Greek Affairs: To Take a Bride: The Markonos Bride / The Greek Tycoon's Reluctant Bride / Greek Doctor, Cinderella Bride

‘I was wrong.’ Deft fingers dealt with the zip holding her skirt up. ‘This needs dealing with before we can hope to discuss anything else with cool sense.'

‘The sex, you mean.’ The skirt slithered to the floor around her feet. ‘Whenever did it not take priority between us?'

As he was about to relieve her of her top something hard flashed across his features. ‘Don’t ever tell me again that what we had between us was just sex! What we had down there on the beach that just tied you up in sensual knots simply recalling it was special. And if it wasn’t for your sunburn I would be ravishing you again out there on those same damn pebbles to remind you how special it was!'

‘Even special sex is still just sex, Andreas.’

‘Is it?’ Her top came off over her head. ‘Then, yineka mou, let us have sex.'

She’d walked herself right into that one, Louisa acknowledged helplessly as with a lithe dexterity he manoeuvred her onto the bed, his kiss already making good its declaration as he followed her down, ravishing the tender interior of her mouth.

And it just went on and on until she was dizzy with it, her fingers agitatedly kneading the thick, muscular shape of his shoulders trapped inside his T-shirt until it wasn’t enough.

‘Take it off,’ she said, dragging her mouth free, her urgent fingers already searching out the edge of the shirt so she could push it up.

Snaking upright he did as she bade him, leaving her spread out on the bed while he stripped off his clothes, watching her watch him as each new inch of sleekly honed, fabulous flesh was exposed to her soft, dark, hungry blue gaze.

He had the strong-boned, handsome face of an arrogant Greek emperor and the body of an Olympian athlete, she observed breathlessly. So big, so lean, so beautifully presented she couldn’t prevent her limbs from enacting a sensual squirm of invitation as he stripped off the shorts to reveal his full formidable strength.

‘I should have locked you up in a box years ago,’ he muttered as he looked down at her lying there like a golden offering. ‘When did you get to be so blatant about what you want?'

‘You taught me,’ she said and watched his response flare like lightning in his eyes as he came back to her.

‘As long as it was only me,’ he growled.

There was a single split-second when Louisa wanted to pick up that comment, then he was burying his mouth in her creamy throat and the moment was lost in the hot, deep, sensual journey of his mouth anointing her skin with warm, moist, gliding kisses on his way to her breasts. She released a soft cry and arched beneath him as he claimed a tight, rosy nipple, fingernails biting into his nape as he suckled and teased with his tongue and his teeth until she could bear the pleasure of it no longer and grabbed at his hair to pull up his head.

His eyes were as black as midnight, his skin the colour of sun-warmed bronze, smooth and sleek and sensationally tight.

‘Tell me what you want,’ he demanded.

‘You know,’ she groaned, running restless fingers over him and loving the way he flexed and shuddered then took the other breast like a marauding pirate, raiding the eager pink tip until she writhed like a wild thing beneath him. Then he came back to raid her mouth, one set of long fingers searing into her gold silk hair to keep her still while the other set stroked and teased in a torment of expert caresses until he reached the soft, springy curls at her thighs. The kiss broke as he delved deeper, his dark eyes intense on her as he watched her whole length stretch out on a sensation-packed sigh.

He aroused her with smooth, slow, expert patience until she was swollen and wet and he was trembling, a long, sleek mass of passionate male holding her trapped by his weight and the knowing stroke of his fingers as she fought what he was trying to make happen to her. He delved deep into her warm gasping mouth, he suckled the soft fullness of her lower lip. He moved with her and on her, every powerful inch of him playing its part to drive the whole thing on. The tight peaks of her breasts throbbed to his kisses. She scored her nails into his back and into his hair, she gripped the bunched muscles in his arms, latched hungrily on to a taut, muscled shoulder and ran hunting fingers down between them to capture the hard, jutting column of his sex.

‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘please …’

He shuddered on a wave of violent pleasure yet still he held it—controlled it and her, stretching out the fabulous torture until with a suddenness that took her by surprise, he came between her thighs and, on a whispered hot curse, thrust his full length into the morass of sensitised flesh she had become.

No part of her missed out on the glory of it. It swept through her in a wild, heated shimmer from her hair roots to the tips of her toes. No part of him missed out as she moved with him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her legs wrapped round his waist. His hands were kneading her hips and her buttocks, his mouth hot with urgency as he suckled her lips. When her explosive cry came with the first rippling wave of climax he let the helpless sound spring around the room and watched with fiercely possessive, glinting black eyes as she lost herself in its screaming-pitch power. Then he joined her, a long, sleek assembly of rippling male muscle taking the reward for his patience in those final grinding surges that spurred her own pleasure on and on.

