Oti pursed her lips and let her eyes slide from Lukas. She’d never thought of it that way, and she didn’t like what she heard. At the same time, it irked her to find she couldn’t deny it.
‘Maybe that was your penance for never having let your mother see your success.’
‘And maybe you’re making assumptions based on what you think my relationship with her was like.’ She bristled unexpectedly. ‘Maybe my relationship with my mother was never particularly good, especially considering how she venerated my sorry excuse for a father her entire married life.’
Her words seemed to charge the air. She could almost see it crackling before her eyes.
‘I presume you had a stellar relationship with your mother before she died,’ she snapped before she could stop herself.
‘Not really. I never knew my father. He ditched us before I was even born. But, like your mother, mine exalted him my entire life.’ His expression was so impassive that it was impossible to tell what he was really thinking. And yet she desperately wanted to know.
‘She’d been a chambermaid before I came along,’ he continued. ‘Possibly her favourite recrimination to me, from my earliest memory through to her death, was that he would have lifted her from that life...if only I had never come along.’
‘Sorry—’ she pulled a face, appalled at her own self-centred outburst ‘—I shouldn’t have lost my temper.’
‘Is that your idea of a temper?’ he challenged, his voice still giving nothing away, although now he had one trademark eyebrow cocked. ‘It’s remarkably...restrained.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she announced before she caught herself, desperate to lift the mood from whatever trench she’d just been digging. ‘I’m sure you’re unrestrained enough for the both of us.’
Where the heck had that come from?
The air around them shifted, closing in on her like summer skies before a thrilling storm.
‘Careful, Octavia, that could be taken as something approaching an invitation.’
A wiser woman might have paid heed to the note in his voice. The warning sign that she should start treading carefully.
The problem was that she’d spent her whole life being careful. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was about Lukas that was so different, but suddenly she didn’t want to be that overly retiring version of herself any more.
‘I do hope so.’ She held his gaze. ‘It’s Oti. Calling me by my full name won’t alleviate whatever this...this thing is between us.’
‘That’s enough... Oti.’
It seemed she’d scored a direct hit when she hadn’t really even known what she was doing. Lukas’s jaw clenched so tightly that she could see the muscle twitching.
‘I did tell you, back on our wedding day, that you risked being all mouth and no trousers.’
Did she really just tease him on a sexual level? Her? Who had less experience than anyone she knew?
‘I said that’s enough.’
She wasn’t even sure that he’d opened his mouth to speak. The words seemed to hiss out of him, the most deliciously dangerous warning.
‘What a shame, Lukas...’
‘If you can’t silence yourself—’ his voice throbbed in the space that separated them ‘—then trust me, Octavia, I will do it for you.’
He moved out of his seat so fast that she didn’t have time to process what was happening. But, unaccountably, she found herself hauled to her unsteady feet and pressed up against his solid, hewn chest, her head as light-headed as if she were drunk.
Maybe she was. But not on the wine.
‘I warned you,’ he growled. And she recognised that tautness in his voice, as though he fought to rein himself in.
Suddenly, that was the last thing she wanted.
‘You did warn me,’ she agreed all too huskily. ‘But I never was very good at following instructions.’
Then, before he could set her aside, just as he had done a few nights earlier, she surged against him and pressed her lips to his.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HE HADN’T INTENDED to kiss her.
He’d intended merely to...intimidate her. To stop her from talking. From telling him how he’d felt about her all those months ago. And how he’d come to choose her as his future bride.
He had sworn to himself, those few nights ago, that he would never touch her again after his alarming lack of control.
In fact, Lukas had rapidly come to the conclusion that staying away from this particular woman would be in both of their interests.
But still it took all his resolve to break the kiss and set her aside. More gently this time than he had the other night.
‘You don’t have to do this, Oti,’ he rasped out, ignoring the fact that his body was clamouring for her. ‘The money is yours. No strings.’
‘And if I want to?’ she managed breathlessly. Almost making him surrender right there, on the spot.
He growled, forcing himself to cross the room. To put that space he’d thought about between them.
‘You don’t want to.’
And then he left the living room and stalked down the hallway to his suite. Stepping through the doors, he stared at his empty bedroom and wondered what the hell was going on that he still lusted after this woman with such intensity.
He didn’t hear the click of the door. He didn’t even realise she had stepped through the connecting archway between their bedrooms until she said his name, and he turned around.
And his body went into overdrive.
His sweet bride, his shy Oti, was standing against the door wearing nothing but a lace lingerie set—in cherry-red this time—and a pair of Do me heels. And it was killing him not to simply obey.
‘Go back in your room,’ he managed hoarsely.
‘I don’t think so.’ She laughed softly, and he wondered if she knew he heard the nervousness.
‘Octavia. I’m not going to tell you again.’
