The past was written and nothing either of them did or said now could change it. The love that had bound them together had been irrevocably broken...
But the passion hadn’t. Their passion still blazed brightly. Their passion was the only thing that mattered now. His passion for her and her passion for him.
Breathing deeply, filling his lungs with her scent, he adopted a silky tone. ‘I seem to remember you wanted things to happen faster in the bedroom. You didn’t want me to back off there.’
‘But that’s another thing I felt controlled over,’ she said, failing to grasp the opportunity to switch the conversation to a lighter tempo. ‘I was desperate for us to make love.’
‘You should have told me.’
‘I did!’
‘You should have told me you felt controlled,’ he clarified.
‘I didn’t feel controlled at the start of our relationship, but after you proposed and everything suddenly started moving at breakneck speed I was too indoctrinated into a believing a man’s word is law to say we needed to slow down, and then as the wedding got closer my anxieties crept up on me. When my parents joined us...it was as though all my fears that I would end up with a marriage like theirs crystallised, and I panicked.’
‘Are they the same fears that stopped you forming another relationship?’
Startled eyes met his. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You stayed a virgin.’ He looked her squarely in the eye. ‘Or am I wrong?’
He didn’t know if he wanted to be wrong. Or right. If he was right then Helena had spent the past three years without a warm body beside her, just as he had, but their reasons would be very different. He hadn’t had a choice. He’d been unable to move on, not with Helena lodged in his psyche, preventing him from finding desire for another.
If Helena had stayed single, then it would have been a deliberate choice.
‘Shall I take your silence as an admission?’ He drained his cocktail. ‘You should have told me.’
Helena would rather have shaved off her hair than tell him. It would have been tantamount to admitting she’d spent the past three years pining for him, which she hadn’t, of course, but Theo would definitely have spotted an opportunity.
‘It wasn’t important.’
‘I disagree. If I’d known you were a virgin I would have taken more care. I could have hurt you.’
‘But you didn’t.’ He would never hurt her.
His huge shoulders rose in a shrug. He looked away from her, out into the distance. ‘You really did go back into your shell, didn’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You left me because you wanted to be free.’ He looked sharply back at her with a distinct flash of anger in his eyes. ‘What the hell have you been doing? I never expected you to turn into a wild party animal, but this...?’
He shook his head and made a grunt-like laugh. ‘I have believed these past years that you were living a boring life with a boring accountant or a boring teacher, having boring sex, everything boring but for you perfect.’
‘Are you saying I’m boring?’ she said, trying to turn it into a joke but shrivelling inside at the acuteness of Theo’s observation. She had tried dating when she’d completed her masters. She’d had dinner with two accountants and one maths teacher. On paper they’d each been perfect for her. None of them would have controlled her or interfered with her career. She’d had a strong suspicion the maths teacher would have been delighted to become a house husband and raise any children, should the opportunity arise.
The opportunity had not arisen, not least because each date ended the same way, with Helena paying her share of the bill, politely thanking them for a lovely evening and then getting the nearest public transport home, never to see them again.
It shamed her that, as lovely and as perfect as these men were, they’d bored her rigid. They were so earnest, so right-on...
She should have snapped one of them up. They might be boring but wasn’t that what she wanted? None of them would have steamrollered her into anything by dint of their personality. Mainly because none of them had had a personality.
In short, none of them had been Theo...
He laughed. ‘You are the least boring person I know but you’re like a frightened bird, terrified to leave the nest and embrace life. You’ve had all the opportunity in the world to explore the different sides that make you Helena and explore them on your terms away from your father’s control and influence, and you’ve squandered them. You haven’t even tried.’
‘That’s not fair,’ she said, stung. She had tried! Those three disastrous dates proved that.
He grimaced before placing his glass on a curved bench close to them, then stood before her and gently cupped her face.
He gazed into her eyes for the longest time. Under the moonlight, his eyes had a silver hue and they danced with the energy that was always in them whatever colour shone out.
He pressed his lips to hers for a moment and breathed her in. ‘You, agapi mou, are beautiful. There is not a heterosexual man alive who wouldn’t want you. You also have a deeply...’ he brushed his lips from her mouth to her ear, sending tiny shivers of delight pirouetting over her skin ‘...sensual side. I have seen it. I have tasted it. The wildness that lives in you...you have locked it back in its box when it needs its freedom. You hide yourself away...’
She forced her mind out of the stupor into which the velvet of his low voice was pulling her. Why had she gone on those disastrous dates? Because the week she’d started her final year of training, she’d gone into a newsagent’s and seen Theo’s broad face smiling at her from the magazine rack. The shock at seeing him had landed like a punch in her throat just as it had every time before. But that time had been different and she’d known she had to do something to help her speed up the healing process.
The dates hadn’t worked.
In the three years since she’d left Theo she hadn’t met a single man who made her feel anything. She couldn’t even imagine kissing another man without shuddering.
She mustn’t let Theo suspect the truth. She couldn’t bear for him to think she had spent the intervening years pining for him.
