by Lynne Graham
‘Tony didn’t want Mum without her father’s money,’ Ellie confided. ‘He broke off the engagement and not long afterwards he married the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer.’
‘So he ditched your mother when she was pregnant—?’
‘No, it wasn’t that simple. A few weeks after he got married he went to Mum and told her that he’d made a dreadful mistake, that he still loved her. I was conceived the same day. She thought he would leave his wife.’
‘Ah…’ Dio murmured with expressive softness. ‘But he had no such intention.’
‘Mum was as green as grass and still mad about him,’ Ellie conceded heavily, and then she sighed. ‘I don’t want to talk about them any more.’
‘No problem,’ Dio told her huskily, letting his big hands slide down her taut spine to curve over her hips and mould her against his lean, hard body.
‘Now it’s your turn…’ Ellie muttered unevenly as she quivered, thought about pulling away, decided to do it, and then discovered that she didn’t have that much will-power.
‘My turn…?’ Dio echoed thickly.
‘Your turn,’ she repeated unsteadily, a twist of heat snaking through her lower belly and tightening every tiny muscle she possessed.
‘My father told me it was time I got married. I said, No, I’m not ready yet…and he said, “I don’t want to see you or speak to you until you are ready,”’ Dio recited with raw-edged emphasis, half under his breath.
Ellie tipped back her head to frown up at him. ‘That’s your joky way of telling me to mind my own business…right?’
‘Wrong.’
‘You mean your father just expected you to get married when he said so?’ Ellie couldn’t hide her astonishment.
‘My own parents didn’t just meet and date, Ellie. They knew each other from childhood, grew up knowing what was expected of them, and when the time seemed right,’ Dio specified in a taut undertone, ‘their fathers got together and set the wedding date.’
‘For goodness’ sake, that’s medieval!’
‘To you, perhaps. But my parents were very happy together.’ Dio smoothed her tousled hair back from her damp brow with incredibly gentle fingers, making her shiver and automatically curve closer, her legs increasingly wobbly supports. ‘Marriage can still be very much a family affair in Greece.’
‘I don’t want to criticise your father…’ Ellie began hesitantly, turning the side of her face into his palm, like a sensuous cat begging to be stroked, and snatching in a fracturing breath as she struggled to concentrate. ‘But I think he should’ve appreciated that times have changed. You’re a grown man and he treated you like—’
‘He knew what was best for me,’ Dio slotted in with velvet-soft finality. ‘I may speak public school English, Ellie, but I am Greek, and marriage is a very serious step. The English rely on love and have a very high divorce rate—’
‘Yes, but—’
‘It’s more important to pick a life partner with intelligence,’ Dio stated, and then he lifted her high in his strong arms, as if he was tired of that particular subject, and sealed his sensual mouth with hungry mastery to hers.
Ellie’s head spun, her heart jumping violently. He needed to talk. This wasn’t what she had planned; this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. In another minute, she swore feverishly, she would pull back, stop this before it got out of hand. But somehow her arms had got round his neck and her fingers were already sliding into the thick luxuriance of his black hair. A cloud of such debilitating weakness enveloped her that by the time she promised herself another thirty seconds she could no longer recall why that strange idea of a time-frame should come into her head.
‘This was inevitable,’ Dio growled, sweeping her right off her feet when she stumbled on her no longer reliable lower limbs and carrying her back into the beach house.
CHAPTER FOUR
A THOUGHT almost made it to the surface of Ellie’s blank mind. And then she locked into Dio’s black glittering eyes. Her heart lurched; her pulses raced. Dizzy and mindless euphoria took a hold again.
She raised an uncertain hand to cover one hard flushed cheekbone with a shy possessiveness entirely new to her. Her spread fingers rejoiced in the rougher texture of his skin, her dilated pupils searching out every tiny detail of him that close.
The lush black spiky lashes, so ridiculously long, the dramatic set of his eyes below those dark defined brows; the sheer masculine beauty of his hard bone structure; the lean, arrogant perfection of his nose. She caressed his aggressive jawline with wondering tenderness, her whole being intensely absorbed in that appraisal. Nothing had ever felt so right or so natural.
