by Abby Green
He had made no move, but his eyes had turned so dark with lust that the green looked almost black. His gaze burnt into her.
With a tremor in her hands she pulled the zip down all the way, and then slowly peeled the dress off her shoulder and down, baring breasts only just confined by a strapless lace bra. Her awful self-consciousness seemed to have faded away to another place. Another person.
Hands on her hips, Lucy wriggled slightly to ease the dress down and over her womanly shape. The veritable waves of heat coming from Aristotle as his eyes followed the path of her dress nearly had Lucy melting on the spot. The heavy silk pooled at her feet, and she stepped out with an innate grace she was entirely unaware of.
Seeing a heavily brocaded chair beside the bed, Lucy lifted one leg to rest her foot there and started to peel one stocking down, only belatedly becoming aware of the eroticism of her pose. She sensed it in the way Ari had stilled even more, felt it in the intensity of his gaze on her, and for the first time in her life, found herself glorying in her innate femininity.
Aristotle knew that the only thing keeping him from jumping out of the bed and burying his aching hardness into her as she bent like that over the chair was the knowledge that, given one touch of her skin, he’d lose all control. When he’d seen her standing at the foot of the bed like a vision, his feeling of pure desire twinned with what had felt suspiciously like joy had made him act gruffer than he would have liked. He gripped the sheets tight in both hands now. It felt hard to breathe. The fact that he also felt more out of control than he’d ever felt with another woman was uncomfortable. Finesse in this kind of situation was a distant memory.
A curtain of dark hair swung forward, restricting his view of the bountiful breasts threatening to spill from that completely inadequate bra, and instinctively he leant forward and brushed it back over one pale shoulder. She turned her head and looked at him, her lower lip caught by her teeth, sending a shudder of pure arousal through his body, tightening the erotic notch on his flimsy control.
She put down that leg and lifted the other, repeated the exercise. By the time she was done Ari could feel sweat rolling down his back from the effort it took to stay still.
Lucy registered the almost indecent bulge in the sheet covering his lap and her throat went dry.
‘Your bra,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Take it off too.’
Lucy reached around behind her and felt for the clasp. She had to pull the bra tighter in the motion it took to undo it, and she saw Aristotle’s Adam’s apple move convulsively as he registered the movement. The clasp was undone, and Lucy held it for a long moment…this was it. And then, with an almost defiant movement, she pulled it away and threw it down, releasing her heavy breasts. She stood before him in nothing but her silk and lace pants. In some dim and distant part of her still-functioning brain Lucy had no idea how she was doing this—the enormity of the moment was too huge to contemplate—but the beat of her blood was drowning out everything but the need to be here right now, with him.
His eyes seemed to glaze over as he looked at her, making her skin tighten and tingle all over, especially her breasts. She could feel the tips puckering and growing unbearably tight. She didn’t have time to feel self-conscious. Aristotle reached out with two hands and grabbed hers in both of his, pulling her close to the bed. The sheet moved down. Lucy had a stomach clenching view of narrow hips and dark hair just above—
With a smooth move she never saw coming he tumbled her down, so that she lay flat on her back. He loomed, huge and dark over her, his hands still capturing hers, held against her belly, his knuckles brushing the sensitive undersides of her breasts. Her heart was beating so fast she felt dizzy, but then his head was lowering to hers, his mouth slanting over hers, and within seconds dizziness had been replaced with heat and sensation. His naked torso crushed her chest. He released her hands and she instinctively wound them around his neck as she arched voluptuously towards him.
Never had she imagined feeling like this. This rightness. She fitted him; he fitted her. The moment she ached for him to touch her somewhere he touched her; the moment she wanted him to deepen the kiss he deepened it—sucking her tongue deep, biting her lip, pressing fiery kisses down over her jaw and further, until he hovered teasingly over her breasts.