She took another step forward. ‘Thank goodness for that. Too much rejection could damage a woman’s ego.’
He wasn’t a green, inexperienced adolescent. He knew women—and their bodies—as well as he knew his own.
Better, perhaps.
He could read the short, shallow breaths which indicated her interest as easily as he could read the hard, pert nipples that virtually called out for him to touch. His eyes had alighted on those sleek, endless legs of hers. He hadn’t been able to stop imagining them wrapped around his waist—or, better yet, draped over his shoulders—since the other night.
The memory of those scraps of electric blue lace that barely concealed her modesty still haunted his dreams. Waking and sleeping.
But he could also read the uncertainty in her eyes.
‘This isn’t what you want. I can read it in your expression.’
And still she advanced into his room, his space, and he knew what was coming. He thought he was ready. Prepared. His hands prepared to snag her wrists, to hold her away, to control this spiralling situation.
‘This is exactly what I want, Lukas. I’m just terrified you’ll throw me out again.’
And he intended to resist her. He really did. But then she took a final step and he caught her scent—soft, fresh, vaguely floral, and that gentle musk that was all woman—and every thought tumbled from his head.
Need punched through him. So hard that he didn’t know how he had stayed standing. He had never, not once, wanted a woman the way he’d wanted Oti. Still wanted her now. With an uncharacteristic recklessness. As if he’d never had anyone else before.
Dazed, all Lukas could see was images of Oti, stretching in front and behind him. And then she put that hot, sharp mouth of hers on his and something detonated inside him, blowing up any sane thought in the process.
Before he knew it, his hand curled around that elegant neck of her
s and he hauled her all-too-willing body to his, revelling in the way she melded herself to him as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
He wanted to lift her into his arms, carry her across to his bed and spread her out on it. And then he wanted to feast on her as if she were his own private buffet.
Lukas had no idea how he managed not to do any of these things. Instead, he took his time. He let her mouth explore his in her own time, as if she was still in control the way she thought she was.
Then again, maybe she was. Or maybe neither of them were?
So he indulged himself. Kissing her over and over, deeper, harder, revelling in the slide of her tongue over his, triumphing in those greedy little sounds she made at the back of her throat.
And the only thought in his head was that he didn’t want it to end.
More.
The word pounded through him with every thump of his heart. Like a drumbeat that thundered in his veins.
Every taste of her was like a drug, slipping through him and leaving him feeling more intoxicated than he thought he’d ever felt in all his years.
Slowly, almost lazily, Lukas allowed his free hand to travel her body. Starting with the long, sensuous line of her spine which he made his fingers walk down with excruciating deliberation, relishing the shivers which his teasing elicited from her.
She arched into him, pressing her breasts against him, abrading her nipples against his chest as though she couldn’t stand not to be touched any longer. And he found he rather liked that image.
Lukas tore his mouth from hers, allowing his fingers, his mouth, his tongue to begin their wondrous journey of discovery. To trace their way down her jaw, down that sensitive column of her throat and to the hollow at the base.
He thought the needy groans she made might actually kill him. As if a storm was raging through him. Only the voice of reason telling him why this was a bad idea holding him back.
But he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not with his bride pressing her body to his as though she couldn’t get close enough, the carnal sounds she made racing along his sex as surely as if it were her very tongue.
And he stopped pretending he had any control left whatsoever where his new bride was concerned.
* * *
Oti was sure that he was going to drive her insane with need. Somewhere along the line, she seemed to have lost the control she’d thought she had. She wasn’t sure that she cared.
Not when her aching, heavy breasts were pressed so deliciously into Lukas’s rock of a chest, and every movement he made chafed them like some kind of exquisite torture. And somehow she couldn’t remember why she’d ever thought it was a bad idea to consummate this marriage of theirs.
Or that she’d been trying to seduce him for any other reason but this driving, primal need that she had never even known that she possessed.
He seemed intent on glutting himself on every inch of her, learning her curves with his hands, then his mouth. He dropped down her body, worshipping every last swell and dip, cupping her backside in his hands as his mouth brushed over her stomach, and abdomen, and...dear Lord...lower.
And then she was being swept up, carried across the room and laid out on his bed whilst Lukas shouldered her legs apart, the darkest, hungriest, wildest expression in that grey stare of his. It made a fluttering chase through her whole body.
‘I don’t... I haven’t...’
‘I have,’ he muttered darkly.
Then, his eyes not leaving hers for a moment as she watched, transfixed, he lowered his head and licked his way inside her.
Oti combusted. Like a thousand glorious sparks firing off all at once. Like the most spectacular fireworks. It was nothing she’d ever known before. How could it have been?
As Lukas used his mouth, his tongue, to trace her core and dip into her silken heat, all she could do was surrender to him. Moaning with each taunting stroke and bucking against him when she couldn’t help herself any longer. And when he laughed, a low, deep sound that vibrated against her very sex, she thought she would shatter into a million tiny shards.
