movements turned to frenzied attempts to push him away. “Get off me! Don’t you see the lights? Someone is—”
“Shh.” He put his lips to her ear. “Don’t talk. Whoever it is will leave.”
Leave? Sam squeezed her eyes shut. Please, yes. They had to leave…
“…delighted you are prepared to make up your mind about the colt, Nick,” Rafe Alvares said, and chuckled. “I have had an offer. An excellent one, and I’m tempted to accept it.”
“The hell you will,” Nicholas al Rashid replied, with lazy humor. “Doesn’t being your brother-in-law count for anything?”
Both men laughed. Their footsteps sounded on the planked floor. Sam buried her face in Demetrios’s throat.
“There he is. A fine animal. As handsome as ever.”
Nick sighed. “More handsome than ever. All right. It’s a deal. Ship him to my farm in Greenwich.”
“As soon as I can make the arrangements.”
“They’ll go now,” Demetrios whispered—and followed it with an oath. He was wrong. The men weren’t leaving. The footsteps were drawing closer. Closer…
He sat up quickly, whipped off his jacket and draped it around Sam’s shoulders. Then he shot to his feet and stood in front of her, blocking her from view.
The light in the little office came on. “Let’s celebrate,” Rafe said, “with a brandy. Or would you prefer…Demetrios?”
“Demetrios?” Nick said, his voice a puzzled echo of Rafe’s. There was a moment’s silence, and then he cleared his throat. “Oh.”
Oh, indeed, Sam thought, and wished, with all her heart, that she were dead.
“Have we, uh, have we interrupted something?”
She squeezed her eyes shut in an old parody of the children’s game. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. They really couldn’t, she told herself frantically. Demetrios hadn’t moved. He was a protective wall, and she was huddled deep in his jacket with her knees drawn up, her face buried against them, but she had never felt more exposed in her life.
“Let’s step outside,” he said. There was a shuffle of feet, the creak of the door half closing, then the sound of Demetrios’s voice saying calmly, almost lazily, “Actually, you have interrupted something,” as if were all some sort of joke.
Sam curled her hands into fists.
“Damn,” Nick murmured. “Sorry, Karas.”
Sam’s heart pounded like a drum. Go away. Go away. Go away!
Rafe cleared his throat. “I had no idea that you—that you were…” He cleared his throat again. “Well. I can see why you didn’t want to meet my wife’s sis…Damn! Never mind.”
“Right,” Nick said quickly, “never mind. We’ll see you later, Demetrios. Rafe? Let’s go.”
Sam held her breath until she heard the footsteps recede. The lights went off, the door banged shut and she scrambled to her feet just as Demetrios hurried towards her.
“Kalóz mou,” he said, reaching for her…
She slammed a fist against his chest. “Don’t—don’t ‘kalóz mou’ me! And don’t touch me, either!”
“Sweetheart. I am sorry. I regret that we were interrupted, but—”
“Yes. I’ll just bet you do.”
She glared a
t him, her blood hot with rage. He was talking in a soft, soothing voice, trying to talk her back onto that couch, but that wasn’t going to happen. How could she have done this? She’d almost slept with a stranger—a stranger who hadn’t wanted to meet her. Wasn’t that what Rafe had just said? That Demetrios hadn’t wanted to meet his wife’s sister?
The man who’d almost bedded her hadn’t wanted to meet her. Okay, he didn’t know she was the woman he hadn’t wanted to meet. Maybe that made a difference. Maybe her logic was flawed but dammit, who cared about logic? She’d been humiliated, embarrassed…and the man who was arrogance and self-conceit personified was still talking.
“Oh, shut up,” Sam said, and brushed past him. She tried to, anyway, but he put out his arm and stopped her.
“Have you heard a thing I said?”
His faint accent, so softly sexy a little while ago, had thickened. Sam blew her hair back from her forehead.
“This is all your fault. If you were any kind of gentleman—”
“Ah. I see. You wish to pretend you had no part in this.”
