by Olivia Gates
He exhaled, shook his head. “I think he pushed himself too far, in his need never to let me win, or at least to never let me go unpunished for winning.”
“You still feel responsible.” This was her own statement.
He didn’t refute it. “I never understood his enmity. We weren’t rivals. We worked in complementary fields. We should have been allies.”
“That’s what he said…once.”
This was news to him. Disturbing news. The bleakness gripping his face deepened. “But he disapproved of me and my origins too much to accept that he could put his hand in mine.”
Her gaze, her voice, sharpened. “My father wasn’t a snob.”
He shrugged, unaffected by her sudden resentment. “He wouldn’t have considered it snobbery. Certain things are too deeply engraved in the Greek persona. But you wouldn’t know that. You were born here.”
“That might mean I’m more American than Greek, but my father remained mostly Greek. I knew him.”
“Did you?”
Two simple words. They fell on her with shearing force, stripping away a confidence she could have sworn her life on. And it made her mad.
She sat up to bring him into the searing immediacy of her displeasure. “I wasn’t only his daughter, I was his protégée, then his business associate.”
“Ne.” Suddenly something that felt spiked in danger and molded of darkness and compulsion rolled from his chest. The amusement it transmitted was only vocal, didn’t tinge his expression. Accompanying it was the first glance that was all hers, as if he’d suddenly realized she was there. “And a worthy warrior he added to his ranks. I struggled for a way out of those traps you laid in that last set of so-called negotiations.”
A wave of heat cascaded through her. She’d been confident she’d had him where they’d wanted him. His own legal team, the best of the best, had been stymied. But not him.
“You eventually found it.” She licked her lips, remembering how chagrined she’d felt when he had. How excited. How she’d worked her butt off to place more roadblocks in his way.
The first thing resembling a smile attempted to melt the cruelty of his masterfully sculpted lips. “Not that you just let me walk out of your maze of hurdles.”
She almost shuddered as the new heat in his eyes enveloped her, bringing with it the intoxication she’d experienced whenever he’d lobbed her best shots back at her, the exhilaration of dueling with him, even if through long-distance legal swashbuckling. She’d won against him almost as much as she’d lost. Until this last time, when she’d felt he’d finally figured her out, would never lose against her again….
He suddenly put down his mug, straightened to stroll toward her with those languid, goose-bump-raising, purpose-laden strides of his. He didn’t stop until his legs almost touched her knees.
The look he gave her now almost made her collapse back on the couch. Hot with appreciation, with challenge. All for her.
“You’re good. The best who ever tried to trip and shackle me. And you’ve cost me big. But I’ll always win in the end. I have a decade on you in age, and about a century’s worth of experience and wiles. Unlike you, I learned the law for one purpose—to find out how to play dirty and come out the other side clean.”
She coughed a ridiculing huff. “And you don’t understand my father’s enmity.”
“So I understood. Doesn’t mean I accepted it. He should have used my abilities. I complemented him.”
“His vision in business clashed with yours diametrically.”
“And therefore mine is wrong and evil?”
“You’re bent on success, no matter the price.”
“That is what business is all about.”
“You take ‘business is business’ to a new realm. That wasn’t his way.”
“No.”
After that monosyllable of resignation and finality, a long silence unfurled.
When it got too heavy, too suffocating, she decided to tackle another bleakness, air another heartache.
“I heard about your brother,” she whispered.
His youngest brother had died in a car accident five days ago. She hadn’t thought it possible, or even acceptable, for her, the daughter of his enemy, to offer condolences, let alone attend the funeral.
He sat down beside her. His thigh burned hers through the fabric of their pants. His eyes turned into twin lightning storms.
“Are you going to say you’re sorry he’s gone, too?” he rasped.
She felt the breakers of his pain collide with hers, shook her head. “Beyond a human sorrow for the death of someone so young, there was no personal connection for me to mourn. Not like the one you evidently had—and maybe never realized you had—with my father. I can only give you the same honesty you gave me when you didn’t pretend to be sorry for my loss. I can only tell you the one thing I do feel. Sorry for yours.”
His arm suddenly clamped around her waist.
Her lungs emptied on a soundless cry of surprise as she slammed against his steel-fleshed body. He gave her a compulsive squeeze and her flesh turned to a pliant medium that melted into his hard angles from breast to hip.
He held her eyes for a tempestuous moment, declaring his intent, demanding her surrender. Then his lips crashed over hers.
He swallowed her cry, poured a growl of hunger inside her, his lips possessing hers, moist, branding, his tongue thrusting deep, over and over, singeing her with pleasure, breaching her with need, draining her of reason.
And it was like a floodgate exploded. She went under in his taste and ferocity and domination. His hands joined in her torment, gliding all over her, never pausing long enough to appease, until she writhed against him, whimpered, begged, not knowing what she was begging for, not knowing what to offer but her surrender.
Pressure built, behind her eyes, in her chest, loins. Her hands convulsed on his arms until he relented, took it to the next level. He freed her blouse from her pants, his hands dipping beneath, feeling like lava against her inflamed skin, undoing her bra, releasing her swollen breasts and a measure of the pressure suddenly about to make her explode.
