“Not at all. Politeness is always acceptable.” It was what she’d been taught. Always be gracious, even when you were aching inside. A lady smiled through adversity. A lady didn’t let anyone see when she was hurting. A lady never complained.
His snort turned into full-blown laughter. A hot current of mortification blazed through her at the sound. Why did she say such silly things? Why did she open herself up to his amusement? Leo was the kind of man who said and did what he wanted, and damn the consequences. He couldn’t understand her world, couldn’t understand why she had to behave stoically and graciously in the face of humiliation.
“Politeness?” he said. “I’m almost naked, darling. And if no one arrives in the next few hours to rescue us, we’ll be sharing body heat under a blanket tonight. We’ve moved far beyond polite, don’t you think?”
CHAPTER FOUR
ANNA’S heart pounded in her chest. Leo had an edge that both compelled her and frightened her. And when he talked of sharing a blanket—sharing body heat—she began to shiver deep inside.
“If you don’t want to be naked when we share that heat, I suggest you take those clothes off and let them dry in the sun.”
She didn’t want to do so, and yet she knew she had little choice. It was either that or sit in the sun with her clothes on and risk a severe sunburn while she waited for everything to dry. Since her teeth were beginning to chatter, her only option was removal.
Jerkily, her fingers found her zipper and tugged it down. And then she was peeling the skirt from her body, tossing it aside, daring him to say a word as she did so. She almost lost her courage when it came time to remove the camisole, but she told herself it was the same as wearing a bikini—so she peeled the wet camisole upward and shrugged it off.
She looked up then, met Leo’s gaze. Realized he hadn’t moved since she’d begun to strip. He was staring at her, his dark eyes gleaming hotly. There was something dangerous in his stare, something too intense to fathom. She was perversely happy she’d put on a matching bra and panty set today. They were lacy, pink and not too revealing. It’s a bikini, she told herself. A bikini.
Except that Leo wasn’t looking at her like she was wearing a bikini. No, he was looking at her with far more heat and intimacy than if she were dressed in a swimming costume. No man had ever looked at her quite like that before. It was … thrilling. And nerve-racking.
Anna wrapped her arms around her body self-consciously and walked past him to where the pack lay. “Are we building this shelter or not?” she asked crisply, kneeling beside the heavy plastic sheeting. She had to do something, or make an even bigger fool of herself.
She heard him move, and then he reached down and lifted her gently.
“You’re cold,” he said. And then he pulled her into his embrace, her bare skin coming into heart-stopping contact with his as he pressed her against him, breast to belly to hip.
Her first instinct was to push away, to put as much distance between them as possible, but he was warm and dry and not the least bit clammy. His heat flowed into her, warmed her cold limbs.
But it was more than that, she realized.
It was sexual heat, embarrassment and longing all rolled into one. Her skin prickled at his nearness. Leo chafed his hands along her arms, her back. For him it was practical while for her …
What an amateur she was! What a pitiful, clueless amateur.
Anna turned her head slightly, breathed in the scent of his skin where her head was pressed to his chest. He smelled like salt, but under that he smelled like soap and spice. She wanted to lick him.
Anna closed her eyes. What was with this constant urge to lick him? Was he an ice cream cone? A lollipop?
Need washed through her, made her knees weak. Thankfully Leo was holding her close, or she’d surely sink to the ground. One hand touched her head, rubbed softly—but no, he wasn’t rubbing, he was finding the pins of her knot and pulling them free.
Her hair tumbled loose and she gasped. Automatically she reached up with one hand, wanting to smooth it back into place. But it was a bedraggled rope hanging down her back. No amount of smoothing would help at this point.
She tilted her head back to look up at Leo. His eyes danced with mischief. And something else. Something hot and intense that frightened her as much as it intrigued her. He was a hard man, a ruthless man when he wanted something. She could see that in him, behind the smiles and winks, behind the darlings. This was a man who conquered, who took everything and left nothing behind. Would he take her if she allowed it? Would there be anything left when he was done?
