Her hands went to his chest of their own accord, drawn by a lure as inexplicable as it was inescapable. She tentatively explored the ridges of muscle that had fascinated her earlier and her fingertips encountered hard points. Mesmerized by this unexpected indicator of his excitement, she investigated the phenomena completely.
He groaned and yanked her into his body, his hold growing fierce, the kiss turning incendiary. Fiery passion sizzled between their lips and she did not pull away. That fact registered with what was left of her conscious mind along with the realization she felt not one iota of fear.
There was no room inside her for anything but an all-consuming erotic craving and physical delight, both sparked by him. He tasted good, so different from her and yet infinitely right and desirable.
Without really knowing how it had happened, his tongue was in her mouth and he was teaching her how to find pleasure in an intimate kiss she had always considered much too invasive. She wanted to give it back and copied his movements with instinctive feminine sensuality she had been sure she no longer possessed.
Growling, he lifted her off the sand, grinding his pelvis against hers and causing shock waves to ripple throughout her body.
But still, she felt no trepidation...nothing that would dilute the molten lava of need flowing through her veins.
When he pressed against her bottom, causing her thighs to drift apart, it was the most natural thing in the world to lift her legs and lock her ankles tight behind his back. Her skirt rucked up, leaving her skin bare against him in an unbearably exciting connection and sexual hunger exploded inside her as her sweet spot rubbed against his hardened male flesh.
She needed something and she pressed herself against him as intimately as possible, gyrating her hips to increase the sensations exploding in her most intimate flesh.
His hand trespassed the silk of her panties to touch a place that had not been touched in seven years. The feel of his fingertip at the entrance to her body brought forth a rush of dew drenched pleasure. Then his finger moved to possess her and old fear rushed through her in an unstoppable torrent, dousing her pleasure and filling her with a desperate need to be free.
She tore her mouth from his. "No. Stop. What are we doing?"
"You do not know?" he asked incredulously, his voice thick with desire.
She didn't answer. Could not answer. The feel of that finger almost inside her had brought forth memories that would drown her if she let them.
Unlocking her ankles, she frantically tried to scramble from his arms.
After a second of unequal struggling, he let her go, spewing words in Greek she had no desire to know the translation for.
"I'm sorry," she jerked out, yanking her skirt down to cover her wobbly legs.
Her heart was beating her to death, her palms were damp and her mouth was cottony and dry.
His hands clenched and she stepped back, unable to prevent a reaction born of the past but called forth in the present.
His face a mask of frustrated desire, he threw his head back and inhaled deeply before looking at her again.
When he did, the feral intensity had been muted, but his mouth was set in a grim line. "No. It is I who should apologize. A man should not take advantage of a woman's weak emotional state. It was wrong to kiss you when you were already upset from the week's events."
She couldn't believe he was taking it on himself, but then hadn't she always known he was no common man? He stood above all others in her mind and had been elevated to almost saint status with his understanding of her rejection.
He didn't know why she had pulled back and had not asked, creating a well of gratitude that ran soul deep inside her.
"I didn't mean to let it go that far," she said, remembering accusations from the past of being a tease, tormenting words that haunted her nightmares.
"I did not mean for it to happen at all," he admitted ruefully, making her smile when it should have been impossible. "I saw you from my room and came out to check on you and to apologize for my inappropriate remark earlier. Instead, I took advantage of an attraction neither of us would benefit from acting on."
While his words completely exonerated her from blame and set her mind at ease, they left gaping wounds in her heart. He was saying that they did not belong together in any sense.
She'd known that.
Had always understood he was way out of her league, but it still hurt. He'd given her her first taste of real passion and the possibility she could know the entire gamut of sexual experience with him tantalized her. She'd gotten frightened, but only when he touched her like she'd been touched that one fateful night.
If she could tell him about it...ask him to avoid doing that, would she be able to make love completely without fear?
Why was she even asking herself these questions? He had made no secret of the fact that he was appalled by the fact he'd kissed her. Sexual intimacy with Sebastian Kouros was not on the cards for her.
She forced her lips into a semblance of a smile. "You're right. A relationship between the two of us would be out of the question." She was trying to sound sophisticated and casually accepting of his reading of the situation, but she was afraid the façade would crack any second. "I—I think, I'll go to bed now."
He insisted on walking her to her room, not relieving her of his now grim presence until she shut the door on his formal goodnight.
Sebastian walked away from Rachel's room calling himself six kinds of a fool. What in the hell had he been thinking to kiss her like that?
To kiss her at all?
Okay, so he had wanted her for years, but she was not the woman for him. Not even for a brief affair. She might be different from Andrea, but Rachel was still daughter to a piranha.
