‘Se thelo…I want you,’ Aristandros breathed thickly as he eased her back into his arms.
‘I thought you’d be out half the night,’ she framed flatly, staying stiff and unresponsive against the hard, muscular heat of him.
‘Not when you’re in my bed waiting for me, moli mou.’
‘I wasn’t waiting for you!’ she yelped.
Brushing back her tumbled silvery-blonde hair, he pressed his sensual mouth to the slender column of her neck, and she quivered beneath the erotic brush of his lips across her skin. ‘Of course you were. Do you think I don’t know when a woman wants me?’
‘Quack,’ Ella pronounced flatly.
Aristandros vented a husky laugh above her head. ‘Meaning?’
‘That normal dialogue is a waste of breath with a guy as vain and arrogant as you are.’
Aristandros extracted her from her nightdress without receiving or even appearing to need the smallest assistance from her. He proved that he was more than capable of rolling with the punches of that negative character-assessment. He nibbled at the tender skin below her ear, while his hands roved from the urgent jut of her swollen nipples to the slick, wet flesh between her thighs. She clenched her teeth and gasped, striving to resist temptation until he teased the tiny nub of arousal below her feminine mound, and suddenly resistance was more than she could bear. She twisted round in a violent movement and found his tormenting mouth for herself, burning for him and burning with shame simultaneously. He held her to him with strong hands and plundered her parted lips until she was breathless with desire. Then he lifted her over him and pushed up into her slick, tight depths with a long, guttural groan of pleasure.
‘As long as you know that I still hate you,’ Ella mumbled shakily, struggling not to lose herself entirely in the pleasure he had unleashed.
‘I love the way you hate me,’ Aristandros husked, long, brown fingers on her hips controlling her rhythm, and then rising to cup her swaying breasts and roll the sensitive crests.
She was dizzy with excitement and beyond thought. The waves of pulsating pleasure began low in her pelvis and slowly spread out in ever-increasing circles in a white-hot surge of shattering pleasure. She cried out, and her head fell back on her shoulders as the wild convulsions of ecstasy engulfed her.
Aristandros cradled her limp body and rolled over to a cooler spot in the big bed. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be on Lykos, and I don’t think I’ll let you out of bed for a week. You make me insatiable, khriso mou.’
Her brain kicked back into gear and she flinched, loathing herself for surrendering to the passion. ‘I meant everything I said,’ she told him doggedly.
‘What a temper you have,’ Aristandros mused lazily, his unconcern on that score palpable.
Her body still throbbing from the primal urgency of his possession, Ella pulled free of him and shifted over to the far side of the bed.
‘No,’ Aristandros said succinctly, and he reached for her with hands that brooked no argument and hauled her bodily back into contact with his long, powerful body. ‘What you sow, you must reap, and I’m not finished yet.’
‘I am!’ But, as she spoke, the familiar signature tune she used on her mobile phone broke out in the tense silence.
‘Ignore it,’ Aristandros instructed. ‘It’s after midnight.’
Ella, by comparison, was accustomed to reacting with urgency to calls during the night, and she broke from his loosened hold and snatched up the flashing mobile-phone on the bedside table to answer it. An instant later, she threw her legs off the side of the bed and stood up to switch on the lamp. Although she couldn’t yet understand what her mother was saying, she realised that the older woman was crying and that something was badly wrong.
‘Calm down; I can’t follow what you’re saying. What happened? Did he hit you?’
Ella felt Aristandros pull himself up behind her. ‘Are you still in the house?’ she prompted her parent. ‘Where is Theo? Look, whatever you do, don’t go back in there,’ Ella warned the weeping older woman. ‘Stay where you are and I’ll come and get you. No, of course it isn’t a problem. Don’t be silly, Mum. All I care about is you.’ Putting her phone down, she turned to Aristandros. ‘I need a car.’
Aristandros was already talking into the house phone and getting out of bed. He broke off to demand, ‘Did Sardelos attack your mother? What happened?’
‘What always happens,’ Ella responded wearily. ‘He has a few drinks, blames her for everything wrong in his life and hits her. He’s in bed. She’s in the park across the street. Why are you getting dressed?’