A Greek Escape(36)

He was hotter and harder than he had ever been in his life just from thinking about such damning pleasure, but through the torment of his stimulating thoughts a shred of sanity—of principle—remained.

He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t abuse her trust like that. Not while he still felt it necessary to deceive her. And yet she was slick with wanting, sobbing her need and her craving for release from this passion he had aroused.

She was lying with her face turned to one side and her arms above her head in a gesture of pure surrender. An angel, he thought, inviting him to share heaven with her. Or Eve, tempting him among the grasses of her sensuous Eden.

With torturous restraint he dipped his head and pressed his lips to the heated satin of her pulsing ribcage, his mouth moving with calculated precision over her slender waist to the flat plane of her abdomen and beyond. Very gently he parted her legs wider and slipped his arms beneath her splayed thighs.

Feeling his mouth against that most intimate part of her drew a shuddering gasp from Kayla. That dark hair brushing the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh was a stimulation she couldn’t even have imagined.

It was the most erotic experience of her life. She had been intimate with a man before, but it had never felt like this. This abandoning of herself so completely to a pleasure that promised to drive her wild.

He knew just how to tease and titillate, just where and how to touch, employing his lips and the heat of his tongue to start a fire building in her as he tasted the honeyed sweetness of her body.

She thought she would die from the pleasure of it, and her body tautened in breathless expectation as flames of sensation licked along her nerve-endings and produced a burning tingle along her thighs.

Her juices flowed from her body, mingling with the moistness of his, anointing his roughened jaw with everything she was—until the mind-blowing sensation proved too much and she cried out as the fire consumed her in an orgasm of pulsating, interminable throbs.

Her sensitivity increased until she couldn’t take any more pleasure, and she clamped her thighs around him, trapping him there, holding him to her in a sobbing ecstatic agony of release until the last embers of the fire he had ignited finally died away.

After a while, Kayla looked up at him where he lay beside her, propped up on an elbow. ‘Why didn’t you…?’ Crazily, even after the intimacy they had shared she was too embarrassed to say it.

‘Why didn’t I what?’ Leonidas leaned across her, tracing the curve of her cheek before picking a small windblown flower out of her hair. ‘Take what I wanted?’ he supplied, helping her.

She nodded, closing her eyes against the exquisite tenderness of his touch.

‘Because I don’t think you’re a girl who indulges in casual sex, and you wouldn’t have thanked me for it tomorrow.’

‘Because you think I’m on the rebound?’ Suddenly self-conscious of her nakedness, when he hadn’t even undressed beyond his gaping shirt, she sat up to retrieve her clothes. ‘I’m not—I promise you,’ she said resolutely, wriggling into her panties.

She was well and truly over Craig now. But perhaps there were other reasons for Leon not taking their lovemaking the whole way. Perhaps he was remaining faithful to someone, she thought uneasily. Someone who moved him to anger and roused his passions in a way she might never be able to do…

‘Did you bring her here?’ She couldn’t look at him as she started fastening her blouse.

‘Who?’

‘The woman you won’t talk about?’ she said grievously.

He laughed—a deep, warm sound on the scented air, mingling with the drone of insects and the mellifluous birdsong. ‘You really are a very imaginative little lady.’

‘Not as imaginative as you, with your island mansion and your racehorses,’ she accused, kneeling up to tug her shorts on.

‘Uh-uh,’ he denied. ‘The racehorses were your idea,’ he reminded her with a hint of humour in his eyes, although the slashes of colour across his cheeks were evidence of the passion that still rode him. ‘And now I really think it’s time that we started back.’

‘I’m being serious,’ she stressed, wishing he wouldn’t continue to evade the issue, wondering if he was only doing it because there really was someone else.

‘So am I,’ he breathed heavily, getting up and pulling her with him, and this time his determination brooked no resistance.





CHAPTER SEVEN