why not? It was a stupid question.
‘Why did I come here?’ she echoed, shaking her head. ‘You know why I came, Demetri. Your father asked me to!’
‘You could have refused.’
‘Refused a dying man!’ Jane was astounded. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ Demetri’s teeth ground together. ‘What are you, Jane? Saint or sinner? I can’t quite make up my mind.’
Her lips parted, and then, a note of contempt entering her voice, ‘Well, at least I don’t have that dilemma, Demetri. You’re totally selfish through and through.’
‘And you’re not?’ Demetri’s lips curled, not sure why he felt this pressing need to pursue this, but unable to let it go. ‘I suppose this means you’ve justified your reasons for walking out on me? Or do you have to keep reminding yourself why you made such a colossal mistake?’
‘It wasn’t a mistake!’
‘Okhi? Why do I find that hard to believe? Isn’t there something hypocritical about holding the moral high ground, when a few weeks ago you were flat on your back, letting me screw your brains out?’
The words sounded so much worse, laced as they were with his accent, and Jane gasped. Before she could prevent herself, her hand connected with his cheek.
Demetri made no attempt to deflect the blow and she watched, with a feeling of disbelief, as the clear marks of her fingers appeared on the left side of his face.
She regretted it instantly. She didn’t do things like this. But it was too late to have second thoughts. Her hand had barely moved in a gesture of subjugation when Demetri’s uncertain control snapped. With a savage exclamation in his own language she didn’t understand, he locked hard fingers about her wrist and dragged her relentlessly towards him. ‘If that’s the way you want to play it, who am I to complain?’
‘Demetri,’ she cried, but it was no use.
‘Skaseh,’ he said harshly. Shut up!
‘But you can’t—’
‘Ipa skaseh,’ he repeated, grasping a handful of her hair and tipping her head backward. And then his hot mouth fastened itself to hers and she knew she was lost.
Anger, and the frustration he was feeling, made it impossible for him to be gentle with her. As he backed her up against the wall behind her, his tongue forced its way between her teeth. He pushed into her mouth, tasting her blood when his savage possession ground her lips against her teeth, but he had no mercy. He wanted to tear the bathrobe from her and bury himself inside her, and her fragile vulnerability was no deterrent, he found.
The moan she gave should have shamed him, but it didn’t. The sounds she was making only served to drive him completely over the edge. Tearing the sides of the robe apart, he feasted his eyes on dusky-tipped nipples, already swollen and painfully erect, and on the slight swell of her stomach and the tight curls that hid her sex.
‘Isteh oreos,’ he muttered thickly. ‘You are beautiful! Keh ti thelo!’ And I want you!
Jane’s hands had been trapped between them but now she dragged them free to rake frantic fingers across his cheek. Thankfully, she didn’t draw blood, but when her nails scraped across his scalp he uttered a groan of protest.
‘Do not pretend you do not want me, too,’ he said unsteadily, and, although her hands had fastened in his hair with the intention of jerking his head away from hers, the shaken timbre of his voice tore her resolution to shreds.
‘I—I don’t,’ she got out fiercely, but her lips told a different story when he kissed her again. Passion built between them with every sensual thrust of his tongue, and when he sucked her lower lip between his teeth, she could only clutch his neck and hang on.
‘This is why you really came here, isn’t it?’ he demanded, his hands sliding possessively up her arms to tip the robe off her shoulders. ‘You are determined to destroy me.’
‘No,’ she protested, as the robe fell to the floor, but Demetri wasn’t listening to her. His fingers slid over her shoulders and down her back, caressing her hipbones briefly, before moving on to her bottom. Filling his hands with the rounded globes, he brought her deliberately against him, rotating his hips so she was made unmistakably aware of the pressure of his erection.
‘Do you feel that?’ he asked, his voice thick with emotion. ‘Yes, of course you do. But do you have any idea what it’s like to be this close to you and not be a part of you?’
‘Demetri—’
‘You drive me crazy,’ he went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, thrusting his thigh between her legs. ‘Stark, staring crazy, and I still want you even closer to me, under me, spreading your legs for me, to give me some relief from this torment you’re putting me through.’
‘Demetri—’
‘Do not try to tell me I don’t know what I’m saying,’ he snarled. ‘I know. I know, Jane. Believe me.’
‘Demetri, please—’
The husky tone of her voice vibrated through him, but he was too far gone to listen to reason. Tucking a hand beneath the tumbled silk of her hair, he tipped her head up to his, his mouth silencing any further protest.
The kiss was deep and erotic, an affirmation of everything he’d been saying, seducing her to a place where nothing mattered but that he should go on kissing her and caressing her, drenching her body in the mindless heat of her own arousal.
She wondered afterwards if he would have taken her there, against the wall of her sitting room, if they hadn’t been interrupted. Demetri was already using his free hand to tear his shirt open, dragging off his tie to send it spiralling across the room. And she—God help her!—was encouraging him, cupping his warm neck between her palms, digging her nails into taut flesh that smelled hot and sweaty and deliciously male.
She was rubbing herself against him, delighting in the sensual brush of his body hair against her breasts, when there was a tentative knock on the door.
For a moment, neither of them moved. It was as if they were suddenly frozen, blood cooling to weld them to the spot. Demetri, his face buried in the scented curve of her shoulder, breathed a word that could more politely be described as ‘Damn!’ and slumped against her. And Jane tipped her head back against heavy silk damask, grateful for the wall’s support.
‘Jane!’
Her mouth went dry. The momentary fear that it was Demetri who’d spoken, alerting whoever was on the other side of the door to his presence, making her feel weak. But almost immediately she realised that Demetri was too enraged to say anything civil. It was another voice that was disconcertingly like Demetri’s who had spoken her name.
With a strength she hadn’t known she possessed, Jane managed to push Demetri’s head back so he could see her lips. ‘It’s your father,’ she mouthed, the consternation evident in her face, and with a resigned gesture he muttered, ‘I know.’
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ she continued as he dragged himself upright and raked
