Uncut Bundle

‘Was there ever a more arrogant man on the face of this earth?’

‘Not here, surely?’ He looked at her wryly, and then gazed around. ‘I’m standing in the middle of my own bedroom.’

‘Then come to me,’ Lisa suggested seductively.

Was lovemaking supposed to start with shrieks of laughter, and end like this? Lisa wondered, lying snug in Tino’s arms. He had just dropped off to sleep, as well

he might after the exertions of the day—and she didn’t just have flying in mind, she reflected mischievously, brushing a stray lock of inky-black hair from his eyes. He moaned softly with contentment, and shifted position slightly at her side, drawing her a little closer.

‘I think I love you, Tino Zagorakis.’ She was safe in the knowledge that he couldn’t hear her—but she did love him, Lisa realised with a jolt of happiness. He was everything to her. Tino was everything she had ever dreamed of and far more than she could ever have imagined. He made her laugh…he made sex fun and safe—and he’d found a use for the emerald earrings, though not the use the high-class jeweller would have had in mind when he’d secured the sale… If the jeweller discovered where those earrings had been clipped Tino would never be able to return them!

Burrowing her face into Tino’s chest, Lisa kissed him tenderly, but she had disturbed him, and he stirred restlessly, pushing her away in his sleep.

‘No…I don’t want to.’ He thrashed his head on the pillow.

‘What don’t you want to do, my love?’ she said softly, tracing the line of his mouth very gently with her fingertip.

‘Don’t hurt me.’ The words jerked out of him, muddled and indistinct.

Resting up on one elbow, Lisa stared down feeling increasingly alarmed. ‘Tino? Are you asleep?’ He was fast asleep, she realised, and he was held fast in the grip of some awful dream. ‘Tino, please, wake up.’

Lisa’s heart was thundering in her chest as Tino shook her off.

‘No!’ he exclaimed louder than before, jerking away from her.

‘Tino!’ Shaking his arm, she raised her voice, hoping to get through to him.

‘Leave me… Go away… Get out of here!’

His voice, still muffled by the pillows, was barely decipherable. But she knew now that he wasn’t speaking to her, he was still locked in the dream—and there was something horribly reminiscent of the commune about it.

But surely Tino hadn’t lived in a commune? That was too much of a coincidence to swallow, and the world would have heard of it by now—as her past had been played out in the glossies and tabloids. So, what, then? From the little Lisa could unravel, she gathered someone was trying to force him to do something, and Tino was determined to fight them off.

They both had terrible secrets locked inside them like maggots waiting to destroy any chance of happiness that came their way.

‘Don’t!’

She recoiled from his cry, but the sound of it was so distressing she reached out anyway, braving his flailing limbs. He swore at her viciously in Greek. It was as if in his sleeping mind the language he had been using all night with her, the language of business and Shakespeare and love, had been wiped from his mind by some unspeakable wickedness from his past.

When his breathing finally steadied and he was quiet again, she curled up, nuzzling her head into the hollow between his shoulders, and wrapping her arms protectively around his waist. She lay awake long into the night wondering if Stella knew… Did anyone know that Tino Zagorakis cried out in his sleep like a wounded child?

‘Lisa?’

She held her breath as he turned over, and then she smiled in the darkness to see him returned to his normal self.

‘Why are you staring at me?’ he murmured so softly she had to lean closer to hear him. ‘When you could be here—’ he turned her like lightning so that she found herself beneath him ‘—kissing me?’

‘You were dreaming.’

‘Of you,’ he said confidently. Lifting himself on his arms, he stared down at her.

‘No.’ Lisa shook her head. ‘Not me, Tino, you were dreaming about something else.’

She cried out—that small excited cry she always gave when he entered her. ‘This—I must have been thinking of this,’ he insisted, kissing her deeply as he started to move.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THEY overslept on Thursday morning, waking twenty minutes before the meeting. There wasn’t a moment to spare for a kiss, or a lingering touch, there were just shrieks of panic from Lisa, and an amused expression on Tino’s face as he jumped out of her way when she scrambled for the shower.