Her shirt and bra were dispensed with. Shoes kicked off. Trousers opened and pulled down. Underwear ripped. She didn’t care. She just craved contact. Mutual desperation fuelled their movements, and they took a simultaneous breath of relief when Maks entered her on a smooth thrust.
But the relief was soon replaced with urgency as the tension built and built, until Zoe was begging incoherently for Maks to release them both... And even though she’d been begging for it, when it came she still wasn’t ready.
She was tossed high, and then fell deep down into a whirlpool of pleasure so intense that she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. Could only hold on as the storm racked Maks’s body too and only then the tumult subsided.
Maks slumped over her body, still embedded deeply, and Zoe wrapped her legs around him and wished that this moment would never end.
* * *
When Maks woke, the bedroom was filled with the pearlescent light of dawn. He felt drunk, but it wasn’t from alcohol. It was from an overload of sensual pleasure. Zoe lay curled into his side, one arm thrown over his chest and one leg over his thigh, her foot locked behind his knee, as if to stop him from going anywhere.
He extricated himself carefully from her embrace, the nerve-ends in his body firing to life as he touched the plump curve of one breast and felt the indentation of her waist...one silky thigh.
She curled up on her side, saying something in her sleep. Maks pulled a sheet over her. She was adorably slow to get going in the morning, sleepy and sexy.
Naked, he went to the open window and stood there for a moment, relishing the cool morning breeze on his overheated skin. He felt utterly sated, and yet a delicious tendril of anticipation coiled in his gut.
He heard movement behind him and looked around, a smile curving his mouth, his blood already heating at the thought of waking Zoe up in a very explicit—
Click. She was sitting up in bed and she had her camera lifted to her face. She was taking pictures.
At first Maks’s smile stayed in place. ‘What are you doing?’
Click. It was as if the sound of the shutter woke him from a trance. He was naked. She was taking pictures.
His smile faded. He said it again. ‘What are you doing?’
Zoe lowered the camera. Not even her bare breasts could distract Maks from the sudden cold rush of reality. And the feeling of intense exposure.
‘I woke up and you looked so beautiful in the light... I just... I didn’t think...’
Maks shook his head. ‘Don’t do that.’
She put the camera down in her lap. Her eyes were wide. ‘Maks, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. You looked so beautiful in the light... I just acted on instinct.’
A sense of vulnerability prickled over his skin. A sense of waking out of a deep dream. He felt cold, all of a sudden. He needed to get away from Zoe’s huge eyes.
‘I’m taking
a shower.’
‘Maks...?’
But he didn’t turn back.
He stood under the hot spray a few seconds later, but it couldn’t melt the block of ice that had formed in his gut. He didn’t have to look at his phone to know that it would be blowing up after he’d rescheduled a whole day of meetings yesterday.
His brother Nikos had been renowned for this kind of behaviour—going AWOL and then turning up in the tabloids, falling out of a club with two women on his arm, in a different city to the one where he’d been due to attend meetings.
Sharif was a little more circumspect, but recently he’d been at the mercy of some unfavourable kiss-and-tells after one of too many discarded lovers had had enough.
Maks did not do this. Maks had had a well-honed instinct to keep out of the limelight after his parents’ toxicity had blighted his and his sister’s lives. He’d always been the solid brother. The one who never failed to turn up to meetings and was discreet in all matters.
He knew he and Zoe would be all over the papers by now, because they’d been seen together at more than one event. And if he wasn’t mistaken he was pretty sure a paparazzo had been following them yesterday. He hadn’t even cared all that much.
And yet it had taken her lifting a camera to her face to wake him up. He hadn’t been able to see her face. He’d only seen that lens. It had made him realise just how far under his skin he’d let her burrow.
All the way.