‘You really are gorgeous,’ she told him helplessly.
Dio brought her down on something firm and deliciously comfortable and leant over her. He stared down into her dazed eyes, his own flaming gold, and groaned, ‘I thought you were the most perfect thing I ever saw in my life when I took that scarf off. Your hair, your skin, your eyes. You stunned me—’
‘Guess you’re s-stunning me,’ Ellie stammered, wit returning to take in the fact that she was lying on a bed in a dimly lit room, sudden dismay blossoming at the edge of her euphoria.
‘You’re really very sweet underneath the tough front…’ Dio lowered his proud dark head.
Ellie could have drowned in those topaz eyes, could literally feel weakness escaping like a honeyed dam breaking its walls inside her, sentencing her to mesmerised stillness.
He took her lips again, prying them apart with the wicked dart of his tongue. Her heart banged and her tummy quivered and she couldn’t get breath back into her lungs. Her submission was absolute, instinctive. She could not have resisted the erotic allure of that kiss had her life depended on it. It was like being reborn, every sensation so sharp, so fresh, so intense she was hooked in helpless, urgent longing for the next.
‘So sweet,’ Dio growled low in his throat as Ellie moaned and gasped under his expert mouth with shivering responsiveness.
Peeling off his shirt, he raised her to him. Ellie stiffened. The whole of her vision was filled with that broad bronzed chest and the thick, dark curling hair marking his pectoral muscles before snaking down into a fine silky furrow over his taut flat stomach. He lifted her hands and put them on him, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that she should touch him.
‘Dio…’ she said jerkily, shock waves running through her as the hard, hair-roughened warmth of him met her splayed fingers.
Heavens, there was so much of him, and suddenly she felt wildly out of her depth, recognising that he was encouraging and expecting an experienced partner.
‘Touch me,’ he invited raggedly.
She studied her own hands as if she was hoping they would lift from him without any conscious message from her brain. But he felt so fascinatingly, wonderfully good. ‘This is…this is a little bit fast for me,’ she mumbled with serious understatement, because she still couldn’t grasp how they had got as far as undressing on a bed.
He covered her small hands with his. ‘You want me to leave, I will.’
A cold stab of fear made Ellie’s stomach flip. She lifted her head up to encounter sizzling dark eyes set in a lean, taut-boned face that made her ache with longing. Leave or stay. Nothing in between. And if he leaves now, maybe he’ll never ask again; maybe he’ll think I’m just a tease, she reflected in anguish, finally appreciating that he saw no reason why they shouldn’t enjoy each other immediately.
‘But I…’ she began, not even knowing what she was going to say, terrified of sounding like some old-fashioned virgin and turning him off completely.
‘Make your mind up.’ Dio’s dark drawl was urgent with stress and tension, pure, masculine need stamped on his lean dark features. ‘I’m not made of steel and I am burning for you…’
Ellie’s taut hands quivered under his. She just couldn’t take her eyes off him. His intensity melted her deep down inside. ‘I want you too…so much.’
Dio
settled her gently back onto the mattress. ‘I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do, pethi mou.’
‘Of course not, but—’
‘Open your mouth for me,’ he urged raggedly.
And she did, taking instant fire from that passionate onslaught. She didn’t notice him skimming her nightdress straps down her arms. Then he coiled back from her to remove the tangle of fabric from round her hips and she focused in shock on her own bare breasts, rising wantonly full, crested by taut pink nipples.
‘You’re exquisite,’ Dio groaned.
Coming back to her, he let his thumb stroke a swollen bud, his palm cupping the underside of her firm breast, and then he closed his mouth there instead. He sent such a jolt of startling sensation through Ellie she cried out loud, her head falling back on the pillows, all thought suspended. Her hands gripped his smooth brown shoulders as over and over again he caressed her sensitive flesh with his tongue and his teeth and his lips. Now she was the one burning, maddened by every sure, knowing stroke, driven to a height of frantic yearning need that consumed her like a greedy fire.
