stroking over her breast, circling a tightening nipple until she cried out in shocked response.
That cry was captured in his mouth again, swallowed down as he pulled her closer once more, angling her halfway down to the desk, supported only by the strength of his arm at her back. The heat of the other hard palm burned against her sensitive flesh as he pushed the pale blue cup aside, wrenching the straps of the bra over her shoulder and partway down one arm, imprisoning it against her side.
But her other hand was free and could reach out to the buttons on his shirt, wrenching them open with rather less finesse than the way he had dealt with unfastening her dress. She heard the material of his shirt rip slightly, the clatter of a button landing on the table, but couldn’t find it in herself to care. All she wanted was the feel of his skin, hot and silky, hazed with body hair, underneath her questing fingertips. A gasping sigh escaped her as she clawed at his chest, fingernails scraping lightly over the tight buds of his male nipples. Her mouth curled into a knowing smile as she heard a muttered imprecation in his native language, felt his strong body jerk in uncontrolled response.
‘Yes, gineka mou,’ he told her roughly, the movement of his mouth tormenting that achingly aroused tip of the breast beneath his lips, the heat of his breath feathering delight over the sensitised bud, making her writhe in delicious torment on the desk.
She heard the clatter of something—perhaps the pencil pot—being knocked aside, the thud of something landing on the floor, and Nikos’s dark laughter against her skin was just an intensification of all the sensations that assailed her already.
‘You are my woman,’ he repeated. ‘Mine.’
‘Yours.’
It was a whispered echo, one that was choked off on a note of abandoned ecstasy as that hot and hungry mouth found her pouting nipple, sucking it deep into its moist heat and swirling a tormenting tongue around its yearning peak.’
‘Yours!’
She arched up towards him, needing to intensify the sensations, the pressure, and felt his teeth gently scrape the distended tip. For a moment she completely lost herself, almost swooning away in pleasure and only coming back to herself when another new and stunning sensation hit.
Those knowing fingers had reached the heart of her, stroking tormentingly along the fine stretch of fabric between her legs, making her gasp aloud, her one free hand clutching at the fine cotton of his shirt, holding him when she feared he might move away. But all he planned to do was hook his fingers in the sides of her knickers, tugging them down along her thighs to expose her to him more openly. At first it was easy, but when they caught and tangled just below her knees he swore roughly and gave up trying for any sort of finesse. A couple of hard tugs and they had ripped apart at the seams, tossed away in an impatient, careless movement.
His mouth was where his fingers had been, kissing a burning path through the dark curls clustered between her legs, the wicked torment of his tongue swirling over delicate, receptive tissue, making it unfurl and respond like a rosebud opening towards the sunlight.
But she had had enough of waiting, had enough of the sensual agony of anticipation, delicious though it was. Her hands were shaking as she fumbled with his belt, clumsy with need and a desperate urgency. She was making a total hash of things when he laid a restraining hand over hers, and his hot mouth kissed the moans from her lips.
She heard the rasp of a zip and knew a moment of agonising tension, her breath held in her lungs, before he came back to her again. Lifting her so that she was half on, half off the edge of the desk, he opened her legs wide, knees bent, feet braced against the polished wood and moved between them. His mouth took hers again, his tongue probing deep, in the same moment that he used his hands on her hips to lift her, move her, then draw her down on to his hard, heated length.
‘Nikos!’
His name was a long drawn out sigh of pure satisfaction and delight, and for a moment she would have been content to stay like that, close to him, filled with him, abandoned to him. But Nikos was not prepared to stay or wait. Already he was moving, stroking deep inside her, in and then withdrawing almost to the end, before plunging in deeply over and over again. Her hands were around his neck, fingers digging into his shoulders, her mouth moving against his jaw, kissing, licking, nipping at the stubble-roughened skin, tasting the salt of his sweat against her tongue. After only a very few seconds she had lost herself, unable to do anything other than absorb herself into the moment, giving herself up purely to sensation. Mindlessly, blindly, she was moving with him, on him, feeling him inside her, taking her higher, higher, until he finally pushed her over the edge into the blazing, whirling oblivion of total ecstasy.
She heard a voice cry out aloud, and from a distance vaguely realised that it was her own, but she was too far gone to care if anyone had heard. A few seconds later she heard Nikos too give a raw, exultant sound as he followed her, and for a long time after that she knew nothing at all. Only the slow, slow drift back to a form of reality, a sort of return to consciousness, but one that kept floating to and fro, coming back to her and then swirling away again. Taking her into the glowing darkness where all she was aware of was the strength of Nikos’s arms around her, the heave of his chest as he fought for control of his breathing, the thud of his heart underneath the powerful ribcage, the scent of his skin where her head rested, totally limp and spent against his shoulder.
It was a good thing there was the desk here to support them both, Nikos reflected, when some of the thundering haze had left his head and he could finally begin to think again. At least it was there to take some of Sadie’s weight and allow him to prop himself up on it until he recovered. After the onslaught of wild and uncontrolled passion that had taken him—taken them both—by storm, he seemed to have lost the ability to focus, to recognise reality when it came back to him. He felt as if he had been at the centre of some furious whirlwind, snatched out of reality and spun around in a spiralling, blazing typhoon of feeling, then dumped back down on still not quite steady ground again, not knowing which was up and which was down. His arms were shaking, his legs unsteady beneath him, and he still couldn’t manage to get enough air into his raw and aching lungs. He was quite sure that the racing of his heart would never ease so that his pulse rate could return to anything approaching normal.
And Sadie was in no better state than he was. In fact, she seemed barely conscious, her head dropped on to his shoulder, her breath scorching his skin as she too struggled to breathe normally. Her whole body sagged against him, limp as a marionette with its strings completely snapped in two, nothing to hold her upright. And the only noise in the room was the raw, unsteady sound of their breathing, that and the faint splash of the waves coming in to shore out beyond the open window, where ordinary everyday life was going on as normal, oblivious to the wild and sensual storm that had raged inside the villa.
But they could not stay shielded from reality for ever. Sooner or later life must start again. Someone might come in. They had to collect their thoughts and return to normality, for the time being at least.
And then they would have to face the repercussions of what had just happened here.
He for one would have to face the fact that he had stupidly, blindly, rashly rushed into this without a thought, without a moment’s consideration for common sense or practicality. Or even, Thee mou, even safety.
He had just had sex with the woman he had hated for the past five years, a woman he had learned the hard way not to trust. And he had done it without even the use of a condom to protect him now and against the future. He hadn’t paused to think about such things but had been totally at the mercy of his body, his libido, as lust-crazed as a newly horny teenager—and every bit as mindless. Both of them had been wildly out of control, responding in such a white hot fury of desire that
