Hot Nights with a Greek

Leo muttered something thick in his throat, then rose above her like some mighty warrior, so powerfully, darkly, passionately Greek that if she had not felt the pounding thunder of his heartbeat when she sent her hands sliding up the wall of his chest, Natasha could have convinced herself that he just wasn’t real.

He eased between her parted thighs with the firm, nude tautness of his narrow hips and the rounded tip of his desire made that first probing push against her flesh. Feeling him there, understanding what was coming and so naïvely eager to receive it, Natasha threw her head back onto the bed, ready, wanting this so very badly she was breathless, riddled by needs so new to her that they held her on the very edge of screaming-pitch.

So the sudden, fierce thrust of his invasion followed by a sharp, burning pain that ripped through her body had her clenching her muscles on a cry of protest.

Leo froze. Her eyes shot to his face. She found herself staring into passion-soaked, burning brown eyes turned black with shock. ‘You were a virgin. You—’

Natasha closed her eyes and refused to say anything, while his deriding denial that this would be her first time replayed its cruel taunt across her tense body, and the muscles inside her that were already contracting around him.

‘Natasha—’

‘No!’ she cried out. ‘Don’t talk about it!’

He seemed shocked by her agonised outburst. ‘But you—’

‘Please get off me,’ she squeezed out in desperation and pushed at his shoulders with her tightly clenched fists. ‘You’re hurting me.’

‘Because you are new to this…’ His voice had roughened, the hand he used to gently push her hair away from her face trembling against her hot skin.

But he made no attempt to withdraw from her, his big shoulders bunched and glossed with a fine layer of perspiration, forearms braced on either side of her, and his face was so grave now Natasha knew what was coming before he said it.

‘I’m sorry, agape mou…’

‘Just get off!’ She didn’t want his apology. Balling her hands into fists, she pushed at his shoulders, writhing beneath him in an effort to get free, only to flatten out again on a shivering quiver of shock when her inner muscles leapt on his intrusion with an excited clamour that made her eyes widen.

Reading her expression with an ease that pushed a hot flush through her body, ‘You are not hurting any more,’ he husked out, and lowered his head to adorn her face with soft, light, coaxing kisses—her eyes, her nose, her temples, her delicate ear lobes—that made her quiver and squirm and in the end dig fingers into his bunched shoulders and send her mouth on a restless search for his.

‘Oh, kiss me properly!’ she ended up begging.

Her helpless plea was all it took to tip a carefully contained, sexually aroused man over the edge. On a very explicit curse, he moulded her mouth to his. A second later and Natasha was lost—flung into a strange new world filled with sensation, piling in on top of sensation, unaware that the whole wild beauty of it was being carefully built upon by a master lover until she felt the first rippling spasm wash through her. She knew that he felt it, too, because he whispered something hot against her cheek, slid his powerful arms beneath her so he could hold her close, then angled his mouth to hers and began to thrust really deep, increasing the pace while maintaining a ferocious grip on his own thundering needs.

The grinding drag of fierce pleasure began to flow through her body. Natasha whimpered helplessly against his mouth. Knotting his fingers into her hair, he muttered tensely, ‘Let go, agape mou.’

And like a fledgling bird being encouraged to fly, Natasha just opened her sensory wings and dropped off the edge of the world into an acutely bright, scintillating dive straight into the frenzied path of an emotional storm. A moment later she felt him shudder as he made the same mind-shredding leap, while urging her on and on until two became one in a wildly delirious, spiralling spin.

It was as if afterwards didn’t exist for Natasha; pure shock dropped her like a rock through a deep, dark hole into an exhausted sleep.

Maybe she did it because she did not want to face what she’d done, Leo mused sombrely as he sat sprawled in a chair by the bed, watching her—watching this woman he’d just bedded like some raving sex maniac while giving himself every excuse he could come up with to help him to justify his behavior.

A virgin.

His conscience gave him a stark, piercing pinch.

And the guilty truth of it was, he could still feel the sense of stinging, hot pleasurable pressure he’d experienced when the barrier gave. A muscle low down in his abdomen gave a tug in direct response to the memory and he lifted the glass of whisky he held and grimly took a large sip.

The prim persona had been no lie.

