‘It’s kind of soothing,’ he remarked as if he’d been thinking along similar lines. ‘He’s so small and helpless, he brings out my softer side, the part that makes men want to nurture and protect.’
‘Not every man has it.’
‘I’m surprised that I have it,’ he admitted. ‘I had no idea I was a baby kind of man until I had to take care of him on the flight over here.’
‘Just think how it would ruin your image if this little scene ever got out.’
‘What image?’ Dark-brown eyes speared a look at her.
Zoe felt that look all the way down deep into intimate places. ‘The ruthless tycoon with his focus concentrated on money and power,’ she explained, dipping her eyes so she didn’t have to look at him.
Lifting her cup to her mouth, she decided not to mention his equally ruthless reputation with the women he took as lovers then discarded once the novelty had worn off. On paper, a man like that should run a mile in the opposition direction from a scenario like this one.
‘Having money and power means you have to be ruthless, or some other bright spark with his eye on both will strip you clean at the first glimpse of weakness.’
Zoe took a few seconds to think about that then decided that he was probably right. ‘Well, a helpless young baby—or a child of any size, for that matter—does not go with that kind of ambition. The desire to nurture and protect gets compromised long the way.’
‘Are we talking about Theo and your father now?’ he questioned.
Were they? She hadn’t thought she was thinking of them when she’d said it. ‘Out with the weak one and bring in the stronger one,’ she murmured, leaning forward to put down her cup.
And that, Anton noted, was a strike aimed directly at him and his position in Theo’s life. ‘I am not and I never have been your grandfather’s heir, Zoe.’ He felt compelled to defend himself.
‘No?’ She shrugged as if the statement was irrelevant. ‘You still spent the last twenty-odd years being honed by him into the person you are now.’
‘Is what you are saying that you don’t like that person?’ Relaxed though he seemed with her brother cradled to his chest, she could see that he was starting to get angry with her.
Even with a glimpse of that anger Zoe was not prepared to hold back what she said next. ‘You lied, you cheated and you kidnapped us for a purpose I am still waiting to find out. You tell me what there is there to like.’
‘Just this evening you thanked me for kidnapping you,’ Anton countered dryly.
‘As I also said this evening,’ Zoe parried, ‘I can appreciate the difference between Islington and here. He’s fallen asleep.’
Coolly she shifted the attention back to Toby, slid up off the sofa then bent to take the baby back.
Anton did not try to stop her but, as she carefully eased the sleeping boy from him, their eyes drew level and, without wanting to do it, she glanced up.
It was another one of those moments when everything else just went still, shut down, turned off. His eyes wore a rich dark-brown lustre that spiralled into black and threw her right back into the garden when she’d felt the power of his attraction almost swallow her up. He was so close she could feel his breath feathering her cheekbones, felt a prickling along her nerve ends when he lifted up his hand and gently removed a lock of her hair away from her throat that had slithered forward. Her hands were cupped around the sleeping baby but she was more aware of the backs of her fingers pressing against the hard warmth of Anton’s chest. The sexually aroused pulse coming from him beat all around her so she released a stifled little gasp. Heat flooded her bones and she dragged her eyes away from him, ostensibly to concentrate on collecting her brother safely into her arms, but really she knew she was looking away from what was happening between them. The thing that was growing stronger and less easy to break away from each time it happened now.
Anton watched her lift the boy onto her shoulder then straighten up. She was flushed and there was a slight tremor going on in the hand she used to support the baby’s back. Aware that he was feeling the heavy drag of desire on his body, he remained where he was, watching her as she began walking up and down while rubbing the boy’s back.
He wished he understood this sexual pull he felt for Zoe Kanellis. She should not be his type. He liked his women around his own age with a level of sexual sophistication that saved him having to question if it was good policy to lure them into his bed. But this woman pricked his conscience almost as much as she pricked him in other parts.
And what was she, besides being Theo’s granddaughter, that was? She was a twenty-two-year-old bright, beautiful and intelligent straight-A student with the kind of career prospects some would kill to have. She should be scrambling to take the world by storm, yet she’d thrown it all in to care for her brother without a single regret as far as he could tell.
That kind of decision-making required very level-headed maturity, which he admired in her. Or was that part of her the attraction? The novelty of meeting a woman who did not put her own needs before everything, and wasn’t selfish or vain, and was so unaware of her own charms that she could walk up and down in a pair of grey cotton pyjamas with a cartoon-character transfer printed on the camisole top?
Then again what those pyjamas did for her figure held a novel appeal in itself. The body inside them moved with a slow, sensual rhythm that highlighted each curve and lithe slender muscle.
‘You should go to bed,’ Zoe said, wishing he would just get up and go away now.
How did they do it? How did they go from sharing a frankly chilly conversation over a baby’s feeding bottle to this, this throbbing physical tension that controlled the very air she drew into her lungs?
She heard him stand up as she bent over the cot to gently place the sleeping baby down in it. As she did so, the tips of her breasts brushed against the rail and she let out a gasp because her nipples were so taut they stung sharply as they grazed the wooden bar.
