by Olivia Gates
Aris again closed in on her. “You should at least state the charges against me before pronouncing the sentence. And then, even if I were the monster he painted me to be, knowing you, you’re the expert in leashing all sorts of terrible entities, harnessing their potential damages into benefits for all.”
Those magical eyes of hers grew opaque as she shook her head. “The decision has been made.”
“Then let’s unmake it. I give you my word, and any other guarantees you’d like, that what happened a year and a half ago didn’t mean I wanted to be rid of you.” Flames sprouted to life in the gaze entwined with his, as again bringing up the professional aspect of their relationship tripped the wires of their brief but explosively personal one. “You don’t have to make a desperate dash for survival by fighting me to the death.”
Her gaze flickered, echoing her waning resolve. Then she at last exhaled. “I will draft a new set of rules for our side of the operations. They’ll be fair, but strict and nonnegotiable and will protect us against any future betrayals. If your claims are true, you’ll agree to them.”
He didn’t hesitate for a second. “I will.”
“If you do, I will recommend to my brothers that they resume dealing with you.”
He felt the elation of wrestling with her spread through him, the fluency of their interaction, the give-and-take, which had been fully echoed in the bedroom.
His lips spread on the first real smile he could remember in years. “Then it’s settled. And now that we’ve gotten business out of the way, let’s move on to a more important topic. Us.”
Her eyes became as dark as a moonless night, their temperature plunging to an arctic chill. “Listen, Sarantos—”
“Aris,” he whispered. She’d called him nothing but Sarantos during their weekend together. While that had been arousing as hell, and he wanted her to keep calling him that at choice moments, he wanted to take this relationship to the next level. He wanted her to call him the nickname he’d always preferred, but that he’d never felt close enough to anyone to let them use. “That’s the name I want to hear on your lips.”
She pursed her lips in an attempt at severity, only making them more luscious and kissable than ever. “I prefer Sarantos. And to end this conversation.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Give me one good reason to do that.”
“Because I want to.”
“And I want one thing. You.”
That had her lost for words. When she finally answered, it was a cold drawl. “Why? You have another weekend to while away?”
The tone in which she said that, that she said it at all, confused him. It seemed as if she had a…grievance? Whatever for?
All he could do now was to negate her insinuation. “I’ve never whiled away an hour in my life. Our weekend together was incredible, incendiary. And I want more.”
He could feel the same tightness that primed his every muscle for passion gripping her as she scoffed, “We’ve been perfectly fine not having more for the past eighteen months.”
“I wasn’t fine with it,” he hissed with all the pent-up hunger he’d been trying to suppress. “I thought it was better not to, that I shouldn’t, but I never stopped craving more.”
Her gaze wavered, before she gave him a wry smile. “Welcome to the real world, Sarantos. As you so astutely worked out, you’d better not, and shouldn’t, have everything you crave.”
“Again, give me one good reason not to.”
“Not to what? Spend another weekend together? I already said I’d pass.” Her gaze shifted in a restless arc, seeking escape from his cornering one. “I don’t have to give you reasons.”
“But I don’t want another weekend. I want all we can have together. Whenever it’s convenient for both of us.”
That yanked her gaze back to his with an openmouthed gape.
After a protracted moment, she cleared her throat. “You’re proposing—for lack of a tasteful modern designation—an affair?”
He moved closer, until his thighs whispered against hers. “It’s what we both need.”
“But if I get you right, you’re not proposing just any affair. You’re negotiating an intermittent, purely sexual and no doubt secret liaison?”
He reached for her again, both hands clasping the arms she had propped against the desk. She went still in his loose hold, emotions fast-forwarding in her eyes with such volume and speed, they made his own tumble, tangle, made him dizzy with desire.
He stroked her arms, trying to transmit his urgency, his conviction. “It’s all we can afford. To separate our arrangement from business, to keep the world, starting with your family, from tainting the intensity we share. And our careers are too demanding, with schedules that keep us on opposite sides of the globe. But I’ll do whatever it takes so that mine allows me as many opportunities as possible to be with you. I should have proposed this a year and a half ago, shouldn’t have let anything stop me from seeking the pleasures that our weekend proved only we can provide each other.”
Selene’s lashes swept downward, veiling her expression, making him seethe with the need to lure her gaze back to his. “You assume I want the same things.”
“You need them. But you evidently believe you have to sacrifice your pleasures to serve your career and your family. It’s how you rose so high so young. You’re like me.”
That had her gaze slamming back to his. The antagonism there perplexed him, yet maddened him with the need to tame it, and her. “I’m nothing like you.” Her voice was as hard as her glare. “And I don’t take kindly to anyone deciding what I want then telling me what I need and how I need it.”
She wanted a fight. A rough tussle. A demonstration of what he’d be willing to do to get her back.
He’d oblige her.
“You want and need me.” Aris suddenly obliterated the gap between them, hauled her from the edge of the desk she’d been gripping harder by the second, slammed her against the body begging for her feel. “As for how you need me, if you need your memory revived, want fresh proof, I’ll give it to you.”
