The more she touched, the more she craved and the farther she strayed past the boundaries of self-preservation. She tested the washboard strength of his midriff—hard, powerful, just like the rest of him. An incorrigible demon of need made her whimper into his mouth.
She heard the sharp intake of his breath and knew she was lost; that in being too daring herself, she’d tacitly invited him to return the favor. His fingers skimmed the length of her torso to search out the sensitive triangle between her thigh and her hip. His thumb strayed inside the leg of her bikini. Circled insolently. Exquisitely. And found its quarry.
Against her will and every shred of common sense at her command, a spasm of tortured pleasure streaked through her. “I hate you,” she moaned, her legs falling slackly apart.
“I know,” he purred, and touched her again. “I hate you, too.”
Rampant desire consumed her. Her entire body contracted in a flood that made an utter mockery of any show of resistance she might have wanted to portray. She was so ready for him, so desperate to feel him skin to skin, heat to heat, that she tore at his shirt like a mad woman.
With a muffled growl, he swept her off her feet and carried her into the palm tree’s dense shadow which neither stars nor moon nor man-made light could penetrate. She heard the rustle and rasp of fabric and zipper as he shed his clothes. Modesty and self-preservation lost in the rapacious demands of a hunger at last acknowledged after too long a fast, she kicked off her bikini bottom, tugged loose the strings holding her top in place and flung it aside.
She reached for him, wanting to touch him as he’d touched her. Intimately, audaciously. She wanted to close her hand around him and hear him groan in an agony of pleasure. She wanted to punish him as he’d punished her and leave his control hanging by a thread, his flesh so tight and yearning for release that he begged for mercy. All this ran through her mind in a molten stream of desire.
But he was not to be so easily subjugated. Closing in on her, hot and naked, he cupped her breasts in his palms and grazed his teeth lightly over her nipples. Teasing and taunting them, with his lips and his tongue until, defeated, she uttered his name on a soft cry, and dissolved in a wash of ecstasy that robbed her of her remaining strength.
He caught her as she collapsed, eased her onto the soft grass and drove into her in one long, hot urgent thrust that sent her over the edge a second time. She clawed at his back. Sank her teeth into the curved muscle of his shoulder. Wrapped her long legs around his waist and clung to him—anything to anchor herself to him as the world tilted on its axis.
He muttered in her ear, Greek and English words jumbled together in graphic exposition of how often he’d imagined this moment, of what she was doing to him.
He called her darling and sweetheart, and told her she was the most beautiful woman on earth, and he the luckiest man.
He cursed her for making him come too soon, and within minutes grew hard inside her again and drove them both to new heights of delirium. And when the demons of passion finally were satisfied, she lay tangled with him, a breath of night-cool air teasing her limbs. The storm had passed and taken the anger with it.
The problem, though, still remained, and for all that she tried to dismiss it, it circled restlessly in her mind, tainting the warm afterglow of loving. Easing herself out of his arms, she stood up and went to retrieve her towel and bikini.
He stopped her with a hand around her ankle. “What are you doing?” he inquired lazily.
“Making myself decent again. I can hardly walk into the house stark naked, and nor can you.”
“Is our truce so soon ended?”
“What just happened wasn’t a truce, Dimitrios.”
His fingers drew mesmerizing circles up her calf. “What would you call it then, agape mou?”
“A gross error of judgment,” she said.
Sensing her disquiet, Dimitrios tightened his grip. “What is it, Brianna? Am I not the lover you thought I was? Did I disappoint you?”
“You know you didn’t,” she said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that what just happened was a huge mistake.”
Chapter 9
Very carefully he removed his hand and propped himself up on one elbow. Her lovely pale shape glimmered in the night, her skin like polished ivory against the dark lush growth of the shrubbery behind her.
“Are you worried I might have left you pregnant?” he asked gently.
