by Olivia Gates
“We make an unstoppable team.” Malcolm’s eyes twinkled at her with their usual geniality, before an edge of seriousness entered them. “And I think it’s a great time for us to take our teamwork and friendship further.”
Oh, no. Please, God, no...
Malcolm went on, oblivious to her dismay. “Think how much more we can be for each other, Naomi. We’d make as great a team at home and as parents for Dora as we are at work.”
She reached for his hand, squeezed it in a silent plea for him to stop. “If there was any chance I thought this would work, I would have made the first move, Malcolm. You would make the perfect husband for some incredibly lucky woman, like you once did for Zoe. But it won’t be me. I love you, but I’ll never be in love with you. And oh, God...I so hope this won’t be a problem between us.”
His expression reminded her of Andreas’s earlier today. Disappointed but understanding, and not a little self-deprecating. Then he covered the hand gripping his. “How can it be a problem? We’re friends, with or without anything more developing. And that’s the difference between us, I guess. I am not in love with you, either, but I don’t think I’ll ever be in love again, not after Zoe. I thought my feelings for you might be enough. But you’re probably right and they aren’t.” Suddenly his smile widened. “Hey, did you know we might have a far bigger thing happening than this contract?”
Relieved he’d let it go this easily, and apparently with no hard feelings, she said, “What could be bigger than that?”
“Andreas Sarantos. He called yesterday and said he’d come in tomorrow to ‘settle things.’ I don’t want to be overly optimistic, but I really think he’ll finally put his financing magic behind SUN Developments”
Andreas hadn’t told her about this. Just as she hadn’t told Malcolm about what had been going on with him. But with Andreas no longer keeping their living arrangements a secret, she hated for her partner to find out from someone else.
So she told him everything. At least the part about Petros’s will and Dora, and their moving in with Andreas.
Malcolm listened in total astonishment, then finally whistled. “That’s quite a radical change. How are you handling this?”
“It’s been smooth,” she lied. “Andreas makes everything so once he puts his mind to it.”
“And you say Dora’s taken to him.”
“Dora adores him.”
Malcolm’s gaze became considering. “Is he the reason you didn’t even consider my suggestion?”
“It’s not because of him, no.”
“Meaning he didn’t make a move, but that doesn’t stop you from being unable to consider anyone else, huh?”
Finding no more reason to deny this, at least to Malcolm, who was being so understanding, she nodded.
He leaned forward, his expression serious. “This has been going on with you all along, hasn’t it? From way back when we first met Andreas?” She again nodded. “And him? I can’t believe he hasn’t snapped you up, especially now.”
“I hate to use the cliché...but it’s complicated.”
Malcolm sighed. “I just bet it is.”
After a moment of silence, she said, “Is it okay if we get going?”
Not that she wanted to return to where Andreas and his killer friendliness awaited her, but this confrontation, as wonderful as Malcolm was being, had left her drained.
“Sure.”
After settling the bill, Malcolm courteously led her out of the restaurant.
As they waited for the valet to bring her car over, he turned to her with a frown. “You know, I’m no longer sure I want Andreas to take us on.”
That stunned her. She grasped her partner’s arm. “You’re not letting what I told you influence you, are you? My personal situation has nothing to do with doing business with him.”
“I actually think they’re closely related. It all ties in to my faith in his judgment. An hour ago he was the guy who mines gold out of dross. Now he’s the dolt who can’t see the rare gem he literally has under his nose.”
Her heart suddenly lifting at her friend’s morale boost, she laughed. “Thank you, Malcolm.”
“Maybe I’ll keep our appointment only to find out what’s wrong with him, and give him a piece of my mind.”
“Oh, no, please don’t even mention me. And don’t you dare think of passing up this opportunity.” She held his eyes until he nodded. “And, Malcolm...I’m sorry again if I disappointed you.”
He waved her apology away. “You never disappoint me.”
Overwhelmed by warmth for this man, she reached out to hug him. Malcolm hugged her back, before taking her arm with a grin and walking her to her car.
After closing her door, he leaned in the open window. “And, Naomi, relax, okay? We’re good.”
She nodded, profoundly grateful to have such a friend.
Then, waving to him with a broad smile, she drove away, her heart lighter than it had been in years.
* * *
By the time she entered Andreas’s house, her heart was leaden again. It felt like going back to a prison cell every time she returned here.
She debated again if she should do something about it. Such as tell him how she felt. That she wanted him, and that if he still had any desire for her they should be together, and it wouldn’t complicate being parents to Dora.
What always stopped her was her fear that she’d risk Dora’s peace. For what would happen when Andreas had enough of her? Or wanted to replace her in his bed? Could she be certain that it wouldn’t impact Dora?
Loki and Thor came rushing to welcome her, their presence, as always, a distraction from heartaches.
Carrying them both, she kissed and cooed to them as she walked to the family room, expecting to find Andreas working on his laptop. She braced herself for his now usual pleasantness.
Her smile faltered when she found him standing in the middle of the room, barefoot, his shirt pulled out of his pants and open, an empty shot glass carelessly in hand.
