by Sara Craven
She had said she wouldn’t resist, and when the long fingers stroked her thighs, she allowed him to part them, without demur. And he was keeping his side of their cold bargain too, she realised, dazedly accepting his almost clinical exploration of her most intimate self. Whatever she’d been expecting, it had not been this, she thought, trying not to flinch and failing.
He saw, of course. ‘I am hurting you?’
Gemma bit her lip. ‘You’re very—thorough.’
He said coolly, ‘And you are very inexperienced. In that, at least, you told the truth.’
She turned her head away and stared at the small flame flickering in the lamp. There was another small flame, somewhere deep inside her, barely alight, struggling for life, which she had to ignore. Because even this bleak, impersonal discovering of her was having its effect on her body’s reflexes.
It would be so easy, she thought wretchedly, to reach up and draw him down to her, to put her lips against his face, his skin. So easy, and so fatal.
She stole a glance at him through her lashes. He looked stem—remote, and when he moved over her, she was frightened again, because he was a stranger whom she had absolved of all necessity to be kind. And if he was brutal, she would only have herself to blame, she thought, her nails scoring tense crescents in the palms of her hands.
But when he’d said he could be patient, he had not lied, she discovered wonderingly. She might not have deserved consideration but it was there for her just the same. And skill. And an infinite control which reduced the initial pain of his possession that her taut, unyielding muscles had made inevitable.
And, as he entered her completely, she cried out, not just because of the hurting, but in amazement too that this joining of their bodies which should have been so traumatic was, in the end, so incredibly, miraculously simple.
He took a corner of the sheet, and gently wiped the tiny beads of sweat from her forehead and cheekbones, and in that moment she let herself acknowledge freely for the first time that she loved him. That the ultimate disaster which she had tried to avoid had already overtaken her.
And she acknowledged too, as he began to move inside her slowly at first, that this brief treasuring of his warmth and strength as part of her would be all of him she would ever have to remember.
Echoing his own words, she thought, ‘So be it, then.’
As he reached his climax he groaned something—her name—some words in his own language, then rolled away from her burying his face in the pillow, while his harsh, ragged breathing slowly steadied.
Gemma lay beside him, not speaking, aching, wondering what she should do next. Go back to her own room, perhaps?
After a while, he flung back the sheet and got out of bed, crossing the room to the bathroom.
She heard the sound of running water. Perhaps this was a signal for her to take her leave she thought, lifting herself up, and wincing a little. But the next minute he was back, carrying a bowl of water and a small towel. He sat on the edge of the bed, and began to bathe her with the dampened towel, first her face, and then, drawing back the sheet, her body.
She saw without surprise that she had bled a little. It was strange, she thought, but oddly sweet to lie there, allowing him to perform this intimate, but at the same time impersonal service for her.
When he had finished, he put the bowl down beside the bed, and let the towel drop to the floor beside it.
She said quietly, ‘May I go now?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You may not.’ There was a note in his voice which seemed to warn her not to press the point.
He lay down beside her again, pulling the sheet to cover them both, and blew out the lamp. His arm went round her shoulders, pulling her down to him, pillowing her head on his chest. His other hand closed round the curve of her hip, drawing her closer to the warmth of his naked body. Cradled against him, she felt the tensions and the misery slowly begin to ebb away. His skin felt like silk under her cheek, the beat of his heart like the pulse of the universe under her hand.
After what had happened, it was madness, she thought, to feel so safe, so comforted.
Yet, after a while, against the odds, against all reason, she fell asleep in his arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE awoke to the beauty of a dawn sky and the realisation that she was being watched. She turned her head a fraction and looked into his eyes.
He brushed his mouth lightly across hers, and she knew what had woken her.
‘You have rested well?’ he asked.
Her, ‘Yes’ sounded strangled, because the hand that had been resting on her hip travelled upwards, and was now cupping her pointed breast, his thumb lazily stroking her nipple, sending fierce shafts of pleasure through her.
‘And I did not hurt you too much?’ He bent his head, and trailed a pattern of tiny kisses around the breast he was caressing, taking the aroused rosy peak between his lips, and tugging it sensuously.
She gasped. ‘What are you doing?’
He lifted his head and smiled at her. ‘Making love to you, agape mou, as I should have done last night.’ He kissed her other breast, his tongue moving against her skin, filling her with piercing excitement.
She said hoarsely, ‘No.’
‘Yes,’ he contradicted her, a sudden fierceness in his eyes and voice. ‘Last night, Gemma, you made me feel like an animal. You will not do so twice. From this moment, I want to feel human again, to feel as a man should do with his woman.’
‘I’m not your woman.’ It was the only defence she could think of, and a poor one as it turned out, because he only grinned at her sardonically, and flung the sheet which was her only protection off the bed.
‘Tell me that later,’ he invited. ‘Much later,’ he added huskily, and kissed her indignantly parted lips very slowly and very completely. When at last he raised his head, she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She lay back against his encircling arm and looked up at him, her eyes widening endlessly. Every nerve in her body seemed tinglingly awake, the blood moving slowly through her veins, as thick and sweet as honey. She was aware of that deep inner trembling, and knew now that it was desire, that her body was crying out for the fulfilment it had been denied.