‘We don’t all have the time or money to go out partying with a new supermodel every weekend like you.’ She put her hands to his chest and pushed. ‘You have the cheek to ask me what I’ve been doing since we parted? I could ask the same of you—in fact, I will. Where do you get off making judgements about my sex life when you can’t stay with one woman for more than five minutes before your eyes stray to her replacement?’
Under the moonlight, she saw a tick pulse on his jaw. But then he smiled and reclaimed the space between them. He traced a finger across her cheek. ‘How do you know so much about my sex life, agapi mou?’
Fear and pride had her retort come without hesitation. ‘It’s hard to miss when it’s always splattered over the news.’
Reading about him had become an addiction. It was almost as if he’d taunted her from the pages of the glossy magazines, as if he knew she would seek news of him and chose the greatest weapon at his disposal to get back at her: her jealousy.
Theo watched all the emotions blazing over Helena’s face and tilted his head, waiting for the burst of satisfaction to know she had followed his life, just as he’d followed hers.
The Helena he’d known had not been interested in current affairs, be it gossip or serious news articles.
She would never know those women had been mere window dressing, a panacea to show the world—and Helena—that his humiliation at being jilted had been a mere flesh wound.
She would never know that the desire burning in him only burned for her. By the time he was finished with her, all the desire would be sated and he would be able to move on.
He traced his fingers lightly to her graceful neck and drifted them down to her bare shoulders, murmu
ring, ‘You need to stop hiding yourself away and stop pretending.’
‘I don’t—’
‘You chain yourself to your work and pretend it counts as a social life. We made love this afternoon and already you’re demanding we go back to Sidiro and pretend that nothing happened. I will go along with it and pretend too, if that is what you really want, but we both know it will be a lie.’ He dipped his face and nuzzled into her neck. Her skin felt fevered. ‘I will still want you. I will be with you in your office and in my head I will be reliving every moment of our lovemaking.’
Her breath hitched.
‘I always imagine us together. I watch you work on your computer and I imagine you taking off your sensible shirt for me in the seductive way you used to strip yourself when you were desperate to tempt me into making love to you.’ He flattened a hand over her breasts. Her nipples were as hard as her skin was hot. ‘I watch you working at the big table on the blueprints and I imagine myself bending you over and—’
‘Stop,’ she moaned, but her cheek rubbed into his head and her fingers groped at his shirt.
‘Am I turning you on?’ He found her mouth and kissed her savagely. ‘Remember when you used to talk to me like this? When you told me all the ways you wanted me to make love to you and all the ways you wanted to make love to me?’ He found the pins holding her hair together and pulled them free. Her hair tumbled like a fragrant cloud. ‘What’s holding you back from acting all your fantasies out now? If you have your way, this will be our only night together.’
Taking hold of her hand, he placed it on his throbbing excitement. ‘Do you feel that? Tell me it’s not the same for you. Tell me you don’t ache for me as I ache for you.’
Her eyes were wide, her breaths little pants. For a long time she did nothing but stare at him. And then she bunched the long skirt of her dress up to her thigh, took hold of his hand and placed it at the heart of her femininity. The heat he found there was hot enough to burn. And it told him better than any verbal response that it was the same for her too.
With more strength than even he realised he possessed, Theo swept her into his arms. Moving swiftly, he carried her to his bedroom. By the time he placed her on the bed, she’d already unbuttoned his shirt.
He made deft work of removing her dress and underwear—she had been wearing knickers, the minx—while she scratched and pulled at his clothing to free him too.
Naked, he pressed her down so she lay flat on her back, then began worshipping his goddess. There was not an inch of flesh he didn’t kiss or drag his tongue over, not an inch of flesh he didn’t inhale. And there was not an inch of flesh on his own body that didn’t blaze with the passion consuming him.
Their lovemaking earlier had been too urgent for him to luxuriate in the act. This time he was determined to go slow and bring to life the fantasies he’d been dreaming of for three years. But it was hard to take his time with Helena writhing and moaning beneath him, her sounds and movements firing his passion.
He remembered the first time he’d seen her naked and how painfully shy she had been. She’d covered her breasts with an arm and placed her hand over her pubis to hide it from him. Within weeks she’d lost all her inhibitions. She would prance around naked, revelling in the effect her nakedness had on him. Always she would try to tempt him into making love. The control it had taken to resist performing that ultimate act had been torture defined. If he’d known then that the control he’d exhibited, which had been only because he’d wanted their wedding night to mean something pure and beautiful, would be twisted by Helena into an act of control over her, he would have said to hell with it and made her his entirely.
Then none of this would have happened. With no Helena-shaped mysteries to unravel, he’d have been able to move on with his life. But if he’d moved on with his life they wouldn’t be there now and the pleasure consuming him would never have existed.
And, Theos, this was pleasure defined. Hungry, dark, all-consuming pleasure. It almost made his three-year abstinence worth it. Tonight, Helena was his. All his. Exactly as she should be.