Oh, please get me out of here! She closed her eyes and sent the prayer winging off into the ether. When eventually she straightened up and turned around, he was waiting for her by the door.
Why?
You know why, she told herself helplessly and started trembling as she made herself walk towards him. She kept her eyes lowered to the floor as she did. They stepped out of Toby’s room together. They crossed the landing to her door. It was still swinging open the way she had left it.
‘Goodnight, then,’ she mumbled, and hated it that the mumble sounded husky and thick.
‘One thing,’ he said, only pulling to a stop once his shoulder rested against the frame by her head. He was all height and bulk and raw sexuality. ‘I will be leaving here in the morning at first light.’
Zoe looked up, caught so off-guard by his announcement she left her expression exposed. It was mad, and she knew it, but she did not want him to go away and leave them.
Anton eased out a sigh. ‘It is right that I leave as I promised you I would do,’ he murmured. ‘Even kidnapping cheats know when it is time to start playing fair.’
He wasn’t really talking about what happened yesterday, he was talking about what was happening right here and now. Zoe nodded in agreement but couldn’t say anything. A tight band of tension had taken a grip on her throat. Desperate to get away from him before she did or said something really stupid, like begging him not to go, she went to brush past him but he lifted up a hand and stroked a finger down the middle of the cartoon character’s famous shape.
‘Lucky Snoopy,’ he husked.
Zoe sucked in a breath, a thick and trembling shudder of a breath, as all the feelings going haywire inside just lost their final fingernail-grip. Before she knew what she was doing, she had turned towards him again. One look was all that it took; one wide-eyed and helpless electric-blue look and she was raising her arms up to wind them around his shoulders, and leaning towards him, lifting her mouth up. Then she was kissing him like she had been waiting to do it for al
He actually fought her for a few seconds, lifting his hands up to clasp them around her wrists with the intention of breaking the link she had on him so he could push her away. Maybe she should have let him. Maybe she should have remembered that she didn’t even like him and that he was the enemy but she just clung more tightly and leaned into him.
A thick, soft, cursing groan vibrated in his throat. Then he was dropping his hands again so he could close his arms around her and it was Anton who coaxed her lips open wider to indulge in a kiss the likes of which Zoe had never received before.
It was a full, undiluted onslaught of his passionate sensuality that shocked her as much as it excited her.
Just like the heat coming from him, his hard, muscular firmness, the contained power in his arms holding her close. She’d gone from being desperate to see the back of him to so desperate to keep him right here she just clung on. She felt dizzily drunk and confused by so many different emotions but she kissed him back with every ounce of hungry desire that she had. When he speared a set of long fingers into her hair and tilted her head back, the move broke the grip she held on his nape, and her hands slithered around to his front, somehow managing to find their way inside his robe as they did.
His shudder of pleasure as her palms made contact with his skin thrilled her.
Then she wasn’t capable of thinking anything because his other hand had slipped beneath her top and was covering her breast. She started trembling, the full force of her attention locked onto those long fingers as they began to stroke and caress. A hot tide of desire swept down through her body. She gasped out feverishly when he grazed her nipple, already standing taut and stinging with the most delicious heat.
She moved restlessly against him, encouraging him with the unknowing instincts of a fledgling siren. The kiss was a drug she wanted to overdose on, as was the feel of his hands stroking slow circles of exploration across her back, her waist, her ribs, then back to her breasts. But, when he clasped her hips to ease her into even closer contact with his body, she felt the power of his arousal with a start of shock that was enough to prize her mouth free.
His eyes were as dark as she’d ever seen them, bands of heat firing across his taut cheeks. ‘You’re playing with fire, glikia mou,’ he warned very seriously.
She might have winced or blinked. In truth she no longer knew what she was doing. His lips were still parted, darker and fuller because of the blood pumping into them. She felt the beating pulse of her own swollen lips as she quivered out a small, trembling breath. And that long, hard shaft of male arousal still pressed against her abdomen, causing a wash of moisture to gather between her legs.
Legs that were threatening to break down beneath her. ‘So, do we stop?’ He tried again, the words arriving from somewhere so deep inside him the question was barely clear enough for her dizzy brain to grasp.
Stop … She picked up from what felt like a long way off. Stop, let him go, remember exactly who he is. Rolling her tongue across the pulsing warmth of her lips, she tried to find the strength to give the right answer but it just would not leave her aching throat. His eyes held her eyes, dark and deep and ever so slightly mocking, but she still found herself drowning in them, in the fierce edge of desire she could feel holding every one of his muscles taut. In the end he released a low sound like a laugh, then the muscles in his arms flexed. For a horrible second she thought he was going make the decision for her and put her away from him. In sheer panic, she parted her lips again and whispered, ‘I don’t want to stop.’
A single flame shot from his eyes and then he was reclaiming her mouth with a deep, sensual fervour that flung the whole thing onto a different level, and he was firing up so many senses it was all she could do just to hang on.
Her hands were buried in his hair now, her body moving to the sensual rhythm of his. Her legs felt so tingly and weak she could barely stand up on them and, as if he recognised the problem, he bent and scooped her up against her chest.
