by Lucy Monroe
“And she blames you for this? Not your irresponsible father who left his wife and daughters in debt?”
She didn’t take exception to Dimitri’s view of her father. Dimitri was a responsible guy, someone who would never leave his family in the lurch. He couldn’t comprehend a man who had absolutely no sense about money.
“Mama doesn’t exactly blame me for losing the mansion, but she was furious when I wouldn’t stop modeling after it was sold. She would have much preferred I married well rather than work to support her and Madeleine.”
“But you did not wish to marry well?”
“I wanted to marry a man I loved, not a bank account.”
“Then it should please you to marry me. If the words you spoke at Chez Renée were true, I can give you both.”
“They were true then,” so much so that parts of her heart were still cracked and bleeding after the abrupt way they’d broken up, “but I don’t love you anymore.”
“I refuse to believe a woman of such strong character could fall out of love at the first sign of adversity.”
She was beginning to have a horrible suspicion he was right, but she wasn’t about to feed his smug pride admitting it. “I wouldn’t call you ejecting me from your life with the force of a rocket launcher so you could marry another woman the first sign of adversity.”
“Yet I did not marry her.”
“Because your brother beat you to the punch.”
He sighed. “You are sure I would have married her otherwise?”
Why was he asking her that? Of course she was sure. He’d made his position very clear that last meeting in Paris. “Yes.”
“If I told you I had already decided not to go through with the marriage, you would not believe me, hmm?”
Was he saying that? No. This was just another one of his subtle manipulations. “Don’t tax your personal integrity making the claim. You’re right. I wouldn’t buy it.”
“And yet I had hired a detective agency to find you within days of you leaving Paris.”
“I waited for you to change your mind for a whole week, Dimitri. You didn’t even call. I can believe you started to consider the consequences if I’d told the truth about the baby, but I don’t think you were prepared to call off your wedding because of it. I didn’t matter to you then, and I don’t matter to you now. It’s all about the baby and I’m not stupid enough to forget that.”
His hand gripped his wine glass very tightly. The same hand that still wore a bandage from the night he’d come to Madeleine and Hunter’s party.
“How did you cut yourself? I never asked.” Her mind had been on other things that night.
He carefully put his wine glass down, staring at it as if it held the answer to an important question. Then he looked up at her and she gasped.
His eyes held a torment that was haunting.
“When Madeleine told me you were dead, I crushed the glass in my hand.”
CHAPTER SIX
DIMITRI’S statement hung in the air between them like a bomb that had not exploded, but still might.
“You were that upset at the prospect of losing your child?” She had not considered Dimitri’s emotional involvement with their baby. Which wasn’t all that surprising considering she’d seen him as an emotionless monster for the past three months.
His jaw tautened. “If it pleases you to believe so, yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
He inclined his head. “With your background, you should understand the importance of our child being raised in his home country of Greece and as a Petronides.”
That was more like it. Dimitri wanted his son because family pride demanded he be raised Petronides. “I understand the importance of loving my baby for his own sake, not the sake of family pride. Whether he’s raised a Dupree or Petronides, he will still be worthy of my love. Can you say the same?”
Dimitri’s features took on the cast of the Iceman. “Apparently you do not believe me capable of any level of emotion, so why should I bother answering?”
She’d hurt him, wounded his sense of self and for some reason, she simply couldn’t bear that. “I didn’t mean—”
“Leave it. Do you want dessert?”
“No.” She couldn’t eat anything now.
“Then we will return to the suite. If we are to have yet another argument, we will do it in privacy.”
The drive back to his hotel was a silent one. She felt guilty and kept telling herself she shouldn’t, but the feeling remained. Just because Dimitri did not love her did not mean he was not capable of loving his son. She’d had no right to imply that it did.
She was still trying to work up to an apology when he let them both into the suite a half an hour later.
“Dimitri, I—”
“I said leave it.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m tired.”
His admission of weakness stunned her.
His lips twisted wryly. “You think I cannot get exhausted like the next man? We all have our limits, pethi mou.”
He hadn’t in the twelve months she’d lived with him.
“I have not slept well for the three months I have searched for you,” he further shocked her by admitting. “I believed once I found you, everything would fall into place. You would agree to marry me. We would be on the next plane to Greece so you could meet my grandfather. I believed I would have to assuage your anger, I did not expect to find a woman who hated me.”
“I don’t hate you,” she averred, “I told you that.”
“You do not wish to hate me for our child’s sake. I understand this, but you do not want to marry me. You do not trust me. I am at a loss where to go from here. Just as you saw modeling as the only solution to your family’s financial difficulties, I see marriage as the only workable solution to our situation.”
It was her turn to sigh. “I know you do.”
“And I am sexually frustrated.” His laugh was harsh. “I don’t like going without.”
She didn’t know if she could handle Dimitri in this strange mood. She was used to him taking charge, demanding. His admissions of weakness surprised her silly. “It hasn’t been that long, surely?”
