“To explain myself to you.”
“You didn’t have to go to such extreme lengths to do that.”
“Really? Are you saying that if I’d tried to speak my mind as you left the hotel, you’d have stopped in midflight and listened?”
“Probably not,” she had to admit. “I was pretty ticked off with you.”
“Exactly! And that’s what encouraged me to spirit you away like this. If you hadn’t cared that our rendezvous on the hotel roof came to such an abrupt end, I wouldn’t have bothered wasting any more of your time, or mine. But…” He fixed her in his gaze and shrugged his broad, beautiful shoulders. “You did care, didn’t you? You felt it, too—that spark of attraction between us, so powerful it defies all reason?”
Mesmerized, she nodded, such a maelstrom of emotion rushing through her at the message she read in his eyes that it took her a moment to pose the question that had gnawed at her for hours. “But in that case, why did you suddenly—?”
“Put an end to things, before they went too far?”
She nodded again.
“Because,” he said, removing her glass before she dropped it, and placing it beside his on the built-in shelf at his side, “I pride myself on being a civilized man who is long past the age where hasty fumbling in a public place is an acceptable way to treat a lady. But you, Gina, you aroused such a hunger in me that I wasn’t sure I could control myself if I remained alone with you any longer.”
At that, a lovely warmth spread through her. “I thought it might be because you’re married.”
“I am not, nor have I ever been married.”
“Oh,” she said, those same bubbles which had streamed so exuberantly in her champagne flute chasing now through her blood.
“Nor,” he continued, “do I plan to seduce you in the back seat of this car. If we are to make love—and that is by no means certain—it will be at a place and time of both our choosing.” His teeth gleamed in another smile. “But if you’ll permit it, I’d very much like to kiss you again.”
Heart stammering with pleasure, she whispered, “I think that can be arranged.”
He took her face between his hands and very slowly let his breath feather over her closed eyes, and her lashes, and down her face to her jaw, before making his deliberate way to her mouth. Once there, his lips closed over hers lightly, decorously even, yet spoke a silent language that promised a depth of passion completely foreign to anything she’d known before.
How easily he made her ache and want and need! Desire gnawed at her, raw and merciless. She felt herself melting, as she had when he’d kissed her on the hotel roof. Heat swirled through her blood. Pooled hot and heavy in the pit of her stomach. Sprang moist as dew in the secret folds of her femininity.
Stop being such a gentleman! she almost begged aloud. Stop holding back!
She was ravenous for him. Wanted him to touch her all over. Wished he’d lower her dress from her shoulders, raise its hem to her waist. Slide his hand inside her underwear. Cup the fullness of her breasts in his palms. Discover the tight buds of her nipples, the hot, tingling flesh between her legs.
More, she wanted to touch him. Run the tips of her fingers down his chest and past the flat planes of his belly. Stray lower into forbidden territory and explore the aroused shape of him. Test its smooth, naked weight in her hand. He would be big and powerful, just like the attraction flaring between them. He would be like no other man she’d ever met. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name.
Her realizing the direction of her thoughts was the only thing that prevented her from acting on her impulses.
Horrified at how close she’d come to embarrassing herself, she pulled away, shocked to the core.
What was wrong with her, that she was behaving like a…a floozy and practically throwing herself at a stranger? Had she been bitten by some exotic foreign bug and contracted brain fever? Admittedly she wasn’t a complete innocent where sex was concerned. She’d lost her virginity at twenty-two to Paul Johnson, her then-fiancé, who’d eventually changed his mind about marrying her when he’d realized it meant taking on her mother, too. But she’d never been “easy,” never cheapened herself with loose behavior.
Of course, some people might say she hadn’t had much choice in the matter because, after Paul broke things off and she went back to the island for good, her social life had pretty much hit rock bottom, especially when it came to dating. The limited number of eligible men she’d met there weren’t interested in a woman forever preoccupied with the doings of a sixty-year-old child.
But this was Athens, Greece, and incredible, beautiful Mikos Christopoulos had kissed her twice, and in doing so had awakened all the pent-up female needs and yearnings she’d suppressed for over five years, and set them free with a vengeance.
It had nothing to do with attraction, although Mikos surely was the most attractive man to walk the earth. It had to do with hunger; with the basic need to be acknowledged as a woman who amounted to more than a daughter and caregiver. But for her to give in to it like this? Never!
“Oh, my…!” she gasped, putting more distance between him and her, and sitting on her hands to keep them from wandering where they most definitely didn’t belong. “I think that’s enough for now.”
He didn’t attempt to dissuade her. If anything, he seemed almost relieved that she’d called a halt to things. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, reaching for the bottle and topping up their champagne.
Bewildered by the mixed messages he was sending—so hot for her one minute, yet able to cool his ardor so effectively the next—she gestured at the luxurious appointments of the limousine. “This isn’t exactly how I expected the evening to end, when I came to the party tonight.”
“Exactly what did you expect, Gina?”
“Why, that I’d go back to my hotel as soon as I’d gathered enough information.”
“Information?”
“For my magazine article.”
“Ah, yes, the magazine article,” he echoed suavely.
Too suavely.
“Yes,” she said, brought up short by the veiled cynicism she detected in his voice. “Don’t you believe me?”
“Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” she lied, taking umbrage at his answering her question with one of his own. “But you sound awfully suspicious suddenly.”
“Do I?” He flicked a glance her way, then turned his attention to the bubbles rising in his glass as if they were the most fascinating things he’d ever come across.
“Yes,” she said again, and when he made no attempt to deny the fact, continued, “Are you?”
He deliberated at length before replying, “Let me put it this way. I’m not a man easily swayed by a beautiful face or an alluring body.
