“I promise,” he whispered again, as if that made up for it. She was scalding hot and whether it was the actual feel of her or just the symbolism of it, taking her barebacked, he found it wildly satisfying. So satisfying that as he slid in and out of her, listening to her little pants of pleasure, feeling her inner muscles clutch his cock, he wondered if he would even keep his promise.
Some wild, impossible impulse was upon him now, a weird claiming thing. He wanted not only to fuck her without anything but to come inside her body, deep, like an animal marking his possession.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, prompting him to thrust faster. “I promise” quickly became a tortured “I shouldn’t be doing this.”
He pushed deeper anyway, but when she planted a heel in his butt and squeezed her pussy muscles some way that made him gasp, he only just had time to pull out, ejaculating over her flat, heaving stomach as she grinned up at him.
“Next time, you can come on my breasts,” she whispered, rendering him rock-hard in just that second.
He groaned. “You’re actually not half bad at that talking-dirty thing.”
And he gathered her close.
* * * * *
Andrea Prentiss was a mirage. And Athena Bennett Stavros was a survivor.
She hadn’t meant to fake her own death on that hazy summer afternoon when she was eighteen. She had just been lying on Stavros’ private beach, alone with the two bodyguards who followed her everywhere, staring out at the waves. She had tentatively touched her midriff exposed by her swimsuit, confirming her broken ribs had healed, and stood up on the sand, stretching. Her collarbone was fine now too. Of course Stavros had been gone on business for a few weeks. It wouldn’t be long before he was back and using his meaty fists and powerful backhand to prove his “love” for his little angel. Usually after he’d pounded down a couple rounds of ouzo to deaden whatever inhibitions he still possessed.
“I think I’ll go for a swim,” she told her bodyguards in her flawless Greek. Raised as a diplomat’s daughter, she supposed she didn’t really have a mother tongue. Her father had been Greek. Her mother…not. And she was…nothing.
How nice it would actually be to be nothing. At the thought, she glanced sideways at her bodyguards. Actually, they weren’t really bodyguards, or rather they weren’t really guarding her body for her. They were guarding her body for him, their boss, Fredrico Stavros.
The two men nodded politely—they were new—and one of them started to strip down to his boxers to accompany her. But he’d barely gotten his belt unbuckled when she took off at a run into the pounding surf and swam as if her life depended on it. Swam so far, she began to believe perhaps she had died and hell was perpetual motion and exhaustion. After a while it was so dark, she couldn’t see one meter in front of her, but still she swam. And when she could swim no more, she stopped, willing herself to sink into oblivion. But instead of oblivion, she got a bright pink foam lifesaver suddenly tossed her way, hitting her in the head. She grasped it automatically and felt herself tugged toward a small wooden boat and lifted over the side. She was crying, hysterical almost, thinking her captors, er, bodyguards, had caught up to her when she realized that it was an old man who had pulled her from the sea. He spoke to her in a dialect she didn’t recognize at first, but like all languages picked up soon thereafter, and patted her on the back and rowed his boat to some nearby rocky shore, bringing her to his cabin.
When she saw the reports of her disappearance on the old man’s tiny black-and-white television a day later, she knew she really did have a chance to escape.
She wanted no part of Fredrico Stavros or the Stavros fortune, which was all her uncle wanted in the end. It was why he had married her mother when he was really in love with Aunt Frannie. It was why he had done what he had done to her mother.
Uncle Freddie was a monster and not coincidentally a crook. Languages weren’t her only skill. She was pretty good with computers as well, helping herself to funds from the Stavros coffers to make her escape possible and taking a little extra to make sure money would never be a problem, all without leaving a trace that she was the one who took it. Once free, she anonymously sent Interpol some coded bank information that led to a score of arrests in the Stavros organization for money laundering. Never up to the top, but she had done what she could, eventually landing in New York in the position at Reynolds Industries. And Andrea Prentiss was born.
Until Tottingham recognized her.
Her memory of her mother had faded with the years and, truth be told, she had not realized how much she resembled her. If she had, she would have made more of an effort to disguise it. But she had gotten careless with her past and all she could try to do was not let it haunt her present. If she hadn’t disappeared again, Tottingham’s recognition might have come to nothing. Maybe she had caused her own doom. She didn’t know.