The fight was over. She had lost.
But she had won too. The incredible feelings ravaging her were proof of that.
For the first time since Nikos’s death, she felt like Marisa again. A woman with desires and needs, not just a mother, a daughter, a sister.
The sensual side of her nature—a side only Nikos had seen—had been locked in hibernation since the day of his death and now he’d awoken it, unleashing the burn that had once seen her beg for his touch.
He couldn’t hurt her again. She knew that now. The damage he’d caused was irreparable.
But he could give her pleasure. Pleasure like nothing else on this earth.
Nikos stared into the molten eyes still pulsing with the effects of her climax. Her body still trembled, her sweet breaths still ragged.
Arousal bit him so fiercely that the scrape of Marisa’s nails against his skull was as effective as if she’d taken his excitement in her hand. It was a struggle to draw in the air he needed to temper it, a task made harder when every inhalation drew her scent into his lungs.
He needed to get hold of himself before he...
He sucked in a sharp breath as she pressed her cheek to his and dragged the hand not kneading his skull down to his hand and placed it back against her breast. The shallowness of her breaths whispering against his skin was as erotic as the feel of the plump weightiness in the palm of his hand.
Theos...
He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes against the deep throbbing in his loins.
Nineteen months of celibacy and the effect was to make him feel like an overly excited teenager about to bed a woman for the first time.
He hadn’t felt such desire even then. The closest he’d come to feeling like that was the first time with Marisa. It had been the headiest, most erotic moment of his life. Her virginity and the length of time she’d forced him to wait for consummation had heightened the effects. That’s what he’d thought. But it had only got better. And better. And better.
Nineteen months of celibacy but his body remembered. Every cell in his body pulsated in anticipation.
Eyes wide open and burning into his, her lips dragged slowly to his mouth and hovered, lips parted but only a whisper of connection between them. The sweet taste of her breath danced onto his tongue. Her fingers dug deeper into his skull.
The last thread holding him to the earth snapped and with a groan he had no control over, Nikos captured her beautiful lips in a kiss of pure, hedonistic savagery.
Tongues entwined, teeth grazed, fingers bit into flesh. There was little comprehension that she’d shifted her body until she was straddling his lap and their bodies were crushed together.
Clasping her bottom, he rose to his feet, lifting her with him. Her legs wound around his waist as he carried her through the open door to the turned-down bed.
In seconds he was lying on top of her, kissing and nipping, their hands working together in a frenzy to strip away the barrier of clothing. Shrugging his shirt off, he covered a breast with his mouth and greedily sucked and licked, hands wrenching at the silk shorts she’d dragged down to her hips, then worshipped her other breast as he worked the shorts to her knees. She kicked them off while her hands tugged at his unbuttoned trousers, sitting up to get a better grip before she yanked them down with his underwear until they were kneeling before each other, naked and panting with lust. For no more than a second they stared into each other’s eyes. Nikos’s arousal reached boiling point to see the unashamed desire in hers and the colour slashing her face.
He pounced. She pounced.
Their mouths locked together as he fell back on top of her.
Marisa’s thighs parted with no thought from her brain. There were no thoughts. Only sensation. Such glorious, heavenly, mind-blowing sensations. The weight of Nikos on her, the feel of his skin against hers, his taste and scent on her tongue and infused in all her other senses...
The heat burning between her legs was almost too much to bear and when she felt the heavy weight of his erection right where she needed it to be, she moaned, ‘Please, Nikos. Please. Now.’
He drove inside her in one long, hard thrust.
The relief was so great that she cried out.
Arms wrapped tightly around his neck, legs hooked around his waist, mouth buried in his shoulder, Marisa closed her eyes and fell into the saturating pleasure.
Deeply he thrust into her, in and out, a fusion of heat and flesh driving each other on until she felt the thickening between her legs and clung even tighter as the pulsating ripples broke free and carried her to a peak that left her limp and boneless.
* * *
A breeze came through the opened door. Nikos closed his eyes and welcomed its cooling touch. Marisa lay on her back beside him, the sheets pulled up to her shoulders. When he’d rolled off her she’d wriggled away from him. She’d made no effort to touch him since.
They hadn’t exchanged a word since their explosion of lust. He didn’t know about her but the thumps of his heart had been impossible to speak through. It was yet to settle back into a normal beat.
It had never beat normally around her...
He took a deep breath. That kind of thought was what had made him glad to end their relationship. Too many strange thoughts in the minutes and hours after making love.
In the aftermath of lovemaking back then, Marisa would always cuddle up to him. She would put her ear to his chest and, though it had gone unspoken, he’d known she’d been listening to his heartbeat. It had been the strangest feeling, unsettling and yet somehow comforting, the way she’d taken such pleasure from the beating of a heart. His heart. She would stroke his skin too. Nuzzle her nose against his chest. Stretch against him and tilt her head to smile at him. Whisper that she loved him. He’d never believed those words but to hear them had always filled his chest with so much emotion it had hurt his heart to breathe through it.
