course,’ Natasha mocked. ‘I’m about to become a very rich man’s sexual doormat, which has to be quite a hike up from being my family’s wimpish doormat and Rico Giannetti’s thieving one.’
Leo said nothing, but she could sense his exasperation as he placed his hand on the small of her back to urge her up the flight steps.
The plane’s interior gave Natasha an insight into a whole new way of travelling. Breaking free from his touch, she took a couple of steps away from him, then stopped, tension springing along her nerve-ends when she heard the cabin door hiss as someone sealed it into its housing and the low murmur of Leo’s voice speaking to someone, though she did not turn around to find out who it was.
This wasn’t right. None of it was right, a sensible voice in her head tried to tell her. She should not be on this plane or tripping off to Athens with Leo Christakis—she should be staying in England and fighting to clear her name!
‘Here, let me take your jacket.’ He arrived right behind her again, making her whole body jerk to attention when his hands landed lightly on her shoulders.
‘I would rather keep it on,’ she insisted tautly.
‘No, you would not.’ Sliding his fingers beneath the jacket collar, he followed it around her slender white throat until he located the top button holding her jacket fastened. ‘You will be more comfortable without it.’ He twisted the button free.
‘Then I can do it.’ Snapping up her hands, Natasha grabbed his wrists with the intention of pulling his hands away. He didn’t let her.
‘My pleasure,’ he murmured smoothly as the next button gave.
Her two breasts thrust forward, driving a shaken gasp from her throat. ‘I wish you would go and f-find someone else to torment,’ she breathed out sharply when his knuckles grazed her nipples on their way to locate the next button, and felt her stomach muscles contract as he brushed across them, too.
He just laughed, low and huskily. ‘When did you find the time to stick your hair up again?’
‘At the flat,’ she mumbled, then went as taut as piano wire when the last button gave way to his working fingers.
‘You’re too skittish,’ he chided.
‘And you’re too sure of yourself!’ Natasha flicked out.
‘That’s me,’ he admitted casually, moving his hands down her sleeves to locate her handbag still clutched in one tense set of fingers. He gently prised it free to toss it aside.
Why the loss of her purse should make her feel even more exposed and under threat, Natasha did not have a clue, but by the time he’d eased the jacket from her shoulders she was more than ready to dissolve into panic. And the worst part about it was that she could not even say for sure any more what it was she was panicking about—Leo and his relentless determination to keep her balanced on the edge of reason, or herself because her senses persisted in responding to him even when her head told them to stop!
His hands arrived at the curve of her slender ribcage over the stretchy white fabric that moulded her so honestly it felt as if he were touching her skin. Natasha closed her eyes and prayed for deliverance when he eased her back against him and she felt his heat and his hard masculine contours.
‘Leo, please…’ It came out somewhere between a protest and a breathless plea.
It made no difference. He lowered his mouth and brushed his lips across the exposed skin at her nape and for Natasha it was like stepping off a cliff, she fell that easily. She murmured a pathetic little stifled groan and her head tipped downwards, inviting the gentle bite of his teeth. As he began kissing his way round her neck, she rolled it sideways on a slow and pleasurable, sensual stretch to give him greater access. She so loved what he was making her feel.
‘Mmm, you feel good, like warm, living silk to touch,’ he murmured. ‘You have a beautiful body, Natasha,’ he added huskily, gliding his hands upwards until he cupped her breasts and gently pressed his palms against their tightly budded peaks. ‘I need you to turn your head and kiss me, agape mou,’ he told her huskily.
And she did. She moved on a restless sigh of surrender when he reached for her hands and lifted them upwards, then clasped them around the back of his neck. The sheer sensual stretch of her body felt unbelievably erotic. She whispered something—even she didn’t know what it was—then she was giving in and twisting her head and going in search of his waiting mouth.
Leo gave it to her in a hot, deep, stabbing delivery. Her fingers curled into the black silk of his hair. It was shocking. She didn’t know herself like this, all soft and pliable and terribly needy.
‘We are cleared for take-off, Mr Christakis,’ a disembodied voice suddenly announced.
Leo drew his head back and the whole wild episode just went up in a single puff of smoke. Natasha opened her eyes and found that she couldn’t focus. Passion coins of heat burned her cheeks. She became aware of her hands still clinging to his head and slid them away from him, her still-parted mouth closing with a soft burning crush of her warm lips.
‘You are quite a bundle of delightful surprises,’ she heard Leo mock. ‘Once unbuttoned you just let it all flood out.’
And the real horror of it was that he was, oh, so right! Each time he touched her it was the same as losing touch with her common sense and dignity. Acknowledging that had Natasha breaking free of him to wrap her arms tightly around her body, then she just stood there, shaking and fighting to get a grip on herself.
An engine purred into life.
‘Take a seat, strap yourself in, relax,’ his hatefully sardonic tone invited, and he was stepping around her to stride down the cabin.
Watching him go, Natasha thought she glimpsed a flick of irritation in the way that he moved and kind of understood it. To a man like Leo Christakis the deal had been done, so to have her continue to play it coy annoyed him. From the little she’d heard about his private life, he liked his women with the experience and sophistication to know how to respond positively to his seduction routine, not blow hot then tense and skittish each time he attempted to act naturally with her.
The gap in their ages suddenly loomed. The fact that there was nothing natural at all in the two of them being together picked at her nerves as she chose a seat at random and sat down.
The plane slid into movement. Natasha watched Leo remove his suit jacket to reveal wide, muscled shoulders hugging the white fabric of his shirt. He draped the jacket over the back of the chair in front of the desk, then folded his long body into the seat placed at an angle to her, those muscled shoulders flexed as he locked in his seat belt, then reached out to pull a large stack of papers towards him and sat back to read.
Dragging her eyes away from him, she hunted down her seat belt with the intention of fastening it, but she spied her discarded jacket lying on the seat opposite and on sheer impulse she snatched it up and put it back on, buttoning it shut all the way up to her throat, though she had no idea what, by doing it, she was hoping to prove.
Unless it had something to do with the tight bubble of anger she could feel simmering away inside at the way he was lounging there already steeped in paperwork and putting on a good impression that he had already forgotten she was here, which hit too closely at the way her family had behaved at the apartment.
Ten