Anna shivered again, and not from cold this time. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“Because your hair will dry faster if you take it down.”
Oddly, disappointment spiraled inside her. Part of her had hoped he would say he’d done it because he wanted to see her hair, but of course he was being practical. And yet his eyes darkened, his nostrils flaring as he looked down at her.
His gaze dropped to her lips and her heartbeat slowed to a crawl. He was going to kiss her. She wanted him to kiss her, wanted it almost more than she wanted her next breath. She wanted to feel the heat, the sizzle, the storm of this man’s kiss.
But not like this. A thread of panic unwound in her brain. She didn’t want her first real kiss to be an afterthought. For him, it was like breathing. For her, it was everything she’d never had.
“No,” she said softly as he dipped his head toward hers, her throat aching as she forced the word out.
Leo stopped, straightened. He looked frustrated. Annoyed.
“I’ve never,” she began, trying to explain. “Never …”
She couldn’t say it, couldn’t admit the shame of never having been kissed. She was twenty-eight years old. She’d been waiting her whole life for a man who had thought less than nothing about rejecting her at the last possible moment. She’d spent years preparing for a wedding that wasn’t ever going to happen. Saving herself for a man who didn’t want her.
Anger blazed to life like a bonfire. And sadness. She’d missed so much, hadn’t she?
“Never what, Anna?”
Her stomach churned. She dropped her head, closed her eyes. “I’ve never kissed a man before,” she said, her voice a husky whisper. Shame clawed into her, singed her with its icy sting. She was a woman who’d never been kissed, who’d never been loved. She was a woman who should have had all those things, and far sooner than now.
Leo went very, very still. She could feel the incredible control he exercised, the restraint, the sudden hum of tension in his body as he stood so still and held her close. “Alessandro never …?”
She shook her head, unable to speak the word. It was humiliating. As if the stories in the papers weren’t enough to make her want to hide her head in the sand forever, the secret knowledge that she’d never been kissed properly, never desired, was infinitely worse.
Leo’s strong fingers cupped her jaw, tilted her head up. What she saw in his face made her heart squeeze tight. “He was a fool, Anna. Do you understand me? A bloody fool.”
And then he pressed his lips to her forehead, gently, sweetly, and she drew in a soft breath laced with tears. A sob hovered in her throat, but she would not let it escape. She barely knew this man, and here she was pressed against him, hot skin to hot skin, her deepest secrets spilling out as if the dam behind which she kept them had suddenly sprung a leak.
Her fingers curled against the hard plane of his chest. He was so warm, so vibrant and alive. She’d never been so close to a man, never felt the things she was feeling right now.
A dagger of need sliced into her. Her sex ached with want. Her nipples were sensitive points against the lace of her bra. Her breasts tingled. She wanted Leo to touch her everywhere. To show her what it meant to make love.
His body was hard against hers. Some parts were harder than others, she realized. His hips pressed into her, his erection unmistakable where it thrust against her belly. A hot, hol
low feeling bloomed in her core. If she were an experienced woman, if she’d done this before and knew what she was doing, she’d run her hands over his torso and slide them beneath the waistband of his sexy, sexy underwear.
But she was a virgin, a stupid, insecure virgin, and she was afraid of what she’d never actually done. Afraid of unleashing something she couldn’t control, of losing her reason and sanity.
She ached and she wanted and she stood very still while Leo kissed her forehead. And then he took a step back, setting her away from him. His eyes were hotter than she’d ever seen them, and his body …
Oh, heavens, his body was beautiful, his muscles so tense and perfect, his erection now straining against the confines of the briefs.
“Leo …” She didn’t know what to say, what to do. She wanted him to do it for her.
But he turned away. “Let’s fix this shelter,” he said gruffly.
