It was as if everything that had happened in the past ten days had been blown away, and with it all the reasons why being alone with him in his apartment and in his arms was all wrong. This was everything she wanted, everything she needed. How could something so wrong feel so right?
And now she didn’t even want to think about right and wrong. All she wanted was to be in his arms. For ever.
She was the one to part her lips, to dart her tongue into the darkness of his mouth, to wind her arms around his neck and press into him. She was the one to break the kiss and drag her lips over his stubble-roughened cheeks and jaw and down the strong length of his neck, to run her tongue over the smooth skin, tasting his musky, masculine scent. And she was the one to draw her tongue back up his throat, dig her nails into his scalp and capture his lips with her own.
A tiny sob escaped her mouth when Helios growled and drew his arms around her. He crushed her to him. His lips parted and he kissed her so deeply and so thoroughly that in the breath of an instant she was lost in him.
A large hand dived into her hair whilst his other hand roamed down her back to clutch her bottom, which he squeezed before spreading his palm over her thigh and lifting it. He ground into her and she gasped to feel him huge against her, her underwear the only barrier to stop him entering her there and then.
In a mesh of lips and tongues he pushed her back against the wall, kissing her as if she were a banquet to be feasted on, before pulling away, tugging at her bottom lip painlessly with his teeth as he did so. His chest rising and falling in rapid motion, the palm of one hand held against her chest to still her, Helios lowered himself, pinched the hem of her dress and slowly raised it up. He kissed her stomach as he lifted the dress to her abdomen, his tongue making a trail upwards, through the valley of her breasts, into her neck, until he’d pulled it over her head and thrown it onto the floor.
Amy dug her toes into the hard flooring, her head spinning. Everything inside her blazed as fiercely as the whirling fires she’d seen on the beach. Her skin was alive to his touch. She was alive to his touch. Her senses had sprung to life from the very first moment she’d looked at him all those months ago and since then she’d been helpless to switch them off.
He straightened to his full height and stared down at her, his throat moving as his liquid eyes took in her semi-nakedness. He clasped her cheeks in his hands and brought his nose to hers. ‘Not being able to touch you or make love to you has driven me crazy,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You’ve driven me crazy.’
She pulled at his hair, wanting to hurt him, wanting him to experience the pain she’d gone through at the separation she’d had no choice but to force upon them. ‘It’s hurt me every bit as much as you,’ she whispered, bringing her mouth back to his.
Holding her tightly, Helios lifted Amy into his arms, staring at her as he carried her through to his bedroom, delighting in the heightened colour of her cheeks and the dilation of her pupils.
All his dreams and fantasies had come true.
She’d come to him.
He hadn’t realised how badly he’d prayed for it until he’d opened the door to her.
But he could still see the last vestiges of doubt and fear ringing in her eyes and he was determined to drive them away.
How could she not know that this, here, being together, was exactly how it was supposed to be?
Laying her down on his bed, he kissed her rosebud mouth and inhaled the sweet scent he had come close to believing he would never delight in again. All that separated them was her pretty black underwear. He remembered how once he’d peeled it off with his teeth, in those early hedonistic days when the desire between them had been so great he’d been certain it would have to abate. But it had only developed into something deeper, something needier.
Whatever it took, he would keep her in his bed.
As he gazed down, seeing the pulse beating in the arch of her neck, the way she stretched out her legs before raising her pelvis, the urgency grew. Theos, but he needed to be inside her.
She raised a lazy hand and pressed it to his chest, then spread her fingers over him, touching him in the way that always filled him with such gratification, as if he were one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
The knowledge that she would explore him in the same manner with which he delighted in exploring her had always been indescribable. There was not a fraction of her he had not tasted and not a fraction of him she had not touched. He would never tire of tasting her and making her his.
He slipped a hand behind her back and unclasped her bra, then carefully pulled the straps down her arms, kissing the trail they made and throwing it onto the floor with a flick. With her delectable breasts now bare, the dusky nipples puckered in open invitation, he dipped his head to take one tip in his mouth, groaning as she immediately arched her back to allow him to take more of her in.
Her fingers tugged through his hair as she twisted and writhed beneath him, the urgency in her movements matching the urgency flowing through his veins. She skimmed a hand down over his back before slipping it across his stomach, reaching for him. His attentions now on her other breast, he raised himself a little to make it easier for her to take his erection into her hand, groaning again as she held it in the way she knew he adored, rubbing her thumb over the head and guiding him to the apex of her thighs.
Gritting his teeth and breathing heavily, he kissed her neck and moved her hand away, squeezing her fingers between his own. Immediately she raised her thighs and rubbed against his length, moaning, begging him with soft murmurs.
But there was still the final barrier of her underwear between them.
He kissed her hard on the mouth, then pulled back, drifting his lips down the creaminess of her neck and breasts until he reached her abdomen. There, he pinched the elastic of her underwear between the fingers of both hands and tugged it down, past her thighs and calves and delicate ankles, until she was fully naked before him.