As well, it would hurt his family if he got involved with her. They deserved better than a second serving of the kind of gossip that had surrounded Matthias's marriage. He had loved his great-uncle very much, but the old man had been ruled by his libido when it came to Andrea and he had brought shame upon their family.
How could a Greek man with any kind of pride stay married to a woman he knew to be unfaithful?
And yet Matthias had.
The night of the crash had not been the first time his uncle had found evidence of his much younger wife's sexual exploits outside the bounds of their marriage. Each time, Sebastian had been sure the old man would finally come to his senses and kick the bitch out of his life, but Matthias never had.
Sebastian would never allow a woman to make such a fool of him. He had no tolerance for lies and subterfuge of the type that had marked Matthias's second marriage. He abhorred any type of dishonesty and would not give the time of day to a woman who lied about her age much less her fidelity.
His great-uncle had been smart enough to prevent his beautiful, conscience-less wife from cleaning him out financially and had shown his brain was still functioning on some level within the bounds of his marriage in not leaving her anything in his will, but there was no doubt Andrea Demakis had bankrupted the old man's pride.
For a Greek male, that was the worst consequence imaginable.
Sebastian had found it impossible to comprehend Matthias's willingness to stay married. How could he have allowed himself to be manipulated by his sexuality into pursuing a lifestyle the total antithesis of what he had known his first sixty-plus years? A man should live his final years with dignity, but his uncle had not.
Humiliation had been his companion, particularly for the past year. What had spurred Andrea to wave her sexual conquests in her elderly husband's face? What had made her behave so foully? And why had Rachel ignored it all, never once attempting to stop the abhorrent behavior?
The dark night outside his bedroom window offered no answers, but the questions served to remind him that no matter how different Rachel appeared on the surface, she had been too self-interested to care about Matthias Demakis.
Just like her mother.
Rachel fi
nished packing the last box in her mother's bedroom and closed it. A sense of accomplishment warred with disappointment. She'd searched Andrea's room thoroughly and found nothing related to her life before she married Matthias Demakis. No indication of who the man who had fathered Rachel might be.
Considering her mother's taste in companions, she would have given up her desire to find him years ago but for two poignant memories from her childhood.
She'd been little, three, maybe four, and sitting on a man's lap. He'd been reading to her and while she had no idea what he'd been reading, she could still remember the sense of love and security she'd felt. She'd called him, "Daddy," and kissed his cheek when he'd finished. He'd hugged her tight and when she closed her eyes she could remember that hug.
It had made her feel safe.
And she remembered waking in the night and searching an apartment in the dark for her daddy, crying and calling his name. She'd been about five, or six then. Her mother had slept on, no doubt passed out from alcohol or something more potent, but Rachel had stayed up all night, accepting that her daddy wasn't coming back only when the first rays of sun indicated a new day.
She didn't know if her father had chosen to stay out of their lives as her mother had claimed or if he had been unable to find them. Andrea and Rachel had lived in various parts of Europe since Rachel had started school.
Her mother's exploits had made the gutter press at times, but wouldn't have been noteworthy in the States. She had been neither filthy rich, until Matthias, nor a celebrity.
Even her marriage to Matthias Demakis had only made her of interest to a few gossip rags in the States. While other students at her university had learned enough about her exploits to judge Rachel on them, that didn't mean a man who hadn't seen Andrea in over twenty years would recognize her in publicized photos, or even read that type of paper.
Rachel wanted to believe her father was an American man, unaware of Andrea's recent notoriety and longtime residence in Europe. However, she had to acknowledge that he could very well be as permanently gone as Andrea.
Shaking off thoughts that led nowhere, Rachel ran tape along the box's seam. For whatever reason, her father was lost to her and that was that. She tore the tape off and straightened, blowing at a strand of hair that had fallen from her ponytail. Emotionally detached, she surveyed the once decadent room now stripped of much of its sumptuous decor.
Sebastian had encouraged her to pack everything for the auction. He planned to redo the room in the near future, erasing Andrea's influence on the villa as thoroughly as possible. Of course, that's not how he'd put it. He'd been very tactful since their discussion in the study three days ago, but his feelings regarding Andrea Demakis were no secret.
Stretching tired muscles, Rachel reached toward the ceiling and then bent from one side to the other. Her muscles ached and her eyes burned with fatigue. She'd spent a lot of time on her knees packing and sorting in the past three days and had slept poorly at night, too much time given to reliving Sebastian's kiss.
Bending forward, she touched her fingertips to the plush carpeting. Straightening, she leaned backward, doing almost a backbend, and saw a pair of trouser covered male legs.
The Greek curse that met her ears was instantly recognizable and just as startling.