He kissed her mouth again, her eyes, the swift unsteady pulse in her throat. She wondered helplessly how she could ever have thought his mouth hard, when it was like velvet against her skin, his tongue a sweet flame, setting her alight in turn...
His fingers caressed her, moulding every curve and plane of her slender body, and where his hand touched, his lips followed in an erotic pilgrimage which made her moan aloud, half in protest, half in yearning.
She moved against him restlessly, driven by instincts she still barely understood, kissing his shoulder, her small teeth grazing the smooth skin. She wanted to please him in turn, to create the same kind of delight for him, but she didn’t know how, and then he took her hands and guided them to his body, and showed her.
She’d always considered herself a girl of her times, informed and intelligent about sex, knowledgeable about the physiology of her own body. But now she knew how wide a gulf there was between theory and practice. No book, no lesson, had ever taught her that one man’s hands caressing her breasts, one man’s mouth unhurriedly exploring the hollow inside her hip bone could turn her responses to frenzy. Nothing had warned her of the pleasure, even pride, to be gained from feeling his own body quicken in answer to her first shy, unpractised advances.
She heard him groan her name, his face taut, almost fierce, then he was above her and within her, and they were one, driven and consumed by the same passionate, primitive hunger.
There was sunlight in the room, touching him like an aureole, turning his lean body to gold, and it was part of her too, she discovered—a great sunburst of sensation, exploding in the deepest core of her being, and rippling through every fibre of her in spasm after spasm of uncontrollable pleasure.
She cried his name, the sound torn out of her in a kind of agony, and heard him
answer, then his mouth took hers in an endless kiss as the storm of feeling slowly subsided, and they slid, still locked together, into calmer waters.
A long time later, he said, ‘Talk to me.’
‘About what?’ She still felt almost dazed, her body weightless with contentment. If his arm had not been across her, anchoring her, she would have floated, she thought idly.
‘About yourself. This career you once spoke of, for example.’
‘You won’t find it very interesting,’ she said. ‘I demonstrate and sell electronic typewriters, and word processing equipment.’
‘For yourself?’
‘Heavens, no, for a company—Protechnics Limited. Graham employs a team of girls.’
‘This Graham is your boss? Tell me about him.’
She tried to think what there was to say about Graham. Not that it was easy to think of anything except that Andreas’ hand was stroking her arm very gently, tracing with one forefinger the delicate tracery of veins inside her elbow.
She said, ‘Well—he’s kind and practical, and a very shrewd businessman, although he’s always moaning that the company’s on the edge of disaster. We all like him.’
‘Is he young?’ He picked up her hand and carried it to his lips, kissing each finger in turn. ‘Middle-aged? Married?’
She laughed a little breathlessly. ‘He’s nearly forty, and very much married, with three children. His wife works for the company too.’
‘This is usual in your country for a wife to identify herself so closely with her husband’s business?’ His mouth caressed the softness of her palm.
‘I’d say that would depend very much on the business.’ It was getting increasingly harder to string coherent words together.
‘Perhaps. And the children—you said three— what happens to them?’
‘They’re all at school. And Jennifer has an au pair.’ She stole a look at him under her lashes, noting a slight tightening of his mouth. ‘You obviously don’t approve.’
He shrugged. ‘How other men live their lives is hardly my concern. But remembering the needs of my own childhood, I am glad that my mother was always there. No nursemaid, however kind, could ever have taken her place.’
‘Is—is your mother still alive?’
‘Very much alive.’
‘And were you an only child?’
‘By no means.’ He kissed the inside of her wrist very softly, making her pulses leap frantically. ‘I have a brother and two sisters, all younger than myself.’
‘So you’re the head of the family.’ Her voice almost cracked in her effort to keep it under control.
‘Yes.’ It was as if a door had suddenly closed. He kissed her hand again, and rolled away on to his back, staring up at the ceiling.
It was absurd to feel so bereft, she thought faintly. Absurd, and shaming too.
Downstairs, she was suddenly aware of faint sounds of movement. He slanted a look at her. ‘Our breakfast has arrived,’ he said lightly. ‘Are you hungry?’
Her mouth felt dry. ‘A little.’
‘Then I’ll fetch us some food.’ He yawned slightly, and stretched, his body lithe and bronzed in the sunshine, making her stingingly aware of the superb play of muscle and sinew. He turned his head and looked at her. Looking at him. She glanced away but not quickly enough, it seemed. Because he said softly, ‘Unless you have other plans?’
‘No,’ she denied hastily. ‘None at all.’
He smiled at her lazily. ‘Then let me teach you some Greek.’ He paused. ‘Say after me, “Mine etho mazi mou”.’ He said the words again slowly, making her repeat them after him. ‘Very good, agape mou. Now say, “Se thelo poli”.’
She complied, looking at him suspiciously. ‘I already have a phrasebook. What am I saying?’ His smile widened wickedly. ‘What you were too shy to say in your own tongue, my Gemma. You told me “Stay here with me. I want you very much”.’
She gasped, ‘Oh,’ her cheeks burning. ‘Oh— you’re a bastard. And it isn’t true.’