He cupped one and then the other, caressing their firm smoothness. Lucy’s breathing was fractured, jerky. She looked down but couldn’t bear the eroticism of seeing her breasts in his hands like that. So she closed her eyes and cried out when he took one burning nipple into his mouth and sucked hard, rolling the tip, flicking it with his tongue, grazing it with his teeth before suckling hard again.
Lucy was burning up, her hands in his hair as he cupped both the voluptuous mounds together, his mouth tasting and testing each peak until they were throbbing with arousal.
‘Please…’ she begged brokenly.
Her hips moved in a silent and primeval rhythm, her lower body on fire. She looked down to see Aristotle looking up at her, eyes dark green, cheeks flushed. His huge broad shoulders blocked out the light as he finally released her breasts and came over her on strong arms, lean and awe-inspiring.
‘Are you ready?’
She nodded jerkily. She wanted to say yes to anything this man said, not even caring what he meant.
‘Are you sure? I think we should check, just in case…don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Lucy gasped. ‘Whatever—just do it…’
He smiled down at her even as she registered that the sheet had fallen away and his powerful erection nudged her belly. On pure instinct she reached down and covered him with her hand, heat suffusing her face and neck as she registered the size of him—fully aroused.
He grimaced as her hand tightened on him and he took it gently away. ‘That’s why we have to see if you’re ready Lucy, mou…patience.’
She didn’t know what mou meant, but then he disappeared, and Lucy gave a yelp when she felt him drawing her pants down, over her hips and down her legs, before he spread her legs apart with big hands. Lucy tried to resist the movement, which felt far too intimate, but he was ruthless, eyes on hers, holding her, telling her to trust him as his head lowered. She closed her eyes and put a fist to her mouth to hold back the groan when she felt his breath feather in the intimate space between her legs, and then the sensation of his mouth and tongue on her nearly sent her shooting into the stars.
He licked her, exploring her secret folds, thrusting deep into her, circling and sucking on her clitoris until her hips were lifting off the bed, wantonly jerking towards him, her teeth biting down on her fist.
When she felt two fingers slide deep into her slick heat everything in her body teetered on an edge that she’d never known before; every nerve pulled tight. But then he was withdrawing for a moment. She heard a drawer slam shut, a foil wrapper, and then he was back over her, strong, hair-roughened thighs parting her own smoother ones even more.
She could feel his erection nudging her down there, where she burned. He moved back and forth, drawing his penis along the moistened and plump folds of her sex, eliciting a deep groan from somewhere deep within her. She was almost mindless for the need for something…she wasn’t sure what it was…it hovered just out of reach.
Lucy put her hands on his shoulders. They glistened with sweat, and the feeling of something so earthy made her rejoice.
‘Ari…’ she breathed. ‘Please—I’m ready.’
And that was when Ari’s control broke. He heard her husky words, felt her tip her hips up towards him, reach down to take hold of him, forcing him to impale her slightly. And then he drove in deep and hard, knowing instinctively that this woman was made for him alone and they would fit like a glove.
Ari stilled his movements—both of them did. Lucy’s eyes were wide with shock at the sensation of him filling her, but it wasn’t painful…it was delicious.
She moved again, experimentally, and Aristotle sank into her even more, pushing her down into the bed. Lucy wrapped one
leg around his waist and threw her head back, hands still clinging onto his shoulders as he slowly withdrew and then impaled her again. He continued with his slow, voluptuous rhythm, the pleasure building and building. Lucy could feel her body starting to shake as he took her other leg and bent it back, opening her up to him even more, changing the angle slightly, going even deeper, and as his movements started to get faster and more urgent Lucy could feel the onset of something so huge, so terrifying as it came hurtling towards her, that she tensed—even though everything in her was urging her to meet it head-on.
Aristotle bent his head, his body holding her suspended with his movements, and kissed her deeply. Her breasts were crushed against his chest, her arms clasping his neck. ‘Let go, Lucy…It’s OK…let go.’
