Nikos didn’t answer. But then he didn’t have to. Looking into his eyes, Sadie saw just what he meant. It was written there, clear and plain to see.
What was a more basic drive than revenge? There was just one answer. Lust. Physical desire. Sexual passion. That was what had driven him from the start and what was still behind everything he did. An intense, searing physical need that obliterated everything else, burning it up in its heat. She recognised that, and understood it. Because didn’t she feel the same whenever he touched her? Hadn’t she just been so driven out of her mind with the same overwhelming hunger that she had let him take her on the desk in his office without a hint of a thought?
‘So…’ Her throat was painfully dry, cracking on the single word. ‘So the whole story of a fiancée?’
‘I told you. It was a pretence from start to finish. It had to be.’
Nikos dropped his head, resting his forehead on Sadie’s so that his eyes burned into her from mere inches away.
‘How could there be someone else when I never got you out of my head? You ruined me for any other woman. You got under my skin and I never got rid of you.’
‘No—no one else?’
That was so much more than she had ever anticipated that her head swam under the impact of it.
‘How could I kiss you like this…?’
His mouth took hers, slow and sensual, heating her blood in an instant and making her sway unsteadily on her feet.
‘…if there was anyone else? How could I touch you…?’
If his kiss had been a sensual assault then his caress, the way his hands swept over her body, was like throwing a lighted match on to bone-dry tinder, making her skin flame in a second, setting her pulse racing between one uneven breath and another.
‘And how could I ever think of taking another woman to my bed when the only one I ever wanted is right here…?’
The one woman I have ever planned on marrying is you.
The words that Nikos had spoken in his office came back to tempt and torment her. Tempting because she so wanted them to be true. Tormenting because she could scarcely begin to imagine that he could actually mean them.
And yet when she had insisted that he tell her about his imaginary fiancée—oh, dear heaven—he had also said: She is the only woman I have ever wanted to marry.
Was the world really spinning round her as she felt it was? Had she been out in the sun too long? Or was it really possible…? Could she believe a word he was saying?
But then Nikos took her lips again and she suddenly knew with a sense of total conviction that deep down she really didn’t care. All she needed, all she ever wanted most in the world, was right here before her in the shape of this man. The man she had fallen for five years before. And she had never managed to recover from that infatuation ever since.
She was sinking deep into the spell of sensuality he was weaving, definitely going down for the third time. But at the same time a tiny, barely audible voice of instinct was whispering inside her head that there was something wrong, something missing, but she couldn’t begin to think what. And quite frankly she didn’t even want to try.
His hands were hot on her body, smoothing over the tingling flesh exposed by her plain black swimming costume. The stretchy material had almost totally dried in the sun, but the heat of the day was as nothing when compared with the flames that were flaring inside, burning her up with the yearning need that he could create so easily. One broad palm cupped her breast, the thumb stroking wickedly erotic circles over her nipple so that she shuddered in uncontrolled response, feeling that she might actually collapse into a molten pool right at his feet. Against her stomach she could feel the hard ridge of his erection, and moist heat flooded between her legs in response.
‘So…’
Nervously, she slicked her tongue over her lips to moisten them enough to get the words she needed out of her mouth.
‘So—when we first met—would you have married me?’
‘Hell, yes. I’d have done anything to get you into my bed.’
That scorching, exciting mouth was doing amazing things to her. Tracing a burning path down her throat, over the exposed slope of her breast. When it caught one pouting nipple into its moist heat, suckling it through the black material of her costume, she cried aloud in response to the stinging pleasure-pain that sizzled through every nerve, destroying thought, leaving only space in her mind for the throbbing need she couldn’t deny.
‘Do you doubt it?’ Nikos questioned against her skin, his breath on the question feathering over the moistened nipple, making it burn with even greater need.
‘No…’
It was a moan of response and she shook her head vigorously, well past the point of being able to think about doubting anything. Her world was made up of just three things—herself, this man, and the wild sexual hunger that was blazing between them.
‘Then come with me now—come back to my bed, glikia mou, and let me show you exactly what I mean.’
She meant to answer, Sadie told herself. She had to answer—because there was only one possible response she could give him. But she wasn’t completely sure whether the wild, fervent yes that was burning in her thoughts had actually translated itself into sound or not.
But obviously it had—or it just didn’t matter and the way that she returned his kiss gave Nikos the answer he’d been waiting for. Because he didn’t ask any more questions or hesitate for a second. Instead he swung her up off her feet and into his arms and carried her out of the blazing sun into the coolness of the house and up the stairs, heading for his bedroom.
THE LATE MORNING sun coming through the window and onto her face finally dragged Sadie from the deep, exhausted sleep into which she had fallen well after midnight. Yawning and stretching, she felt the faint aches in her body after the night of passion she had shared with Nikos.
A long, long night of passion that had followed on from the equally ardent afternoon they had spent in bed too. At some point they had emerged to eat a meal, drink some wine, but the food had barely been touched before Nikos had leaned across the table, catching her chin in his hand and drawing her face towards him to plant another long, lingering kiss on her partly open mouth. Sadie had responded with equal enthusiasm, and soon they had abandoned all pretence of wanting to eat and headed back to the bedroom.
She could still feel the places where Nikos had kissed her, caressed her, finding pleasure spots she hadn’t known existed, opening a world of sensual delights to her with every second that had passed. The scent of his body still permeated the sheets, and if she rolled over she could see the indentation on the pillows where his head had rested when they had finally succumbed to sleep.
And she could even still taste him on her mouth. If she licked her lips then her tongue caught the faint flavour of Nikos’s skin, the salty tang of his sweat, the deeply personal memory of his tongue tangling intimately with hers.
Sighing contentedly, she stretched again, savouring the memory that the taste brought back to her.
The taste of her first, her one and only lover.
The taste of the one man she had ever loved.
Her heart kicked hard and sharp at the thought, pushing her upright in the bed, staring sightlessly out of the window to where the clear blue Aegean Sea lapped lazily against the shoreline below.
The one man she had ever loved and the one man she still loved with all her heart.
She drew in