by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
And when she shuddered, he only laughed.
Achilles carried her across the top floor, all of which was part of his great master bedroom. It took up the entire top level of his penthouse, bordered on all sides by the wide patio that was also accessible from a separate staircase below. The better to maintain and protect his privacy, she thought now, which she felt personally invested in at the moment. He strode across the hardwood floor with bold-colored rugs tossed here and there, and she took in the exposed brick walls and the bright, modern works of art that hung on them. This floor was all space and silence, and in between there were more of those breathtaking windows that brightened the room with the lights from the city outside.
Achilles didn’t turn on any additional light. He simply took Valentina over to the huge bed that was propped up on a sleek modern platform crafted out of a bright, hard steel, and laid her out across it as if she was something precious to him. Which made her heart clutch at her, as if she wanted to be.
And then he stood there beside the bed, his hands on his lean hips, and did nothing but gaze down at her.
Valentina pushed herself up onto her elbows. She could feel her breath moving in and out of her, and it was as if it was wired somehow to all that sensation she could feel lighting her up inside. It made her breasts feel heavier. It made her arms and legs feel somehow restless and sleepy at once.
With every breath, she could feel that bright, hot ache between her legs intensify. And this time, she knew without a shred of doubt that he was aware of every last part of it.
“Do you have anything else to confess?” he asked her, and she wondered if she imagined the dark current in his voice then. But it didn’t matter. She had never wanted anyone, but she wanted him. Desperately.
She would confess anything at all if it meant she could have him.
And it wasn’t until his eyes blazed, and that remarkable mouth of his kicked up in one corner, that she realized she’d spoken out loud.
“I will keep that in mind,” he told her, his voice a rasp into the quiet of the room. Then he inclined his head. “Take off your clothes.”
It was as if he’d plugged her into an electrical outlet. She felt zapped. Blistered, perhaps, by the sudden jolt of power. It felt as if there were something bright and hot, wrapped tight around her ribs, pressing down. And down farther.
And she couldn’t bring herself to mind.
“But—by myself?” she asked, feeling a little bit light-headed at the very idea. She’d found putting on these jeans a little bit revolutionary. She couldn’t imagine stripping them off in front of a man.
And not just any man. Achilles Casilieris.
Who didn’t relent at all. “You heard me.”
Valentina had to struggle then. She had to somehow shove her way out of all that wild electrical madness that was jangling through her body, at least enough so she could think through it. A little bit, anyway. She had to struggle to sit up all the way, and then to pull the T-shirt off her body. Her hands went to her jeans next, and she wrestled with the buttons, trying to pull the fly open. It was all made harder by the fact that her hands shook and her fingers felt entirely too thick.
And the more she struggled, the louder her breathing sounded. Until she was sure it was filling up the whole room, and more embarrassing by far, there was no possible way that Achilles couldn’t hear it. Or see the flush that she could feel all over her, electric and wild. She wrestled the stiff, unyielding denim down over her hips, that bright heat that churned inside her seeming to bleed out everywhere as she did. She was sure it stained her, marking her bright hot and obvious.
She sneaked a look toward Achilles, and she didn’t know what she expected to see. But she froze when her eyes met his.
That dark gold gaze of his was as hot and demanding as ever. That curve in his mouth was even deeper. And there was something in the way that he was looking at her that soothed her. As if his hands were on her already, when they were not. It was as if he was helping her undress when she suspected that it was very deliberate on his part that he was not.
Because of course it was deliberate, she realized in the next breath. He was giving her another choice. He was putting it in her hands, again. And even while part of her found that inordinately frustrating, because she wanted to be swept away by him—or more swept away, anyway—there was still a part of her that relished this. That took pride in the fact that she was choosing to give in to this particular temptation.
That she was choosing to truly offer this particular man the virtue she had always considered such a gift.
It wasn’t accidental. She wasn’t drunk the way many of her friends had been, nor out of her mind in some other way, or even outside herself in the storm of an explosive temper or wild sensation that had boiled over.
He wanted her to be very clear that she was choosing him.
And Valentina wanted that, too. She wanted to choose Achilles. She wanted this.
She had never wanted anything else, she was sure of it. Not with this fervor that inhabited her body and made her light up from the inside out. Not with this deep certainty.
And so what could it possibly matter that she had never undressed for a man before? She was a princess. She had dressed and undressed in rooms full of attendants her whole life. Achilles was different from her collection of royal aides, clearly. But there was no need for her to be embarrassed, she told herself then. There was no need to go red in the face and start fumbling about, as if she didn’t know how to remove a pair of jeans from her own body.
Remember who you are, she chided herself.
