She tilted her head backwards and his stubbled jaw ran across her décolletage then lower, his mouth, warm and moist, curving around one of her nipples, his tongue lashing it until she was in a state of delirium. His hard arousal thrust into her again and again, his hands lifting her bottom, holding her higher so he could reach all of her, and then one hand was moving around to her womanhood, his fingers tormenting her most sensitive cluster of nerves until she was whimpering with the sheer agony of her desire.
‘I feel like I’m on fire,’ she groaned, and he smiled against her breast, but it was a smile of tension, because the same agonising want was throbbing through him, churning his gut, making him impatient for a release that he wanted to stave off as long as possible.
‘I like being on fire,’ she said, not even sure the words made any sense; her mind was no longer a part of her body. There was only this: feeling, pleasure, desperate yearning. He moved rhythmically, his body stoking hers, and she pushed up on her elbows as a tidal wave of need she couldn’t fight, didn’t want to fight, dragged at her and she let it pull her out to sea. It crashed against her, pleasure a rush of awakening that made breathing almost impossible.
She cried his name out, tasting it as she exploded in his arms, oblivious to the way he stilled, watching her, his eyes intent on her pleasure-creased face as she fell apart at the seams and slowly breathed herself back together again. He watched her and just as her breathing slowed he began to move again, so her eyes flared wide, locking to his, shock in them because her needs were already back, desire shifting inside her, greedily seeking more. He spoke to her in Greek, hushed words she neither recognised nor understood, words that filled her with pleasure just the same, words that were perfect in that moment, as he drove her to the heights of her pleasure anew.
This time, when the wave dragged her under, it dragged him with it, and she held onto him for dear life, as though everything she was depended on being close to him. They were adrift at sea, but adrift together.
Just that moment, just that night.
* * *
Alice stretched in bed, the silk sheets like gossamer against her well-kissed skin. She smiled at Thanos, not at all self-conscious in her naked state. How could she be? After they’d made love on the ottoman, he’d lifted her up and carried her to this sumptuous bedroom, laying her on the bed where he’d continued to pleasure and delight her body, kissing her most intimate flesh, tasting her, inviting her to explore his body, to look and learn, and she’d lost herself down the rabbit hole of sensual awakening, a hazy fog of lust pummelling her from the inside out.
It was now somewhere near dawn, but she wasn’t tired. Not even a little. She lifted her fingertips to his chest, tracing a line down the centre, her eyes following the gesture lazily. He was bronzed all over. She liked looking at his skin. She liked looking at him.
‘You know,’ she said, pushing up on one elbow so she could look at him properly, ‘you’re very, very good at that.’
Her fingers pushed lower, trailing the line of hair that arrowed down his abdomen.
‘My ego is glad you think so.’
Her lips twisted in a half-smile.
‘I didn’t really know it could be so...whoa...’
‘Whoa?’ he teased, his eyes shuttered so she couldn’t discern emotion in their depths.
‘So mind-blowing,’ she clarified, swirling her fingers in figures of eight, just below his navel.
‘Ah.’ He made a sound of comprehension, swiftly followed by a knitting together of his brows. ‘And that’s...different for you?’
His accent was thicker in this snatch of time, before daylight danced across the horizon, pulling out of the ocean’s depths.
Alice’s fingers moved lower, slowly, so slowly, until her fingertips brushed against the base of his erection. She felt his swift intake of breath and smiled at the raw rush of feminine power.
‘I don’t really have much experience.’ Her eyes flicked upwards and now there was self-consciousness there. ‘Definitely nothing compared to you.’
She didn’t see the frown that etched across his face.
‘You were not a virgin?’
‘No.’ Her smile was wistful. She wished, in that moment, she had been. It was ridiculous, but the only thing that could have made what they’d shared more meaningful was if he’d been her first. She could make her peace with the fact this was a very temporary affair, she could make her peace with the fact that soon—in a matter of months—their marriage would be dissolved and they’d go their separate ways. But somehow, that didn’t detract from the specialness and uniqueness of what they’d just shared.