Holding on tight, she took the final, terrifying leap and let go…and was thrown so high and so far on the wave of her orgasm that she was hardly even aware of Aristotle’s own explosive loss of control as his big powerful body jerked and still rhythmically thrust into hers as the never-ending ripples of her orgasm held him suspended in a halfway world he’d never known before.
Chapter Seven
ARISTOTLE was running away. And the fact that he was aware of what he was doing made him nearly incandescent with rage. He didn’t run away. And yet after last night, with Lucy, all he’d known was that he needed space—and fast. His brain was still too hot and far too tangled to even pretend he could deal with a banal morning-after scenario. He’d received a call from his New York PA while Lucy lay sleeping, and on the flimsiest of pretexts had declared he’d fly over for the weekend to take care of something that ordinarily he wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole.
Lucy had woken to find him dressing that morning. He’d seen her wake through the reflection of the mirror as he’d knotted his tie with unsteady hands. Unsteady because he’d wanted to strip off all his confining garments and go over to where she lay in such gloriously voluptuous naked abandon and take her all over again. But the truth was he wasn’t sure if he could take that intensity of experience again.
Wasn’t sure if he could take that intensity of experience again? Ari’s hand clenched around the crystal glass, the design digging into his palm as he looked unseeingly out of the plane window. Since when had sleeping with a woman been too intense for him? They were the ones left weak and dizzy and sated. Not him.
He closed his eyes and threw his head back. And then opened them again abruptly when all he could see was Lucy’s passion-glazed eyes as she’d looked up at him the moment he’d filled her, the moment he’d been completely sheathed in her hot moist warmth…It had felt…it had felt like nothing he could have imagined. He could remember the feel of her breasts pushing against him, their peaks as hard as bullets against his chest, could hear their heartbeats even now, thudding slow and unsteady, and then, as he’d started to thrust deeper and deeper, the beats had got faster…until—
Aristotle swore softly. He needed to numb that intensity.
His mouth twisted and he called himself all sorts of a fool for running away. So it was the best sex he’d ever had? That was it. It didn’t mean anything. It hadn’t touched any part of him that hadn’t been touched before. So why did it feel as if it had?
Ari blocked out that assertion. He was immune to feeling, immune to emotions. He’d started to shut them away when his mother had died, and then when Helen Savakis had come into his life, and then finally on that first night in a cold boarding school in England at the age of five. It was the last time he’d cried and now…His gut clenched. Now he only cried in his sleep. He reiterated it to himself: he didn’t do emotions.
Perhaps he’d sensed that Lucy did, and that was why he’d run. A sense of calm stole over him. That was it. She wasn’t like the women he went for…she was bound to be less versed in how this would work. He’d seen the look on her face that morning, slightly nervous, biting her lip…And suddenly he was right back to square one—a raging erection pushing against his trousers, thirty thousand feet in the air, and the only chance of alleviating it far behind him on Greek soil.
He just had to lay it on the line with her, that was all. Make sure she knew what not to expect. And then…then he would take her again, and these demons would not be hovering over his shoulders. Ari smiled cynically. Who would have thought he’d be growing a conscience now, after all these years?
Lucy had got over Aristotle’s abrupt and cold departure yesterday morning. She told herself stoutly that she was back on an even keel. But if she allowed images to surface for a second—She stumbled slightly in the street and a kindly old woman caught her arm and smiled up at her, saying something in Greek. Lucy smiled weakly and mumbled something back. So much for an even keel. If she even thought about the other night for a second she lost her balance…Self-disgust ran through her.
She spied a taverna on the other side of the street and made her way there, sitting gratefully in an empty chair. She ordered sparkling water and fanned herself with a menu, thinking that perhaps it was the heat getting to her. Who was she kidding? The heat was getting to her all right, but it had nothing to do with the sun.
And along with the heat was a lingering hurt—Lucy brutally cut off her thoughts there. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t.