Afterwards was like floating above the planet, Louisa didn’t even feel the need to breathe. Yet he was hot and heavy on her, a golden-skinned weight still experiencing the aftershocks of what they had shared with his strong arms wrapped around her and her legs still wrapped around him.

It felt like an age before he released his grip on her and levered himself up, tender fingers combing the damp strands of her hair from her face. ‘Now that,’ he kissed her softly, ‘was a lot more than just sex …'

Opening her eyes, Louisa looked into the cavern-darkness of his and quivered out a rueful smile. ‘In a dominant-male kind of way.'

An ebony silk eyebrow lifted. ‘You preferred me to be subservient?'

Lifting her hand, she let her fingers trace the silk arch as she slowly shook her head. She loved the way he took such masterly control of her. He knew that. She loved the way, when he finally surrendered his own control, he did not hold anything back.

‘Then why the pensive look?’ he questioned.

‘Because,’ she said, only to stop and frown while she tried to decide what the because actually was.

Drifting her eyes over his face, unaware of the stretching silence, Louisa tugged in a breath then wished that she hadn’t when that old familiar scent of his loving curled through her senses. Andreas, she thought bleakly, her first lover, her only lover. The man she had spent five long years trying hard to forget, yet, as she lay here with him heavy on her, she had to ask herself now how she had managed to exist so long without him when it had taken hardly any time at all to bring them back to this point.

‘Not sure you enjoyed it?’

The silken purr in his voice brought her eyes into focus to discover that his had narrowed, the darkened softness of sensual satiation gone from his face.

‘You know it was fantastic,’ she told him drily.

‘No.’ He shook his dark head. ‘You still look uncertain, so I think we had better try again, only slower this time—perhaps draw out the agony a bit longer until you beg me even more?'

Louisa tensed beneath him. ‘I did not beg!’ she objected.

‘You begged,’ he repeated, ‘but clearly it was not good enough to stop you from going wherever it was you just wandered off to.'

‘I did not wander off anywhere,’ she denied in exasperation. ‘What’s the matter with you, Andreas? You never used to be unsure of your mighty prowess!'

The corners of his mouth flexed. ‘Perhaps I’m losing my touch—'

‘I think you’ve gone crazy!’

If the black jealousy burning a hole in his chest was crazy then that, Andreas decided, was what he was.

He knew what it was that was bothering him—Max Landreau, Andreas thought grimly. Had Louisa been daring to think about Landreau while she lay here beneath him looking all pensive and bleak? Had she been comparing the old lover with the new?

Louisa gave a push at his chest. ‘Let me up,’ she instructed, stunned by how quickly he’d turned the most amazing loving of her life into another battle—and all because she’d let herself think!

‘Not a cat in hell’s chance.’ He caught hold of her hands and pinned them to the bed.

‘I don’t like you in this mood,’ she gasped, wriggling beneath him.

‘You love me in this mood,’ he drove her back onto the pillows with the bruising hot pressure of his kiss, ‘dominant and primitive and giving you no options. A few days of this and you will be so much my woman again you won’t want to wander off anywhere.'

Her eyes widened. ‘What do you mean—a few days of this?'

‘Well, you are not exactly fighting to get away from me …'

It was a taunt that hit right at her pride and her ego because she wasn’t trying to get away—not from this villa, not from this bed … not from him.

Chagrin turned her sparking eyes a deeper shade of blue.

‘I am going to love watching you fight the next battle with yourself when the ferry comes back in …'

It took a few seconds for his meaning to click then she sparked all over again. ‘If you’re daring to think I’m going to stay on here with you after this week then—'

Too late—too late, she thought as he crushed the protest from her lips and the breath from her body. Heat flared in the pit of her abdomen as thirty seconds later and true to his dominant promises he was sinking her right back down into the whole hot, sensual quagmire and to fight him she knew she had to want to, but she didn’t.

It was her biggest crime, though she chose not to recognise it.

CHAPTER TEN

DAYLIGHT came with glinting droplets of sunlight seeping in through the window and across the bed. Louisa lay there for a few minutes feeling much too lazy to want to bother to move—until it suddenly occurred to her that if the sun had reached such an angle in the sky that it could seep in through the bedroom window then it had to be getting very late.