Without warning Dio rolled back from her and slid off the bed backwards, burnished golden eyes welded to her pale pink body. It was like being visually consumed. She was hot and out of breath, in a state of mindless hunger beyond anything she had ever imagined possible. Her eyes followed him. She simply couldn’t bear him that far away from her.
‘Dio…?’ she muttered uncertainly.
‘You respond to me like you were made for me,’ Dio told her with primal satisfaction.
She watched him unzip his well-cut pants. Her eyes widened, a shred of awareness returning. His black boxer shorts were skimmed off his lean hips a split second later. Receiving her first view of a fully aroused adult male shook Ellie. And although Dio was even more beautiful than she had naively imagined, he was considerably more intimidating. Belatedly conscious of her own nakedness, Ellie sat up and wrenched at the sheet so that she could squirm beneath its cover, her heart pounding against her breastbone as if she had run a three-minute mile.
The knowledge of her own inexperience provoked a current of panic. Dio strolled back to the bed without inhibition. In fact she doubted that Dio had ever had the slightest urge to hide himself in the bedroom. ‘You’re shy,’ he murmured almost tenderly, but he threw back the sheet to join her, with scant allowance for that reality.
‘Yes… Dio—’
‘I want to look at you,’ he confessed, curving her into the hard, abrasive heat of his powerfully masculine body with a long possessive arm. ‘You’re shaking…’
‘You’re making me nervous.’
He meshed lean fingers into her thick hair and brought her mouth up to his, tasting her with deep, sensual appreciation until her head swam and the nerves were squeezed out of her by more physical reactions.
He lifted his imperious dark head then. Brilliant golden eyes gazed down into hers. ‘This isn’t a one-night stand. This is something exceptional and special. I don’t sleep around,’ he asserted with husky sincerity.
Ellie raised an unsteady hand and brushed the tousled black hair off his brow, her heart banging somewhere in the region of her throat. She couldn’t believe the power he had over her. She couldn’t believe that a man finally had her hanging on his every word, hoping and praying that he was worthy of her trust. It was a terrifying feeling, but when he held her eyes and touched her there wasn’t a fibre of her being capable of resisting him.
Dio ran an exploring hand over her trembling length. She jerked and gasped, her whole body already so sensitised he could reawaken her with the slightest touch. When he teased the soft silver-gilt triangle at the juncture of her thighs she moaned, and thrust her burning face into his hard shoulder. With devastating expertise, he traced the hot, swollen centre of her and located the most sensitive place of all. And from that point on Ellie was lost, without hope of reclaim, stormed by endless exquisite sensations that just as quickly became a kind of sustained torture.
‘You are so tight,’ Dio muttered in a sensual groan of appreciation.
The ache of need he aroused was unbearable. Ellie writhed out of control, tormented gasps wrenched from her as she clutched at any part of him she could reach. ‘Dio, please…’ she moaned in desperate appeal.
He slid over her, rearranging her with urgent hands. She clashed with blazing eyes and exulted in her femininity, sensing his control was as ragged as her own was non-existent. Fierce hunger seethed in her shamelessly at that instant. She would have walked through fire to lie under him. And then he plunged into her, and the sharp, wrenching pain of that passionate invasion startled her into crying out in surprise.
Dio stilled. Stunned black eyes looked down into hers. ‘Cristos…you can’t be!’ he exclaimed.
‘Not any more…’
Something primitive flared then in his tense gaze. ‘You like shocking me, don’t you?’
Ellie was blushing like mad now, maddeningly conscious of the tiny smooth shifts with which he was easing his hungry passage all the way inside her. ‘Can’t talk now,’ she mumbled, wholly intent on this new and fascinating experience.
A ragged laugh was torn from Dio. He kissed the crown of her head and began to demonstrate how much more exciting it could get. Raw, out-of-control need possessed her as thoroughly as he did. She couldn’t breathe for the insane race of her heart. The world could have ended, and nothing but the pounding surge of his body into hers would have mattered. The intensity of the pleasure drove her wild, and finally off the edge into a hot, wrenching paroxysm of shattering release.
