The men ducked out of Amy’s eyesight before reappearing with thick, long sticks, the ends of which were ablaze. Her mouth opened in awe as she watched them dancing and twirling and leaping and whirling whilst the fire made patterns in the darkness, bringing the very air to life.
‘You look cold,’ Helios murmured, stepping behind her and wrapping an arm around her waist to secure her to him.
Transfixed by what was happening on the beach, her skin dancing with something like the same flames that were playing out before her, Amy didn’t resist, not even when he brought his mouth down to nuzzle into her hair. Her insides melted and despite herself she leant back into his hardness, dizzying relief rushing through her at the sensation of being back where she belonged. In Helios’s arms.
She gasped as she felt his hand slide over her stomach and drift up to rest under her breasts. She knew she should throw off his hand and walk away, that allowing herself to be held like this was the height of stupidity and danger, but no matter how loudly her brain shouted at her feet to start walking her body refused to obey.
A thumb was raised up to brush against the underside of her breast and he pressed his groin into the small of her back, letting her feel his arousal. The fire-wielding acrobats became a blur in her vision as her senses all turned inwards to relish the feel of Helios against her.
She should be like a marble Minoan statue. Unresponsive. Cold. But his touch turned her molten.
Send her to hell, but she rubbed against his arousal. He hissed in her ear, dropping his hand to her hip and gripping it tightly. She could feel his racing heart beating against her back.
Only the loud sound of applause cut through the sensuous fog she’d fallen into.
The show had finished.
The crowd was dispersing.
Blinking hard, aware of Greta searching for her, Amy finally managed to make her body obey, grabbed Helios’s hand and pushed it away.
She took a step to distance herself from the security of his hold and drank the last of her mojito.
‘Come back with me,’ he said. For once, there was no arrogance in his voice.
She kept her eyes from his, not wanting him to see the longing she knew would be written all over her face. ‘I can’t.’
‘You can.’
Greta had spotted them and was heading for them, or rather weaving unsteadily towards them.
‘Come back with me,’ he repeated.
‘No.’ She propelled herself down the steps, desperate to be away from him before her vocal cords said the yes they so yearned to speak.
He followed her, grabbing her hand when she reached the bottom step and spinning her around.
She waited breathlessly for him to say something, but all he did was stare at her as if he was drinking her in, his thumb brushing little swirls over the inside of her wrist. The message he was sending didn’t need words.
Tugging out of his hold, she hurried away before she could respond to his silent request.
* * *
Helios pressed a hand to his forehead and growled to his empty bedroom. He’d been back for over an hour and not even his two Long Island iced teas, which had virtually every spirit imaginable in them, had numbed his brain enough to allow him to sleep.
His body still carried remnants of the arousal that had been unleashed by holding Amy in his arms. One touch was all it had taken. One touch and he’d been fit to burst.
If he’d been one of his ancestors from four hundred years ago he would have marched down the passageway, broken down her door and demanded she give herself to him. As he was a prince of these lands she wouldn’t have been allowed to refuse him. She would have had to submit to his will.
But good Queen Athena, Agon’s reigning monarch from 1671, had been at the forefront of the abolition of the law which had allowed women to be little more than chattels for the royal family’s pleasure.
And even if he could he wouldn’t force Amy into his bed. If she came back to him he wanted it to be under her own free will.
He knew she’d returned to the palace. After the fire show she’d disappeared into the throng, and then the last he’d seen of her had been when she’d climbed into one of the waiting palace cars with some of the other live-in staff.
Why was she doing this to him? To them? She was as crazy for him as he was for her, and he struggled to understand why she was resisting so hard.
He knew that she wanted to punish him because he had to marry someone else—if he were in her shoes he would probably feel the same way. The mere idea of her with another man was enough to make his blood pressure rise to the point where his veins might explode.
As ashamed as he was to have done so, he’d got his security team to find out who she’d dined with on Saturday night. Leander Soukis, a twenty-two-year-old layabout from a small village on the outskirts of Resina. How Amy had met this man was a mystery. And there was something about their meeting that ground at him.