‘But you haven’t found sex “mind-blowing” to date?’
She bit down on her lip, shaking her head. ‘I mean, I was only with one guy.’ Her eyes lifted to his. ‘Once.’
He was very still then, and not because her fingers were continuing their exploration of his erection. ‘You have only had sex once before?’
‘Well, now I’ve had sex a lot,’ she teased, sobering at his look of absolute disbelief.
‘I know that must seem ridiculous to someone like you,’ she said quietly. ‘But it wasn’t really...a great experience. Definitely not one I was rushing to repeat.’
Thanos reached beneath the sheets and captured her hand, pulling it away from his member with a warning look. ‘I cannot think when you do that.’
‘Good.’ She blinked at him with mock innocence.
‘I want you to explain to me,’ he insisted, lifting her hand to his lips and pressing a kiss against her fingertips so her heart jolted inside her.
Alice sighed, her eyes shuttering a little, her gaze focussed on his lips. He was sort of like a conversational solar eclipse; there was such an intensity in his eyes that it was hard to concentrate when she looked directly at him.
‘There’s not really much to explain. I learned my lesson,’ she said quietly.
‘What lesson is that?’
She forced her eyes to his then, burnt sugar holding glowing amber. She aimed for light-hearted; it came out strangled. ‘That handsome men who promise you the world aren’t to be trusted.’ She flicked her lips into a smile for good measure; Thanos didn’t return it. Nor did he relinquish his hold on her gaze.
‘It’s funny. All my life my mom drummed it into me again and again that men weren’t to be trusted.’ Her smile was wistful. ‘It wasn’t her fault. My dad burned her pretty badly and we both had to live with the consequences of that for a long time.’
‘What did he do?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s a long story. The point is, he broke her heart and she made sure I grew up knowing there’s no such thing as Prince Charming or saccharine happy endings. She was trying to protect me, and I guess she really did have a point.’
He frowned; she didn’t notice.
‘But then I met Clinton, and despite being a walking cautionary tale, everything I knew to be true, everything Mom had always said, flew out of the window as I fell head over heels in love with his smooth lines.’
‘He was your contemporary?’
‘A few years older,’ she corrected. ‘Twenty—which to an impressionable sixteen-year-old meant the world.’ She shook her head with disbelief. ‘I was such an idiot.’
‘You were sixteen?’
‘And foolish.’
‘What happened?’
She expelled a soft sigh. ‘I slept with him and I thought it was the beginning of something amazing and special and incredible.’
‘But it wasn’t?’
She shook her head, her expression unknowingly haunted.
‘So what?’ His voice was impatient, but not with her. ‘He what? Broke up with you once you’d slept together?’
Alice swept her eyes shut, the awful, horrible fallout from that weekend something she tried to forget. ‘More or less.�
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‘Meaning?’
‘Oh, he was a bastard,’ she groaned, blinking her gaze to Thanos’s. ‘He made sure all of his friends knew he’d been my first, that I was bad in bed, inexperienced.’ She shook her head. ‘I thought I loved him, and he... It was a pretty horrifying experience.’
‘Men like that are overcompensating for some personal deficiency.’ The words were snapped from his mouth, disapproval zinging around the room.
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘You are not bad in bed.’
It was so not what she’d expected him to say that Alice laughed, a soft sound, and when she looked at Thanos, she found him staring at her in a way that made her body tremble a little.
‘Anyway, it was an eternity ago. I’m definitely not the same girl I was then.’ She tilted her chin defiantly, remembering how true that was, the leaps and bounds she’d come on since then. ‘He taught me a lesson that I shouldn’t have needed to be taught, but it’s one I’ve never forgotten.’
‘And what lesson is that, Kyria Stathakis?’
