A Deal with Demakis(43)
Every word out of his mouth was the utter, inescapable truth. Only she hadn’t seen it until now. It coated her mouth with distaste, twisted the biggest relationship of her life, the only one, to a painful, jagged mass.
Was that what everything between her and Tyler had been reduced to? Had she clung to him all these years knowing that things weren’t right? She couldn’t bear the desolate thought. “You don’t know what you are talking about. You just can’t understand what the big deal is, why Venetia and I are willing to go to any lengths for Tyler. Because you’re incapable of understanding it, of feeling anything, and it’s beginning to annoy the hell out of you.”
His face could have been a mask poured out of concrete. Every muscle in his face froze in contrast to the blistering emotion in his gaze. It put paid to her stupid claim that he didn’t feel anything. “You little hypocrite. I saw you when he kissed you. You couldn’t wait to get away and yet you clung to him. You want to know how it feels when you feel the opposite, Lexi, when you can’t wait to rip off someone’s clothes?”
She could have said that she already knew—that it was all she wanted to do when she was near him. But he didn’t give her the chance. Pressing his upper body into hers, he nudged a thigh between her legs and claimed her mouth.
Her shocked gasp was lost in his mouth. The stubble on his chin scratched her sensitive skin, the hard angles of his body imprinted on her and she shivered as he nipped at her mouth, knocking the breath out of her.
He didn’t kiss her gently like Tyler had done. It was as if the storm had burst, as if he had been waiting forever to do it, as if his next breath depended on kissing her. His hands stole under her T-shirt until his hot palms were laid flat on her bare flesh.
His tongue licked the inside of her lower lip, sucked at her tongue, stroked her to a high that she had to climb.
It was a kiss with pure erotic intent, it was a kiss to possess her senses, it was a kiss to prove his point. But he didn’t know that he didn’t need to. She was already a slave to her body’s wants and desires when she was near him.
A moan rose through her throat and misted into the darkness as he sank his teeth into her lower lip. An electric shiver tingled up her spine as a million nerve endings sprang into life, both pain and pleasure coalescing and shooting down between her legs.
The wetness at her sex shocked and aroused her even more.
She groaned loud, a whimper to stop and a plea to continue, all rolled into one. Her knees trembled and she rubbed against the hard thigh lodged against her throbbing core, mindless with aching need.
His hands gentled in her hair, his hard muscles pulled back from her. He murmured something in Greek. She shivered as he blew a soft breath on her throbbing lower lip. Something almost like an apology reached her ears.
He claimed her lips again, but this time, he was exploring, teasing, and it was the unexpected gentleness that broke the spell for her.
With a grunt, she pushed him back from her, her chest rising and falling with the effort it took to pull air into her lungs. “No,” she whispered into the darkness. And then repeated it louder for her sake more than his. “No, Nikos.”
The dark intent in his eyes scared her, her own powerlessness in the face of the blazing fire between them scared her. If he touched her again, if he kissed her again, she wouldn’t say no. She couldn’t say no.
He was the first man to incite knee-buckling desire in her. Why did he have to be so out of her league, so different from who she was?