His body seemed relaxed, but it was the way his head was tilted, the way he watched her from beneath lowered eyebrows, and the total absence of his now accustomed smile that made her feel like a deer walking into a mountain lion’s ambush.
Her steps faltered as she approached him, bringing his face into focus. Its stark lines seemed to be hewn from granite, and his eyes crackled like lightning.
“Anything wrong? Is Dora all right?” she whispered, even though she instinctively knew this wasn’t about Dora.
Without relinquishing her gaze, he bent and placed the glass on the coffee table. “Put the cats down, Naomi.”
It was only then she noticed she was hugging them tightly, as if to hide behind them, and they were squirming to get away. Cursing silently, she released them, and they jumped down and ran off to indignantly groom themselves.
She raised uncertain eyes to Andreas as he approached her, deepening her feeling of being stalked. Her hand rose to her throat, where she felt her heart had migrated, and his gaze singed it before moving to her lips, then her eyes, sending her heartbeat into a crazy spiral.
His voice was a predator’s growl. “For forty-one nights I’ve held back, Naomi, kept my distance, given you something different. Now, no more.”
He’d counted the nights since they’d last made love? “Andreas...”
All thought evaporated as his arm shot out. Next second she was slamming against his unyielding power. Then the world spun upside down as he...he...
Andreas had hauled her over his shoulder!
Her lungs emptied on a cry of shock, every nerve firing as his fingers sank into her buttocks and thighs. Her senses churned as he strode down the hallway, her world turning into a swirl of vertigo and overstimulation.
Then he was sweeping her from his
shoulder and tumbling her onto a bed. His bed. Where she hadn’t been sleeping every night of the last hellish month.
Before her heart could spill the next batch of chaotic beats, he was straddling her and pushing her jacket off, then pulling her blouse along with her bra over her head. He slid off her, only to sweep her skirt and panties down her trembling legs.
“Andreas...” That was all she could say. She said it over and over like an invocation.
“Ne. Moan my name like that, Naomi, whimper it, and when I’m riding you, scream it.”
She would have screamed it right then if she had breath left in her. But all she could do was lie there, enervated, watching him push away and up to rid himself of his clothes with the same barely contained ferocity and haste. Then he fell back on top of her, like a starving predator over his willing prey.
He squashed her shuddering breasts beneath the hardness of his hair-roughed chest, rubbed against her until she keened and writhed to intensify the contact.
“This...this is what I’ve gone stark-raving insane for all those forty-one nights, Naomi. This.”
He bore down on her, grinding his huge, marble-smooth and hard erection into her mound. Her thighs fell wide apart and her back arched, begging for his total invasion.
He dragged her head back with a hand bunched in her hair as his lips latched on to hers. His roughly devouring kisses trailed down her cheeks, jaw and neck, drawing on her flesh, wrenching out every spark of desire from every blood cell, until she felt her very life force rushing into him. She tried to draw in a breath, but he lifted her off the bed, twisted her around and pinned her beneath him facedown, his hands beneath her cupping her breasts, his erection furrowing searing undulations between her buttocks.
With gush after gush of readiness flooding her core, she undulated her hips against his hardness in a frenzy, eliciting a rumble of savage triumph from deep in his chest. “Agápi mou, ne, ne. Show me. Show me how much you need me.”
And she did. She turned her head, blindly reaching for his lips, squirming beneath him, in heat. He caught her lower lip in a growling bite, sucked and pulled on it until it swelled, until she sobbed. Every part of her was disintegrating with the need to take him inside her. He anchored her with a bite where her neck flowed into her shoulder, and slipped one hand beneath her, probing her molten flesh until he took her over the edge. She screamed his name in a soul-searing climax.
As she was still in the throes, and with one hand still stimulating her, he crammed a pillow beneath her hips, spread her wide, then drove his erection all the way inside her drenched, clenching tightness.
Pleasure detonated from every inch of flesh that yielded to his red-hot thickness and length. Unleashed now, he powered into her, growling words of lust in English and Greek as he ravaged her mouth with scorching kisses, while his thrusting manhood drove her to mindlessness.
Ecstasy reverberated inside her with each thrust, each word, like the rushing and receding of a tide gone mad. It all gathered, swelling to its zenith like a tidal wave before the devastating crash.
Before it did, Andreas left her body and swept her around, his bulk and hands splaying her thighs wide in ferocious urgency.
Then he plunged inside her all the way again, this time finding what he was seeking, the gate to her innermost core, lodging into her womb. “Now, agápi mou. Come all over me...now.”
And she did, the coil of maddening need snapping, lashing through her, over and over again. She screamed, bucked beneath him with each blow of release that pummeled her.
He rode her harder through the storm, causing the shock waves to expand, to raze her, to wring her around his girth in contractions so violent they fractured her breaths, strangled her shrieks. She writhed in an agony of ecstasy, crushed herself against him, around him, inside and out, as if she’d assimilate him and dissolve around him.
