Married to a Mistress(23)

‘Something rather less choregraphed, a little warmer and more enthusiastic,’ Angelos purred with sudden dangerous cool, strolling over to the side of the bed to stare down at her with slumberous eyes of alarming shrewdness. ‘I’m developing a strong suspicion that to date your bedroom forays have been one big yawn, because you really don’t understand how I feel, do you?’

Face pink, and uneasy now, Maxie levered herself up on one elbow. ‘What are you trying to imply?’

‘You’re about to find out.’ Disorientatingly, his bold black eyes flamed with amusement as he began unbuttoning his shirt.

‘Is that a threat?’ Maxie said breathlessly.

‘Is that fear or hope I hear?’ With a soft, unbearably sexy laugh, Angelos dispensed with his shirt and gazed down mockingly into very wide blue eyes. ‘Your face...the expression is priceless!’

Maxie veiled her scrutiny, her fair complexion reddening.

Angelos strolled across the room, indolent now that he had her exactly where he wanted her, fully in control. ‘As for me thinking about sex all the time...don’t you know men? I’ve been celibate for many weeks. I’ve wanted you for an incredibly long time. I’m not used to waiting and fighting every step of the way for what I want. When you have everything, what you cannot have naturally assumes huge importance—’

‘And when you finally get it, I suppose it means next to nothing?’ Maxie slotted in tightly.

Angelos elevated a slanting ebony brow ‘Lighten up,’ he advised, not even pretending not to comprehend her meaning. ‘Only time will decide that. I live in the present and so should you, pethi mou.’

He undressed with fluid ease. She watched him. Ever since that night at the cottage, his powerful image had been stamped into her brain like a Technicolor movie still. But she was still hopelessly enthralled, shaken by the extent to which she responded to his intensely physical allure. Yet she had never seen beauty in the male body until he came along. But from his wide brown shoulders, slim hips and long, powerful hair-roughened thighs, Angelos made her mouth run dry, her pulses race and her palms perspire.

‘You’ve been so quiet since that ceremony...and now you recline like a very beautiful stone statue on my bed.’ Angelos skimmed off his black briefs in one long, lazy movement. ‘If it wasn’t so ridiculous, I would think you were scared of me.’

Maxie managed to laugh but her throat was already constricting with nerves. He was so relaxed about his nudity, quite unconcerned that he was hugely aroused. And while common sense was telling her that of course God had fashioned men and women to fit, Maxie just could not begin to imagine how at that moment.

Angelos came down on the wide bed beside her. He scanned the sudden defensive upward tilt of her perfect profile, trailed a slow and appreciative hand through the lush tumble of golden strands of hair cascading off the pillows. He threw himself back and closed his hands round her slender forearms to bring her gently down to him. ‘And now my reward for waiting,’ he breathed with indolent satisfaction. ‘Nothing can disturb or part us here.’

Maxie gazed down into smouldering golden eyes full of expectancy. ‘Angelos...’

He reached up to run the tip of his tongue erotically along the tremulous line of her generous mouth. ‘You feel like ice. I’ll melt you,’ he promised huskily, deft fingers already engaged in releasing the catch on her bra.

Maxie trembled, feeling her whole body filled with delicious tension. She closed her eyes. He kissed her, and every time he kissed her it got just that little bit more tormenting, and she would open her lips wider, needing more pressure, more passion, begging for it as the floodtide of unstoppable hunger began to build and race through her veins.

He rolled her over and closed a hand over the pouting swell of one pale breast. Her taut body jumped as he smiled brilliantly down into her shaken eyes. ‘And yet you are so red-hot, responsive when I touch you. Every time that gives me a high,’ Angelos confessed thickly. ‘I love seeing you out of control.’

Threatened by that admission, Maxie shifted uneasily. ‘I don’t like that—’

‘You’ll have to learn to like it.’ Angelos bent his dark, arrogant head over a pink straining nipple and laved that achingly tender tip with his tongue, engulfing her in sensation that she now struggled instinctively to resist.

‘No...’ she gasped.

‘Don’t fight what I can make you feel...’ he urged hoarsely, employing expert fingers on her sensitive flesh, making her squirm in breathless, whimpering excitement.