He reached behind her and swept the desk clean, sending everything crashing to the floor.
His violence jolted through her, the jumble of reactions gripping her face and body all his to decipher now. Alarm, outrage, consternation—and raging arousal.
“That’s my father’s stuff, you jerk…” she gasped.
He pushed her down until he had her plastered on her back against the cool mahogany, snapped open the button holding her jacket closed, spread her legs, pressed his hips between them and leaned over her. “Nothing there to be broken, and I will put them back in their exact arrangement…afterward. Now, for that proof…”
He gazed into eyes that were now like dark, stormy oceans as his hand slid down her thigh, brought it up to hook over his hip, the other diving into the silk curtain splayed around her head.
“Tell me this…” He bunched her hair around his aching fingers, wrung a moan from those full, rose-petal lips. “And this…” He lowered his head, buried his face in her breasts, inhaled the scent that had been haunting him, then opened stinging lips over one nipple after the other, nipping through her blouse and bra. He slid up to catch the gasps she rewarded him with, his tongue thrusting inside her, devouring her confession of pleasure. When her hips started undulating beneath him, he straightened, growled, “And this…” He thrust his agonizing hardness against the inferno at the junction of her thighs, wringing more and more urgency from her. “Tell me all this wasn’t what you saw, what you burned for each time you closed your eyes, awake or asleep.”
She looked up at him, feverish arousal, steely defiance and something akin to…disappointment?…warring on her face.
With obvious effort, she pushed herself up on the arms she’d thrown over her head at his onslaught. Her thighs hugged his hips tighter, making his arousal jerk harder against her core.
Before he could push her back and take her then and there, she rasped, “So I hav
e a healthy sexual appetite and you’re every woman’s fantasy sex partner. Too obvious to need proof.”
He held her eyes for another long moment. Then, with the last iota of restraint he had, he stepped away from their intimate tangle. “I’m your fantasy sex partner. And you don’t go around randomly satisfying your healthy sexual appetite. I bet another man would have gotten his eyes clawed out by now.”
She straightened her clothes with unsteady hands. “I was thinking of the ensuing legal catastrophes that giving in to the temptation would have involved in your case.”
“The only temptation you resisted was tearing my clothes off my back and clawing my flesh as you begged me to take you.”
She lowered her gaze as she circumvented him on legs he knew were trembling with need. “Maybe. And maybe if you’d made this proposition after that weekend, I would have taken you up on it. It’s too late now. I have someone in my life.”
He almost doubled over as if from a one-two combo to the groin and gut.
He stood there as she walked to the door, vibrating like a building in the aftershocks of an earthquake.
The moment she put her hand on the doorknob, he growled, “Break it off.”
She turned to him with a disbelieving glare.
He pressed on. “If you can kiss me back, want to slide under my skin, consume me whole, like you just did, it won’t do him any favors if you’re with him for all good cerebral reasons while you’re starving for me. It will end up hurting and humiliating him.”
She gave him a pitying glance. “You think you have everything in this world figured out, don’t you?”
“No, but I have finally figured out what we share. If you can tell me that being with me wasn’t the most intense pleasure of your life, that this other person provides you with a fraction of what you shared with me…you’ll be lying. Wanting like this, compatibility like this, happens once in a lifetime, if we’re phenomenally lucky. As we were, to have that weekend out of time to find each other.”
She shook her head, started to turn again.
He was across the room, catching her in a second. “Say yes to me, like you did that weekend, and let’s take what we need together. Break up with this…other man. I’ll wait.”
This time she yanked her arm away as if his touch burned her. “No. And that’s a final no. We had our fling, and there’s no good enough reason in my book to resurrect it for occasional indulgences, even of the mind-blowing variety.” She opened the door, tossed him one last look over her shoulder. “You know the way by now, Sarantos. See yourself out.”
Aris saw himself out. But not before he gathered the information he needed to plan her capitulation campaign.
He was damned if he’d take no for an answer. And he wouldn’t wait for her to come to her senses, either. She wasn’t engaged or married. So his plan was clear. He would find out who the other man was and break them up.
He’d learned that she no longer lived in the mansion, so he’d waited in his car until she left.
He tailed her to an exclusive country club, followed her inside.
He watched her stop by a woman with a baby. She greeted the woman and bent to kiss the baby before rushing away.
He rushed, too, afraid to miss her probable meeting with the man he already considered his rival. He approached the woman and the baby she’d greeted, sparing both a distracted glance.
Something he couldn’t define made him take a second glance. Then a third. Then the world came to a crashing halt.
Something detonated inside his chest, threatened to expel whatever he had inside him that passed for a soul.
That baby…
That baby.
He was…his.
Three
Conviction sank through Aris like a string of depth mines.
Observations accumulated at an intolerable rate, burying him under an avalanche of details, everything that comprised this fresh, robust life.