She even slept the sleep of an innocent, he observed as he ran his eyes over her. No hint of sensual abandon in the modest curve of her body outlined against the white sheet.

Another slug at the whisky and he was studying her face next. Perfect, beautiful, softened by slumber and washed pale by the strain of the day she’d been put through when she should look…

He took another pull of the whisky, and as he lifted the glass to his mouth, her eyelids fluttered upwards and her sleep-darkened blue eyes looked directly at him.

The nagging tug on his loins became a pulsing burn that made him feel like a sinner.

He lowered the glass, and half hiding his eyes, watched her catch her breath, then freeze for a second before he said sombrely, ‘We will get married.’

Natasha almost jolted right out of her skin. ‘Are you mad?’ she gasped, pulling the covering sheet tightly up against her chin. ‘We have a deal—’

‘You were a virgin.’

As she dragged herself into a sitting position her hair tumbled forwards in a shining, loose tangle of waves around her face and she pushed it out of her way impatiently. ‘What the heck difference should that make to anything?’

‘It means everything,’ Leo insisted. ‘Therefore we will be married as soon as I can arrange it. I am honour-bound to offer you this.’

‘Stuff your honour.’ Heaving in a deep breath, Natasha climbed out of the bed on the other side from where he was sitting, trailing the sheet around her as she went. ‘Having just escaped one sleazy marriage by the skin of my teeth, I am not going to fall into another one!’

‘It will not be a sleazy marriage.’

‘Everything about you and your terrible family is sleazy!’ she turned on him angrily. ‘You’re all so obsessed with the value of money, you’ve lost touch with what’s really valuable in life! Well, I haven’t.’ Tossing her chin up, eyes like blue glass on fire with contempt, she drew the sheet around her. ‘We made a deal in which I give you sex for six weeks until I can give you back your precious money. Show a bit of your so-called honour by keeping to that deal!’

With that she turned and strode off to the bathroom, needing to escape—needing some respite from Leo Christakis and his long, sexy body stretched out in that chair by the bed. So he’d pulled a robe on—what difference did that make? She could still see him naked, still visualise every honed muscle and bone, each single inch of his taut, bronzed flesh! And she could still feel the power of his kisses and the weight of him on top of her and the…

‘You were innocent,’ he fed after her.

Was he talking about her sexual innocence or her being innocent of all of the other rotten charges he had laid against her? Did she care? No.

‘Stick to your first impression of me,’ she flung at him over her shoulder. ‘Your instincts were working better then!’

On that scathing slice, she slammed into the bathroom.

Leo grimaced into his glass. His first impression of Natasha Moyles had been deadly accurate, he acknowledged. It was only the stuff with Rico that had fouled up that impression.

He heard the shower running. He visualised her dropping the sheet and walking that smooth, curvy body into his custom-built wet room. The vision pushed him to his feet with the grim intention of giving into his nagging desires and going in there to join her. This war they were having was not over yet and would not be over until he won it.

Then something red caught the corner of his eye and he glanced down at the bed.

‘Theos,’ he breathed as his insides flipped into a near-crippling squirm in recognition.

Proof that he had just taken his first virgin was staring him in the face like a splash of outrage.

Leo flexed his taut shoulders, glanced over at the closed door to the bathroom, then back at the bed. ‘Damn,’ he cursed, trying to visualise what she was going to feel like when she saw the evidence of her lost virginity, and added a few more oaths in much more satisfying Greek.

Instead of going to join her, he discarded his robe to snatch up his trousers and shirt and pulled them back on. He had no idea where Bernice kept the fresh bedlinen, but he was going to have to find out for himself because the hell if he was going to ask…

CHAPTER SIX

WRAPPED in a spare bathrobe she’d found hanging behind the door, Natasha tugged in a deep breath, then opened the bathroom door and stepped out. Her heart was thumping. It had taken her ages to build up enough courage to leave the sanctuary of the bathroom and her muscles ached, she was so locked on the defensive, ready for her first glimpse of Leo sprawled in the chair by the bed.

It took a few moments for her to realise that she’d agonised over nothing because he wasn’t even in the room. And the bed had been straightened so perfectly it looked as if it had never been used. Even her clothes had been picked up and neatly draped over the chair he had been sitting in.

