‘Nothing? You can say nothing?’ He gave a harsh bark of a laugh but his voice had been agonised, desperate. ‘I touch you and you melt for me—that is not nothing. I do not believe you have ever felt this way before because I know I have not.’
She didn’t want to hear this, couldn’t hear it. She had to believe she was doing the right thing, the only thing.
‘Listen to me, Sophy.’ He took her arms in his, holding her in front of him as he looked down into her face with burning eyes. ‘There was a girl once, many years ago. We were going to be married and then I found out she was playing around. The same old story that happens a hundred times a day. I finished it but I told myself I would never meet anyone else I cared for like I did Larissa. And then I met you and I knew I had never loved her as I was meant to love.’
‘No.’ Her face was white. ‘No, you don’t love me.’
‘Yes.’ He shook her slightly, his body rigid. ‘I’ve had relationships since Larissa but I have always known, and the women have too, that they couldn’t go anywhere. But this is different.’
‘You thought you loved Larissa but now you say you didn’t,’ she whispered through pale lips. ‘You would say the same to me in time. Someone would come along, someone younger and prettier. And we hardly know each other, anyway,’ she finished desperately.
‘I have known you from the beginning of time,’ he said softly. ‘I recognised it that night by the pool, and so did you.’
‘No.’ She tried to struggle free but he wouldn’t let her. ‘I don’t want this. I don’t want you.’
‘You want me.’ His voice was as hard as steel.
‘No.’ Fear made her cruel. ‘I despise the sort of man you are.’
‘Despise me?’ His voice was harsh again. ‘You couldn’t respond like this to a man you despise.’
The kiss was as savagely challenging as his words and continued to be so until she stopped struggling. By the time the force had gone the power of his mouth was holding her more effectively than anything else could have done, and she was accepting his hands and his mouth blindly.
Each one of his kisses was more urgent, deeper, hungrier, and she was answering the desperate need with a desire to match his, passion sending rivulets of sensation into every part of her. His hands had slid under the soft material of her top, sliding over the silky skin beneath as he explored her rounded curves until she moaned beneath his lips.
His tongue was probing, thrusting, sending electric currents coursing through her body as she melted against him, the relentless plundering of her mouth and the sure firm hands on her body creating a throbbing in the core of her that she’d never experienced before. Her body felt hot and molten, and she was no longer sure who was leading and who was following, she just knew she wanted more.
‘You see, Sophy?’ His voice was shaking, the tremours that pulsed the big male frame echoed in hers. ‘You see how it is?’
She couldn’t deny the messages her flesh was sending to his, but his voice was a subtle intrusion into the world of colour and light and sensation beneath her closed eyelids, and she opened heavy lids, her mind dizzy.
‘This is real,’ he said softly. ‘I am real. Me, Andreas Karydis. I want you because I love you. Do you understand?’
She wanted to believe him. With all her heart she wanted to believe
him but in the final analysis she dared not. She had seen what loving a man with all one’s heart and mind and soul and body had done to her mother, and she couldn’t cope with that sort of consuming emotion. It had been safe with Matthew; she had been in control and, although life had never been exciting or possessed of highs and lows, it had been her life. She had held the strings and kept her autonomy.
And suddenly she saw very clearly what she had to do. Struggling for calmness, she backed away from him, praying she would have the strength to say it all without breaking down.
‘I understand,’ she said quietly, ‘and I love you, too.’
He waited, knowing from the look on her face and the tone of her voice that in spite of her confession something was still terribly, terribly wrong.
‘And because I feel like I do, I can’t be with you, Andreas.’
He did react then, taking a step towards her which was instantly checked when she said, her hands raised to ward him off, ‘Please listen to me. I…I’ll try to explain and then you’ll see there can’t be any sort of future for us.’
She told him it all, starting from the first time, as a small child of perhaps three or four, that she remembered asking about her father. The picture in the attic, her difficult childhood, the heartache and bitterness of spirit that eventually killed her mother, it all came pouring out. ‘Jill said something recently that I vehemently objected to,’ she finished sadly. ‘She said I was damaged. I hated that—it suggests some sort of victim thing—but none the less she’s right. I can’t change the way I am and all I’d do was to make us both miserable and destroy anything we had, even if—’ She stopped abruptly.
‘Even if?’
She raised her chin at his soft voice. ‘I was going to say even if you are not like my father,’ she said jerkily. ‘You see, you see how it is? I don’t believe you, Andreas. I can’t trust you. I care too much to be able to do that. All the time I’d be waiting. No one can live like that.’
She knew from the unmasked agony in the beautiful silver-grey eyes that he knew she meant it. ‘So you run back to your insulated little bubble in England, is that it?’ he grated. ‘Where you consider yourself impregnable. To a life that is risk-free. A life that will eventually dry you up and shrivel everything that makes you you. Fear will turn you into a lonely young woman and then a lonely old one, and it is a poor bedfellow. You have met me now; I shall be there in your head even if you shut me out of your flesh. You can’t go back to the way things were before you came here.’
‘I can try.’ She had to do this for both their sakes, but it was killing her. ‘It will be me that suffers, after all.’
‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ He stared at her, his face set and the note of pleading gone from his voice. ‘You as an individual finished the day we met. When you suffer, I suffer now. We are in this together. Your pain is my pain, the same as your joy and happiness would be my joy and happiness. Don’t you see what you have done, Sophy? You have become part of me and you won’t alter that by going away.’