She sat up in the bed, pushing her tumbled hair back from her face, then groaned as each movement brought on a series of aching complaints. Three days of playing Andreas’s sex slave was beginning to take its toll, she noticed drily. They made love, they ate, they made love, they lazed or played in the sun—they made love, she listed with a half-deriding smile. The only respite from this very specialised diet was when Andreas shot off to the family villa for a couple of hours each morning to use the business facilities set up there so he could keep in touch with the outside world.

Or the real world, she amended as she climbed off the bed, because this world wasn’t real by any stretch of the imagination. Even her brother was playing his part in the fantasy by making himself scarce as he enjoyed himself with Pietros while they—well they were behaving like a pair of young lovers pretending the past hadn’t taken place at all.

How had she allowed that to happen?

She hadn’t. Andreas had, in his arrogant, pushy, dominant role. He had orchestrated her every thought and feeling and action and she had just let him have his way because.

There it was again, she thought on a sigh as she stepped beneath the shower spray, the because was still playing games with her head. Only, three days on from the first time she’d stuck on the word, she now had the answer.

She loved him—still loved him, and if it had not gone away before now then it was never, ever going to go away, was it? He was so much in her blood he was like a virus, unshakeable and tenacious.

And today the ferry came back.

Stepping out of the shower, she wrapped a towel around her then just sank onto the edge of the bath.

Decision time.

Did she catch the ferry and leave here or did she stay? With him.

On the wild off-chance and flimsy excuse that she might be carrying his child again?

Heaving in a deep breath, she let it back out because that excuse no longer had anything to do with what the two of them had been doing here. They hadn’t even discussed the subject of babies again, and Andreas had been very careful to protect her since that first crazy loss of control. In fact they had not discussed anything. He had not asked about her life in London. He had dropped the subject of Max. And their parents were never mentioned. He went quiet sometimes, distant, usually when he returned from the other villa and seemed to struggle to slip out of his businessman role. He even looked different then, distant and cool, as if he’d pulled on a hard outer casing she was not able to penetrate.

The tough tycoon playing the tough tycoon, she likened with a smile.

Then right out of nowhere he would just crash through that outer casing, gather her up and take her to bed, or if he found her lazing on the beach he would strip off, catch hold of her and stride with her into the sea in playful mood—then take her to bed.

The two faces of Andreas Markonos, she mused. The tough and the playful—both were too deliciously charismatic for her peace of mind.

None of which helped her to look beyond the moment when the ferry sailed back in. Getting up, she walked into the bedroom, only to pull to another stop when she saw her bags standing there still lined up against the wall, saying more about the temporary nature of what she was doing here than anything else did.

What happened when she picked up those bags to leave here?

An image of Andreas striding off in one direction while she walked off in the other sent a cold little shiver chasing down her spine. She huddled into the towel. Her life was in England. Andreas’s was in Greece. She was no longer the young girl she had used to be, willing to play the placid little wife while he shot off to do the important bread-winning stuff. She had a life, a job she loved and a sense of her own value that had come to mean a lot.

Frowning, she chose fresh clothes out of her now depleted selection, dressed and dried her hair. She’d just stepped into the kitchen when the sound of a jet-ski had her glancing outside to witness the flourishing way her brother guided the craft up the shingle beach.

Looking tall and tanned and rakishly sea-sprayed, he strode up to the house. ‘Hi,’ he said as he stepped into the kitchen, then sent a quick look around. ‘Where’s Andreas?'

‘Using the office at the other house,’ she answered casually.

‘Good. That makes it easier because he turns to stone when I mention your boss.'

‘You had no right to bring Max up at all,’ Louisa said crossly.

‘I know, but at the time I enjoyed watching him suffer.’ Jamie grinned, unrepentant. ‘Anyway, Max is why I’m here. He rang the hotel this morning looking for you. He was not pleased when I said where you were.’ Digging his hand into the pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a folded slip of paper and handed it to her. ‘He wants you to ring him pronto, something urgent.'

Looking down at the note, Louisa unfolded it. ‘Switch your damn mobile on!’ Jamie had scored with a flamboyant mimic of how Max must have relayed the message to him. ‘I have to speak to you—now!'

‘But he knows I switch off my phone when I come here.’ She frowned.

Jamie just shrugged. ‘He sounded very pushy.’

Still frowning, Louisa turned and walked back through the house to the bedroom, wondering what crisis could have erupted at work to put Max in such a bad mood? It wasn’t like him, Max thrived on crises. In the four years she’d worked for him he had never attempted to intrude on her vacations with hot little missives like this.

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