‘You should have told me I’d be the first, pethi mou,’ Dio rasped, out of breath.
‘Didn’t seem important,’ Ellie muttered evasively, revelling in the way he was holding her close to his hot, damp magnificent length, tears of reaction in her softened eyes which she was glad he couldn’t see.
Was it possible to fall in love in the space of twenty-four hours? she wondered dreamily, struggling to recognise the person she now felt inside herself, but too happy and fulfilled to feel threatened by that change. Special? How special was special? She already knew how special he was to her. She wanted to wrap him up in a big blanket of affection and hug him to death, and Ellie had never felt that soppy in her life before.
‘It was important to me,’ Dio confided softly. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘I can’t remember when I last ate,’ Dio muttered reflectively.
‘Not very sensible,’ she told him.
Releasing her, Dio rolled over and reached for the internal phone by the bed to order some food. Then, reaching for her hand, he pulled her out of bed with him. Her arms wrapped round herself as if she was freezing cold, Ellie hovered in the bathroom, watching him switch on the power shower. All of a sudden she felt so horrendously shy. She was being thrown into the deep end of sexual intimacy.
Dio tugged her into the shower with him, either not noticing or deliberately ignoring her discomfiture. ‘You really are tiny,’ he sighed.
She could feel him staring down at her. ‘I’m five foot one inch,’ she muttered—adding the inch.
‘You looked so funny in that coat at the airport…like a little girl dressing up.’
Ellie couldn’t think of anything witty to respond with.
‘Why have you gone so quiet?’ Dio demanded with sudden force.
‘I’m not wearing any clothes and I’m not used to holding conversations in a shower.’
A reluctant laugh of appreciation was dredged from Dio. He lifted her up into his arms like a doll, and hooked her arms round his shoulders. Holding her level with him, he stared into her eyes, his own dark and deep and curiously unguarded. ‘Are you on the contraceptive pill?’
Ellie frowned and reddened, wondering why he was asking such a question when she knew that he himself had protected her. ‘No…’
‘I didn’t think you would be. The condom broke,’ Dio admitted with unflinching ex
actitude.
‘No…’ The warm colour drained from Ellie’s complexion as the implications of that admission sank in. Cold fear snaked through her.
‘If anything happens—which I think unlikely—we’ll deal with it together.’ Dio’s breath fanned her parted lips and he slowly, gently kissed her again with incredible expertise.
Snatched in the nick of time from the pessimistic image of having her life ruined by an unplanned pregnancy, as her mother had, Ellie clung to his clearly more optimistic outlook and hurriedly pushed the matter out of her mind. Reality for her had evaporated well over an hour ago, and she was in no hurry for it to intrude again.
‘I have plans for you,’ Dio shared teasingly between drugging kisses that made Ellie tremble. ‘You’re going to enjoy being with me.’
They picnicked on the bed. They ate deep-fried courgette, followed by lobster and a Greek salad. Ellie had never eaten lobster in her life, and just about died when she saw it on her plate. She kept on sipping her wine until Dio got around to his, and then copied what he did with it. Her own ignorance embarrassed her, reminded her of what vastly different worlds they inhabited, and that was not something she could bear to be reminded of.
‘Thank you for what you said on the beach earlier,’ Dio murmured levelly. ‘It helped me to put the situation into perspective. If either I or my father had once suspected that he had so little time left we would have been instantly reconciled. The biggest irony is that I was already working in that direction.’
‘How?’ she prompted.
‘That conversation you overheard,’ Dio reminded her wryly. ‘That company I plan to buy out in a few hours’ time. My father lost it a long time ago. The reacquisition was to have been a subtle olive branch.’
‘Oh, Dio,’ Ellie sighed in sympathy. ‘So that’s why it was so important to you.’
‘I’ll toast his memory instead. He was a strong, vital man who lived life to the full. He would not want me to remember him with sadness.’
‘Explain to me the significance of what I overheard in that office,’ Ellie invited, to drive away the vulnerable darkness in his eyes and distract him.