Bought for Her Innocence

Without opening her eyes, she nodded. Her hand moved restlessly over his chest, traced the ridges of his abdomen, came to rest on his shaft, over the duvet. He clasped her wrist, but she slapped him away and resumed her position. Heat punched through him as she played with it, a soft smile playing around her lips.

As if it was her right to fondle him. As if there was nothing else she would rather do.

“Jas, if you keep doing that, I will take you again.”

Her mouth pressed into his skin. “So who’s stopping you?”

Something between a groan and a growl escaped him as she pushed herself upon her elbow and proceeded to lick his nipple. As though she were a cat and he cream. “Your body is unused to this, to me. Since you don’t seem to possess any good sense, it falls to me. And I’d rather not test my self-control, especially when it comes to you.”

“Okay,” she agreed, and moved her hand up to his chest but showed no signs of releasing him.

Theos, he hadn’t meant to say so much.

Did he have to spell out everything to the infuriating woman? Did she find some perverse pleasure in behaving so outrageously that he inevitably watched over her?

And beneath his increasing fervor to have her again, he found that he liked indulging Jasmine. He wanted to stay there and let her play with him, to see a smile light up her eyes.

Usually, he couldn’t wait to get away the moment his release hit. He had tried a couple of times to stay, to wrench some kind of feeling out of himself but all he had felt was coldness, an instant detachment that curdled any pleasure he had found just minutes ago.

An empty hollowness that he couldn’t rid himself of.

So he moved on, to the next chase, to the next warm body that would provide that ephemeral release.

And yet, languorous heat pumped through him as she caressed him with more of an artless curiosity rather than skilled strokes designed to arouse. With her vined around him like that, he never wanted to get out of the bed.

Dmitri knew he should feel guilty. Or some other horrible emotion should be coursing through him, remonstrating with him for his lack of tenderness or finesse. Or shame that he had willingly given up that thread of honor Giannis had tried to instill in him.

Stavros would tell him, in that forbiddingly arrogant voice of his, that he should feel guilty about not feeling guilty, at least.

Breathing in the wild scent of Jas and sex combined, feeling her soft curves surround him, he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything but the most primal kind of satisfaction.

Sated after the most intense sex of his life, he couldn’t hate himself for it.

How could he when he barely ever felt anything this deep? When even the faces of the women he’d slept with the previous night faded by the next morning? When, sometimes, even sex didn’t fill the void inside him for a few minutes?

The whole world, including Giannis, even Stavros, who knew him better than anyone else, thought he had no discipline, barely any self-control. That he gave in to every self-indulgence because that was all he cared about—pleasure and wealth and everything superficial.

What they didn’t know was his inability to feel anything.

Not after he had cleaved himself in two and removed the guilt of his mother’s death and the pain his father’s fists had wreaked on him. That if he accessed anything deep, if he stayed too long with any woman or in any relationship, he started to panic.

As if that boy was just waiting to come back to life, bringing with him unbearable agony and pain. So he kept his entire life about casual relationships, transient fun. If not for Giannis first, and then Stavros grounding him, he had a feeling he would have become nothing but an empty shell who fed on transient pleasures and swam through life without meaning.

Until Jas had come into his life.

Her eyelids were drooping, and she still had that silly smile over her face. Then he was smiling because she looked infinitely breathtaking in the utter enthusiasm with which she’d embraced tonight.

And that smile knocked over into his life, kicking everything he had ever believed about himself wide-open, as though she was the domino who started it all. Digging his hands into her hair, he pulled her closer. “Why are you still smiling?”

Finally, she deigned to open her eyes and he found himself falling deeper and deeper into her spell. The openness of her expression made it impossible to be anything but. She looked at him as if he was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen.

It filled him with a strangely exhilarating weight that he had not known in his adult life. It magnified inside him, spreading to his chest, filling every nook and cranny. As if he was now responsible for keeping that smile on her face.