Her body wasn’t her own any more, but by then she didn’t want it to be. With every atom of her being she craved those caresses. Wild sensation was addictive. She was hooked between one second and the next, her mind wiped clean of all thought. The hot wire of his seduction pulled tight as heat flared between her shifting thighs. She moaned his name low in her throat.

He took her mouth with a hot, sexual dominance then. He sealed her to the abrasively masculine angles of his hard, hungry body. She panted for breath when he released her swollen lips, sensually bemused eyes focusing on the brooding intensity of that darkly handsome face now curiously stilled above hers.

‘Angelos...?’ she mumbled, her fingers rising without her volition to trace the unremittingly harsh compression of his mouth.

He jerked back his head, so that she couldn’t touch him. In pained bewilderment Maxie lowered her hand again and stared up at him.

‘You used to watch me all the time,’ he breathed grimly. ‘But the instant I turned in your direction, you looked away...except that once, seven months ago. Then I knew you were mine, as much mine as if I had a brand on you!’

Stricken by that assurance slung at her out of the blue, Maxie twisted her head away, feeling naked, exposed. Even then Angelos had been able to see inside her, see below the surface which had dazzled other men. And, worst of all, he had immediately recognised the hunger she had refused to recognise within herself.

‘So I waited for you to make your move,’ Angelos admitted in a tone of growing condemnation. ‘I waited and I waited for you to dump him. But you still stayed with him! I began to wonder if you had a single living brain cell inside that gorgeous head!’

He was talking about Leland. Shocked rigid by what he was telling her, Maxie muttered, ‘But I...I didn’t—’

Angelos vented a harsh, cynical laugh. ‘Oh, I know why you stayed with him now! You owed him too much money to walk out. Did you think I hadn’t worked that out yet? But that’s when you reduced yourself to the level of a marketable commodity, and when I think about that it makes me want to smash things! Because, having learnt that wonderful lesson with him, you then sold yourself to me for an even higher price.’

‘How can you—?’

‘What else is this marriage but the price I had to pay for you?’

‘You...swine,’ Maxie whispered brokenly, white as death as the contempt he had concealed from her sank into her sensitive flesh like poison.

‘And I’ll get you out of my system soon if it kills me,’ Angelos swore with ragged force as he gazed broodingly down at her.

‘Start by letting me out of this bed,’ she demanded unevenly.

‘No way...I paid with a wedding ring and millions of pounds for this pleasure.’

‘No!’

‘But you’re no good at saying no to me,’ Angelos murmured with roughened menace against her tremulous lips. ‘Sexually you are one very weak reed where I’m concerned. It’s my one and only consolation while I’m making a bloody fool of myself over a woman like you!’

‘How dare you?’ Maxie gulped.

But Angelos skimmed an assured hand down the taut length of one quivering thigh and kissed her with fierce, angry hunger. And it was like instantaneous combustion. She went up in flames. He didn’t hold her down. He didn’t pin her to the mattress. He kissed her into submission, tormented her with every erotic trick in his extensive repertoire and the most overpowering physical passion. He swept away her defences with terrifying ease.

Stroking apart her slender thighs, Angelos traced the swollen, moist sensitivity at the very heart of her with knowing fingers. With a strangled moan, Maxie clutched at him in desperation. He controlled her with the hunger she could not deny and made her ache for him. That ache for satisfaction tortured her. He groaned something in Greek, pushing her tumbled hair back off her brow with an unsteady hand, circling her mouth caressingly with his one more time.

As Angelos shifted over her she couldn’t get him there fast enough. Her own urgency was as screamingly intense as his. And then she felt him, hot and hard and gloriously male, seeking entrance, and she shivered convulsively, on a high of such anticipation and excitement she was mindless.

So when he thrust hungrily into her willing body she was quite unprepared for the jagged pain of that forceful intrusion. Pain ripped apart the fog of sensual sensation and made her jerk and cry out in shock as she instinctively strove to push him away from her. But Angelos had already stilled to frown down at her with stunned, disbelieving black eyes. ‘Maxie—?’

‘What are you looking at me like that for?’ Maxie whispered in stricken embarrassment, utterly appalled and outraged that her own body could have betrayed her to such an extent.