“There’s that, of course,” she said, wrapping herself in her towel as though ashamed to let him see her naked body. “I’m not on the pill, and you didn’t use anything.”
“I wasn’t expecting to make love to you. But, Brianna, what does it matter if you have conceived? A child born of love is cause for celebration, and we’ll be married soon enough that no one need know we didn’t wait until our wedding night to pledge ourselves to each other.”
“A hasty marriage isn’t the solution to everything.”
“There’s another problem I don’t know about?”
“There is, and you know very well what it is.”
No sweeping stuff under the rug with her, he thought wryly. She wouldn’t let him get away with a damned thing. “You’re still angry with me.”
“My anger isn’t the issue. It’s yours that worries me. Deny it all you like, but this business with your parents is eating you alive. Put an end to it, Dimitrios, please. I’ve had enough in-fighting with my own family to last me a lifetime. Don’t ask me to take on yours, as well.”
If ruining the moment was her intention, she was succeeding admirably. All traces of passion as dead as last year’s roses, he pulled on his pants and drew up the zipper. “And exactly how do you propose I go about doing that?”
“Swallow your pride and talk to your father. Declare a truce. If you could do that with me, you can do it with him.”
“It’ll be cold day in hell before I grovel to Mihalis Poulos, my dear.”
“Come on, Dimitrios, be the bigger man,” she persisted. “You need your family at this time. Poppy needs her grandparents.”
“She has you and me and everyone else in my house. We are all the family she needs.”
“What if your parents need her?”
“They do not. My father refuses to acknowledge her, and my mother—”
“Would defy him, if she knew she had your support. Instead you go through her to try to punish him and it’s not working, Dimitrios, because he doesn’t care. The only one hurting here is the person least able to arm herself against you.”
“Leave it, Brianna,” he said harshly. “Don’t push me on this. My mind is made up.”
Her sigh gusted into the night, rife with frustration. “Is this the example you want to set for Poppy, Dimitrios? To hold on to a grudge at any price?”
“If it’s justified, yes.”
“Even if she turns on you one day? You’re human, after all. You make mistakes, just like the rest of us. What if you do something she decides she can’t forgive? How will you live with yourself?”
“It won’t happen. I won’t allow it.”
“You won’t allow…?” She lapsed into a silence that hung in the air, an implicit threat. Then she spoke again. “What if I can’t live with a man who thinks he’s God?”
He didn’t like what he heard in her voice. “Are you saying we’re at an impasse, Brianna? That this is a deal breaker and if I don’t give way on it, you won’t marry me?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“I don’t deal well with ultimatums.”
“Of course you do,” she shot back scornfully. “As long as you’re the one issuing them. And if, in the process, you trample all over a few hearts, well that’s just the price of doing business, isn’t it?”
“Whose heart am I trampling? Yours?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. Mine is made of sterner stuff. I’ve lost you once and lived to tell about it. I can do it again, if I have to. Your mother, though, she’s
a different story. Between the pair of you, you and your father are going to end up putting her in her grave.”
“So let me get this straight. Either I agree to your terms or you walk. May I ask where Poppy fits in the picture?”
“Exactly where she deserves to be—as my top priority. She isn’t the problem here, Dimitrios. You are. In your own way, you’re as dysfunctional a parent as Cecily was, and our mother before that.”
No one else would have dared speak to him so bluntly, laying bare truths he didn’t want to acknowledge. But she was different. She always had been. Beneath that delicate exterior lay a tempered-steel core of integrity that refused to be compromised. How could he not respect that?
He wiped a hand down his face. “You do realize this is emotional blackmail, pure and simple?”
“Of course,” she returned blithely. “Surprising though you might find it, my IQ does register on the positive side of zero, which leaves me well able to put two and two together and come up with four.”
Choking back a laugh, he said, “Okay, I’ll make you a deal. Marry me, and I’ll agree to try to sort things out with my mother—my mother, Brianna, not my father.”
“When?”
“Is tomorrow soon enough?”