She was Princess Valentina of Murin. It didn’t matter that seeing her mother might have shaken her. It didn’t change a thing. That had nothing to do with who she was, it only meant that she’d become who she was in spite of the choices her mother had made. She could choose to do with that what she liked. And she was choosing to gift her innocence, the virginity she’d clung to as a badge of honor as if that differentiated her from the mother who’d left her, to Achilles Casilieris.
Here. Now.
And there was absolutely nothing to be ashamed about.
Valentina was sure that she saw something like approval in his dark gaze as she finished stripping her jeans from the length of her legs. And then she was sitting there in nothing but her bra and panties. She shifted up and onto her knees. Her hair fell down over her shoulders as she knelt on the bed, swirling across her bared skin and making her entirely too aware of how exposed she was.
But this time it felt sensuous. A sweet, warm sort of reminder of how much she wanted this. Him.
“Go on,” he told her, a gruff command.
“That sounded a great deal like an order,” Valentina murmured, even as she moved her hands around to her back to work the clasp of her bra. And it wasn’t even a struggle to make her voice so airy.
“It was most definitely an order,” Achilles agreed, his voice still gruff. “And I would suggest you obey me with significantly more alacrity.”
“Or what?” she taunted him gently.
She eased open the silken clasp and then moved her hands around to the bra cups, holding them to her breasts when the bra would have fallen open. “Will you hold it against me in my next performance review? Oh, the horror.”
“Are you defying me?”
But Achilles sounded amused, despite his gruffness. And there was something else in his voice then, she thought. A certain tension that she felt move inside her even before she understood what it was. Maybe she didn’t have to understand. Her body already knew.
Between her legs, that aching thing grew fiercer. Brighter. And so did she.
“I think you can take it,” she whispered.
And then she let the bra fall.
She felt the rush of cooler air over the flesh of her breasts. He
r nipples puckered and stung a little as they pulled tight. But what she was concentrating on was that taut, arrested look on Achilles’s face. That savage gleam in his dark gold eyes. And the way his fierce, ruthless mouth went flat.
He muttered something in guttural Greek, using words she had never heard before, in her blue-blooded academies and rarefied circles. But she knew, somehow, exactly what he meant.
She could feel it, part of that same ache.
He reached down to grip the hem of his T-shirt, then tugged it up and over his head in a single shrug of one muscled arm. She watched him do it, not certain she was breathing any longer and not able to make herself care about that at all, and then he was moving toward the bed.
Another second and he was upon her.
He swept her up in his arms again, moving her into the center of the bed, and then he bore her down to the mattress beneath them. And Valentina found that they fit together beautifully. That she knew instinctively what to do.
She widened her legs, he fit himself between them, and she cushioned him there—that long, solid, hard-packed form of his—as if they’d been made to fit together just like this. His bare chest was a wonder. She couldn’t seem to keep herself from exploring it, running her palms and her fingers over every ridge and every plane, losing herself in his hot, extraordinary male flesh. She could feel that remarkable ridge of his arousal again, pressed against her right where she ached the most, and it was almost too much.
Or maybe it really was too much, but she wanted it all the same.
She wanted him.
He set his mouth to hers again, and she could taste a kind of desperation on his wickedly clever mouth.
That wild sensation stormed through her, making her limp and wild and desperate for things she’d only ever read about before. He tangled his hands in her hair to hold her mouth to his, then he dropped his chest down against hers, bearing her down into the mattress beneath them. Making her feel glorious and alive and insane with that ache that started between her legs and bloomed out in all directions.
And then he taught her everything.
He tasted her. He moved his mouth from her lips, down the long line of her neck, learning the contours of her clavicle. Then he went lower, sending fire spinning all over her as he made his way down to one of her breasts, only to send lightning flashing all through her when he sucked her nipple deep into his mouth.
He tested the weight of her breasts in his faintly calloused palm, while he played with the nipple of the other, gently torturing her with his teeth, his tongue, his cruel lips. When she thought she couldn’t take any more, he switched.
And then he went back and forth, over and over again, until her head was thrashing against the mattress, and some desperate soul was crying out his name. Over and over again, as if she might break apart at any moment.
Valentina knew, distantly, that she was the one making those sounds. But she was too far gone to care.
Achilles moved his way down her body, taking his sweet time, and Valentina sighed with every inch he explored. She shifted. She rolled. She found herself lifting her hips toward him without his having to ask.
“Good girl,” he murmured, and it was astonishing how much pleasure two little words could give her.
He peeled her panties down off her hips, tugged them down the length of her legs and then threw them aside. And when he was finished with that, he slid his hands beneath her bottom as he came back over her, lifted her hips up into the air and didn’t so much as glance up at her before he set his mouth to the place where she needed him most.
Maybe she screamed. Maybe she fainted. Maybe both at once.
Everything seemed to flash bright, then smooth out into a long, lethal roll of sensation that turned Valentina red hot.
Everywhere.
