‘Andreas...’ she started to protest as he came round to her chair and stood behind her. ‘I don’t...’
‘You’re wasting your breath, Saskia.’ Pia chuckled. ‘Because my dear brother obviously does! Oh, you needn’t put that lordly expression on for me, brother dear.’ She laughed again, before adding mischievously, ‘And I wouldn’t mind betting that you won’t be lapping the pool at dawn...’
‘Pia!’ her mother protested, pink-cheeked, whilst Athena gave Saskia a look of concentrated hatred.
Hastily Saskia stood up, and then froze as Aristotle did the same, insisting in a thick voice, ‘I must claim the privilege of family friend and kiss the new addition to the family goodnight.’
Before Saskia could evade him he was reaching for her, but before he could put his words into action Andreas was standing between them, announcing grimly, ‘There is only one man my fiancée kisses...’
* * *
‘IF YOU’LL TAKE my advice, you’ll keep well away from Aristotle. He has a very unsavoury reputation with women. His ex-wife has accused him of being violent towards her and—’
Saskia turned as she stepped into the bedroom, her anger showing. ‘You can’t mean what I think you mean,’ she demanded whilst Andreas closed the door. How could he possibly imagine that she would even contemplate being interested in a man like the accountant? It was an insult she was simply not prepared to tolerate.
‘Can’t I?’ Andreas countered curtly. ‘You’re here for one reason and one reason only, Saskia. You’re here to act as my fiancée. Whilst I can appreciate that, being the woman you are, the temptation to feather your nest a little and do what you so obviously do best must be a strong one, let me warn you now against giving in to it. If you do, in fact...’
If she did... Why, she would rather die than let a slimeball like Ari come anywhere near her, Saskia reflected furiously. And to think that back there in the dining room she had actually felt sympathetic towards Andreas, had actually wanted to protect him. Now, though, her anger shocked through her in a fierce, dangerous flood of pride.
‘If you want the truth, I find Ari almost as repulsively loathsome as I do you,’ she threw bitterly at him.
‘You dare to speak of me in the same breath as that reptile? How dare you speak so of me...or to me...?’ Andreas demanded, his anger surging to match hers as he reached out to grab hold of her. His eyes smouldered with an intensity of emotion that Saskia could see was threatening to get out of control.
‘That man is an animal—worse than an animal. Only last year he narrowly escaped standing on a criminal charge. I cannot understand why Athena tolerates him and I have told her so.’
‘Perhaps she wants to make you jealous.’
It was an off-the-cuff remark, full of bravado, but Saskia wished immediately she had not said it when she saw the way the smoulder suddenly became a savage flare of fury.
‘She does? Or you do...? Oh, yes, I saw the way he was looking at you over dinner...touching you...’
‘That was nothing to do with me,’ Saskia protested, but she could sense that the words hadn’t touched him, that something else was fuelling his anger and feeding it, something that was hidden from her but which Andreas himself obviously found intolerable.
‘And as for you finding me loathsome,’ Andreas said through gritted teeth. ‘Perhaps it is unchivalrous, ungentlemanly of me to say so, but that wasn’t loathing I could see in your eyes earlier on today. It wasn’t loathing I could hear in your voice, feel in your body...was it? Was it?’ he demanded sharply.
Saskia started to tremble.
‘I don’t know,’ she fibbed wildly. ‘I can’t remember.’
It was, she recognised a few seconds later, the worst possible thing she could have said. Because immediately Andreas pounced, whispering with soft savagery, ‘No? Then perhaps I should help you to remember...’
She heard herself starting to protest, but somehow the words were lost—not because Andreas was refusing to listen, but because her lips were refusing to speak.
‘So when exactly was it that you found me so loathsome Saskia?’ Andreas was demanding as he closed both his arms around her, forming them into a prison from which it was impossible for her to escape. ‘When I did this...?’ His mouth was feathering over hers, teasing and tantalising it, arousing a hot torrent of sensation she didn’t want to experience. ‘Or when I did this...?’