She keened. With relief, with the spike in arousal. “Please…”
His eyes shot up, twin steel infernos. Everything inside her surged toward him, needing anything…anything he’d do to her….
What was she thinking, doing? This was Aristedes Sarantos. Her family’s enemy. Her enemy…
“Say no,” he groaned as he sank back over her, suckling her neck in pulls that made her feel he was drawing her heartbeats right into his own body. “Tell me to stop. If you don’t tell me to stop, I’ll devour you.”
The brief shock at the acute turn this had taken was expunged right there and then. She was certain of one thing.
She couldn’t say no. She couldn’t bear it if he stopped.
And she told him. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“Then tell me not to stop. Tell m—” He stopped, pushed away from her, hissed as if he was tearing his skin off. “Theos…I have to stop, to tell you to go.” When she started to protest, he gritted his teeth. “I don’t have protection.”
Her heart punched her ribs. With elation, that he didn’t have protection as a mandatory measure. With disappointment, that this would force him to put an end to this magical interlude. And she couldn’t let it end.
“I’m safe…and i-it’s the wrong time of the month…” She almost choked. She’d only ever had sex with one man, three times to be exact, years ago. Anyone hearing her would think she was an old hand in impromptu sexual encounters.
But she didn’t care. She wanted this. Wanted him. Felt she’d disintegrate if he didn’t just…just…
“I’m safe, too.” He was back over her, giving her what she needed, with the exact force and urgency that she needed it.
He tore at her clothes, predatory growls issuing from him at every inch he exposed and owned. Those became aggressive with impatience when her pants’ zipper snagged and tore
in his urgent fingers. “Skirts, kala mou, wear skirts…”
Her ravenous sobs turned to giddy giggles, seeming to feed his frenzy. She hadn’t worn skirts since high school. She’d wear anything he wanted, if it made him mindless with the same need tearing at her.
She writhed with stimulation and embarrassment as he bared her legs to his hunger, captured them in his powerful hands, spread them for his bulk and ground his hardness against her soaked core through their remaining clothing. She cried out with anticipation…and anxiety.
If she felt her heart would stampede out of her rib cage now, how would she feel when he took it further, took her?
Then he slid down on his knees between her legs, feasted on them, sinking his teeth into her quivering flesh, leaving marks that evaporated as they formed, yet felt as if they had marked her forever.
“Beautiful, perfect…” He dragged her panties down her legs, opened them wide and without giving her a chance to draw another breath, he opened the lips of her core, slid his fingers into her fluid heat. She cried out, then again with the first contact of his hot lips and tongue with her swollen, intimate flesh. Then again and again when he licked and suckled her, growling his enjoyment.
She was dying for the release she felt would consume her with his next strokes, but she wanted far more to be joined with him, to reach that release with him, around him.
And she begged, “With you, please…with you filling me…”
He lifted raging eyes to her, rasped something incoherent as if all the tethers holding his sanity in place had snapped wholesale. He rose over her, freed himself, left no chance for the alarm at his daunting size to register before he dragged her by the legs, lifted them around his waist. He caressed her flaming flesh with his satin steel, bathed himself in her flowing readiness in one teasing stroke, from her bud to her opening.
On the next stroke, he plunged inside her, fierce and full.
Her whole body arched before going nerveless as he overstretched her, forged to unknown depths inside her. She collapsed beneath him in sensual shock so deep her sight, her scream, vanished, only one thing left in her. The need to engulf all of him, have him invade her to the last reaches of her body and soul, assuage all the anguish and erase all the loss.
And he did, thrust inside her over and over, thrust her beyond her limits, beyond her endurance, beyond her existence.
She regained her sight, saw him above her, eyes crackling with the same insanity that had her at its mercy. Then her voice came back, begged him for more, more, to never, ever stop.
The begging became shrieks as her insides splintered on pleasure too sharp to register, then to bear, then to bear having it end. His roars echoed her desperation as his body caught the current of her convulsions, fed them with his own, poured his release on the conflagration that was consuming her, sending it spiraling out of control.
Nothing registered for an eternity.
Nothing but being merged with him in ultimate intimacy, feeling him still shuddering over her, inside her, pouring his essence into her recesses.
Then everything seeped back, a trickle at first, then a current. Then a flood surged over her.
What had she done?
This should be a fantasy of her overwrought psyche. Finding an explosive release in the arms of the one man who would cause enough trouble and heartache to take her mind off her bereavement.
But this was real.
She’d made unbelievable, abrupt, climactic love with Aristedes Sarantos.
And she wanted more.
Aftershocks still quaked through her; his rock-hard arousal still occupied her brutally satisfied flesh. But pangs of withdrawal were already intensifying, tension roaring inside her again. More, her body screamed. Him, them, like this. Like this…
As if he’d heard the clamor, he responded to the intimate flesh throbbing demand around him, thrust deeper into her as he raised himself on extended arms, palms flat beside her head.
She dreaded meeting his eyes.
Would that distance be there again? Or worse, dismay, or disdain or disgust?
