Bridal Bargains

Nell dragged her eyes away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Sex, agape mou,’ he named it. ‘You are quivering with delight because you love to know you can affect me like this.’

‘For all I k

now you’re like this with any woman you come into contact with,’ she tossed at him, making a jerky shift in an effort to move back.

His hands held her clamped to him. His hips gave a slow, smooth, sensual thrust. She quivered like a trapped little bird as damp heat spread across the exposed and vulnerable centre of her sex.

‘Do I apply the same reasoning to your response?’

He knew what was happening to her, Nell realised. How could he not when she was so burning hot? A stifled gasp shot from her when he bent his head, his lips moulding hers and taking control of them, his tongue darting into her mouth. Each time they did this it got worse, she thought dizzily as she fell into it with a hopeless groan and let her slender arms snake up and around his neck.

She felt strong muscles flex in his shoulders as he lifted her up from the marble, felt the hard and pulsing sexual promise in his body as he flattened her to his chest. Her legs had wrapped themselves tightly around him and they might as well have been back in the ocean with no clothes on because she could feel everything that was happening to him.

It was only when he tipped her down onto the bed that she realised where they were now. With a gasping drag on her unwilling lips she broke the kiss to look around her. With a swimming sense of disorientation noticed for the first time that since she’d taken her shower earlier someone had been in here and closed the shutters over the windows to keep out the fierce heat of the afternoon sun. The room had a warm, soft, sultry feel to it as if it had been deliberately set for making love.

Even the bedcovers had been drawn back, she realised. Her gaze flicked back to the man lying in a languid stretch beside her on the bed, lazily reading each expression as it passed across her face. He offered her a mocking smile. The air went perfectly still in her lungs. He’d done it. When he’d come up to take his own shower he’d come in here and made this room ready for seduction as if it had always been a forgone conclusion that it was going to happen this afternoon.

‘No,’ she pushed out across taut throat muscles.

He merely held on to the smile and brushed a stray lock of Titian silk from her suddenly pale cheek. ‘I’ve spent a whole year imagining you lying here with your beautiful hair splayed out around you and your beautiful mouth warmed and pulsing as it awaits the pleasure of mine.’

Sensation trickled right down the front of her. ‘We are not going to do this,’ she insisted shakily.

For an answer he began to unbutton his shirt. Nell stared as warm, bronzed skin roughened by dark hair began to make its appearance. Everything about him said man on a course he would not be moved from. Real alarm struck her with a frightening clarity.

She drew in a taut breath. ‘Y-your m-mother,’ she reminded him. ‘W-we—’

‘I don’t need her permission to do this, agape mou,’ he drawled.

‘But she—’

He moved, long fingers leaving the shirt to come and frame her heart-shaped face from pale cheek to trembling chin. Pinpricks leapt across the surface of her skin as he bent to brush his mouth across hers. ‘No more reprieves,’ he murmured very softy. ‘This is it, my beautiful Helen. It is time to face your fate because it is here …’

Her fate. Nell stared at him. He was deadly serious. To her horror he began to stroke the hand down her throat and across her shoulder, fingertips pushing stretchy jade fabric out of his way.

‘Stop it!’ she choked out and at last found the sense to put up a fight.

Dark eyes lit with a kind of cold amusement that chilled her as he captured her flailing fists and flattened them to the bed above her head. ‘The little game you’ve been playing with me is over,’ he said grimly. ‘Accept it, for you are about to get your just desserts.’

‘You’re angry,’ she gasped in shocked realisation.

His tight grimace confirmed it.

‘But—why?’

The innocent question locked his lean, handsome face. ‘I’ve done nothing but treat you with respect since we married and you paid me back by leaving me for another man.’

With his free hand he went back to undoing shirt buttons in a grim display of intent.

‘Just thank your lucky stars that you did not make it, my beautiful Helen,’ he glinted down at her. ‘Or you would not be about to enjoy Alexander Pascalis the lover, but the other Alexander Pascalis—the one that makes big men quake in fear!’

‘How do you know I didn’t make it?’ she prodded recklessly, staring as more and more of that muscled, bronzed, hair-roughened chest appeared. ‘How do you know I didn’t make it a dozen times during the week Hugo Vance wasn’t around to stop it from happening?’ she choked up at him. ‘Before I decided to leave you for good!’

The fingers stopped working the buttons. Nell heaved in a wary breath of air as a frisson of alarm shot across her heaving breasts.

‘But you didn’t, did you?’