She edged away from the palm tree and onto the pool deck, her face a study in suspicion. “It’s not like you to capitulate without a fight. Where’s the catch?”
“There isn’t one,” he said, and following her, caught her around the waist. “I want you more than I don’t want the alternative, that’s all.” And pulling her back into the shadows, he kissed her again.
At first she resisted him, holding herself stiff as a board.
“Be patient with me, agape mou,” he whispered against her closed lips. “Remember, I’m a work in progress.”
She made a soft, helpless sound in her throat and wound her arms around his neck. Her mouth bloomed under his, hot and sweet.
His body quickened in a burst of need that staggered him. Bracing himself against the tree, he tossed aside her towel and yanked down his fly. In one swift move, he lifted her so that she straddled him, and slid to the hilt in her sleek and eager flesh.
She convulsed around him almost immediately; spasm after mind-numbing spasm that pushed him beyond anything mortal man could hope to withstand. Desperate to prolong the pleasure, to distract himself from the siren song that was her body, he doggedly recited to himself the months of the year. Ianouarios…Fevrouarios…Martios….
April made a fool of him. He came in a blinding rush, spilling into her endlessly, violently, until he had nothing left to give. Drained, and still buried inside her, he sagged at the knees and lowered them both to the grass, too depleted to support his own weight, let alone hers. “If you don’t end up pregnant after that,” he panted, when at last he was able to speak again, “then one or both of us needs to see a fertility specialist.”
Her breast rose in a sigh. “I didn’t mean to play Russian roulette again. You caught me off guard.”
“I caught me, as well.” He wrapped her more securely against him. “Not surprising, really. I’m making up for four years of lost time.”
“It wasn’t all bad. At least you ended up with Poppy.”
He’d feared all along that sooner or later he’d have to share everything with her; that she deserved better than the laundered truth he’d so far given her. If golden opportunity was what he’d been waiting for, the one she’d just handed him couldn’t be beaten. “And I wouldn’t be without her,” he began. “Until you came back, she was my whole life, but—”
She stopped him dead with an ear-splitting shriek as a jet of cold water sluiced over them. Too late, he realized that the in-ground sprinkler system had been turned off only where the tables and tent were set up. The rest of the grounds were receiving their nightly soaking.
Cursing, he rolled to his feet and took her with him. Another blast caught them in the crossfire, streaking over his pants and spraying the length of her spine. Grabbing her towel, he thrust it at her and shoved her toward the pool deck, then raced back to collect their remaining clothes. He didn’t fancy having one of tomorrow’s guests stumbling over her bikini or his boxers.
Joining her, he said, “Not exactly how I’d hoped to end the evening, but now you know how I keep my gardens so green and lush.”
Drops of water spiked her eyelashes and clung to the ends of her hair like so many scattered diamonds. Her teeth were chattering, likely as much from shock as cold, and she looked thoroughly offended. “I thought someone had turned a hose on us.”
“It’d take more than that to put out the fire between us, agape mou!” he laughed. “Come on, I’ll sneak you in by the side door and up the back stairs. With any luck, you’ll make it to your room without bumping into anyone.”
“I can only hope,” she said tartly. “I’ve had about as many surprises as I can handle for one night.”
Close to an international crowd of a hundred showed up the next afternoon, among them several personnel Brianna had met at the hospital over the past two weeks. The vast majority of guests, though, were strangers, and although some did a double take, most managed to mask their surprise when Dimitrios introduced her as Poppy’s aunt and his future bride.
“How very lovely to meet you,” they murmured politely, giving her a discreet once-over.
And “What a refreshing return to normality for little Poppy, to have two parents again.”
They didn’t add, “Especially when one’s a dead ringer for her late mother,” but Brianna was sure that must be what they were thinking. Once out of earshot, they gathered in little cliques and exchanged knowing glances over their champagne flutes and teacups.