She tried to focus on her surroundings, the pretty and quaint area of Anafiotika, a hidden gem of old Athens within touristy Plaka, just beneath the Acropolis. She’d climbed up there earlier, the exertion doing little to clear her head of the tangled knots. She took a sip of water, but with annoying precision her mind slipped back again to that excruciating moment when she’d woken the day before.
She’d felt so heavy, so lethargic, so replete. She’d lazily stretched and opened one eye before realising that she was naked, and that muscles ached where no muscle had been before. In an instant she’d been alert, and staring into the cool, wide-awake green eyes of Aristotle as he’d knotted his tie in the mirror.
She needn’t have worried about the embarrassment of the morning after as he’d coolly informed her he had to go to New York urgently on business, that he didn’t need her, and that he’d be back late on Sunday. It was almost as if nothing had happened. Lucy had even wondered for a paralysing moment if she’d sleep-walked into her boss’s bed and he was merely being diplomatic and ignoring the faux pas.
And then he’d gone, leaving her there, shell-shocked, the only evidence that anything had happened in the tremors that had started through her body along with the ache when she moved.
After he’d left her mind had gone to some numb place where she wouldn’t have to process what had happened, answer the questions that were piling up. Was that it? Had he just been scratching an itch? Would things revert to normal now? Was he that cold with everyone? Lucy had remembered the way he’d treated Augustine Archer and she’d doubled over in her steaming shower, feeling sick. How could she have let this happen with a man like that?
Because, she realised now, as the everyday hustle and bustle went on around her, she simply had not had a choice. He’d overwhelmed her—her response had overwhelmed her. And she was grateful for the space and time to process what had happened.
At that moment a group of handsome young Greek men passed her table, and they all turned to look Lucy over appreciatively as they backed down the street. One of them cheekily wolf-whistled. The shock of the attention when she wasn’t used to it made her freeze. She felt acutely self-conscious in her khaki shorts and V-necked black T-shirt. The waiter in the restaurant bustled over and shouted something at the boys. They ran, laughing, and he started apologising to Lucy, but she assured him smilingly that it was fine and put some money on the table, getting up to go.
She had to acknowledge as she walked away that it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience to be noticed like that. She’d hidden away for so long that she’d never had a chance to just play with situations like this.
The sun beat down and she tipped her head up to it for a moment. She felt an alien sensation of l
ightness, as if she were finally letting go of a weight. It was also a sense of freedom, and she desperately wanted to cling onto it. One thing she knew: if Aristotle thought they could take up where they’d left off when he returned, that sense of freedom might disappear. She’d indulged in the experience once; it would have to be enough. She knew too much about him, about his cold methods, and she knew that she didn’t have the hide of someone like Augustine Archer to be able to take it.
But she had a mortifying, sickening feeling that he’d had enough already, and it killed her to admit to feeling other than overjoyed at the prospect.
She set off back in the direction of the hotel. Just before she rounded the corner a flash of movement caught her eye, and she looked over to see Aristotle lounging against an ancient wall, hands thrust deep into jeans pockets, a faded white T-shirt making him look indecently handsome. Dark glasses hid those amazing eyes, but added to the overall devastating package.
It was so like something she might have conjured up out of a fantasy that she blinked and blinked again. Was it a mirage? He was dressed more casually than she’d ever seen him. He moved, strolled towards her. Stopped in front of her. Her heart stopped and kick-started again with heavy thuds.
This was no mirage.
‘You’re…back.’ Despite the drink of water, Lucy’s mouth felt like a desert.
Ari smiled a hard smile and in that second Lucy knew it was him. Despite his hardness something melted inside her, all her good intentions of moments ago disappearing like pathetic wisps of cloud.
He lifted his glasses onto his head. ‘I left New York in the middle of the night.’
The shock of seeing him like this and the force of those eyes on hers made her brain feel fuzzy. ‘But you…you had to work.’
