her intense annoyance she found that her inner tension had communicated itself to her hands, so that she fumbled clumsily as she tried to insert her key in the lock. Supremely conscious of Constantine’s eyes, dark as the night sky, watching every awkward move, she cursed herself silently under her breath, trying again. Luckily this time she succeeded, and turned back to face him, relief evident in her smile and her voice.
‘Well, here I am. Safe and sound, as you can see. Thank you again for seeing me home.’
If this really had been a first meeting, she would have added something about having enjoyed her evening, perhaps even a suggestion that they could do it again some time. But of course the idea that they could turn back the clock in that way was a pure fiction, throwing her mind into total confusion as she hunted for a way to say goodbye that fitted the circumstances.
‘I—I’ll say goodnight, then.’
‘Is that all?’
‘All? You— I mean, what else is there? After all…’ She aimed for flippancy and missed it by a mile, her voice becoming high-pitched and shrill. ‘We’ve only just met tonight.’
‘So would it be too forward to ask for a kiss goodnight?’
The question sounded light, friendly even. The way he’d been earlier in the evening, in the kitchen, when they’d been pretending that they really had just met.
A goodnight kiss; nothing more. She could cope with that.
But underneath all the carefully rational, logical reasoning lay something darker, something more disturbing. Something that lurked like the jagged rocks at the bottom of a still, calm sea, just waiting to catch at the base of her thinking and rip it apart, laying open the real truth. The one she hardly dared acknowledge to herself. The fact that she wanted this, wanted Constantine’s kiss more than she would ever admit.
‘Okay.’ She nodded—casually, she hoped. ‘One kiss goodnight…’
Constantine’s head lowered, blocking out the light from the nearby streetlamp, and instinctively her lips parted slightly.
But it was her cheek that his mouth made contact with, the kiss brushing against it warm and soft and so painfully familiar. And heartbreakingly brief.
‘Goodnight.’
Before she even had time to think, even as she was steadying herself for the real kiss, the one her lips were aching for, the one that had already quickened her heartbeat in anticipation, he had stepped back.
‘Goodnight,’ he said again, his voice harsh and flippantly dismissive. ‘See you around.’
Grace couldn’t believe it. She shivered inside as pain, raw and cruel, ripped through her, lacerating her heart. She had actually let herself believe—had hoped… Bitter tears of humiliation burned in her eyes, blinding her.
‘G-goodnight.’
She forced herself to say it. Forced herself to turn the handle and open her door. Felt the rush of warm air from the hall out into the coldness of the night.
But she couldn’t make herself step over the threshold and into the house. Even now she couldn’t turn and move away from him.
It was not enough! She wanted more, so much more. That one kiss had sparked off all the need, the hunger, the passion she had once felt for this man and which she had thought was safely buried, out of sight.
But it seemed that Constantine had spoken nothing more or less than the truth when he had said so casually, ‘I’m over it.’
‘I—I’ll…’
Go! Her mind screamed at her. Out of here now, before it gets any worse!
But, no, her heart pleaded. Let me have just a little bit more. Just one moment longer in his company. After these two long, empty years, let me have one more chance to hear his voice, see him smile.
Before she knew she had even formed the thought she had acted impulsively. The aroma of Constantine’s cologne and the warm, clean scent of his body reached her nostrils as she leaned towards him, making her head swim with the force of its sensual impact. His eyes were deeper, darker pools in the shadows of the night, and she could hear the soft, regular sound of his breathing.
‘Goodnight,’ she said on a very different note as, taking her cue from him, she pressed her lips to the hard, lean plane of his cheek. The warm satin of his skin was slightly roughened by the result of a day’s growth of beard that brushed abrasively against her mouth.
‘And thank you…’
But that one unthinking act proved her undoing. With a phenomenal speed of reaction, Constantine turned his head so that her lips were forced to move. Unable to do anything but slip over the bronzed skin, as if on ice over a frozen pond, they found themselves sliding inexorably towards the heated softness that was his mouth.
‘Grace…’
He muttered something thick and rough in Greek against her lips before taking them harshly, urgently, crushing her mouth under his.
‘You should have gone—headed for safety—while you had the chance. Now it’s much too late.’
Too late! Grace echoed inside her head on a note of disbelief. It had already been too late in the moment that he’d kissed her. Even such a desultory peck on the cheek had told her all she needed to know.
No, it had been earlier than that. It had happened in the moment when she had opened Ivan’s door and looked into the black depths of his eyes and known that, no matter what had happened, Constantine was still the only man in the world for her.
‘Sweet Grace…’
A cold sneaking wind wound itself around Grace’s legs, but she was beyond noticing it. The bulk of Constantine’s strong body protected her from the cold, and the heated race of her blood through her own veins warmed her skin until she felt as if she was on fire. Her heartbeat was staccato with excitement, the coming and going of air in her lungs feverishly erratic.
‘You really should have gone in.’ Constantine’s breathing was every bit as uneven as her own, his voice hoarse and jerky. ‘Now there’s no turning back. Grace, agape mou…invite me in.’
Invite me in. It was a command, not a request. She knew exactly what was behind it, what was uppermost in his mind.
So why wasn’t she saying no? Why wasn’t she telling him to get out of there and out of her life? The thought slid into her mind very briefly, but then, just as swiftly, slid straight out again.
‘D-do…?’
Her voice failed her, drying painfully, so that she had to moisten her lips before she could speak again. In the light from the hall she saw Constantine’s black eyes drop to her mouth, to follow the tiny, unconsciously provocative movement with an intensity that made her heart jerk convulsively against her chest.
‘Do you want to come in?’
‘Do I…?’ It was a shaken, husky laugh. ‘Grace, I swear to God that if you don’t let me in with you right now, I’ll—’