In the depths of delirium, she heard him roar his release, felt his seed splash against her over-sensitized flesh, causing another wave to crash down on her, shattering her completely with the brutality of sensations.
It could have been minutes or hours before she lurched back to awareness. She found him spread beneath her, still hard and pulsating inside her, setting off mini quakes that kept her in a state of continuous orgasm.
He was regarding her with the same predatory intensity as before. As soon as she met his eyes he pressed her tight to his length and said, “Call Malcolm and put him out of his misery.”
The gruff words interrupted her renewed swooning, made her jerk back. “What?”
Andreas looked positively menacing as he rumbled, “He asked you to marry him, didn’t he?”
She pushed against him. “How do you know that?”
He let her put distance between them, reluctantly leaving her body. “He said something when I called him that made me realize he was going to make a move. He made it, didn’t he?”
“And I told him it wouldn’t work.” Her heart started to thud painfully as she struggled to a sitting position. “Does this have anything to do with you hauling me off to your bed, literally? You were making sure I would say no to him?”
Andreas gathered her against his hot, hard body once more, his eyes so possessive she felt he was already invading her again. “I was damned if I was going to take it slow anymore, only for you to settle into considering me a friend, leaving you wide open for another man to make a move on you.”
She struggled out of his arms, tumbling deeper into an abyss from the heights, which his possession had catapulted her to. “Well, he made it and I declined, so you didn’t have to go to the effort of sabotaging him.”
“I would have carried you off to my bed sooner or later. I have him to thank for making it tonight.”
“Now you have. Hope you’re satisfied.”
Andreas trapped her beneath him again, ending her struggle, his eyes crackling with hunger. “I’m nowhere near satisfied. After all this deprivation I’ll need a steady and intensive diet of you before I begin to remember what satisfaction feels like.”
This felt real. But where had that passion been those forty-one nights he’d counted so accurately?
“I thought you no longer wanted to take me up on my offer.”
“Of unlimited sex? I certainly don’t. And I don’t want to remarry you, either.”
The words fell on her heart like a mallet.
She’d already known he didn’t. But hearing him say it, and after what had just happened between them...
“I want to marry you. The first time doesn’t count.”
She gaped at him, her heart forgetting to beat.
“I’ve been trying to prove to you it would work between us this time, that I can be there for you and Dorothea in a family setting. I struggled to keep sex out of it to make it a real test for me, to prove it to myself as much as to you. But I guess we both know now where my limits are.”
All this had been a test? He’d been demonstrating to himself before he did to her that he could be a family man?
Apprehension melting, she reached out a trembling hand to smooth the tension from his face. “I wish you had reached your limits way before now. Not that I didn’t love exploring other sides to you, finding out about them even as you found them out about yourself.”
Anxious eagerness flared in his eyes. “You did?”
She pulled him down, planted a tremulous kiss on that knotted brow. “Oh, I certainly did.”
He groaned as his arms tightened around her. “I want you to forget everything that happened between us before.”
She pushed away, allowing indulgence to enter her eyes and caress at last. “But there were so many memorable events.”
“Toss them out. I’ll give you new ones, as frequent as your voluptuous delight of a body can withstand.”
That sounded l
ike a dream come true.
Or it would have, if he’d said he loved her.
But he wanted her, and he wanted to give everything to Dora, and to the family they’d form around her. Whether their relationship or his emotions for her ever deepened beyond that, remained to be seen. But Naomi had been ready to settle for far, far less with him.
So she’d be marrying him again knowing she felt more for him than he did for her, but this time she had a hope the emotions he’d spent a lifetime suppressing would blossom enough that he’d love her back one day.
Until then, she’d take whatever she could with him and with Dora, the two pieces that made her heart, and the glue that held together her soul, her world.
He’d started making love to her again, but before he joined them together, he paused above her, tremors of tension traversing his great body as he groaned, “You haven’t said yes, agápi mou.”
She drew him inside her, gave herself over to him completely and cried out, “Yes, Andreas, yes.”
Eleven
Announcing their impending marriage to Hannah and to Andreas’s family was more emotional than anything she’d expected. To say everyone was delighted would be the understatement of the decade. But everyone also said they’d been certain this was coming. Seemed they’d all known things only Naomi had been oblivious to.
Then Andreas insisted on having the wedding on Crete, and as soon as possible, setting everything on hyperdrive, with Naomi finding herself in a situation she’d never experienced—becoming part of a large family.
Not that it was only she and Dora who were being engulfed and assimilated into the Sarantos family. Andreas was experiencing his family, whom he’d purposely alienated himself from since childhood, for the first time, too. And it was heart-wrenchingly poignant watching him sinking into their warmth and reciprocating it.
But it was Andreas himself who made her feel giddy with delight and hope for the future. Each day that passed he was becoming the man she’d sensed he could be all these years beneath the reticence and distance. He was opening up to her more every day, making a concerted effort to be there for her in every way. He was going all out to give her everything he hadn’t given her in the past, and so many things she hadn’t even known to hope for.