Now his tongue-tip was probing the lips she was trying so desperately to keep firmly closed, stroking them, tracing their soft curves, over and over again, until she could hear herself moaning helplessly as they parted softly for him. But still it seemed he hadn’t extracted his pound of flesh, because even this victory wasn’t enough for him.
‘What? Still no answer...? I wonder why not,’ he was taunting her, before adding bitingly, ‘Or do I need to wonder at all? You are a woman who is used to giving her body to a man, Saskia, who is used to experiencing pleasure. And right now you want that pleasure from me.’
‘No,’ Saskia moaned in denial, trying to turn her face away from his and to break free of him.
‘Yes,’ he insisted rawly. ‘Yes. Admit it, Saskia... You want me... Your body wants mine. It wants the sexual satisfaction it’s used to...it aches and craves for.’
A shudder of shock ripped through her as Saskia recognised the truth of what he was saying. She did want him, but not in the way he was suggesting. She wanted him as a woman wanted the man she loved, she realised shakily. She wanted him as her lover, not merely as her sexual partner, someone with whom she could find a release for a basic physical need, as he was so cruelly saying. But how could she love him? She couldn’t... But she did.
She had fallen in love with him virtually the moment she had set eyes on him, Saskia acknowledged despairingly, but she had told herself that because of her loyalty to her friend he was out of bounds to her and that she could not, must not allow herself to have such feelings, just as she could not allow herself to have them now. Although for very different reasons. Megan was no longer a barrier to her loving Andreas, but Andreas himself and what he thought about her certainly was.
‘Let me go, Andreas,’ she demanded.
‘Not until you have admitted that I am right and that you want me,’ Andreas refused. ‘Or are you trying to goad me into proving to you that I am right?’
Saskia flinched as she felt the suffocating, dangerously toxic mix of fear and excitement explode inside her.
She hesitated whilst she tried to formulate the right response, the only sane, sensible response she could give, and then she realised that she had waited too long as Andreas told her rawly, ‘You’ve pushed me too far, Saskia. I want you, but you already know that, don’t you? How could a woman like you not know it? You can feel it in my body, can’t you?’ he demanded. ‘Here...’
Helplessly Saskia leaned against him whilst she tried to absorb the shock of having her hand taken and placed so explicitly against the hard, intimate throb of his maleness. If only she could find the strength to drag her hand away, to tell him that she didn’t want the intimacy he was forcing on her. But despairingly she knew that she was too weak, that there was no way she could stop herself from aching to use the opportunity he had given her to touch and explore him, to know him...to know his maleness...to—
She gave a small moan as her body started to shake with tremors of desire. Andreas’s heart was pounding so savagely that she could feel it almost inside her own body. Earlier in the evening, when he had almost absently caressed the ball of her shoulder—the touch of an established lover for his beloved—she had shuddered in mute delight, but that was nothing to what she was feeling now.
She ached for him, hungered for him, and when she closed her eyes she could see him as Athena had so tauntingly described him—proud and naked as his body sliced the water. She moaned again, a high, sharp sound this time that had Andreas covering her mouth with the hard, hot, demanding pressure of his, the words he was groaning against her lost as his passion sent a kick of shocking voluptuous pleasure searing through her.
Her mouth was properly open beneath his now, her tongue hungry for the sensual melding stroke of his, and the intensity of her own feelings was dizzying and dazzling her.
‘You want me... You need me...’
She could feel him mouthing the words and she couldn’t deny them, her body, her emotions were saturated with the intensity of a response to him so new to her that she had no defences against it.
Everything else was suddenly forgotten, unimportant. Everything else and everyone else. All she needed... All she wanted... All she could ever want was here within her reach.
She moaned and trembled as she felt Andreas’s hands on her body and over her dress, their touch hard, hungry...excitingly, dangerously male. The unfamiliar intimacy of his body against hers was depriving her of the ability to think or to reason properly. There was no place for reason to exist in this new world she was inhabiting anyway.
‘I want to see you...watch you whilst I make love to you,’ Andreas was saying thickly to her. ‘I want you to see me... My God, but I can understand now just why all those other men fell victim to you. There’s something about you, some witchery, some— What’s wrong?’ he demanded as he felt the abrupt way Saskia had tensed against him in rejection.