‘Please...’ she beseeched him, raising her thighs higher and reaching out a hand to touch him. ‘Please.’
Swallowing hard at the sight of her, so full of desire and need for him it made him heady, he guided his erection into her welcoming heat.
He pushed himself in with one long drive and buried his face in her neck, biting gently into the soft skin. And as she gripped him tightly within her he knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was where he belonged.
Skin against skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, arms and legs entwined, he made love to her.
And she made love to him.
He could sense the tension within her building, could hear it in the shortening of her breaths, the shallowness of her moans, feel it in the way she gripped his buttocks, deepening his thrusts. And then he felt her pulses pulling at him, pulling him even deeper inside her, her slender frame stilling, her teeth biting into his shoulder.
He didn’t want it to end. He wanted it to last for ever, to be locked in her tight sweetness with her legs wrapped around him and her nails digging into his back for eternity...
And then there was no more consciousness. His own climax surged through him, tipping him over a precipice he hadn’t known he was on the edge of and exploding in a wash of bright colours that took him to a place he’d never been before.
* * *
Amy awoke in the comfort of Helios’s embrace, her face pressed against his chest, his arm hooked across her waist, his thigh draped heavily over hers.
Remorse flooded her in an instant.
What had she done?
Everything she’d sworn she wouldn’t do had been ripped away in one moment of madness.
She should go. She had to go. She couldn’t stay here.
How many times had she awoken in the night in his arms and felt the stirring to make love to him all over again? How many times had she lifted her head a touch and met his kiss? Had him fully hard and inside her in an instant? Too many to count. Sometimes she would wake in the morning and wonder if she’d dreamt the
ir lovemaking in the early hours.
But at this moment Helios’s breathing was deep and even. If she was careful she might be able to sneak out without him waking. Then she could flee to her apartment, pack a suitcase and check into a hotel. That was it. That was what she had to do.
Because she couldn’t stay here—not now when she knew how hopeless she was at resisting him.
She’d tried so hard to stay away.
Oh, God, what had she done?
She could dress it up any way she liked but she’d given in to temptation, and now the ecstasy of being back in his arms had gone, replaced with an acrid taste in her mouth and a gutful of guilt.
She had to leave. Right now.
Carefully, after stealthily slipping out of his arms, she edged her way out of the bed, holding her breath until her feet touched the floor.
Scrambling, half-blind in the dark, she found her dress thrown across an armchair. She had no idea where her underwear had got to and was in too much of a panic to escape to hunt for it for long. She shrugged her dress on and, fearful of choking on the swell rising in her chest, tiptoed to the door.
‘You wouldn’t be running away, would you?’
Helios watched as Amy’s silhouette froze at the bedroom door. Switching on the bedside light, he propped himself up on an elbow as she slowly turned around to face him with wide, pain-filled taupe eyes. To see her mussed-up hair and her beautiful face contorted in such misery... Something sharp pierced him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘I know it’s cowardly to sneak away.’
‘Then why are you?’
‘I shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t have...’ Her voice tailed away and she looked down at the floor.
‘Made love?’ he supplied.
She gave a tiny nod. ‘It was wrong. All wrong.’
‘It felt damn right to me.’
‘I know.’ She gave a sudden bark of harsh laughter and her eyes flashed. ‘It’s what I keep thinking. How can something so wrong feel so right?’
‘If it feels so right then how can it be wrong?’ he countered.
‘It just is. You’re getting married.’
That little fact was something that constantly played on his mind. Only being in Amy’s arms had driven it and the accompanying nausea away.
Tightness coiled in his stomach. Throwing off the covers, he climbed out of bed and strode over to her, slamming his hand on the door to prevent her from escaping.
He spoke slowly, trying to think the words through before he vocalised them, knowing that one wrong word would make her flee whether or not he barricaded the door. ‘Amy, I might be getting married, but it’s you I want.’
‘We’ve been through this before. It doesn’t matter what you want or what I want. It doesn’t change the reality of the situation. Tonight was a mistake that can’t be repeated.’
‘Running away won’t change anything either. Admit it, matakia mou. You and I belong together.’
Her jaw clenched in response.
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked scathingly, leaning closer to her ashen face. ‘Run away and start a relationship with Leander? Is that how you intend to prove we’re over?’
‘How do you know about Leander?’ She shook her head and took a deep inhalation. ‘Don’t answer that. I can guess.’
He felt no guilt for seeking information about her date. Helios looked out for those he cared for. ‘He’s too young for you. I know you, Amy. You don’t need a boy. You need—’
‘He’s my brother,’ she snapped suddenly, angry colour flushing her cheeks.
Her declaration momentarily stunned him into silence. Stepping back to look at her properly, he dragged a hand through his hair. ‘But Leander is from Agon. Your brothers are English, like you...’
‘I’m only half-English.’
‘Your parents are English.’ Weren’t they? Wasn’t this something they had talked about...?
‘My father’s English. Elaine—my mum—didn’t give birth to me. My birth mother’s from Agon.’