Leo was out of his depth and he wasn’t accustomed to it. His usual relationships were simple affairs involving women who knew what they were getting into when they dated him. He was typically monogamous, but serial. His affairs lasted days or weeks or, in some cases, months.
There was no falling in love, no happily ever afters. He didn’t believe in them anyway. He’d grown up in Bobby Jackson’s household, where his father’s relationships with women were anything but normal. Women were the revolving door of Bobby’s life. Leo figured it was possible to love one woman forever, but not for a Jackson male. The closest he’d come to a stable relationship was with Jessica Monroe, and that had ended in disaster when she’d wanted more than he could give.
Marriage and children were not for him, and he wouldn’t be like Bobby and attempt to do something he was genetically doomed to fail at. The least he could do was spare his nonexistent children the shame of having a Jackson for a father.
Dear God, Anna. She was innocent and incredibly sexy, though she didn’t seem to realize it, and Leo wanted her so badly he was having a tough time keeping his body from reacting. He could not have her. He reminded himself forcefully of that fact as he glanced over at her. She was too innocent to engage in a torrid affair—to know that it was simply an affair.
If he made love to her, she’d want forever. She’d thought that’s what she was getting from Prince Alessandro, and she’d happily ordered her life with that end in mind. How could she reformat her thinking simply to gratify Leo’s baser urges?
She couldn’t, and he wouldn’t touch her no matter how he ached.
They’d set up the shelter and he’d gone to lay their clothes in the sun to dry. For once, he prayed they’d be dressed again very soon. Not that he didn’t appreciate a gorgeous woman in her underwear, but Anna was so innocent that he felt like a jackass for ogling her. For wanting her.
And he definitely, definitely wanted her. He wanted to fill his hands with her lushness, wanted to slip that lacy pink bra from her shoulders and cup his hands around the mounds of her breasts. He wanted to see the tight points of those nipples he’d felt pressing into him, and then he wanted to fill his senses with her. He wanted to skim his mouth along the sweet skin of her belly and slide her panties from her hips before opening her delicate femininity to his gaze and sliding his tongue along the wet seam of her sex.
He wanted to make Anna come, wanted her to scream his name. He wanted to give her everything she’d missed out on, and he wanted to brand her as his when he did so.
But he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t fair to her. She was vulnerable and hurting and he couldn’t take advantage of her. When he’d thought she was simply an uptight woman who’d been jilted by her fiancé, he’d imagined a bit of sexual fun was exactly what she needed to take her mind off her troubles.
He might be bad, but he wasn’t so bad as to seduce an innocent virgin who’d never been kissed before. He had a conscience, no matter if it had often been reported otherwise.
“How long do you think it will take them to find us?” Anna asked, cutting into his thoughts.
He looked over at her and almost wished he hadn’t as his gut twisted with longing. Her hair was long, brunette, and she’d finger combed it before it had dried into a tousled, thick mane that suited her far more than her sleek chignons did. He wanted to run his hands through that hair, wanted to bury his fingers in it and tilt her head back while he plundered her mouth with his own.
His body responded in spite of himself, the blood pooling in his groin, filling him. Ah, damn. What, was he sixteen again? Unable to exercise even a little bit of control?
Except it wasn’t a little control where Anna was concerned, it was a lot. Especially when he could see the raw need shimmering in her eyes.
Leo shrugged casually when he felt anything but casual. “I doubt they’ll be looking for us for hours yet.”
She frowned. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
“We’ll be fine, darling,” he said lightly. “We have food, water, shelter. All the necessities.”
She turned her head away, her hair falling over her shoulder and seemingly caressing one gorgeous breast. He was jealous of her hair at that moment. “That’s not what worries me.”
It took him a moment to figure out what she meant. At first he thought she meant she was worried to be alone with him, but then he realized it was something far more significant in Anna’s world. Something far more insidious. It wasn’t being alone with him so much as the perception that being alone with him would create.
“Anna, you can’t live your life in fear of what the tabloids will say.”