Now she might as well be a corpse for all the life he detected from her.
But she was awake. Marisa was too deep a sleeper to fake it. When sleep came for her, she rolled onto her side and curled into a ball. He’d always hated the loss of her warmth when she did that. Often he would wake and find he’d curled into her as if his sleeping body had subconsciously sought her out. He’d never done that with anyone else either.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.
There was a long period of silence before she answered. ‘Why?’
‘It’s not like you to lie quietly after sex.’
‘It’s been a long time since we shared a bed, Nikos.’ She sighed and turned her face to his. ‘Shouldn’t you go back to your own room?’
‘Do you want me to?’
She looked back to the ceiling. ‘I think it’s best.’
‘Why?’
‘Sometimes Niki wakes early. I bring him back to bed with me.’
‘Can’t you do that with me here?’
‘It would only confuse him.’
‘Why?’
‘It just would. I don’t want him to think you and I are like other mamas and papas.’
‘Isn’t he too young to think like that?’
‘I don’t know what he thinks. He might have lots of fully formed thoughts in his head.’
‘He might,’ Nikos conceded. ‘And one of those thoughts might be a wish for his mama and papa to live together.’
‘Don’t speak like that.’ She rolled to the edge of the bed and slipped her robe on.
‘Why not?’ he challenged. ‘Is that not a normal wish for a child?’
She tightened the sash and got to her feet. ‘Nobody’s normal is the same as anyone else’s.’ She stepped out onto the balcony. A moment later, the outside light was turned off and she came back in, closing the door behind her.
Using the dim light of the moon and stars to illuminate the wa
y, she carried the baby monitor to her bedside table and sat on the bed with her back to him. ‘I mean it, Nikos. I don’t want to confuse him.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘Good.’
‘I only want to do what’s best for him, as I know you do.’
Her head dipped forward.
‘Which is why I think we should consider marrying.’
The stiffening of her back, the slow turn of her body to face him, the wide eyes and open mouth were almost comical but the situation was too serious for him to find amusement in it. Now that the idea of marriage had rooted in his head, he knew he had an uphill battle to get Marisa’s agreement but was confident he would succeed. All he had to do was pull the right strings.
As difficult as the task would be, there was already relief that the decision had been made. Nikos’s feelings for his son grew by the day. He wanted to be a real father to him, with autonomy, not someone for Niki to visit a few times a year. He wanted the security of knowing his son could never be taken from him.
He could manage a year of marriage and then separate from Marisa knowing he had the right of being a father in the law’s eyes on his side. Sure, she’d named him as the father on Niki’s birth certificate but marriage gave him much greater protection. She wouldn’t be able to deny his demand for equal access.
A year of marriage also meant a year of having Marisa in his bed and that brought relief of a different hue. Such a short time since they’d made love but already fresh awareness was coiling through him.
It had been like this before. His desire for her had intoxicated him. Almost driven him to madness.
A year of marriage would be long enough to spend his passion for her and allow them to reach the natural end his fake death had denied them.
Now all he needed to do was persuade Marisa to say yes.
CHAPTER NINE
MARISA SHOOK HER head as if expelling water from her ears. She’d been holding onto herself by the skin of her teeth, desperately fighting the craving to lie in Nikos’s arms and recapture the closeness she’d always adored after making love when he’d dropped his bombshell on her. He thought they should marry?
How was she supposed to process something like that? It would have been less of a shock if he’d told her he wanted fly to Jupiter and colonise it.
She stared at his dimly lit face, looking for a sign that he was joking. He lay stretched out on the bed, arms folded above his head, his gorgeous face expressionless, but she sensed him soaking in her shock, waiting for her to get herself together. It was an expression that made her hackles rise.
Shifting her entire body round to face him, she folded her arms tightly around her chest, afraid he would see the ferocious thudding of her heart. ‘You think we should marry?’
‘Yes.’
She shook her head again. ‘What on earth for?’
‘For Niki. For all of us.’ He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow. ‘Being away from you this week made me realise how much I need you both in my life. I want us to be a family, agapi mou.’
How she wished the strings of her heart didn’t tug so hard at this. ‘You’ve changed your tune.’
‘I didn’t know how much being a father would change my perspective on life. You had an idyllic childhood with a mother and father who were together and I want that for our son. Don’t you want that for him too?’
She’d wanted that once, she thought with a deep wrench. She’d ached for it. Her early pregnancy had been spent clinging to the futile hope that Nikos was still alive, cast away on a desert island sending smoke signals and creating a giant SOS on a beach. He would be found. She would tell him of the pregnancy and he would drop to one knee, declare his love for her and they would live happily ever after.
