It had taken every ounce of his willpower, which was not much to begin with when it came to her, to keep rejecting her in the face of her increasingly reckless questions. In the face of her soft mouth flush against his, her breath coating his skin.
Take my virginity. Have sex with me, just once. Call the debt paid.
Something about the casually abhorrent way she had made that offer wouldn’t leave him alone even now.
As if she was offering herself up like some sacrifice to circumstances beyond her help and he...he was unscrupulous and monstrous enough to want to take it.
It hurt him, he realized, stunned at the new development. It stung that she would think him low enough to take her under those conditions.
Did she think him so completely without morals? Hadn’t he done all he could to make her think that?
But the farce he had begun sat like a knife under his ribs now, constantly pinching him. That she thought he was without morals or loyalty or even basic decency grated on him.
Theos mou, the more he tried to insult her and humiliate her and chain her with his words, the more she seemed to sink under his skin, the more she seemed to carve into him.
And the thing that boomed loud inside his head, refusing to be ignored, that had rattled him through the office hours today until he had walked out of a shareholder meeting that he had insisted on, was how tempted he had been to take her up on the disgusting offer.
Tempted to continue kissing her, to swallow her gasps and moans, to tear away the loose shirt and bare her to his gaze, to strip her until all that she worked so hard to hide was revealed to him...
Something desperate and needy inside him was mesmerized by her.
By her daring smile, by her disarming innocence, by her disquieting loyalty to her brother and mother, by her disturbingly sensual mouth that seemed to say the most outrageous things to him...
Having showered and dressed, he made his way back to the grounds, eagerly eating up the space. He spied Leah and Stavros at a distance chatting with a cousin of Giannis’s who was an absolute bore, and grinned at the scowl that was beginning to make an appearance on his friend’s brow when the younger man kept touching Leah.
Stavros, when it came to Leah, was like a dog with his favorite bone... No one would touch her if it was up to him, no one would even look at her...although for the first time since Dmitri had met Stavros, he began to understand Stavros’s possessiveness.
Theos, he wished he didn’t but he did.
He took a champagne flute from a passing waiter and downed it in one go, feeling decidedly on edge. Deciding he needed something stronger, he was about to walk toward the bar set up near the house when he heard husky laughter and turned toward the gazebo.
The vividly red curve of a woman’s lush mouth met his gaze. Arrested, he stared, realizing slowly that it was none other than Jas.
Jas, as he had never seen or imagined her—exotic, stunning, brimming with a sensuality that had every drop of blood in him pounding south. Possessive desire knocked at him.
You’re not my type.
You’re prickly, you’ll be high maintenance in bed.
Each and every one of his words came back to him as if fate had very neatly and viciously aligned them for him to swallow back.
She stood in the gazebo, a circle of light bathing her from head to toe. He noticed her shoulders first. A strange thing to be noticing about a woman, he instantly thought, the excellent champagne warming his throat.
Bare and delicately rounded, while her long arms had a muscle tone to them. His fingers itched to trace the graceful line of her neck to her collarbone.
Her hair, her glorious hair, finally free of that knot, framed her face in thick, wavy curls, softening that feral look.
A shimmering gold dress, with a neckline that crisscrossed over her breasts, pushed her breasts up and then, right below, flared out into billowing folds. It ended several inches above her knees, baring long, toned legs that literally went on forever.
For days, she had been covered up in the baggiest of clothes.
He had been right, she was far too much on the thin side, all jutting bones and sharp angles. But the shimmering fabric made everything of what there was of her.
She looked like an exotic bird; nothing so pedestrian as the word beautiful would suit her. A barely there chain hung over her throat with a glittering diamond pendant nestling in that cleavage.
Desire and possessiveness rolled through him in waves.
It felt like his stamp of possession that she wore a thing he had bought. Even though the simple fact that she was wearing the necklace proved that she clearly didn’t know it. She would probably throw it in his face, he thought, grinning.