“You should not only be a licensed attorney, but a licensed weapon, kala mou. You could easily finish a man.”
Her gaze fluttered to his and she almost whimpered in relief.
Far from anything she’d feared, his eyes were pouring scorching sensuality and indulgence over her. She felt so thankful that she dug her fingers into the luxury of his mussed satin locks, brought his head down to close each eye with a trembling kiss.
He stilled over her, letting her offer and savor the moment of tenderness.
Then he pulled back. And she gasped.
That dangerous desire was a storm roiling in his eyes again, the drugged veil of short-lived satisfaction vanishing in the blast of renewed need.
Her breath caught as she felt him grow impossibly bigger inside her, arched her back into the couch involuntarily, thrusting her hips to accommodate more of him, croaked, “It doesn’t seem like you’re…finished.”
“I’m far from it. If you know what you’re inviting.”
“I want to know.”
He swooped down, fused their lips, his carnal possession perfect in its flavor and ferocity. “Remember, this is you giving me license to take you, to do everything to you.”
She clutched him closer still, clenched around him, her lips trembling on a breaker of the urgency that was tossing her into its turbulence. “Yes, everything…take it all, give it to me…”
He reared up, tore open her blouse, then his shirt. Her loosened bra disappeared off her aching breasts, his hair-roughened chest replacing it, inflaming them to agony. He exchanged that torment for his teeth and lips, each nip and pull on her nipples creating a new flood of need in her core, a core he plundered to the same driving rhythm.
This time pleasure wasn’t a sudden annihilating blast, but a building pressure, promising even more destruction.
Then desperation for release overwhelmed her need to have the pleasure mushroom until it buried her, made her wail, “Too much…just g-give me…”
And he gave her, rode her to a crescendo that had her seizing in excruciating ecstasy, wringing every drop of his own climax with its force.
She passed out this time. She knew, because she came to with a jerk. She found Aristedes propped up on his elbow beside her on the floor—where she assumed they’d crashed during that last passionate duel—caressing her with a possessive hand on her breast and a leg between her jellified ones.
The moment she met his gaze, he gathered her and effortlessly rose with her near-swooning mass in his arms.
As he crossed to the bathroom, he nudged her ear with his lips, sending her senses haywire again with his touch, then with his words. “Now that we’ve taken the edge off the hunger, it’s time I devoured you properly.”
Selene crept around the bedroom, gathering her clothes.
The new ones he’d ordered to replace those he’d ruined, that she’d come here wearing. Two days ago.
Every time she’d thought he’d put an end to their explosive encounter, or that she should be the one to do it, he’d dragged her back into delirium. She’d ended up staying the whole weekend.
This was the only time she’d been awake while he slept.
He lay on his back, the magnificent body that had possessed and pleasured her for two long days and nights spread like a replete lion’s, for the first time relaxed and unaware.
Her heartbeats tripped over each other. She wanted to rush back to him, snuggle against all that power and sensuality.
But she couldn’t. This experience had been transfiguring. But now that he wasn’t wringing mindless responses from her, she felt lost.
She didn’t know what to do next. So she had to go.
She had to let him show her where he wanted to go from here.
Aristedes Sarantos showed her, all right.
Not personally, but in national newspapers.
Selene read the headline aga
in.
Sarantos Leaves States After Brief Business Visit.
That was where he wanted to go from here. Away, without even a look back.
Her heart twisted.
Fool. How had she thought this could end any other way? She’d even wanted it to—why? Because of the great sex?
But if it had been only sex, how could it have been so sublime…?
Shut up. He’d just been living up to his reputation as an obsessive overachiever and conqueror.
And he’d alluded to nothing more than gorging himself on the pleasures of the moment. She’d been beyond wishful to think he’d want an encore. That their time together had been about her in any way.
He hadn’t even uttered her name once.
She’d been a two-night, ecstatically willing outlet for whatever turmoil he’d been going through. And she should see him that way, too. It had been her own need for solace that had sparked her uncharacteristic abandon. He was the last man on earth she should have indulged with, making the encounter all the edgier, the riskier, wielding the power to negate her grief for as long as it had lasted. It had also been the safest outlet, letting go with the one man guaranteed to do what he’d done. Disappear after it was over without repercussions.
Now they’d go back to their old status. With one difference. She’d now inherit her father’s role as his adversary.
Whatever madness had passed between them was over.
As if it had never happened.
Two
Eighteen months later…
Déjà vu tightened its grip on Aris’s senses.
Standing in front of the Louvardis mansion brought it all back. That fateful day a year and a half ago.
He couldn’t believe it had been that long. Or only that long. It felt as if it were yesterday, and yet in another life.
Not that it had been a day, but rather a week of blows, ending in those mind-boggling two days and nights with Selene Louvardis.
His body tightened and his breath shortened, the unfailing effect the memory of that weekend had on him. Each time the slightest tendril of recollection strummed his senses, he relived the fever that had possessed him, ending in a surreal sense of fulfillment and peace, and almost total amnesia. He’d woken up remembering nothing about himself or his life, only the tempestuous, delirious time with her.