“I have not made love to another woman since the night I told you I was marrying Phoebe.”
For a hopelessly oversexed male like Dimitri that was a lifetime. No wonder he wasn’t himself. She didn’t know why he had abstained, but something deep inside her was fiercely glad he had. “I see.”
“I doubt it, but maybe you will someday.” All tiredness disappeared from his expression to be replaced with predatory sensuality. “You could help me out.”
She backed toward her bedroom. “I think I’ll make an early night of it, t-take a shower, m-maybe read a book.”
He’d already proven she couldn’t resist him physically. She wasn’t about to stick around and offer herself as the main course to end his months long sexual fast.
She took the image of his primitive smile with her as she closed the door to her bedroom. She pushed the lock in for good measure and took her first unhindered breath in five minutes. She couldn’t let him make love to her again. She was too vulnerable to him and she needed to think. She wouldn’t be able to do that with any sense of clarity while under the influence of his passionate nature.
Her eyes closed, Alexandra rinsed the lather from her hair, enjoying the feel of hot water cascading over her body from three different directions.
The luxury of the spa shower had even won out over a long soak in the oversized, jetted tub. Two showerheads shot warm showers of water toward her body from chest height while another sent down a gentle spray from above her head. She felt completely pampered in the glass and tile enclosure.
So pampered that she was almost able to push her chaotic thoughts away, but not quite. Somehow, she had to work things out with Dimitri. He had as much right to love their son as she did and more importantly, their child had a right to two loving parents if possible. Dimitri had made it clear such an eventu
ality was possible, but he did not love her.
Was it right though, for her to make her child pay the price for her own unfulfilled dreams? And their son would pay a price if she refused to marry Dimitri. He would be born outside the bonds of matrimony. For many that would not matter, but among his Greek family and future business associates, it would.
Her own mother might never accept him. While that made Alexandra furious, she knew there was little she could do to turn around a lifetime of conditioning. Her mother’s belief system was as ingrained as a fossil in rock.
In his fossil research, her father had often been forced to leave rock sediment on one of his specimens because to remove it would be to destroy the fossil. She didn’t want to destroy her mother. She didn’t even want to upset her. Because despite her mother’s irritating habit of seeing the world only from her own point of view, Alexandra loved her and wanted her to be happy.
Wishing she could brush her troubling thoughts away so easily, Alexandra swiped the water from her eyes and opened them…to blackness. She blinked, but no light penetrated the darkness surrounding her. Had there been a power outage? Didn’t all the larger hotels have generators?
Suddenly the stream of water pulsing down on her head ceased. The two other showerheads kept going however, leaving her feeling disoriented. She fought down panic as she reached out to touch the tile of the wall for a sense of reference and touched bare flesh instead.
For an instant her brain could not take in the significance of the hair roughened, heated flesh under her agitated fingers. What…? Then, “Dimitri?” whispered because she couldn’t force more volume from the frozen muscles in her throat.
“It is I.” His voice surrounded her with more warmth than the steam from the hot water flowing over both their bodies.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
An arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her forward. “Should I not?” he asked against her shocked lips.
“No. I don’t want this.” Did she sound as unconvincing to him as she sounded to herself?
Knowing fingers brushed gently over nipples that had gone turgid and aching the moment she realized his naked body stood so close to her own. “Are you sure about that?”
“We need to talk,” she tried again, while her body shook with the need to melt into his.
“No,” he said with harsh emphasis. “We have talked enough. It gets us nowhere, but this…” He squeezed her nipple between thumb and forefinger and she could not stifle her moan. “This I can give you.”
“Sex won’t solve our problems. It’s what started them in the first place,” she said, trying one last time to keep hold of her senses.
“No. It was not the sex. When we make love it is like a poem of rare beauty and beat. Words have brought this distance between us. My words. Your words. I will not let it continue. I cannot let it continue.”
The urgency in his voice affected her as deeply as the emotive words and she felt tears burn the back of her throat. He was right. Their distance had been caused by words. Making love had never been anything but beautiful between them, even that last tempestuous time.
She couldn’t stand the distance any longer either, but undoubtedly for a different reason. There in the steamy darkness, she accepted a truth her heart had been telling her all along. She was not over Dimitri Petronides. She would never be over him. The love she felt for him was too strong, too deeply imbedded in her.
Again it was the fossil in the rock, only this time she knew with absolute certainty that to try to rip the love she felt for him from her breast would destroy her completely.
She made a noise of need and longing. His arm tightened around her, bringing her body flush with his own. Familiar lips closed over hers in a kiss so passionate, she felt scorched by the heat of it. Dimitri nibbled impatiently at her bottom lip until she opened her mouth and then he was inside, laying claim to her softness and reminding her of the incredible physical bond they had once shared. A bond that rejection, distance and time had not been able to sever.
