“Of course I did.”
“Why? I thought your thing was running away.”
“I can’t let you get mixed up in this.”
“Remember, I told you once already. Too late.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him, drenched body to drenched body, the cold no match for the heat of what they felt for each other, the swaying of the deck no match for the grounding they experienced in each other’s arms.
“How could you leave me like that?” he asked, directly in her ear. “Without a word? You promised.”
“I didn’t promise you anything.”
“You did. You promised to tell me what you could before you left.”
“I—there was nothing to tell.”
“And you promised more than that. You know you did.”
One kiss, even long, hard, bruising her salty lips, wasn’t enough to quench his thirst for her. He thrust his fingers in her hair and held her for a second and then a third.
Then he tugged her down the stairwell to the lower quarters. When he had her below, he switched on a light to see her shivering. Rummaging through a cupboard, he threw out a shirt, the investment banker’s no doubt. “Here. Get out of that wet suit.”
He threw her a towel as well.
“What about you?” She was shaking as she clutched the towel to her chest.
In answer, he ripped his clothes off, without thought, without emotion as she watched, slowly slipping one strap off her shoulder, then the other. When the black cloth was bunched up around her waist, he came at her—she was too slow for him—yanking the wet material all the way down her body. As she stepped out of the suit, she said, “You should tie the boat down. This storm is bad.”
He stood, taking the towel from her and briskly rubbing her body before he snatched the investment banker’s shirt up and pulled it over her head, the long, wet tail of her hair coming out to trail down her back.
“Fuck the boat,” he said shortly. “It can sink for all I care.”
“With us on it?” she asked in a small voice.
“Your instinct for self-preservation kicks in at the oddest times.”
She cocked her head. “So does your libido.”
Glancing down, he realized it had definitely kicked in, and he didn’t know what the hell he was doing putting clothes on her, no matter that the shirt barely came to the top of her thighs. Maybe he just wanted her to be warmed up enough to have circulation while he fucked her brains out.
Which he was going to do any second now.
But first things first.
He moved so there was barely a breath of distance between their bodies and slid his hand underneath the hem of the shirt, against the bare skin of her stomach, which was still chilled but warming.
“I don’t want to just fuck you,” he muttered against her mouth, “I want to brand you. I want to own you so you never think to leave me again. Do you understand that?”
She closed the gap between a mutter and a kiss, pressing her lips to his, thrusting her tongue in. But whether she thought to placate him with her kisses or not, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Still not letting her go, he walked her back to the built-in bed against the bulkhead, yanking off the covers and pushing her down, coming right on top of her.
When he had her beneath him, he said, “What’s your name? Tell me.”
One shake of her head was enough to undo him. He kissed her fiercely, again and again. “Tell me,” he demanded, wedging his legs between her bare thighs, positioning his cock so he could bury it between her legs where she was wet and ready for him.
Hands on either side of her head, he kissed her. “What is your name, Andrea?”
“Athena,” she whispered.
He slid his cock in her tight, hot cunt, all the way in. Had it been only a mere day or two since he had been between her legs? It felt like an eternity. It felt like forever. She sighed, tilting her hips up to take him deeper.
“My name is Athena Bennett Stavros. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
“I wanted you to say it. I wanted you to tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not hiding from me anymore, Athena.”
She shook her head. “No. I’m not. It was never much of a disguise. Not with you anyway. But I don’t feel like Athena anymore.”
“Yeah?” He thrust slowly, resting his hot forehead against hers, and whispered, “Well, I don’t feel like Evan anymore either. So we’re even.”
“You feel like Evan to me.” Wrapping her arms around his neck, she crooned, “All hard and warm and sweet.”
He smiled down at her as the lights suddenly went out. Maybe the boat really was sinking. Neither of them paid it any mind.
“Sweet?”
“Mmm.”
The rhythm he set was slow and, well, hell, kind of sweet, he guessed. Not the fierce possessiveness he meant to show her.
“Why don’t you feel like Evan anymore?” she asked in a murmur.
“Because Evan was laid-back and solitary and—”
She wrapped her legs around him.
“And calm,” he finished.
“And you don’t feel like that now?”
“From the very minute I met you, I’ve felt tense and wound up and—”
“And what?” she urged.
“And lonely when I’m not with you.”
“Oh Evan.”
He’d always thought expressions of love—even in great literature—rang false somehow. Undying declarations of this and that never failed to fall flat, to him anyway.
But something about her simple sigh, her “Oh Evan” moved him.
He thrust harder, suddenly sure he was about to recite a Shakespearean sonnet to her. He could feel it. Maybe the one about love being like a red, red rose. Or maybe that was Browning.
He thrust harder and she murmured a little, one soft hand coming up to his face.
Or maybe it was a Linda Ronstadt song.
He tried to hold off.
He didn’t know anymore. He just knew he—God, she felt so good beneath him—he loved this woman.
Without thinking, he slipped his hands beneath her ass and pulled her as close as she could get and poured his love into her.
Or his semen anyway.
He groaned with his climax, feeling her shudder beneath him.
He supposed he should say the love part aloud once they could both breathe again.