Had Bernice come in here and tidied up after them? The very idea pushed a flush of mortified heat into her cheeks. Natasha dragged her eyes away from the bed and began scanning the room for her holdall, while wishing that someone had bothered to tell her that she was going to feel like this—all tense and edgy and horribly uncertain as to what happened after you jumped into bed with a man you hardly knew!

Then the bedroom door flew open and she spun to face it with a jerk. Half expecting to find Bernice or one of the maids walking in, she was really thrown into a wild flutter when it was Leo standing there.

He was dressed and she definitely wasn’t. The way his eyes moved over her turned the flush of mortification into something else.

He swung the door shut behind him, then began striding towards her like some mighty warlord coming to claim his woman for a second round of mind-blowing sex and making her more uptight the closer he came. How could he wear that relaxed smile on his face as if everything in his world was absolutely perfect? Had he never felt awkward or nervous or just plain shy about anything?

Not this man, she concluded with a deep inner quiver when he pulled to a stop right in front of her. He gave off the kind of masculine vitality that made her fingers clutch the collar of the bathrobe close to her throat.

‘Your hair is wet,’ he observed, lifting a hand up to stroke it across the slicked back top of her head.

‘Your state-of-the-art wet room has a w-will of its own,’ she answered, still feeling the tingling shock she’d experienced when jets of water had hit her from every angle the moment she’d touched the start button in there.

‘I’ll find you a hairdryer,’ he murmured as he moved his hand to stroke the hectic burn in her cheek. ‘But in truth, I think you look adorable just as you are and if I thought you could take more of me right now I would be picking you up and taking you back to bed.’

Natasha shook his hand away. ‘I wouldn’t let you.’

‘Maybe,’ he goaded softly, ‘you would find yourself with little choice?’

Natasha’s startled gaze clashed with his smiling dark eyes. ‘You would make me, you mean?’

‘Seduce you into changing your mind, beautiful one,’ he corrected, then lowered his head to steal a kiss.

And it wasn’t just a quick steal. He let his lips linger long enough to extract a response from her before he drew back again.

‘Fortunately for you, right now I am starving for real food,’ he mocked her smitten expression. ‘Find yourself something comfortable to put on while I shower, then we will go and eat.’

With that he strode into the bathroom. Arrogant—arrogant—arrogant! Natasha thought as she wiped the taste of his mouth from her lips.

Thoroughly out of sorts with herself for being so susceptible to him, she hunted down her holdall and used up some of her irritation by hauling it up onto the bed and yanking open the zip. For the next few seconds she just stood looking down into the bag with absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what the heck she had packed inside it. She only had this very vague memory of grabbing clothes at random, then dropping them into the bag. Tense fingers clutching the gaping robe to her throat again, she let the other hand rummage inside the bag and pulled out an old pair of jeans and a pale green T-shirt.

Great, she thought as she discarded those two unappealing garments onto the bed. A pair of ordinary briefs—not a thong, thank goodness—appeared next, and she tossed those onto the bed, too. She found another suit styled like the pale blue suit she’d been wearing all day, only this one was in a dull cream colour that made her frown because she could not imagine herself buying it, never mind wearing such an awful shade against her fair skin. Yet she must have bought it or it wouldn’t be here.

Or perhaps this new Natasha—the one clutching a robe to her throat after losing her virginity to an arrogant Greek—had developed different tastes. She certainly felt different, kind of aching and alive in intimate places and so aware of her own body it started to tingle even as she thought about it.

No make-up, she discovered. She’d forgotten to pack her make-up bag or even a brush or comb. A couple of boring skirts appeared from the bag, followed by a couple of really boring tops. Frowning now with an itchy sense of dissatisfaction that irritated her all the more simply because she was feeling it, she finally unearthed a floaty black skirt made of the kind of fabric that didn’t crease when she pulled it free of the bag. A black silk crocheted top appeared next, which was going to have to go with the skirt whether she liked it or not since she did not seem to have anything else like it in the bag.

Only one spare pair of shoes—and no spare bra! she discovered. Sighing heavily, she turned towards the chair where her other clothes were neatly folded, and was about to walk over there to recover her white bra—when Leo strode out of the bathroom.