The deep blue velvet jumpsuit that encased the baby’s sturdy body. The pattern of each mahogany curl adorning his perfectly formed head. The slant of eyebrows and the press of lips that painted his face in unwavering determination as he commanded his toys’ submission. The same expression he’d seen on another face, in an almost forty-year-old photo. Then came the incontrovertible sense that trumped all. That kindred tug. That blood jolt.
It was impossible, incomprehensible. It was also irrefutable. It filled every recess of his being with the first pure certainty of his life.
This was his son.
Then the baby noticed him.
The baby captured him in the bull’s-eye of silver pools of endless, elemental curiosity. Slowly, answering recognition formed in their gleaming depths, beginning to radiate, then hurtle at Aris like heat-seeking missiles, skewering him through the heart and gut.
Before a reaction could form inside him, it dawned. And almost incinerated him with its advance.
A smile.
A six-toothed blow of unadulterated glee and eagerness.
Aris struggled to fill lungs that felt as if they had collapsed. Before he managed a breath, the baby moved, expelling every remaining wisp of air inside his chest, leaving it a cage tightening around an igniting coal.
He watched, mute, motionless, as that package of energy and purpose and zeal incarnate crawled in his direction as if in a fast-forwarded video. He stood there, for the first time in over twenty-five years unable to think, powerless to act, waiting for another entity’s whim to decide his fate.
He looked down in total helplessness as the baby reached him, caught him in a lunging hug. Then, with the same determination with which he’d conquered his toys, the baby tried to climb his legs.
Aris felt…felt…
There were no words for what razed through him.
He stared down at the baby who was using him as a prop. The baby looked up at him and riddled his vision with the brightness of his excitement, fanning the heat inside his chest to combusting…
“Alex, come here, sweetie.”
The feminine tones lashed through Aris, splitting the shell of upheaval clamping him in two. He lurched, his gaze sightlessly following the direction of the alien voice.
The woman with the baby. Dark haired and eyed, evidently Greek, a few years older than him. Neatly dressed and carefully coiffed. She wasn’t looking at him but at the baby, distress on her face.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” she gasped. “I’ll get you a wet towel to wipe this off!”
Aris stared blankly into eyes the woman now raised to his in embarrassment, watched her rush to her table, then back with the promised towel. He followed her gaze down to where the baby still clamped his legs, found him busy chewing on his pants, having already caused a sizable drool patch.
The woman swooped down on the baby, extricated him gently from around Aris’s legs, to the baby’s explosively vocal protest.
Aris stood rooted as the woman thrust the towel at him as she tried to get a firm hold on the now twisting, shrieking baby.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” she spluttered. “I hope the stain comes out, and if not, I’m sure Ms. Louvardis will be only too happy to compensate you.”
Aris numbly took the towel, stared at the woman, aware of only his mushrooming realizations.
She must work for Selene. No doubt as the baby’s nanny.
Selene’s baby.
Selene’s baby…and his.
“I don’t know what came over him,” the woman went on. “Alex is usually very reticent with strangers.”
Aris barely heard her, everything inside him focusing on the baby squirming in her arms. Alex was reaching his arms out to him, his silver eyes drowned in fat, trembling tears, his chubby cleft chin quivering as if he was imploring Aris to save him from a monster about to devour him.
Without volition, Aris felt his own arms rising. The woman started to loosen hers, the baby pitched toward him…
“Eleni!”
They all jerked at the harshnes
s of the admonishment.
The woman lurched around, swinging the baby out of Aris’s reach. The baby started to whimper at the rude interruption of his purpose before he suddenly gave a squee of delight. Aris raised bemused eyes, searching out the instigator of all the reactions.
Selene. She was coming back.
Aris watched her strides pick up momentum until she was streaking toward them. A lithe leopardess wreathed in deceptive white, her hair like a piece of the deepening night she was cleaving through, flying around her like angry black flames as she charged to save her cub.
“Eleni,” Selene muttered as she slowed down, steps away. “Take Alex back to the cabin. Gather everything. We’re leaving at once.”
The woman looked stricken at Selene’s sharpness, which she likely had never been subjected to. A look of guilt gripped her face as she nodded and rushed with the once again bawling baby to what Aris realized for the first time were day-use cabins surrounding a children’s playground.
Then both baby and woman disappeared from his awareness, as everything converged on Selene. Selene, who was glaring up at him as if she’d like to pounce on him and rip out his neck like the leopardess his bemused fancy had just painted her as.
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes spewed blue fire that scorched through his numbness. “How dare you follow me.”
He shook his head. Not to negate her accusation. To jog the shards of his shattered reason back into place.
But she wanted no answer. It had been a rhetorical question. She made that clear as, in frozen fascination, he watched her hair swirl around her in a wide arc as she swung around and started to walk away.
One step. The realizations flooding through him regressed into questions. Two steps. Questions congealed into confusion. Three. Confusion stampeded into chaos. Four. Chaos crashed into his foundations, tore at the tentacles gripping them in paralysis. Five. Paralysis disintegrated, expelled him from its grasp.
He lunged after her before she’d taken the sixth step fueled by the intention to leave him behind. He latched on to her arm.