The rapid spate of Greek she let out threw him off. Raising his head, he looked at her askance—she knew he couldn’t speak Greek—a smile softening the skepticism, until he saw she wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to the guy standing over them with a large automatic weapon.
The man yelled something, an obvious order to get out of bed, motioning with the gun. Dressed all in black, he blended in with the darkness it was now obvious he had engineered for his boarding. Whether he’d been quiet about it or not, Evan couldn’t say, preoccupied as he had been at the time and with the noise of the storm all around them in any case.
The lights went on again, showing it wasn’t just one intruder but three, the other two spaced at intervals back to the stairs to the deck, all three in black from head to toe, all three with those nasty machine-gun-looking things. The one standing over them barked out his order again but Evan was reluctant to roll off Andrea.
He glanced back down at her tense beloved face and for one brief second, he harbored the hope that these men were mere run-of-the-mill pirates who maybe wanted the investment banker’s boat more than even he had, but the voice over his shoulder cured him of that illusion.
“Mr. Reynolds, what a godsend you’ve been. I send my men here to help with a little drowning and they radio me you’ve brought me my Athena back. So of course I came to check it out myself. To make sure. I mean, I assume this is my Athena. You didn’t come halfway around the world to ask your questions and then fall into bed with the first slut who climbs up on your deck, did you?”
Eva
n glared back to see Stavros peering at the bed.
At that, Andrea pushed at his shoulders and he relented, rolling off her so she could sit up, dragging the top of the sheet with her to cover her nakedness.
Stavros smiled a crocodile grin and murmured something in Greek.
“Fuck you,” Andrea responded calmly in English.
“Athena, how I’ve longed to see you. I knew here,” he gestured dramatically to his chest, “in my heart, that your own heart still beat, my angel.”
“Oh? Did the goons you sent after me tell you that?”
Evan sat fully up in bed as well, glancing around. He wondered if the investment banker had kept any handguns on board, like maybe under the pillow or something he hadn’t noticed.
This wasn’t turning out to be exactly a good setup for what he originally had in mind for an ending to all this, which was Stavros dying, not him and not, God forbid, Andrea.
Chapter Ten
Fredrico Stavros looked the same as every nightmare she no longer had about him. Big. Prosperous. Powerful. Like some mythic monster, he didn’t even seem to have aged in the eight years since she had seen him. He was just there. Like Zeus. Or death and taxes.
God, how she hated this man.
“I was going to kill you anyway, Reynolds,” Uncle Freddie was saying amiably, “but under the current circumstances any Greek court would call it justifiable homicide since I’ve found you in bed with Athena, defiling her. Legally, I’m her closest relative, you know.”
Evan pulled her closer. “You piece of filth. You raped your own niece.”
“Bah! She was no Stavros. My brother was a poof. Everybody knew that. Angelica knew that. That’s why she married him. That’s why she passed another man’s child off as his. A Stavros! You see these pale cheeks, these blue eyes.” He gestured expansively toward her. “You think she’s half Greek?”
“I’m not sure I trust your assessment of family attributes.”
“How about DNA? Do you trust that? Because that proved conclusively there’s no blood relationship between me and Athena.”
She tried to digest this latest revelation, one she’d never heard, as a matter of fact. He tossed it out so glibly, she was surprised she never had. He clearly seemed to think the fact they weren’t blood-related made it okay to treat her as he had.
Paul Stavros, the man she had known as her father, was a faint, warm memory—of calm brilliance and affectionate acceptance—but no clearer than her memory of her mother. She perhaps should have felt more surprise that she was not his biological daughter, if Freddie was even telling the truth. But she didn’t. She was so weary of this whole Greek tragedy.
“Why were you so anxious to get rid of her, then?” Evan asked.
“Because it didn’t matter. My weakling of a brother left his whole fortune to his wife and if she died, then to his so-called daughter. It didn’t matter if she wasn’t really his or not.”
There was another reason that Freddie was so anxious to get rid of her as well, although she wondered if he would dare to voice it. Sometimes she wondered if he even knew. He’d never acknowledged that he did.
But she knew the truth. She had seen what he had put in her mother’s tea that day. And for that reason alone, she was a threat to him.
“So you weren’t raping your niece. Just your stepdaughter. Nice.”
“He never raped me,” she said quietly. “He just beat me to a pulp. He left the actual sex to one of my ‘bodyguards’.”
She remembered the cold, brutal insertion of a penis into her vagina those few times, usually no more than an unzipping of a man’s suit pants and a shoving of her skirt up, with the crotch of her panties pushed aside. The dry painful process. The violation.
It wasn’t even the same thing as the lovemaking she had shared with Evan.
And after those first few times, Freddie didn’t force her to do it anymore. It didn’t hurt enough apparently and she didn’t struggle enough for his tastes. If she could have taken all his punishment that way, perhaps she could have avoided it. But as careful as one tries to be, it is nearly impossible not to show a reaction to broken ribs or internal injuries. So those Freddie continued to mete out with regularity and, thank God, left the sexual part out.