She turned back to him then, her jade-green eyes flashing. “What do you know of it? You’re a man, a veritable god for all your exploits. I’ve had nothing but humiliation from them. If they know I’m out here, alone, with you—”
Leo resisted the urge to swear, but barely. “Do you plan to live your entire life by the numbers? Do you think that if only you are good enough, they’ll leave you alone?”
She gaped at him. Angry. Fearful. “I … I …”
He wanted to punch something. For her. He wanted her to fight back, wanted her to not give a damn—and he knew he couldn’t make her do it. That was his style, not hers. Had his mother given a damn? She must have, since she’d saved the articles. And yet she’d survived it, just as he’d survived the attention later, after her death.
“It doesn’t work that way, Anna. Whatever sells magazines or papers is what works. You—and Alessandro and Allegra—are the flavor of the moment. You will always be the poor little bride who lost her groom on the eve of the wedding. Always. It’s up to you to choose how you deal with it.”
She swallowed hard. “How?”
How? It seemed absurd that he was being asked to give advice on dealing with the press since he’d never much cared one way or the other what they’d said about him—since growing up anyway—but he could see she was serious. That she believed he had the answer since his family were in fact a tabloid staple. Thanks to his father.
Bobby didn’t care what the press said, so long as they said something. His greatest fear, Leo thought, was becoming irrelevant. So long as the media were printing stories, Bobby felt he was doing something right. Even when he’d been in the papers for the wrong reasons—affairs, fights, money trouble, refusing to acknowledge his ten-year-old son until the courts shoved a paternity test in his face. Bobby mined it all and emerged from a pile of excrement smelling like roses.
And yet that wouldn’t work for Anna. She didn’t want or need the attention. She didn’t crave it.
Leo drew in a breath. He told her the only thing he knew how to tell her. “By being happy. By living your life. By refusing to adhere to some standard you believe some anonymous they want from you. You’re Anna Constantinides and you’re free to be your own person. Screw the press and screw whatever you thought you were supposed to do with your life. The truth, sweet Anna, is that nothing you thought you were going to be is possible any longer.”
Her eyes flashed with pain and fury. �
�I know that.”
Leo clenched his fists at his sides to keep from pulling her to him and wrapping her in his embrace. Why did he feel such a strong urge to protect this woman? He wanted her, but that wasn’t anything unusual for him. But to shelter her from pain? That was a completely new bit of territory he’d broken, and he still wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it.
It must be because of his mother, because he’d never forgotten how she must have kept those articles year after year. Had she reread them? Or had she stashed them away and never looked at them again? He would never know. But he couldn’t stand the idea of Anna brooding over what the press said for years to come.
“Then do what you want, Anna,” he told her fiercely, trying to impart strength. “Stop trying to please whomever you think it is you must please. Be the dragon lady I know you can be.”
She dropped her gaze, studied her feet. Or so it seemed. “My mother is Queen Zoe’s best friend. Did you know that?”
He did not. And it made the whole thing seem uglier somehow. “No.”
“They’ve been planning this wedding since we were children. Hoping to unite our families. I have always been Alex’s bride, even when I was a six-year-old playing with dolls. It was predestined.”
The thought made him angry. Not because he was suddenly judgmental of the way royals ordered their lives, but because someone had told a little girl that this was her destiny and none other would do. She’d never been allowed to choose for herself, never been allowed to grow other than to grow into Prince Alessandro’s wife. Everything she’d done had been in preparation for that life. He could see that now.
And it had all come to nothing because Alessandro had met Allegra. Leo loved his sister and wished her all the happiness in the world, but at the moment he was more than furious with Alessandro, a man who’d thought nothing of abandoning his bride-to-be. And he was furious with the Santinas and Constantinideses.
“They were wrong to do that to you, Anna.” All of them, he silently added. “You should have been allowed to choose for yourself.”
The Girl Nobody Wanted Lynne Raye Harris Page 5