At the first touch of Theo’s tongue on her swollen nub, Helena closed her eyes and sank into the magic she knew would follow. When his hand dragged upwards over her belly and to her breasts, squeezing the highly sensitised flesh, she moaned and captured his fingers in hers, linking them together.
Oh, but he knew what she needed and wanted. He knew better than she.
This was why she’d been unable to find desire for another. It was not possible that she could respond to anyone else in this way, a mass of sensation and so alive. Theo made her feel as if she could fly.
The hand not clasped in hers cupped her bottom and gently raised it, slightly changing the angle with which he was pleasuring her. It was all that was needed to send her soaring. Crying his name, Helena rode the tsunami of pulsations that throbbed from her core into every crevice of her body.
She was still floating when he slowly kissed his way up her body. His face over hers, he brushed a lock of hair from her eyes and kissed her. Their lips fused together, he entered her.
Their lovemaking felt as if it were happening in slow motion. Every thrust, every brush of his chest against her breasts, every squeeze of their laced fingers, every dance of their tongues consumed her entirely. Theo consumed her.
When they were finally spent and she was cocooned in the safety of his arms, her cheek on his chest, his heartbeat thrumming beneath her ear, unbidden tears suddenly filled her eyes. She blinked them away. This moment was too special to allow doubts and fears to spoil it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE SCULPTOR’S STUDIO was nestled in a remote hillside. Theo drove them there himself in his favourite sports car, roof down, music blaring. Wearing one of her new summer dresses, hair loose and whipping around her face, Helena felt an exhilaration she’d not experienced in so long that she closed her eyes to savour it.
She didn’t fight the images that immediately popped to the forefront of her mind. They were images to savour as much as the exhilaration was.
Her body became suffused with heat as she remembered all the ways they’d made love throughout the night.
She pressed her thighs together in a futile effort to counter the thickening and pulsing ache between her legs.
They’d had breakfast on his private balcony. After devouring his food, he’d devoured her.
She should be exhausted but that feeling of being alive still buzzed on her skin. There was a zesty energy in her veins. Her throat kept wanting to expel bursts of laughter.
And beside her sat the man who’d brought all these feelings out of her as effortlessly as he controlled the powerful car.
‘I love this song!’ Theo suddenly said, pressing the controls on the steering wheel to turn the volume up. It was a jaunty summer tune Helena had never heard before but she soon found her foot tapping along to the beat while Theo massacred the lyrics by tunelessly but enthusiastically singing along.
She’d forgotten singing was the one thing he was useless at, but nothing could stop Theo doing something he enjoyed.
Music, like everything else Theo had introduced her to, had been forgotten when she’d returned to her life in London. The only music system she had was an old radio she’d been given by her grandmother on her fifteenth birthday.
The studio, when they reached it, was a huge white building neatly hidden away on a large plot of land. A diminutive man of around fifty, dressed in ragged jeans and T-shirt nominally protected by a black apron, hurried out of the wide-open doors to meet them.
‘Theodoros, it’s good to see you again,’ he said, speaking so quickly Helena struggled to keep up.
Theo shook his hand and then introduced him to Helena. ‘Do you have time to give her a tour of your studio before we get down to business?’
‘It would be my pleasure.’
Walkin
g past Titanic-sized slabs of marble, they entered the vast space. The temperature dropped and the noise level increased the moment they stepped over the threshold.
Helena found her eyes struggling not to pop out of her head. The interior more closely resembled a warehouse than anything, an interior filled with a dozen people all turning different-sized slabs of marble into works of art. One wall was lined with shelves containing foot-high marble statuettes of religious themes, while dozens and dozens of marble slabs at least ten feet high were raised on boards and in varying stages of finish. Whatever stage any of the works were at, the one common denominator was that they were exquisite. These were works Donatello would have been proud to create.
Takis, the sculptor whose name they all worked under, introduced her to his newest apprentice, a young Englishwoman covered in white dust who happily showed her the bust she was working on. Her talent took Helena’s breath away. The face appearing in the marble already appeared to pulse with life.
‘Don’t you get scared?’ Helena asked her.
‘Of what?’
‘Making a wrong mark.’ Architecture was as precise as sculpting must be, but creating plans was an evolving process. She didn’t draw the first line of a building knowing that if she got it wrong she would not be able to correct it. If the wrong mark was made on marble, it couldn’t be deleted or the marble scrunched up like a piece of paper and another magically produced to start again. She had a luxury this woman didn’t have and yet she envied her the nerve she must have to make that first mark. Do or die.
If Helena were the sculptor, she would probably spend a year plucking up the courage. Theo, on the other hand, wouldn’t think twice. He’d make the mark in a heartbeat.
The woman smiled, her eyes shining. ‘It’s terrifying!’
Soon, Helena and Theo were led to Takis’s office at the far end of the warehouse. Judging by the mess, it was a room rarely cleaned, but Takis was not in the least embarrassed by the state of it. He rummaged through a drawer and eventually pulled out a thick sheaf of A4 paper and handed it to Theo.
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