The kiss did not break as he crossed her bedroom; it still clung when he set her down beside the bed. She didn’t notice the efficient way he dispensed with his robe and her top—not until she felt the coolness of cotton against her back. She opened her eyes in time to soak in the sheer masculine beauty of his naked bronzed torso as he lowered himself down beside her then drew her back into his arms.
‘Anton …’ she whispered, and did not know why she was whispering his name like that.
He seemed to understand, though, because he fed out unevenly, ‘I know,’ and stroked his hand down the flat surface of her front then beneath her pyjama bottoms, sending shockwaves of taut, tingling sensation skimming across her flesh.
She cried out, in no control of the way her hips arched up towards those seeking fingers. He caught her up to him and completed the smooth, invading stroke into the pool of moist heat and watched her as she just went wild. Her heartbeat thundered out of control as his tongue darted into her mouth and began a sensual mimicking of what his fingers were doing to her while she clutched at his shoulders and shook.
He was hot and hard and felt like satin. Every sensitised nerve in her body craved his attention; every glide of his fingers, every touch with his mouth, drove her deeper and deeper into a yawning black chasm filled with sparkling, bright starbursts of blinding light. She writhed and quivered and he kissed her so deeply and so often that she never got the chance to even think of pulling back from the brink.
The trail of his fingers dipped into that molten place and sent her twisting restlessly onto her side, her limbs curling upwards in a roll of ecstasy. He muttered something and gently straightened her out again, trailing away her final piece of clothing, then deepening that limb-curling caress until she was sobbing his name out again and again. She vaguely noticed that there was a raw, trembling urgency vibrating behind the determined patience with which he was arousing her, higher and higher, until she wondered if she was going to pass out through lack of oxygen getting through to her lungs.
Although she was breathing in short, frantic gasps she did not feel she was gaining anything from it.
But all of that raw-edged patience fled when she touched him. Her restless fingers brushed against him by accident at first, then not by accident when she discovered the thick velvet beauty of his long, swollen length. He captured her wrist and drew her hand away, shuddering as he did so, and cursing softly as he pushed her flat then rolled on top of her, overwhelming every inch of her slender frame with his stronger, harder more powerful body.
He let her feel his weight, the sweat-slicked heated tremors of his pleasure. Her breasts were crushed against hair-roughened hot skin, their distended tips so sensitised she could barely stand the aggressive rasp. When he let go of her wrist, she wrapped her arm around his shoulders, not thinking of anything else but the aching need for more of what he was making her feel.
His mouth did not leave her mouth, not once, keeping her so sunk down in the swirling mists it did not occur to her what was going to come next until it was too late. He settled his hips between her spread thighs and she felt for the first time the probe of his manhood nudge against the tender heart of her sex just a short, blinding second before he drove inside, forging his route like a conquering warrior claiming his prize.
It was too late for her to warn him as the screaming shock of sudden agony split through her like forked lightning, arching her spine and clenching her muscles on a high-pitched, pained cry.
Anton froze like a man turned to marble. He stared down at her as she flicked open her eyes. Bright, spearing sparks of vivid blue attacked his shock like piercing pin-pricks. He had never felt so totally shattered about anything in his entire life.
‘No,’ he ground out unsteadily.
Zoe couldn’t say anything; she was feeling so very shattered herself. His full pulsing length was buried inside her, no thought to hold back any of it, no compromise at all. And her muscles were working along him like some hot, bloody torment.
‘You cannot be,’ he ground into her shock-whitened face.
‘I hate you,’ she choked, then she cried out again for a completely different reason when he tried to withdraw. ‘Don’t you dare—don’t you dare!’ she gasped then. ‘Oh God,’ she groaned when he stilled instantly, severe tension scoring his face. ‘I hate you,’ she moaned out a second time. ‘You did not deserve this but I want you—I want you!’
Reaching up, he pushed her damp, tangled hair away from her face. His fingers were trembling, Zoe noticed. Remorse glittered in the heavy darkness of his eyes. But when he made a gentle move with his hips it wasn’t pain that made Zoe writhe and quiver, and the remorse in him turned into desire as he set a hot, sensual rhythm that lost her in layer upon layer of erotic excitement. Her eyes clung to his with an intensity which heightened the whole experience. He kept kissing the increasingly more helpless gasps from her lips.
‘Anton,’ she kept on breathing his name and each time she said it his rhythm grew fiercer, as if hearing her chant his name fed his fire.
When she felt herself reaching a vital pinnacle between this moment and what was about to happen, he buried his fingers in her hair and gave her the full, devouring force of his kiss. She tipped, she cried out, she clung to his shoulders as she tumbled, she fell apart beneath him and all around him, and finally experienced the dizzy pleasure of feeling him fall apart with her.
The flowing river of release she was floating down barely lasted a minute before he was ruining it, grating out a word in Greek that made her jerk in startled dismay. Her eyes flew open. She found him glaring down at her, the next second he was levering himself up and throwing himself to his feet by the bed.
Totally gloriously magnificent in his nakedness, he stood like he’d been turned into a bronze statue, the potency of his sex still a powerful thing to behold, which surprised Zoe; she had no previous experience to call upon to know if this was normal.
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