He licked his way into her. He teased her and he learned her and he tasted her, making even that most private part of her his. She felt herself go molten and wild, and he made a low, rough sound of pleasure, deeply masculine and deliciously savage, and that was too much.
“Oh, no,” she heard herself moan. “No—”
Valentina felt more than heard him laugh against the most tender part of her, and then everything went up in flames.
She exploded. She cried out and she shook, the pleasure so intense she didn’t understand how anyone could live through it, but still she shook some more. She shook until she thought she’d been made new. She shook until she didn’t care either way.
And when she knew her own name again, Achilles was crawling his way over her. He no longer wore those loose black trousers of his, and there was a look of unmistakably savage male triumph stamped deep on his face.
“Beautiful,” he murmured. He was on his elbows over her, pressing himself against her. His wall of a chest. That fascinatingly hard part of him below. He studied her flushed face as if he’d never seen her before. “Am I the only man who has ever tasted you?”
Valentina couldn’t speak. She could only nod, mute and still shaking.
She wondered if she might shake like this forever, and she couldn’t seem to work herself up into minding if she did.
“Only mine,” he said with a certain quiet ferocity that only made that shaking inside her worse. Or better. “You are only and ever mine.”
And that was when she felt him. That broad smooth head of his hardest part, nudging against the place where she was nothing but soft, wet heat and longing.
She sucked in a breath, and Achilles took her face in his hands.
“Mine,” he said again, in the same intense way.
It sounded a great deal like a vow.
Valentina’s head was spinning.
“Yours,” she whispered, and he grinned then, too fierce and too elemental.
He shifted his hips and moved a little farther against her, pressing himself against that entrance again, and Valentina found her hands in fists against his chest.
“Will it hurt?” she asked before she knew she meant to speak. “Or is that just something they say in books, to make it seem more…”
But she couldn’t quite finish that sentence. And Achilles’s gaze was too dark and too bright at once, so intense she couldn’t seem to stop shaking or spinning. And she couldn’t bring herself to look away.
“It might hurt.” He kept his attention on her, fierce and focused. “It might not. But either way, it will be over in a moment.”
“Oh.” Valentina blinked, and tried to wrap her head around that. “I suppose quick is good.”
Achilles let out a bark of laughter, and she wasn’t sure if she was startled or something like delighted to hear it. Both, perhaps.
And it made a knot she hadn’t known was hardening inside her chest ease.
“I cannot tell if you are good for me or you will kill me,” he told her then. He moved one hand, smoothing her hair back from her temple. “It will only hurt, or feel awkward, for a moment. I promise. As for the rest…”
And the smile he aimed at her then was, Valentina thought, the best thing she’d ever seen. It poured into her and through her, as bright and thick as honey, changing everything. Even the way she shook for him. Even the way she breathed.
“The rest will not be quick,” Achilles told her, still braced there above her. “It will not be rushed, it will be thorough. Extremely thorough, as you know I am in all things.”
She felt her breath stutter. But he was still going.
“And when I am done, glikia mou, we will do it again. And again. Until we get it right. Because I am nothing if not dedicated to my craft. Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” Valentina said faintly, because it was hard to keep her voice even when the world was lost somewhere in his commanding gaze. “I guess that’s—”
But that was when he thrust his way in
side her. It was a quick, hard thrust, slick and hot and overwhelming, until he was lodged deep inside her.
Inside her.
It was too much. It didn’t hurt, necessarily, but it didn’t feel good, either. It felt…like everything. Too much of everything.
Too hard. Too long. Too thick and too deep and too—
“Breathe,” Achilles ordered her.
But Valentina didn’t see how that was possible. How could she breathe when there was a person inside her? Even if that person was Achilles.
Especially when that person was Achilles.
Still, she did as he bade her, because he was inside her and she was beneath him and splayed open and there was nothing else to do. She breathed in.
She let it out, and then she breathed in again. And then again.
And with each breath, she felt less overwhelmed and more…
Something else.
Achilles didn’t seem particularly worried. He held himself over her, one hand tangled in her hair as the other made its way down the front of her body. Lazily. Easily. He played with her breasts. He set his mouth against the crook of her neck where it met her shoulder, teasing her with his tongue and his teeth.
And still she breathed the way he’d told her to do. In. Out.
Over and over, until she couldn’t remember that she’d balked at his smooth, intense entry. That she’d ever had a problem at all with hard and thick and long and deep.
Until all she could feel was fire.
Experimentally, she moved her hips, trying to get a better feel for how wide he was. How deep. How far inside her own body. Sensation soared through her every time she moved, so she did it again. And again.
She took a little more of him in, then rocked around a little bit, playing. Testing. Seeing how much of him she could take and if it would continue to send licks of fire coursing through her every time she shifted position, no matter how minutely.
