‘Wasn’t that a little…offhand?’ she pressed self-consciously as they climbed the stairs.
‘It’s one in the morning and it’s our wedding night,’ Jax intoned, his hand tightening on hers. ‘We can get chatty tomorrow.’
She thought about what she had been avoiding thinking about and colour mantled her cheeks as Jax walked her into a vast room overflowing with urns of white roses and lilies, ornamented with trailing ivy. It was magnificent but not as magnificent as the vast divan bed on the dais scattered with rose petals.
‘Heracles wasn’t joking when he said he’d set the house up for the bridal couple,’ Jax conceded with forbidding cool.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Lucy muttered, because it was and she was grateful that her fatherin-law had been prepared to make the effort on their behalf. ‘But maybe a little too grand for the likes of me.’
‘The “likes of me” now happens to be my wife,’ Jax reminded her in reproof. ‘And nothing is too grand or too good for my wife.’
‘I’ll get used to it…it’s just a little overwhelming coming to a house like this,’ Lucy confided.
‘It’s ours now,’ Jax revealed, sharing his father’s plans with her. ‘I think he’s hoping we’ll go forth and multiply now for him.’
Lucy shrugged a slim shoulder, making no comment on that possibility.
‘I think Bella’s enough for us at present. I still have to learn how to be a father,’ Jax completed, making his opinion clear. ‘Do you want a drink or anything to eat? There’re snacks waiting on the trolley.’
‘No. I only want to get my shoes off,’ Lucy admitted, dropping down into a luxurious armchair with a sigh. ‘My feet are hurting.’
‘Let me…’ In the most disconcerting way, Jax crouched down lithely at her feet and unfastened her shoes to slip them off. ‘You have such tiny feet. They used to fascinate me.’
Long brown fingers gently stroked the back of a delicate ankle and Lucy snatched in a sudden startled breath because her skin felt super sensitive, as though he had touched her somewhere much more intimate.
‘All that got me through the day was the glorious thought of sating myself inside you again, koukla mou,’ Jax said huskily, rising to lift her bodily out of the chair and settle her down on the huge bed.
Eyes flying wide, cheeks flushing, Lucy stared up at him with bright blue eyes.
‘So, why do you look like a cornered rabbit?’ Jax asked pleasantly. ‘You’ve been acting strangely all day.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I… I FELT OVERWHELMED,’ Lucy told him and it was true.
The cathedral wedding, the sleek bejewelled Antonakos relatives and guests and the absence of any actual friends aside of her father’s had weighed her down. The constant stares and the low buzz of conjecture hadn’t helped either but when someone as rich as Jax married a waitress, who was the mother of his child, people stared and speculated. The wedding had been a strain and her father’s confession of wrongdoing had crushed her. It had been the ultimate humiliation to learn that only Kreon’s criminal act had made it possible for her to marry Jax.
And yet what could they possibly do about it now? Kreon had confessed too late to change anything. If she and Jax were to part this very night, it would cause a major scandal and she knew Jax wouldn’t want to invite that media attention, which meant that at the very least they would have to stay married for a few months to make any breakup appear less worthy of comment.
‘I can understand that,’ Jax conceded, removing his jacket in a lazy fluid movement.
And Lucy watched him with a fast-beating heart, still wondering what she should do and how she should be behaving. Yet with a good ninety per cent of her being she craved the intimacy that being with Jax would give her. She wanted forgetfulness. She wanted to sink into the comfortable depths of the massive bed and shut the rest of the world out to take refuge in Jax. Even if he wasn’t really hers and possibly wouldn’t be hers for very long. His dazzling green eyes gleamed in the low-lit room, so bright against his dark bronzed skin, and her mouth ran dry.
Tugging his shirt from his waistband, he came back to the bed and sank down behind her to unzip her dress. She sat there like a little statue, her heart thudding like crazy in her chest as he lifted the garment up over her head, leaving her clad only in the white lace lingerie she had worn with her wedding gown. Sliding upright again, he unbuttoned his shirt, displaying a wide slice of his torso, well-defined muscles coming into view as he shed the shirt.
And she was as entranced by his sheer male beauty as she had once been in Spain, feasting her eyes on him with feminine appreciation. Jax worked out and it showed. He was all lean muscle and controlled power.
‘Take the rest off,’ he urged. ‘I want to look at you.’
Her face burned as she reached behind her back to unclasp her bra. She had never done that before in front of him. Her clothes had once vanished beneath his skilled hands and she hadn’t had to think about it or ever feel particularly naked. But there in that silent bedroom she was insanely aware of her body and its deficiencies as she let the bra fall. Most of the pregnancy weight had fallen away but there was no denying that she was curvier at bust and hip and there was an obvious scar low on her belly from the Caesarean she had had to have. Her waist was bigger too, she thought nervously, anxiously cataloguing every flaw. And this was a guy accustomed to the flawless female bodies of underwear models.
Jax studied the pouting swell of her pink-tipped breasts with intense pleasure, arousal flashing through him with storm-force potency. Everything about her daintiness appealed to him because her slender lines became lush in all the right highly feminine places. And he knew exactly what would happen when he touched her. He knew she would respond to him in a way no other woman ever had and that there would be nothing fake or exaggerated about it. Anticipation gave him the ultimate high.
‘I’m not perfect,’ she warned him tightly as her fingers flirted with the band of her knickers. ‘Well, I never was, but—’
A flashing grin flared across Jax’s lean, darkly handsome features as he came down on one knee on the bed and yanked her playfully to him by her ankles. ‘You’re perfect for me… I only want to see you.’
Sharply disconcerted by that teasing assault, Lucy looked up at him with apprehensive eyes of blue. He hooked his hands into her knickers and dragged them off, lowering her back gently against the pillows and then rearranging her to his own satisfaction, her legs parted and her hands by her side.
‘I’d love a painting of you looking like this, all spread out and waiting for me, but I couldn’t stand the artist seeing you naked,’ he admitted thickly, peeling off his trousers and his boxers in an impatient movement.
Lucy lay there feeling like a sacrifice and yet she was quite ridiculously excited by his scrutiny and the thrusting fullness of his arousal. He was so ready for her, was always ready. He made her feel as though her body were flawless and the desire he made no attempt to hide warmed the sore place inside her where her father’s betrayal had contrived to undermine her self-esteem.
Jax joined her on the bed and went straight for her mouth with hungry, driving kisses that parted her lips and sent a current of high-voltage expectation flying through her trembling length. Her fingers clutched into his spiky, messy black hair and tears burned behind her lowered eyelids because she wanted him so much that she hurt with the wanting. It felt too intense, too desperate and that wasn’t what she wanted to feel. She needed to stay in control, she told herself, remember what was real and what wasn’t real. And what they had now wasn’t real. Why did thinking that drive a knife through her when it was only the truth?
‘I can’t get enough of you,’ Jax growled between the urgent biting kisses that bruised her lips and the devastating plunge of his tongue that made her slight body jackknife in reaction beneath his.
‘We’ve got all night,’ she whispered through rosy swollen lips, eyes glazed with passion.
‘I’ve got a
hunger that one night won’t come anywhere near satisfying,’ Jax told her rawly, fisting a hand in her tumbling curls as he snaked a string of kisses down over her collarbone and found a plump, pointed nipple to torment with attention.
‘Oh… Jax,’ she gasped, a fire trail of tingles lighting up from her breast to her pelvis where a warm damp sensation pulsed.