How had he not known this?
Amy must have sensed the direction his mind was travelling in. ‘Do you remember once asking me how I’d developed such an obsession and a love for your country?’
‘You said it was... You never gave a proper answer...’ Realisation dawned on him as he thought back to that conversation, months ago, when they had first started sleeping together. She’d brushed his question aside.
‘And you never pursued it.’ She shook her head in a mixture of sadness and anger.
‘I didn’t know there was anything to pursue. I’m not a mind reader.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She gave a helpless shrug. ‘A huge part of me wanted to tell you, and ask for your help in finding her, but I knew that confiding in you would change the nature of our relationship.’
‘What would have changed?’ he asked, completely perplexed.
From the first the chemistry between them had been off the charts. Making love to Amy had always felt different from the way it had felt with his other lovers. He’d never felt the urge to ask her to leave at night—he liked sharing his space with her, this incredibly sexy woman with a brain the size of a watermelon. He loved it that she could teach him things he didn’t know about his own country.
To learn now that she had roots in his country...
‘I didn’t keep any secrets from you,’ he added, his head reeling.
‘Apart from throwing a party to find a wife?’
He inhaled deeply. Yes, the real purpose of the ball was something he’d kept from her for as long as he could. But this information was on a different scale. He’d known Amy had kept a part of herself sheltered from him, but he’d had no idea it was something so fundamental.
Her eyes held his. ‘I was scared.’
Another stabbing pain lanced him. ‘Of me?’
‘Of what you would think of me. At least I was in the beginning.’ Her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘And I was scared because you and I came with time constraints. We had a fixed marker for when we would end, we both knew that. We both held things back.’
‘I never held anything back.’
‘Didn’t you?’ There was no challenge in her eyes, just a simple question. ‘Helios, I couldn’t take the risk of what we had developing into something more—of us becoming closer. We can’t be together for ever. I was trying to protect myself.’
For an age he stared at her, wishing he could see into her mind, wishing he could shake her...wishing that everything could be different.
‘Do not go anywhere,’ he said, turning his back to her and striding to his dressing room. ‘You and I are going to talk, and this is not a conversation to have naked. We’re long past the point of keeping secrets from each other.’
While Helios slipped on a pair of boxers Amy used the few moments alone to catch her thoughts before he reappeared.
It wasn’t long enough.
She pressed her back tightly against the door, her vocal cords too constricted for speech.
‘I mean it, Amy,’ he said with a hard look in his eye. ‘You’re not going anywhere until we’ve talked this through.’
‘What’s the point?’ she asked, her voice hoarse.
‘If your history is what’s stopping us from being together then I damn well deserve to know the truth.’ He strolled back to the bed and sat in the middle of it, his back resting against the headboard. ‘Now, come here.’
What an unholy mess. It had never been supposed to end like this. Her memories of her time with him were supposed to be filled with wonder, not sorrow and despair. Losing him wasn’t supposed to hurt.
She perched on the end of the bed and twisted to face him. Blowing out a puff of air, she gazed at the ceiling.
‘My father had an affair with the au pair. She dumped me on him when I was two weeks old and has wanted nothing to do with me since. Her husband and her parents don’t know I exist.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
OTHER THAN A slight shake of his head and a tightening of his lips, Helios gave no response.
‘My birth mother had me when she was nineteen. I know very little about her—she didn’t work for them for long.’
‘When you say for them...?’
‘My parents. My mum—as in the woman who raised me—was pregnant and had a three-year-old son when they employed Neysa, my birth mother, as an au pair. She quit after a couple of months but then turned up at my dad’s workplace seven months later and left me with the receptionist.’
Amy studied Helios’s reaction carefully. She no longer really feared, as she had at the beginning of their relationship, that he would think any less of her, but nagging doubts remained. Cruel words spoken in the playground still haunted her, clouding her judgement.
‘You must have been one ugly baby for your own mum to dump you.’
‘Do you have 666 marked on the back of your head?’
‘Your real mum’s a slut.’
She’d had to force herself to rise above it and pretend the taunts didn’t affect her when in reality they had burned. For years she had tortured herself, wondering if the taunts held the ring of truth. For years she’d tried to live a life as pure as the driven snow to prove she wasn’t intrinsically bad.
For years she’d wondered how Elaine—to her mind, her mum—could even bring herself to look at her.
Helios stared at her as if she’d just told him that all the scientists and even physics itself were wrong and the world was actually flat.
‘Did she leave a note?’ he asked quietly. ‘Give a reason?’
‘Her note to my father said only that I was his and that she couldn’t keep me.’
‘So your father had an affair with the au pair when your mum was pregnant? And they’re still together?’
She nodded. ‘God knows how Mum found it in her to forgive him but she did, and she raised me as her own.’
Helios shook his head, amazement in his eyes. ‘She raised you with her own children?’
‘Yes. Danny was born five months before me. We were in the same school year.’
He closed his eyes with a wince. ‘That must have been difficult.’
Helios Crowns His Mistress Page 8