It was as if she’d been thrown into an instant freeze the way she stood there between the bed and the chair, pinned to the polished wood floor while her busy mind full of what to wear came to a sudden halt.

Other than for the towel he had slung low around his lean waist, he was naked. Beads of water clung to the dark hairs on his chest. Her heart began to race as her eyes dropped lower, over the taut golden brown muscles encasing his stomach that shone warm and glossy and sinewy tight. The towel covered him from narrow hips and long powerful thighs to his knees, and the strength she could see structuring his calf muscles held her totally, utterly breath-shot as she felt the undiluted wash of what true desire really meant suffuse heat into each fine layer of her skin.

Oh, dear God, I want him badly, she acknowledged as those legs came to a sudden standstill and brought her eyes fluttering up to clash with his. It was like being suffocated, she likened dizzily, because she knew by the way he narrowed his eyes that he was reading her responses to him.

‘I’ve forgotten to pack any m-make-up.’ The words jumped from her in a panic-stricken leap.

He continued to stand there for a few more seconds just studying her, then he started walking again. ‘You will not need make-up for dinner here alone with me,’ he responded evenly.

Natasha pulled her eyes away from him to glance at the scramble of clothes she’d thrown onto the bed. ‘I don’t even have anything here fit to wear for dinner,’ she said, trying desperately to sound as calm as he had when calm was the last thing she was feeling.

He came to a stop beside her. ‘Wear the cream thing,’ he suggested with only the vaguest hint of distaste showing in his voice.

It was enough. Natasha shook her head. ‘I hate it.’

Beginning to frown now, he turned to look down at her. ‘Natasha, what—’

‘W-what are you going to wear?’ she heard herself blurt out, then grabbed in a tense breath because—in all her life she had never asked a man such a gauche, stupid question! And his frown was darkening by the second. She could actually feel him mulling over what to say next! She wanted to call back her silly question. She wished she weren’t even here!

She turned to face him. ‘Listen Leo, I…’

Then it came—his shockingly unexpected answer to her problem: he dropped the towel from around his waist. ‘Let’s wear nothing,’ he said.

The sheer outrageousness of the gesture completely robbed Natasha of speech. Heat flowed through her body, soaking her groin like hot pins and needles before spreading everywhere else. She tried to breathe. She tried to swallow. She tried to stop staring at him but she couldn’t. She tried to back off when he reached across the gap between them, but her legs had turned to liquid and were refusing to move.

He reached for the hand she was using to clutch the bathrobe to her throat and gently prized her fingers free.

‘Leo, no…’ She mouthed the husky protest with her heart clattering wildly against her ribs because she knew what was coming next.

‘Leo—yes,’ he interpreted softly.

Two seconds later the bathrobe fell to the floor at her feet and his hands were taking its place. Freshly showered skin met with freshly showered skin and her naked breasts swelled and peaked. Her shaken gasp was captured by the sensual crush of his mouth and her troubled world tilted right out of kilter as the whole sexual merry-go-round spun off again. She didn’t even want to stop it, she just threw herself into the dizzying pleasure of the kiss with her hands clutching at his solid biceps and her hips swaying closer to the burgeoning evidence of his desire and its formidable promise. Within seconds she was a quivering mass of nerve-endings, moving against him and kissing him back, her heart racing, her breathing reduced to fevered little tugs at oxygen filled with his intoxicating clean scent.

The sound of the bedroom door being thrown open with enough force to send it slamming back into something solid almost blew the top off her head. She flicked her eyes open. Leo was already lifting up his head. Way too dazed to think for herself, Natasha watched him shift the burning darkness of his eyes away from her to look towards the bedroom door, then copied him to look in that direction, too.

A woman stood there. A tall, reed-slender, staggeringly beautiful woman, wearing a dramatically short and slinky red satin dress. Her flashing black eyes were fixed on Leo, her exquisite face turning perfectly white.

‘Gianna,’ he greeted smoothly. ‘Nice of you to drop in, but, as you can see, we are busy….’

As cool as that, he turned Natasha into a block of ice as his wife—his ex-wife—threw herself into a rage of shrill spitting Greek. Leo said absolutely nothing while the tirade poured out. His heart wasn’t thundering. His breathing was steady. He just stood holding Natasha close as if trying to shield her nakedness with his own naked length, and let the other woman screech herself out.