He teased her and toyed with her. Knowing exactly what she needed to carry her out on wave after wave of incredible sensation, whilst he built the storm inside her. Higher and higher. Her hips rocked and jolted, chained to the rhythm that he was setting. Performing the dance that he wanted her to perform.
She didn’t care. Just so long as he never, never stopped.
And then she felt that final wave swelling beneath her. Lifting higher than she’d ever been before. Panic—banished until that moment—rushed back into her, racing through her body and threatening to overwhelm her.
‘Lukas...’ She barely recognised her own voice, as breathless and urgent as it sounded.
But, as though he knew exactly what she was feeling, he grazed one hand over her body, making her belly tremble as it skimmed the skin. Then, suddenly, he slid a finger inside her and did something magical with his mouth, and Oti was hurled straight back into the glory of those rolling waves.
This time was all the more devastating than before. With every sweep of his tongue she shook and she shook, spinning higher and higher and more out of control. And then Lukas did something magical, and those last flimsy threads holding Oti to reality were broken.
She was gone. Spiralling up into nothingness with a cry so primal that it surely couldn’t have been her. It was as if she were fragmenting. Splintering into so many pieces that she doubted they could ever be put back together properly again. She doubted she could ever be put back together again.
She had no idea how long she soared, but when she finally, finally came back to herself, it was to find Lukas moving up the bed and gathering her in his arms as though she was something infinitely precious.
But that was fanciful. And foolish. Sex was sex, and...love was love. Only a fool would confuse the two.
So then you’re a fool.
But she didn’t have time to dwell. As he rolled onto his back, he carried her with him, settling her down on top of him, his solid, velvety length pressing against her wet heat. And she shivered again, though this time for a slightly different reason.
‘Lukas...’
‘Stunning,’ he breathed, his hand reaching up to cup her breasts and making her bite her lip again.
Was it the incredible sensations or the intensity of his gaze that emptied her head of all rational thought? She didn’t know; she could only hear her own breathing, shallow and panting slightly, as he reached between them and traced her swollen core again.
Then, suddenly, he was lined up and Oti found herself waiting, needing, desire overcoming anything else she might—or perhaps ought—to be feeling.
And finally, as his eyes locked with hers and she forgot how to breathe, she moved her hands to cover his as they cupped her hips and let him plunge inside her.
It hurts.
Oti stiffened as her fists shot out involuntarily and slammed hard against his unforgiving chest. The pain lanced though her, searingly hot and so very, very sharp that it chased every bit of air from her lungs so that she couldn’t even breathe.
He was much too big, much too thick, much too everything...so deep inside her. Though, slowly, it dawned on her that he was no longer moving. That he too had gone still, holding her above him with an impressive self-control of which—she was vaguely aware—any other man would have been incapable.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even bring herself to meet Lukas’s gaze, though there was no way to avert her face so that he couldn’t look at her. Not that she needed to. She could tell by the way her skin burned that he was glowering at her.
That he was furious.
‘Are you going to explain this?’ he bit out at last, a dangerous edge to his tone despite the quiet, too-controlled pitch that he employed.
A sudden sob made
its way up through her and it was all she could do to swallow it back. How had she been so foolish as to think she could deceive Lukas? That he wouldn’t discover she was some untried, untested virgin?
His opinion of her had already been low. It seemed that she couldn’t even seduce a man without showing her abject lack of experience. And now he wanted her to explain herself.
Oti shook her head, helpless against the sting of bitter tears as they welled behind her eyes.
‘Ahh, don’t cry, Oti.’ His tone changed in an instant. It softened in a way she hadn’t heard him speak before. ‘Not because of a man like me. I’m no good. I’m not worth it.’
Oti’s eyes flew to his before she realised what she was doing.
He sounded so...different, and she couldn’t put her finger on what that emotion was which skittered across his impossibly handsome face, but she knew it was better than what had gone before. And he was still there, inside her. Filling her. Stretching her.
What was she to think?
‘You should have told me, though,’ he added with a slight frown.
‘And you would have believed me, of course.’
She didn’t know how she kept her tone light. Conversational. Not that it seemed to lessen the impact on Lukas. Another dark cloud crossed his features and Oti waited for him to deny it, but he didn’t even attempt to do so. She wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.
‘I don’t blame you.’ The words tumbled out before she’d realised she was going to speak. ‘I played my part as the party girl at one time. Not to mention, my father put enough rumours out there about my lifestyle, my partying.’
‘I should have asked.’
‘Like I said, you wouldn’t have listened, and I can understand why.’
‘I’m listening now.’
‘Now?’ She snapped her head to him, praying he couldn’t read all the embarrassment that was surely written all over her face. ‘With you... inside me?’
Tempted by Her Convenient Husband Page 10
