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 a sharp, raw-edged breath at the realisation that this was how it was, and nothing she could do would ever change it. She had fallen head over heels in love with Nikos in the first moment she had met him and nothing had changed since. All that had happened, all that had come between them, had never managed to destroy the way she felt, even when she’d believed it had. Deep in her heart, the feelings had remained just the same. She still loved him; she would always love him.
And Nikos?
Now she realised just what she had been trying to grasp hold of in her mind yesterday by the pool, when Nikos’s kisses and caresses had driven her so distracted with need that she hadn’t been able to think of her own name, let alone grasp the elusive, whispering little voice that had tried to warn her that not all was well. That there was something she really should be thinking of before she jumped in too deep and let the dark waters of sexuality close right over her head.
Now, too late, she knew what it was—and she also knew that it meant that her life would never be the same. She also knew that it had been too late yesterday, too late from the moment she had confronted Nikos in his London office, seeing him again for the first time. Too late to go back to her old way of life, to managing to live without Nikos in it, without knowing that she still loved him. From the moment she had set eyes on him again she had fallen right back in love with him—though in those first days she had never realised the truth.
If, in fact, she had ever really fallen out of love with him. She had been terrified of being in love with a man who didn’t love her at all. And so she had forced herself to believe that she hated him because it was safer for her, easier that way.
‘Safer!’
Sadie actually spoken the word aloud, the way she was feeling turning it into a sound of shaken laughter. Safer just didn’t come into it. Safer wasn’t possible. Because the truth was that she had done exactly that, no matter how careful her personal safeguards had been.
She was in love with Nikos Konstantos and Nikos…Well, Nikos wanted her. He desired her intensely sexually; she could be in no doubt about that. He had spent last night and half of yesterday proving just that to her. He might even want to marry her. But only to get her into his bed and keep her there. He’d said as much yesterday.
‘Hell, yes. I’d have done anything to get you into my bed.’
But he had spoken no word of love. Had never shown any sign of even considering that such an emotion existed. And probably, for Nikos, it never had. He had never loved her in the past, didn’t love her now. And there was no hope that he would ever come to love her at any time in the future—if they had one together.
‘Oh, Nikos!’
Sighing, Sadie forced herself to throw back the covers and get out of bed. What was it they said about the cold light of dawn? Yesterday had been wonderful, the night a sensual fantasy come true. But now, with the morning light shining bright on the new day, and with Nikos no longer in her bed to kiss her distracted, keep her thoughts from the ‘what nexts’ and ‘if onlys’ that plagued her, she was forced to face the probability that last night had not been a beginning, a start to a future, but instead a one-off final fling.
Wasn’t it far more likely that Nikos had seen last night as a way, as he had said, ‘to deal with what is between us’? To get her out of his system once and for all. He had made no promise, offered her nothing else. And she would be all kinds of a fool if she looked for anything.
But for now she’d take what was on offer, she resolved as she headed for the bathroom and the shower. The truth was that she was weak