Never mind that Leander was five years younger than Amy, when Helios distinctly remembered her saying she couldn’t relate to younger men, he was also a slight, skinny thing, with a bad reputation. He came from a wealthy family, but that counted for nothing—Leander had been kicked out of three schools and had never held a job for longer than a week. Indeed, he was an ideal candidate for his brother Talos’s boxing gym, which he’d opened in order to help disaffected youths, teaching them to channel their anger and giving them a leg up in life.
Why had she gone on a date with him of all people? Had it been her way of proving to Helios that she was serious about their relationship being over? Maybe he should have accepted her resignation rather than let his pride and ego force her into staying. If she was gone from Agon he wouldn’t be lying in his bed with a body aching from unfulfilled desire.
But he knew such thoughts were pointless. Amy didn’t need to be in his sight to be on his mind. She was there constantly.
And he would bet the palace that right at that moment she was lying in her bed thinking of him.
A soft ping from the security pad on his wall broke through his thoughts.
Jumping out of bed, he pressed a button on it, which brought up the screen issuing the alert. It was from the camera and the sensors in the secret passageway.
Peering closely, he saw a figure moving stealthily along the passageway, getting closer and closer to his room. With his heart in his mouth he watched as she hesitated, and willed her to take the final step and knock on the door.
* * *
Amy stared at Helios’s door, not quite certain what she was doing or how she had got to this point.
Knowing she was vulnerable to temptation, she’d accepted an invitation to go to one of the other curator’s apartments for a drink: a mini-soirée she would usually have loved attending. She’d tried so hard to pull herself out of the trance she’d fallen into, but her contribution to the conversation had been minimal. She couldn’t remember a word of it. It was as if she’d been floating above it all, there in body but not in spirit.
She wanted to blame the alcohol, especially the mojitos Helios had given her, but that would have been a lie. It was all down to him.
She’d gone back to her own apartment after just one drink, but before she’d even stepped into her bedroom she’d stopped and stared at the door that led to the secret passageway. Her breaths had shortened as a deep yearning had pulled at her.
Impulse had overridden common sense. She’d unlocked the connecting door and stepped into the passageway in the same dreamlike state she’d ridden back to the palace in, not consciously thinking about where she was going. But now, standing at his door, sanity had pushed its way back through into her mind.
She couldn’t do this. It was all wrong.
Closing her eyes, she pressed the palm of her hand to his door, holding it there.
This was as far as she dared go. If she were to knock and he were to answer...
She heard the telltale click of the lock turning.
She snatched her hand away, her breath catching in her throat.
The door opened.
Helios stood in the doorway, naked, nonchalant, as if Amy sneaking up to his room and doing nothing but touch his door was an everyday occurrence. Except the nonchalance was only on the surface. His chest rose and fell in tight judders. His jaw was taut; his nostrils flared. His eyes bore through her as he did nothing but stare.
And then he moved, sending out a hand to wrap around the nape of her neck and pull her to him and over the threshold. As soon as they were in his room he held her firmly and pushed the door shut. He pressed her against it, trapping her.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked roughly, leaning close enough for his warm, faintly minty breath to touch her skin.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.
She didn’t know. The closest she could come to describing it was her subconscious overriding her resolve. Now, though, the opposite was true. The sensations darting through her had overridden her subconscious and every inch of her had sprung into life. There was not a single atom of her body that wasn’t tilting into him, yearning for his kiss, his touch.
‘I know.’
Then, with a look that suggested he wanted to eat her alive, he brought his mouth to hers and caught her in his kiss.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IF HIS KISS had been the demanding assault she’d anticipated Amy would have been able to resist and push him away. But it wasn’t. His lips rested against hers but he made no movement, stilling as if he was breathing in her essence. Amy inhaled deeply in turn, letting the warmth of his breath and the scent of him creep through her pores and inhabit her.