“What were you trying to do anyway, Uncle Freddie?” she asked him. “Beat me to death? Because you could have really gone about it so much more simply.”
“Ah, but where would be the fun in that?”
Freddie whipped his head around at the lilting Greek accent Andrea recognized even before the speaker herself came into the light.
“Frannie!” Stavros said. “See! I was right. Athena was alive.”
The implication chilled her. Deep down, after all the pain and betrayal she had experienced in her life, she still held on to the hope that some people had not been part of it. And Francesca Stavros was one of those. A lush and full beauty, Aunt Frannie had always seemed so full of life and love. Athena had never wanted to believe she had known about any of this, about how Freddie had treated her, niece or not. But she supposed she should have known better when the woman had not taken her up on her anonymous offer to help her to escape Freddie. She had seen pictures of her aunt in the society columns over the years, always expensively dressed and coiffed, diamonds everywhere.
And now here Aunt Frannie was, her jet-black hair swept up elegantly and her soft citrus perfume wafting around her, leisurely stepping into the scene of an about-to-be double homicide.
“Yes, right again, Freddie.”
The gunmen fell back as she approached the bed and in a Judas-like moment, leaned over to kiss Andrea lightly on her cheek, taking her hand and bringing it up to her own soft cheek.
“Athena. As beautiful as your name, as ever, my dear. And the spitting image of your mother.” She glanced back at Freddie. “Isn’t she?”
He grunted. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to be here, Frannie.”
“Nonsense. I couldn’t have Athena here in Greece, almost home, and not come by to say hello.”
The gunmen in the background traded identical looks of confusion and Evan wasn’t far behind. Andrea blinked rapidly. She’d always felt safer when Francesca was around, even though it hadn’t made much sense at the time. Frannie was Freddie’s mistress when he married Angelica Stavros and his wife when Angelica died, and if stereotypes had held, Athena should have hated her.
But Frannie had never played the part of evil stepmother or the other woman. Only ten years or so her senior, she had been the one to give Athena a much-needed hug at her mother’s funeral, the one to take her to buy tampons when she unexpectedly got her period in true mortifying fashion during the wake, the one to encourage her to make her peace with her parents’ deaths, and to make friends at school and…and…to just be a girl sometimes.
Athena, and now Andrea, had never wanted to believe Francesca had known what Uncle Freddie had done to her, or to her mother.
But here she was, so obviously part of this.
“And who is this absolutely handsome young man we find you in bed with, Athena?”
“You know who it is, Frannie.” Her husband seemed to be wearying of whatever game she was playing.
“Well, I don’t think it was very smart of you to plan to kill a member of the Reynolds family, Freddie, right after he visited you too. My goodness, his father would have your head.”
“It’s going to look accidental,” Freddie muttered.
“Not if there’s a bullet hole in him when he washes to shore.” The little titter she gave at that sent a shiver down Andrea’s spine. Evan took the hand Frannie wasn’t holding and squeezed it. She shrugged, no more sure what this meant than he was, no doubt. “Well, in any case, you’d best get down to it. His brother apparently is in town.”
Freddie muttered a vicious Greek swear word.
“He called right before I came out here and, my, my, he seemed agitated when I said you weren’t available.”
“Do you think if you’re going to arrange my death, I might get up and get dressed first?” Evan asked calmly.
“Oh please do.” Frannie dropped her hand and stepped back. “I can’t wait to see what you have under those covers, you beautiful young man.”
The slap Freddie whipped his wife’s head back with took them all by surprise and the Greek he spat at her needed no translation even for Evan. Freddie was calling his wife the worst kind of whore as she delicately brought her fingers up to her bleeding lip.
“Take care,” she responded in Greek. “This is going to show, my dear.”
“Enough!” Freddie snapped in English again.
“There’s another reason why you treated Athena as you did,” Francesca said conversationally. “Isn’t there? She knew what you did to her mother. Not the ‘special’ care you gave her and me, but something less ‘loving’, you might say. Poison is a woman’s weapon usually, isn’t it, Freddie? But just as effective as your fists.”
Andrea swallowed hard. He had known.
“And when she tried to tell her mother what you were doing to her, well, we know what happened then, don’t we? So you not only needed Paul’s half of the fortune, you needed Athena’s silence too, didn’t you?”
The blood from the split lip blended with Frannie’s lipstick to make a garish, joker-like smile.
“Take Athena back to the house,” Freddie growled at one of the guards. “My wife will go with you too. We’ll deal with the girl there.”
“I’m not leaving Evan.”
Freddie charged toward them, trying to yank her up, and Evan socked him in the jaw, causing a yelp of pain from the older man and a powerful conk on Evan’s head from one of the gunmen who joined the fray but then fell back at a word from Freddie.
“Fine! You want to see him die, Athena? You’ll see him die. Hold him up!”
The order was no more than out of his mouth when Freddie’s face suddenly turned an eggplant shade of purple and he clutched his chest, sinking to his knees.
“Mind your heart, Freddie,” Francesca said in a low singsong voice as she watched her husband crumple to the floor, his henchmen immediately falling beside him, frantically loosening his necktie as it became clear he struggled for breath.
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