But that hope had always been in vain, and she’d known it. He’d fallen overboard in the Mediterranean. His crew had discovered him missing the morning after a night anchored at sea in bad weather. The last person to see him alive reported he’d been standing on deck, watching the surrounding storm. The hunt for him had been one of the largest undertakings the region had ever seen. All the small uninhabited islands in the Balearics, the area in which he’d disappeared, were thoroughly searched numerous times. No body had been found.
The sea had swallowed Nikos up. Eventually, her heart had accepted this, as well as the knowledge that her son would never know his father. When her own father was subsequently murdered, she’d had to deal with the unimaginable pain of his death and the aching realisation her son would have no father figure in his life. Once, she’d hoped Raul might be the father figure Niki would come to need. Blind desperation for help with the business, and safety and protection for her son had seen her propose to him.
And now Nikos was offering her the one thing she’d always longed for from him and all she could think was that he hadn’t cared to tell her he was alive and well until he’d learned about their son.
‘Since when do you need me in your life?’ she asked.
‘Since I came back into it.’ His gaze didn’t falter. ‘I thought we’d both moved on but what we’ve shared tonight is proof that what we had is still alive.’
Her pelvis clenched and blood thickened to remember exactly what they’d just shared and she pressed her thighs tightly together, doing everything she could not to allow all the internal sensations show on her face. ‘Is that what tonight was about?’ she asked as evenly as she could. ‘A seduction to remind me how good we are together? To soften me up with sex so I’m more open to the idea of marriage?’
‘Partly.’
She closed her eyes at the sting of his admission and turned away from him.
‘But you can’t deny the chemistry between us has been getting stronger,’ he added into the silence. ‘What we just shared was going to happen and it will happen again whether you agree to marry me or not.’
‘Your ego is as big as ever,’ she said shakily.
The mattress dipped. Tingles raced up her spine, breath catching as she felt him close the gap between them. When he placed his hands on her shoulders and pressed a kiss on the arch of her neck she had to clench her teeth to stop a moan escaping.
‘Not my ego,’ he murmured into her hair, pressing his chest into her back. ‘The truth. And I know you feel it too.’
Nikos cupped a weighty breast and rubbed his thumb over a nipple that hardened at his touch.
‘See?’ he whispered. ‘Already you want me again. There is not a minute when I’m with you when I don’t fantasise about us being together like this.’
She caught hold of the hand manipulating flesh that had always been so sensitive to his touch. Her fingers dug into his skin and stilled as if in hesitation before lacing through his.
‘This is just sex,’ she said with a sigh.
‘Good sex. Great sex. Just as we had before. Remember how good we were together? We can have that again.’
She yanked his hand off her breast and shuffled away from him. ‘If we were so good together, why didn’t you come back to me?’
He chose his words carefully, regretting his honesty in those hours after his return. If he’d known then what he knew now—if he’d felt then what he felt now—he would have handled things differently.
‘You’d moved on. You were engaged to another man. I thought I’d moved on too but no one compares to you.’ He closed the gap she’d created and put his hands on her hips. ‘There has been no one but you since the day we met, and I know we can make it work. We can be a real family and give Niki the love and stability I never had.’
She was silent for a long time but he took comfort that she didn’t pull away from him again.
‘Tell me about it,’ she said.
‘What?’
Now she did pull away, stretching across the bed to put the bedside light on. Then she turned round to face him.
‘Tell me about your childhood.’
‘It’s history,’ he dismissed.
‘Your history. If you want to marry me so Niki has the love and stability you never had, then I want you to tell me why. Explain it to me. Make me understand. Otherwise my answer is no.’
Nikos could see from the set of her jaw and her unwavering stare that Marisa wasn’t bluffing. He cursed himself for unwittingly opening the goal for her to shoot into.
He’d never brought Marisa to Mykonos when they’d been dating because he’d needed to keep a separation between them. He’d never discussed his childhood, had always made it clear from the outset in any relationship that it was an off-limits subject. But Marisa was not like his other lovers. On the surface, she’d been of the same breed as the others. Glossy. Immaculate. But surfaces were deceptive and hers was more deceptive and far deeper than most.
The first obvious difference between her and his other lovers had been her refusal to go home with him that first evening. It hadn’t been the refusal that had marked her as different but that she had meant it. Marisa hadn’t been playing a game of hunt and chase. She’d had self-respect and he’d quickly come to respect her hugely for it. She’d got closer to him than anyone ever had, and it had been a battle to fight through the intoxication of their lovemaking to resist letting her get any closer.
He’d resisted bringing her to the home of his early childhood because he’d sensed she had the capacity to dig beneath the villa’s glossy, immaculate exterior and bring the ugly truth into the light.
To bring Marisa here would have meant answering questions about a part of his life he preferred to forget.
His instincts back then had been right.
But his past had been pushing for air, swirling into his thoughts during his time in exile, the memories strengthening and blindsiding him ever since his son had come into his life.
Stomach churning, he leaned back to rest against the headboard. ‘What do you want to know?’
The Secret Behind the Greek's Return Page 10