Hungry for the feel of him, she let her fingers trail over the musculature of his chest. His mouth broke from hers and she sensed his head falling back as his body shuddered. “Yes, moro mou, touch me. I need you to touch me.”
She had no hesitation about obliging him. She’d tried to hide from it, but she’d missed him so much. She circled the hard little nubs of his nipples, making him grind his already pulsingly erect flesh against her stomach.
Memories of how that flesh felt filling her would have sent her to her knees, but for the almost bruising hold he had on her waist. Running her hands up his chest and over his shoulders, she got drunk on the ability to touch him once again. She leaned forward and took one nipple into her mouth. Gently she teased it with her teeth and small flicks on the very tip with her tongue. He was moving against her with almost uncontrolled desire and she loved it.
If nothing else, she knew that in this, he was hers…completely.
She started sucking on that same erotic bit of flesh and Dimitri made hoarse sounds of need from deep in his throat. Then his hands were on either side of her face, exerting light pressure to her head. She let go of his nipple with reluctance.
“I want it to be so good for you, you will never leave me again,” he vowed with a fervency that was almost frightening.
He pushed against her shoulders until she was leaning against the slick wet tile wall at the back of the square shower cubicle. “Press your hands to the wall.”
She did it because she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“Do not move them.”
“Dimitri?”
“Trust me.”
In this, he had never hurt her and she knew deep in her heart, he never would. “All right.”
Masculine fingers traced her cheeks until one brushed her lips and pressed inside. She felt warmth flood her between her legs as she sucked on that hot finger sliding in and out of her mouth. He continued the light tracing of her skin with his other hand, brushing down over her collarbone to her left breast. He stopped there, exploring her new shape brought on by changes from her pregnancy.
It was fuller and more sensitive. He seemed to sense this and kept his touch feather light as he used all five fingers in a cone motion encircling her entire breast. He brought his hand toward himself, bringing his fingers together as he did so until they circled her distended peak. He squeezed lightly and then did the entire motion all over again, and again, and again until she felt feverish with the need for his mouth on it.
“Dimitri, please…Your mouth…”
He laughed huskily. “Not yet, hmm?” Then he pulled his hand from her mouth and gave the same treatment to her other breast until her head was thrashing back and forth against the wall in an agony of need.
“Please…” She could not articulate another word.
She didn’t need to. He dropped to his knees in front of her and took one straining tip into his mouth. He started off suckling ever so softly, but soon increased the pressure until the pleasure was almost pain and she was crying out.
“More, please…Oh, Heavens…Stop! I can’t bear it. No…Don’t stop! Harder. Now, Dimitri! Now…” and she came with an explosion of color in the inky blackness of their sensual prison.
She sagged against the wall, but he wasn’t done. He kissed a path down to her belly. If she thought his exploration earlier of their baby’s current home had been erotic, it was nothing compared to the way he caressed every new curve, every bit of skin stretched tight over her womb with both fingers and lips that almost worshipped.
“Moro mou.” His baby. He kissed the center of her distended tummy. “Yineka mou.” His woman. Both his hands covered her skin in possessive declaration.
She was so lost in her sensual daze that she almost did not catch the significance of the words whispered against the taut wall of her stomach, but when they penetrated her brain she felt emotion course through her. Earlier he had called her his baby, but now he was
acknowledging their son. And her, but in a very different way. He’d claimed her with an endearment he’d never used with her before. Words that both connoted her place in his life as his woman, but also laid claim to her as his wife.
“I will never let you go again.”
She could not respond. What could she say? He acted as if her leaving his life had been voluntary and also that it had hurt him. She didn’t know if she could believe him, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it. His lips were traveling down her stomach until they found her most secret place. He kissed her there, a soft salute and then exerted pressure on the outside of her thighs to bring her legs together.
She was unprepared for the penetration of his tongue. He did not pull her legs apart again, but let his tongue slide between her slick folds of femininity. He stroked her sweetest spot with the tip of his tongue, going back and forth and then in circles, all the time keeping her legs together. She couldn’t believe how incredible it felt to have her inner thighs touching and the swollen flesh of her womanhood pressed together and around the wet stimulation of his tongue.
She felt the sensations of pleasure begin to build to ecstasy once again. Tears ran down her cheeks to mix with the water on her skin from the still pulsing showerheads as she said his name over and over. His hands moved from their hold on her outer thighs to cupping the underside of her bottom and she pressed herself against his marauding mouth, unable to stop the wanton movement.
Then one of his fingers penetrated where she had not been touched in over four long months and she came apart, sobbing out her pleasure and his name. He didn’t stop and she bucked against him, convulsing over and over again until she went limp and the impenetrable darkness was no longer responsible for the blackness before her eyes.
She came to on the king-size bed in Dimitri’s room. He was toweling her dry with gentle movements. The bedside lamp was on, casting a gentle glow over his bronzed features.