‘Is it not?’ The long arms captured her effortlessly, pulling her to him. He whispered against her lips. ‘Then prove it...’
Gemma stepped out from the shower, and wound a towel round her body before going back into the bedroom. Andreas had opened the windows fully before going downstairs, and the sun was streaming in. She stepped out on to the little balcony, and stood drying her hair with her fingers.
She ached, but not unpleasantly, and at the same time she felt vividly, shiningly alive. The air had never seemed so clear, the colours of the rock, the sky, the foliage so sharp and new.
Glancing at herself in the mirror, she had almost been surprised to see she looked the same as usual. Well almost the same, she thought smiling a little. Her mouth looked slightly swollen, and there were faint marks on her shoulders and breasts and thighs which had never been there before.
Their last coming together might have started out in laughter, but it had ended in an almost savage urgency, her body matching his in the fierceness of its demands. When it was over, she had cried, and he had held her closely, comforting her as if she was a child.
She flexed her shoulders in the sun’s warmth, narrowing her eyes against the glare. Only she wasn’t a child any more. She was a woman, with all a woman’s certainties, a woman’s power. His woman.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a movement, a splash of colour which had not been there before, and she turned her head sharply, her attention focused.
It was Maria, her red dress sharply contrasting with the white dazzle of the rock she was silhouetted against as she climbed the track up the mountain.
Gemma frowned. It was obvious the Greek girl didn’t want to be seen, by the way she kept glancing back over her shoulder towards the village path. At first, Gemma wondered whether she could be running away, but she seemed to have nothing with her in the way of luggage. And if she was simply on her way to visit another village, why was she behaving so furtively?
But Gemma thought, with a mental shrug, it was no concern of hers what Maria might be up to. And then stopped dead, her mind almost blanking out with shock. Because she’d almost— almost forgotten in the dazed aftermath of her first experience of passion, why exactly she was at the villa.
If it had not been for Maria she would have come to Crete, met Michael somewhere and possibly spent a few days sightseeing in his company. Because of Maria, Andreas had come into her life, not as her lover, but as an avenger, and now she had to face the bitter acknowledgment that their hours together in that bed had been primarily the exactment of that vengeance.
She shivered, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. He’d done exactly as he’d threatened he would do—taken her for his pleasure, without love or the promise of commitment, and now she was left with the shame of that knowledge.
It seemed ironic that only a few days before, she’d been complaining to Hilary how all the men she met seemed to want to rush into serious relationships.
I like to take things slowly, she reminded herself painfully, one step at a time. And yet here I am— over my head, and out of my depth.
And she couldn’t even pretend she hadn’t seen the danger, because she’d recognised it from the first moment she saw him.
She bent her head, and a sigh shook her whole body. Last night, she’d known exactly what she was doing. She’d fought her senses with her mind, and won a small, bitter victory. She should have gone on fighting, but she’d been betrayed by her love for him, and by the needs she hadn’t even known existed in her.
But he’d known, she thought wretchedly. He was diabolically experienced. Every time he’d touched her, kissed her, he’d been gauging the sleeping sensuality within her, and planning how to awaken it.
At dawn, that was how, she thought stormily, when she was half-asleep and vulnerable, and bewildered by the gentleness he’d shown her. And she’d forgotten everything—everything except how much she wanted him.
She only hoped she would be a
ble to forget everything that had happened between them as easily.
She started violently as his hands descended on her shoulders.
‘What are you dreaming of?’ His mouth brushed the side of her throat.
She said woodenly, ‘I was just looking at the view.’ She pointed. ‘What’s up that track?’
He shrugged. ‘Very little. A few goats, many stones, and an old hut which the shepherds use. Why do you ask?’
‘I thought there might be another village.’ She turned back into the bedroom.
‘Still trying to run away, Gemma mou?’ He spoke lightly, but his eyes were narrowed.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘As you mentioned, dressed like this I wouldn’t get very far.’
‘But with your clothes, and in the jeep, you could get as far as Aghios Nikolaos.’
Her heart seemed to miss a beat. ‘You—you’re letting me go?’
‘No, little fool.’ He dropped a kiss on her bare shoulder. ‘I have to go there on business later, and I thought you might like to go with me.’ He paused. ‘Well? What do you say?’
She shrugged pettishly, moving away from him. ‘What’s the alternative. Another day alone with Cerberus?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Then I’ll go to Aghios Nikolaos,’ she said ungraciously, and he laughed.
‘You are indeed a woman of contrasts, agape mou. In bed, a passionate angel. At breakfast, a grudging shrew. I suppose I must thank God it is not the other way about.’ He indicated the tray he had placed on the bed. ‘Have some honey on your bread. Perhaps it will sweeten your temper.’
She bit her lip. ‘You mentioned my clothes. Do you mean you’re letting me have them back?’ ‘Your case is downstairs at this moment.’
‘And my money? My passport?’
‘Not those.’ The dark eyes glinted. ‘Nor your plane ticket to England.’ He looked at her, half-smiling, half-watchful. ‘Are you really so eager to leave me?’
She shrugged again. ‘There isn’t a great deal to keep me here—now that you’ve got what you wanted.’