It was awful. Natasha wished she could just sink into a hole in the ground. It was so humiliatingly obvious that Gianna felt she had a right to yell at Leo like this or why would she do it? Likening this situation to the one she’d witnessed between Cindy and Rico made her shiver in shame.

Feeling her shiver, Leo flicked a glance at her, then frowned as with a smooth grace he bent and scooped up the robe she had been wearing and draped it around her shoulders. ‘Shut up now, Gianna,’ he commanded grimly. ‘You sound like a shrieking cat.’

To Natasha’s surprise the shouting stopped. ‘You were supposed to be at Boschetto’s tonight,’ Gianna switched to condemning English. ‘I waited and waited for you to arrive and I felt the fool when you did not turn up!’

‘I made no arrangement to meet up with you,’ Leo said, bending a second time to pick up his towel, which wrapped back around his hips. ‘So if you made a fool of yourself, you did it of your own volition.’

‘You were expected—’

‘Not by you,’ Leo stated. ‘Here, let me help you…’

Trying to push her arms into the robe sleeves, Natasha found Leo taking over the task, but, ‘I’ll do it myself,’ she breathed tautly, and pushed his hands away.

She couldn’t look at him—did not want to look at his ex-wife. Embarrassment was crawling around her insides and she felt so humiliated she was trembling with it.

Speaking earned Natasha Gianna’s attention; she felt the other woman scythe a skin-peeling look over her. ‘So you like them short and fat now?’ she said to Leo.

Fat? Natasha burned up inside with indignation, huddling her size-ten figure into the all-encompassing bathrobe.

‘Much better than a rake-thin whore with a sluttish heart,’ Leo responded, reaching out to stroke one of his hands down Natasha’s burning cheek as if in an apology for his witch of an ex-wife’s insult. ‘Now behave, Gianna, or I will have Rasmus throw you out of here. In fact,’ he then drawled curiously, ‘I will be very interested to hear how you got in here at all?’

Daring a glance at the other woman, Natasha saw that she was standing there with her slender arms folded across her slender ribs. She had to be six feet tall and the way she’d been poured into that red satin dress said everything there was to say about the differences between the two of them.

No wonder she still claimed super-model status, she concluded, flicking her eyes up to Gianna’s fabulous bone-structure to see that her almond-shaped, Latin black eyes were gleaming defiance at Leo, her lush red mouth set in a provoking pout.

Leo released a soft, very cynical laugh as if he understood exactly what the look was conveying.

‘So, who is she?’ Gianna flicked another snide look at Natasha. ‘Yet another attempt you make to find a substitute for me?’

Natasha flinched. Leo drew her back into his arms again and ignored her when she tried to pull back. ‘Never in a thousand years could anyone substitute you, my sweet-tongued angel,’ he mocked dryly. Then he looked down at Natasha and, with the silken tone of a man about to rock her world off its axis, ‘In the form of a heartfelt apology to you, agape mou,’ he murmured soft to Natasha, ‘I must introduce you to Gianna, my ex-wife.’

‘I am your ex-nothing!’ Gianna erupted.

‘Gianna.’ He spoke right across the shrill protest. ‘Nothing in this world has ever given me greater pleasure than to introduce you to Natasha, my very beautiful future wife.’

As a cool, slick way of dropping a bombshell, it was truly impressive. Staring up at his totally implacable face, Natasha almost fell backwards in shock.

The beautiful Gianna turned deathly white. ‘No,’ she whispered.

‘You wish,’ Leo responded.

‘But you love me!’ Gianna cried out in pained anguish.

‘Once upon a time you were worth loving, Gianna. Now…?’ He gave a shrug that said the rest, then apparently committed the ultimate sin in Gianna’s eyes and leant down to capture Natasha’s shock-parted lips with a kiss.

Without any warning it was about to happen, fresh pandemonium broke out with a keening wail that spliced up the atmosphere, then Gianna was coming at Natasha like a woman with murder in mind. Natasha jumped like a terrified rabbit. Leo spat out a curse and stepped right in front of her, taking the brunt of Gianna’s fury upon himself.