The Demetrios Virgin

She heard herself starting to protest, but somehow the words were lost—not because Andreas was refusing to listen, but because her lips were refusing to speak.

‘So when exactly was it that you found me so loathsome Saskia?’ Andreas was demanding as he closed both his arms around her, forming them into a prison from which it was impossible for her to escape. ‘When I did this...?’ His mouth was feathering over hers, teasing and tantalising it, arousing a hot torrent of sensation she didn’t want to experience. ‘Or when I did this...?’

Now his tongue-tip was probing the lips she was trying so desperately to keep firmly closed, stroking them, tracing their soft curves, over and over again, until she could hear herself moaning helplessly as they parted softly for him. But still it seemed he hadn’t extracted his pound of flesh, because even this victory wasn’t enough for him.

‘What? Still no answer...? I wonder why not,’ he was taunting her, before adding bitingly, ‘Or do I need to wonder at all? You are a woman who is used to giving her body to a man, Saskia, who is used to experiencing pleasure. And right now you want that pleasure from me.’

‘No,’ Saskia moaned in denial, trying to turn her face away from his and to break free of him.

‘Yes,’ he insisted rawly. ‘Yes. Admit it, Saskia... You want me... Your body wants mine. It wants the sexual satisfaction it’s used to...it aches and craves for.’

A shudder of shock ripped through her as Saskia recognised the truth of what he was saying. She did want him, but not in the way he was suggesting. She wanted him as a woman wanted the man she loved, she realised shakily. She wanted him as her lover, not merely as her sexual partner, someone with whom she could find a release for a basic physical need, as he was so cruelly saying. But how could she love him? She couldn’t... But she did.

She had fallen in love with him virtually the moment she had set eyes on him, Saskia acknowledged despairingly, but she had told herself that because of her loyalty to her friend he was out of bounds to her and that she could not, must not allow herself to have such feelings, just as she could not allow herself to have them now. Although for very different reasons. Megan was no longer a barrier to her loving Andreas, but Andreas himself and what he thought about her certainly was.

‘Let me go, Andreas,’ she demanded.

‘Not until you have admitted that I am right and that you want me,’ Andreas refused. ‘Or are you trying to goad me into proving to you that I am right?’

Saskia flinched as she felt the suffocating, dangerously toxic mix of fear and excitement explode inside her.

She hesitated whilst she tried to formulate the right response, the only sane, sensible response she could give, and then she realised that she had waited too long as Andreas told her rawly, ‘You’ve pushed me too far, Saskia. I want you, but you already know that, don’t you? How could a woman like you not know it? You can feel it in my body, can’t you?’ he demanded. ‘Here...’

Helplessly Saskia leaned against him whilst she tried to absorb the shock of having her hand taken and placed so explicitly against the hard, intimate throb of his maleness. If only she could find the strength to drag her hand away, to tell him that she didn’t want the intimacy he was forcing on her. But despairingly she knew that she was too weak, that there was no way she could stop herself from aching to use the opportunity he had given her to touch and explore him, to know him...to know his maleness...to—

She gave a small moan as her body started to shake with tremors of desire. Andreas’s heart was pounding so savagely that she could feel it almost inside her own body. Earlier in the evening, when he had almost absently caressed the ball of her shoulder—the touch of an established lover for his beloved—she had shuddered in mute delight, but that was nothing to what she was feeling now.

She ached for him, hungered for him, and when she closed her eyes she could see him as Athena had so tauntingly described him—proud and naked as his body sliced the water. She moaned again, a high, sharp sound this time that had Andreas covering her mouth with the hard, hot, demanding pressure of his, the words he was groaning against her lost as his passion sent a kick of shocking voluptuous pleasure searing through her.