Her lips pulled a little to the side. ‘Not to be such a gullible fool.’ The mood between them had shifted; there was an intensity between them and a vulnerability within her that she didn’t entirely like. She pulled her hand away from him, teasing it down his body once more, her eyes holding a silent challenge as they connected to his.
‘I wouldn’t have slept with you tonight if it weren’t for the fact we both know what the boundaries of this are.’
He didn’t move; didn’t speak.
‘I like that you’ve been honest with me. I like that we both have our reasons for knowing this will run its course and we’ll go our own way. I’ve learned not to trust anyone but, somehow, I do trust you, Thanos.’ Her hands curved around his arousal and a throaty breath pushed out of him, lifting his chest.
Thanos wasn’t sure he’d ever had anyone say those words to him. It did something completely foreign to his chest. ‘Why?’ The question was grated out of him, as his ability to think and process were lost in a fog of uncertainty.
‘Because you’re not making any promises.’ She flicked her gaze to his and then pushed up at the same time she pulled the sheet off his body. ‘You’ve been honest with me from the start, and the reason I know you’re telling me the truth is because nothing you’ve said has been designed to get me into bed.’
She straddled his legs and brought her face closer to his arousal, her eyes holding his. ‘I’m here because I want to be.’ It was the last thing she said before she curved her lips over the tip of his arousal, and Thanos lost any ability whatsoever to speak, think or worry.
* * *
As dawn began to crest over the ocean, spreading light and newness into the valley of vines, Thanos pushed out of bed, taking a moment to look back at a sleeping Alice before pulling on some briefs.
Her eyelids moved frantically—a sign of deep sleep and busy dreams—and he smiled a little, wondering if he was in her dreams.
But his smile shifted from his face as he moved from the bedroom back into the lounge area, his eyes falling first to the ottoman, his body hardening as he remembered the frantic, animalistic passion of their coming together, the feeling of absolute, sheer need driving him to her as though everything he was depended on that possession.
But Thanos was no stranger to sexual passion. He liked women. He liked being with women. He made no apologies for his appetite, nor did he need to. Alice was right—Thanos never lied in order to seduce a woman. In fact, he was always at great pains to be blindingly honest with any woman he was interested in.
Thanos wasn’t the kind of man to offer ‘more’—the elusive promise of something beyond the physical. He had no interest in anything other than sex, and never had done. It was one of the reasons he generally kept his ‘relationships’ to a one-time affair. It was a lot harder to hurt someone if you only spent a night in each other’s company.
And that had worked for him—it had been easy. Guilt-free.
But there was danger here, so much danger. Because everything was different with Alice. The intensity of his need for her was unlike anything he’d ever known. The sex had been mind-blowing, just as she’d said, so he’d been insatiable for her, wanting more and more and more. Even now, after knowing the pleasures of her body, her hands, her mouth all night, he was still filled with a hunger for her, a desperate craving that wouldn’t quit.
But by far the biggest danger they faced was that he couldn’t simply walk away from this. He couldn’t kiss her on the lips and fly off in his helicopter, back into his real world. He couldn’t turn his back on her and never see her again, as he ordinarily might.
She was his wife, and, even though they both knew their wedding was practicality at its finest, they were inescapably bound.
Sex complicated that. It complicated it in a way that meant he couldn’t make his peace with it, and yet he already knew he couldn’t walk away from it either. What he needed was to regain a sense of control; to put some boundaries in place. Because she was right. He hadn’t lied to her, and he didn’t intend to. Not with words, certainly, but not with actions either. He owed it to both of them to show he could control the passion that flared between them. It was a delight to be carefully enjoyed, not a need that should be allowed to overtake them.
He wouldn’t allow it, and he was Thanos Stathakis so naturally he didn’t, for one moment, doubt his chance of success.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘WHAT HAPPENED WITH your father?’
He lifted his gaze from the newspaper he was reading to find Alice watching him with undisguised curiosity.