“I imagine you’re finding this a bit of a baptism by fire,” Noelle remarked sympathetically at one point. Petite, blond and elegant in lavender shantung, she looked more like a ballet dancer than the head of a prestigious transplant team, and was a perfect foil for Dimitrios’s dark good looks. “Don’t let it get you down, Brianna. Just be yourself and enjoy the afternoon.”
Easier said than done, though. She and Dimitrios made a handsome pair and Brianna felt very much the third wheel, tagging along in their wake as they mingled with the crowd. Still, she made the effort, smiling and nodding in all the right places, but the strain must have shown because after a while, Dimitrios took pity on her and sent her off to the refreshment tent for a reviving cup of tea.
Not a good idea, as it turned out. Only a few people clustered around the linen-draped buffet table, among them four women, all Americans, were helping themselves to an array of tiny pastries and deep in conversation not meant for anyone else’s ears, least of all hers.
“Marrying the identical-twin aunt takes keeping it all in the family a bit too far, if you ask me,” one in robin’s-egg-blue brocade declared.
“Not the smartest choice he could have made, I agree,” another put in. “If she’s anything like Cecily, he’s in for a load of trouble he doesn’t need, what with his daughter being so ill and all. Noelle’s a much better candidate.”
The third nodded conspiratorially. “Grist for the gossip mills, though. The buzz around Athens is he met both sisters at some sort of celebrity yachting party years ago, and this is the one he was really after, but Cecily put the moves on him and trapped him into marrying her instead.”
“Just goes to show even Dimitrios Giannakis makes a mistake once in a while. Kind of gives hope to the rest of us mere mortals, doesn’t it?”
“That’s harsh,” the remaining member of the quartet said. “If the rumors are true and this is a love match that’s been forced onto the back burner all this time, I say good luck to them.”
“And they’ll need it. Sixty-seven percent of second marriages end in divorce, and I’d lay money on theirs being one of them,” robin’s-egg-blue brocade pronounced sanctimoniously.
Resisting an uncharitable urge to stuff the entire tray of pastries down the woman’s throat, Brianna t
ook aim and fired a shot of her own. “If saving face is at all important to you, you might want to keep that opinion to yourself,” she said sweetly, her hand admirably steady as she accepted a cup of Earl Grey from the uniformed maid manning the sterling tea service. “Dimitrios and I, you see, plan to be one of the remaining twenty-three percent.”
The collective gasp that followed indicated she’d scored a direct hit. It should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. Rather, it underscored what she’d believed from the outset. She and Dimitrios were getting too far ahead of themselves.
Just that morning, on the way back from visiting Poppy, she’d tried talking him out of going public so soon with news of their engagement, if such it could be called. “It’s not the time,” she’d argued. “This afternoon’s about honoring the people on your guest list. It’s nor fair to steal their thunder.”
He’d disagreed. “Face it, Brianna, when it comes to news like this, there’s no such thing as the right time. It’s going to cause a stir, no matter when we announce it. We might as well get it over and done with.”
“But I’m not ready to broadcast it to the whole world.”
“Why not? Are you still having second thoughts about us?”
“No,” she said slowly. “It’s more that I’m still getting used to the idea of us being a couple, and I don’t want to share it with anyone else just yet.”
“That’s all very fine, sweetheart,” he reminded her, “but you forget my father already knows. This is happy news, Brianna, the best, and I’m not about to stand back and let him taint it with his own particular brand of poisonous cynicism.”
Against her better judgment, she’d allowed herself to be persuaded. But what she’d just overheard warned her that Mihalis Poulos didn’t have a monopoly on poison. And once again Carter’s advice came back to haunt her. Take care, Brianna….
We’re rushing into this too fast, she thought miserably. Too much is going on, and we’re losing sight of the most important person here, who is Poppy. The minute this party’s over, I’m going to talk to Dimitrios. I have to convince him to slow down.
The Giannakis Bride Page 11