“I’m not the one who dragged me into this—this barn.”
“One,” he said coldly, “it is a stable. Two, if I were not a gentleman, there might be some debate as to who dragged who.”
“Whom,” Sam snapped.
“Three,” Demetrios said, his voice cutting across hers, “we are only here because you refused to go into the house.”
“Yes. Yes, I did. I, at least, have some sense of propriety.”
“That is surely the reason you climbed all over me at the gazebo.”
He wasn’t just arrogant, he was insufferable. Sam thought about slapping him but really, he wasn’t worth the effort. Exhaustion, she thought furiously, as she pushed past him and headed for the stable door. It was all a case of exhaustion.
“You have my jacket,” he said sharply. “Or are you in the habit of taking souvenirs?”
She swung towards him and flung a string of curses she’d just learned in Egypt in his face. Demetrios glowered; a horse in a nearby stall gave a soft whinny and looked on with interest.
“What did you say?”
“I said,” Sam replied, smiling brightly, “that I hoped your descendents would all be carrion-eating jackals, and that you’d lose all your teeth and go bald by the time you’re thirty-five. Good night. I’d say it’s been a pleasure, but it hasn’t.”
“You’re right. It hasn’t.”
“As for your precious jacket…” She shrugged the item in question from her shoulders and held it out in a two-fingered grasp. Demetrios looked from her face to the jacket to the horse in its stall…
“No,” he said, but it was too late. The jacket dropped. The horse snorted. And the woman he’d been fool enough to have thought he wanted strode towards the door.
“Good night,” Sam said pleasantly, and batted the door open with her hand.
A single, harsh word floated out into the night. It was Greek, but she didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what it meant. Sam dusted her hands off as she strode towards the house. The jacket had, undoubtedly, found its hoped-for target, something that was the inevitable product of horses and stables.
There was justice in this world after all.
Demetrios glared at the closed door. Then, teeth clenched, he leaned into the stall and carefully retrieved his jacket. He carried it as the woman had, by two fingers, until he reached the door where he dropped it into a trash container.
He had never learned her name, but it wasn’t necessary. As far as he was concerned, it might as well be Circe. She was a sorceress. A tease. Hell, she was a bitch…And yet, as he stepped out into the warm night and thought of the curses she’d uttered, his lips began to twitch.
Descendents that were jackals were bad enough, but that he should be toothless and bald in another two years? He began to chuckle, and then to laugh out loud. She was not the first woman to have cursed him, though it had always been because he was the one heading for the door. Certainly, none had ever done it so creatively.
As for Nick and Rafe…Demetrios sighed. He was going to have to come up with some kind of explanation. He was sure they’d be waiting for him. They’d want details, the name of the woman, why he’d taken her to the stables instead of to his bedroom…
Why he’d had to dump his jacket in the trash.
Well, they were in for a disappointment. He wasn’t going to tell them much of anything. The assignation—the almost assignation—had begun as passion and ended as farce, but he had no wish to share it, not even for the good-natured laughter it would surely bring. It had been far too private.
As for Circe…whoever she was, she was quite a woman.
Whistling softly, even smiling—which, he had to admit, was an odd thing to do, considering the less than satisfactory end to what had begun as a fascinating evening—Demetrios tucked his hands into his pockets and strolled towards the house.
CHAPTER THREE
ALMOST four weeks later, the phone in Sam’s apartment rang just as she was pouring her first cup of morning coffee.
She put down the pot, glanced at the clock and picked up the receiver. “Good morning, Amanda,” she said sweetly.
Her sister gave a dramatic groan. “Please don’t tell me they’ve perfected video calling. Not at this hour of the morning.”
Sam laughed. “This hour of the morning is how I knew it was you. Nobody else would call me at five after seven.”
“Anybody with a four-year-old would. Besides, I wanted to be sure and get you before you left for the day. Didn’t you say you had a job interview on tap?”