The yacht had been a bad idea. A very bad idea. If he’d been wanting to prove to himself that he could control this flame of desire, suggesting they take his yacht out onto the Balearic Sea had been foolhardy in the extreme.
From the minute Alice had appeared in a floaty sundress with a huge wide-brimmed hat, he’d felt a pulsing of warmth in his body that had had less to do with admiration than it did amusement—a sentiment he feared was just as dangerous.
She’d brought a huge bag with her, packed with books of all things, and a big bottle of water, as though she didn’t realise his yacht had a commercial-grade kitchen on board as well as an army of staff to keep them fed and serve them drinks of any variety.
But it was when she’d removed her sundress to reveal a bright red bikini that he’d known it was going to be harder than he’d banked on to control his need for her.
Alice Smart—no, Alice Stathakis—had the most tantalisingly creamy skin he’d ever seen. Flawless and pale, with golden undertones, and toes that had been painted a surprising black matte in colour. She’d wiggled them as she’d read, and he’d found the sight of that infuriatingly erotic.
He’d had to fight an urge to ask her what she was reading. To ask her if she read often. What her favourite books were. To ask her anything and everything. Because asking, he feared, would lead to knowing her better, and, more than that, it would lead to looking at her and wanting to strip that scrap of Lycra from her body and make love to her right here on the deck of his yacht, with not a care in the world for the possibility of drone cameras overhead or long lenses on shore.
‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,’ she offered, an apologetic heat creeping into her cheeks.
He frowned, not perfectly able to recall what she’d asked.
‘I guess it was pretty hard for you. Having him be sent away.’ She turned back to her book, her dark hair plaited in a single braid, which she’d pulled over her shoulder. The tasselled ends landed against her breast; a breast he’d touched and tasted and was hungry to feel again now. Her skin would be sun-warmed and salty from the ocean.
‘It wasn’t hard.’ The admission surprised them both. Him, because he rarely spoke of Dion Stathakis to anyone. Even he and Leonidas, by unspo
ken yet mutual consent, had formed a silence when it came to their father and his wrongdoing. Of course, Leonidas had so much more to resent the man for than Thanos did—Leonidas who had lost his wife and child in a madman’s revenge against Dion. But Thanos had still lost enough to hate his father with all his soul.
‘No?’ She pressed a finger into the pages of her book and placed it on her lap. His eyes followed the gesture.
‘I wish he’d received a life sentence. No, sometimes I’ve wished he’d been put to death.’
Her breath made an audible gasp as she processed this.
‘You may think that’s harsh,’ he said softly. ‘But you have to understand the damage he did, the life he took.’
‘Whose life?’
Thanos let out a laugh—but not one of amusement. ‘Mine, my brother’s, my grandparents’ legacy, and theirs before them.’ He shook his head in disapproval. ‘He ruined everything and not because he needed money, but because he wanted power. Not the kind of power you can have when you own half the hotels in Europe,’ Thanos pointed out with a wry shift of his lips. ‘He wanted people to fear him. He wanted them to tremble when he entered a room.’
Alice was quiet for a moment and Thanos wondered if she was regretting asking the question. But after a moment, she shifted her body weight, pushing onto her side so she could face him properly. And even in the midst of recounting a time in his past he loved to forget, his eyes were drawn to the sway of her breasts, and desire offered a very welcome reprieve from the darkness of his thoughts.
‘Were you afraid of him?’
The question was not at all what he’d expected.
‘No.’
Alice frowned. ‘Did you know he was involved in the mob?’
‘No.’ His nostrils flared as he breathed out, and he reached a hand towards her, running his fingers over her plait, flicking the tail distractedly. ‘I am not being intentionally vague.’
‘I know that.’ She grimaced. ‘I guess it’s not exactly your favourite topic.’
Bride Behind The Billion-Dollar Veil (Crazy Rich Greek Weddings Book 2) Page 9