worse than missing him had been the realisation that never again would she meet a man who came anywhere close to Kyros Pavlidis and the way he made her feel. She remembered understanding that with a painful kind of clarity and she had been proved absolutely right.
She would never tell him that, of course—his ego did not need such a boost—but neither could she deny having missed him at all, for surely it was impossible to tell an outright lie of that magnitude? It would make her sound like a fraud.
But she could choose how to tell him, for she was no longer a young, impressionable girl rocked by the urgent power of first love.
‘It was inevitable that I should miss you to some extent,’ she said. ‘We’d been an item for nearly a year. It went from full time to nothing.’ Still warmed by the cocktail, she even managed a fairly convincing smile. ‘I suppose what I found odd was the abruptness of it all. You never wrote, or phoned. You disappeared completely from my life. I never saw you or heard from you again.’ So that sometimes it had seemed like some strange and glorious dream.
His mouth curved into a hard, mocking line. ‘It was better that way,’ he said. ‘If we’d stayed friends…’ What? He might have been tempted to come back and to take her to bed and lose himself in her body over and over again? He had wanted—no, needed—to make a clean break with her. To forget his blonde lover—with her long legs and her emerald eyes.
But he had never forgotten her, he realised that now. Nor got her completely out of his system. He had buried his hunger for Alice—and he was only just discovering how deeply. And now? Just like a seed which had lain dormant all these years and been suddenly fed light and air and water, his desire for her was fizzing over like a warm glass of champagne, given life by the sight of her sitting like some goddess in the moonlight, her hair a silvery fall down her back.
‘We could never have stayed friends, Alice,’ he said harshly. ‘Ex-lovers don’t make good friends.’
‘No,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘I guess you’re right.’
Her green eyes were unreadable in the dim light. He had expected—what? That she, of all people—having tasted the pleasures of his body—would respond to him as other women did? That she would be pouting and sending out silent signals that she wanted him? But Alice had not done that.
It was true that she was dressed like a siren—but she had not followed that up with any suggestiveness. And hadn’t that always been part of her attraction to him? Her cool blonde beauty hiding the rampant sensual fire beneath?
So what was he going to do about it? He was going to do what he always did—take what he wanted, and then walk away.
Reaching out his hand, he splayed his fingers over the base of her throat—just below the necklet of fake gemstones. He could feel her pulse skittering beneath the delicate skin, could see the way that her lips parted instinctively. In the fading light her eyes darkened.
‘Kyros…’
He pulled her into his arms and stared down at her, his features tense and black eyes bright with sexual hunger as they roved over her face. Alice knew in that moment that he was going to kiss her and that it would have been easier to have floated down to the end of the garden than to have resisted him. He knew that and she knew that. ‘You bastard,’ she whispered.
His laugh was soft as he trickled a careless finger over the pert bud of her satin-covered nipple and it tightened in response. ‘But you like that. You like your hard, tough, Greek macho man, don’t you, my beauty? It turns you on. It always did.’
‘Kyros—’ But any protest was lost then for he was crushing his lips down on hers and she was kissing him back as if her life depended on it.
Her fingers fluttered up as they sought the broad shoulders, pressing against the hard muscle and wanting to tear away the T-shirt and to touch the silk of the olive skin beneath. She sucked in a breath—his breath—and moaned his name into his mouth.
With an angry kind of curse he pulled her down from the bench onto a soft patch of grass and pressed his body hard into hers. He felt so…so…hard. But that was okay, Alice thought weakly—because at least it was honest. She didn’t want softness—she didn’t want anything that masqueraded as love. This was what her hungry body craved—this virile man who was kissing her more passionately than any other man could.
Locking her arms tight around him, she kissed him back with a wantonness which felt as if it had been building up since last time he had kissed her all those years ago.
‘Alice!’ He let out a groan as she wriggled beneath him—the touch of her so shockingly and instantly familiar, but this time tempered with the spice of absence. His mouth at her throat, he nudged his thigh insistently against hers and they opened for him immediately and Kyros groaned with a kind of stunned disbelief. Her desire was simple and straightforward. She would play no games. She never had. Her sexual appetite had been more than a match for his—had he somehow thought that time might change that?
Heart pounding like a piston in his chest, he skated his hand down the front of her dress—the siren call of her body urging him on as he rucked up the slippery fabric of her dress, stroking his hand along the cool silk of her thigh until it alighted on her panties, and then he slipped his finger inside her.
At that she gasped, her eyes snapping open, and even in the shadow of the evening he could see they were dense and black with desire just as he could feel her barely contained shiver of delight.
‘Kyros! Stop it. We…we can’t—’
His hand stilled. Alice—refusing him?
‘We can’t…stay here.’
In the moonlight he smiled as he moved against her heated flesh. ‘No?’
Alice groaned—her hungry body calling out to her—but some last shred of sanity made her shake her head. Because how the hell would it look if someone found them locked in an intimate embrace? Did she think so little of herself that she could allow such an easy seduction? ‘No,’ she moaned. ‘There are people at the other end of the garden.’
In the darkness, his mouth curved into a hard smile. That did not sound like a refusal—more like a delaying tactic. He eased back from her a little, recognising the need to quieten down his aroused body or there was the very real fear that he would be unable to walk.
He stood up, and held his hand out to her. ‘Get up,’ he demanded unevenly. ‘We’re going back to your house.’
Alice steadied her ragged breathing. ‘But…what will people think?’
‘I don’t care what people think, Alice.’
Warning bells went off in her head at his arrogant statement, reminding her that she was risking getting hurt all over again.
‘Well, I do,’ she said.
‘Not enough to stop me,’ he taunted softly, his hands now cupping her silky bottom and bringing her hard up against the cradle of his desire. ‘Is it enough to stop you, Alice?’
Say no. Say it’s wrong. Too soon. That any respect he may have had for you will be destroyed by this illadvised passion. Say no!
‘No,’ she admitted