“Two of them,” Sam said, tucking the phone against her shoulder so she could open the fridge and get out the cream. “The first one’s in just a couple of hours, so—”
“So, you can’t talk long. Yes, I know. That’s been your excuse ever since we got back from Brazil.”
“It isn’t an excuse,” Sam said quickly. Too quickly, she thought, and told herself to slow down. “I’ve been busy, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh. Well, what’s on that frantic schedule of yours today?”
“A couple of meetings this morning. Which means—”
“Which means,” Amanda said pleasantly, “you and I can get together for lunch. Remember that little place off Madison?”
“Where walking through the door and inhaling puts a thousand calories on your hips?”
“Haven’t you heard the latest scientific facts, sister mine? A blast of sunshine reduces the calorie count. And, in case you haven’t noticed, spring has finally sprung. Take a peep out your window. That big yellow ball hanging over the East River is sun.”
“It’s pollution. And honestly, Mandy, I don’t see how I can make it. I’m seeing somebody at the UN at nine—”
“You’re going to work at the United Nations? I thought you hated being bottled up indoors.”
“It’s a private job. Some letters that need translating. And then, at eleven, there’s a professor at Hunter who stumbled across some poems by a nineteenth century—”
“Fascinating,” Amanda said politely. “But I thought you didn’t do that. Translate poetry and letters, I mean. I thought you preferred on-the-spot things. You know, Mr. Pavarotti, meet Mr. Jagger. That kind of stuff.”
Sam laughed as she stirred a dollop of cream into her coffee. “Well, that’s what I prefer, but my bank account isn’t as finicky as my brain—especially when I haven’t picked up a decent job since—since I got back from that weekend at Carin’s.”
What an idiot! Surely, after all this time, she could trust herself to say “Brazil” without dredging up memories of that humiliating episode with Demetrios Karas.
“Really?”
“Really. Nobody seems to need translations in French or German or Italian or Spanish or—”
“Borneoese?”
Sam laughed again. “You just invented a language. Anyway, what I did in Borneo was translate from Italian to English
and from English to Italian. There was this pair of ethnologists, see, and one spoke…” She sighed. “Trust me. I don’t do what you just dubbed Borneoese.”
“Or Greek,” Amanda said pleasantly.
Every nerve cell in Sam’s body went on alert. “Why would I need to speak Greek?”
“You wouldn’t. I just mentioned it. I mean, you said—”
“I know what I said. And what you said. And you said, Greek.”
“Samantha, honestly, stop being so defensive. Have you had your morning coffee?”
Sam stared down into her rapidly cooling cup. “No.”
“Well, you see? That’s what you get for trying to talk to me before you get your caffeine levels where they should be.”
“Amanda. You are the one who called me.”
“So I did, although I don’t know why you should be such a grump, considering that I’m inviting you to a sinfully scrumptious lunch where I’m going to tell you about your next job.”
Sam stood up straight. “Translating?”
“Of course. What other kind of job would Nick offer you?”
“Your husband needs a translator?”
“A business acquaintance of his needs one. Well, actually, a friend. And it’s your kind of thing, Sam, nothing to do with dusty old letters or poetry.”
“Well, that’s great!” Sam lifted her cup and drank some coffee. “Who’ll I be working with? Where? In what languages?”
“I don’t really know the details. You can get all that from Nick. He said he’d meet us at The Lazy Daisy and fill you in.”
“Okay. Fine.” Sam cleared her throat. “Uh, so, speaking of Nick…Did he, um, did he enjoy the weekend at Rio de Ouro?”
“Doesn’t he always? You know what good friends he and Rafe are.”
“Oh, sure.” Sam ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. “And—and I’m sure he saw other friends that weekend, too. I mean, they all know each other, don’t they? Nick. Rafe. And—and other people.”
“All of a sudden, I have the feeling I’m the one in need of a translator. What are you talking about?”
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