thing he’d looped his hands beneath her arms and produced two champagne flutes.
‘Get rid of the plate and the coffee cup and take these from me,’ he instructed.
One part of her wanted to get up and walk away from him but another part was still stinging from being called a grouch.
‘This is so romantic.’ She restricted herself to a touch of acid as she gave in and took the glasses.
He ignored her and said, ‘Hold them upright if you don’t want champagne on your skirt.'
Tilting the flutes into an upright position, Louisa watched as he poured champagne until it fizzed and frothed. ‘I don’t think I should be drinking this on an empty stomach.’ She’d barely touched her sandwich.
‘A few sips won’t make you fall flat on your face.’
You can, though, she thought bleakly.
Taking one of the glasses from her, he chinked it against the other one. ‘To us and our new home,’ he said and lifted the glass to his mouth and drank.
Louisa didn’t drink—not to an us that just was not going to happen or the our new home bit. ‘How is it that I don’t remember this spot?’ She diverted the subject.
‘The land has belonged to me since my grandmother died,’ he informed her. ‘But the trees used to come to the edge of the shingle until last winter when a storm brought a lot of them down.'
‘Making the perfect clearing on which to build a house. Lucky you.'
‘Am I not?’ was the very dry reply which came back. ‘I suppose you are now thinking that I called up the storm so that I could clear the land.'
‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ she said, remembering the law prohibiting building on Aristos unless it was to replace old with new.
‘There used to be an old shed where the house stands but—'
‘It blew down in the storm too.’
‘You have become a terrible cynic, Louisa,’ he chided. ‘And here I am, mistakenly thinking that you would find this particular spot so romantic …'
It hit her then, just where it was they were sitting. A stinging sensation shot down the length of her spine and snatched at her breath. ‘It isn’t …’ she whispered.
‘We anchored offshore and swam in,’ he confirmed. ‘I found an old blanket in the hut and we stretched out on the beach in the sun to … dry out.'
Louisa saw it all in vivid Technicolor. Her, lying there in her little pink bikini. Andreas, in his creamy shorts that had such a sexy habit of riding too low on his hips. He’d been teasing her about something—she couldn’t remember what—then the teasing had stopped abruptly when he’d rolled over her and suddenly captured her mouth.
She moved restlessly, not wanting to remember the deep, drugging kisses that had grown more and more intimate, or the soft gasps of their fevered breathing as the whole thing had sunk them both beyond the point of pulling back. She could even feel the pebbles digging into her when she’d finally allowed him the one intimacy she had been holding back from him, hear the roughness of his voice groaning, ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ and her own helpless whisper, ‘You could never hurt me,’ then the full, burning heat of his first powerful thrust.
The muscles around her sex curled then throbbed and tightened, jolting her like a wayward dart to her feet. Behind her she could feel Andreas’s surprised stillness. In front of her the sun was setting like a great ball of flaming heat and her heart was pounding, she was shaking all over, her legs had gone hollow except for the shooting stings of telling heat.
She tried to crush it, to damp it all back down again. It was mad that such an old memory should be this intense. She was no longer that innocent seventeen-year-old giving herself for the first time to the man she loved, she was a mature woman with the bitterness of failure and the tragedy of loss to cool her ardour and she no longer loved him—she didn’t.
The champagne flute was suddenly snatched from her fingers, hard hands spun her about. She looked into glinting black eyes and trembled all the harder when she saw the fierce reflection of her own wild thoughts stamped into his hard, dark face. Her breathing fractured. He roughed out a thick, damning sound then his hands were tightening.
‘No,’ she whimpered.
‘Yes,’ he hissed and wrapped her against him so tightly her head whirled at the raw, hard evidence of his passion as he claimed her mouth with a hot, hunting hunger that hurled the past out there into the sunset and replaced it with the right here and now.
And her surrender to it was so fast she groaned and quivered, despising herself even as the sensual claim of his tongue between her lips sent a burn of pure sensation spearing right down her front and she was kissing him back as if there would be no tomorrow, fighting to get her arms free from his crushing embrace so she could throw them around his neck.
He saved her the trouble by scooping her up in his arms to begin carrying her back to the house. This kiss didn’t ease up as he picked his way over the rough ground and entered the kitchen with the sure-footedness of a man arrogant enough to be that confident in himself.
Only when they entered the bedroom and he let her feet slither to the floor did a brief glimpse of sanity return and she wrenched her mouth free. ‘What happened to sorting out the issues?’ she said on a shaky last-ditch attempt to redeem herself.
‘I was wrong.’ Deft fingers dealt with the zip holding her skirt up. ‘This needs dealing with before we can hope to discuss anything else with cool sense.'
‘The sex, you mean.’ The skirt slithered to the floor around her feet. ‘Whenever did it not take priority between us?'
As he was about to relieve her of her top something hard flashed across his features. ‘Don’t ever tell me again that what we had between us was just sex! What we had down there on the beach that just tied you up in sensual knots simply recalling it was special. And if it wasn’t for your sunburn I would be ravishing you again out there on those same damn pebbles to remind you how special it was!'
‘Even special sex is still just sex, Andreas.’
‘Is it?’ Her top came off over her head. ‘Then, yineka mou, let us have sex.'
She’d walked herself right into that one, Louisa acknowledged helplessly as with a lithe dexterity he manoeuvred her onto the bed, his kiss already making good its declaration as he followed her down, ravishing the tender interior of her mouth.
And it just went on and on until she was dizzy with it, her fingers agitatedly kneading the thick, muscular shape of his shoulders trapped inside his T-shirt until it wasn’t enough.
‘Take it off,’ she said, dragging her mouth free, her urgent fingers already searching out the edge of the shirt so she could push it up.
Snaking upright he did as she bade him, leaving her spread out on the bed while he stripped off his clothes, watching her watch him as each new inch of sleekly honed, fabulous flesh was exposed to her soft, dark, hungry blue gaze.
He had the strong-boned,
