“And what?” she urged.
“And lonely when I’m not with you.”
“Oh Evan.”
He’d always thought expressions of love—even in great literature—rang false somehow. Undying declarations of this and that never failed to fall flat, to him anyway.
But something about her simple sigh, her “Oh Evan” moved him.
He thrust harder, suddenly sure he was about to recite a Shakespearean sonnet to her. He could feel it. Maybe the one about love being like a red, red rose. Or maybe that was Browning.
He thrust harder and she murmured a little, one soft hand coming up to his face.
Or maybe it was a Linda Ronstadt song.
He tried to hold off.
He didn’t know anymore. He just knew he—God, she felt so good beneath him—he loved this woman.
Without thinking, he slipped his hands beneath her ass and pulled her as close as she could get and poured his love into her.
Or his semen anyway.
He groaned with his climax, feeling her shudder beneath him.
He supposed he should say the love part aloud once they could both breathe again.
The rapid spate of Greek she let out threw him off. Raising his head, he looked at her askance—she knew he couldn’t speak Greek—a smile softening the skepticism, until he saw she wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to the guy standing over them with a large automatic weapon.
The man yelled something, an obvious order to get out of bed, motioning with the gun. Dressed all in black, he blended in with the darkness it was now obvious he had engineered for his boarding. Whether he’d been quiet about it or not, Evan couldn’t say, preoccupied as he had been at the time and with the noise of the storm all around them in any case.
The lights went on again, showing it wasn’t just one intruder but three, the other two spaced at intervals back to the stairs to the deck, all three in black from head to toe, all three with those nasty machine-gun-looking things. The one standing over them barked out his order again but Evan was reluctant to roll off Andrea.
He glanced back down at her tense beloved face and for one brief second, he harbored the hope that these men were mere run-of-the-mill pirates who maybe wanted the investment banker’s boat more than even he had, but the voice over his shoulder cured him of that illusion.
“Mr. Reynolds, what a godsend you’ve been. I send my men here to help with a little drowning and they radio me you’ve brought me my Athena back. So of course I came to check it out myself. To make sure. I mean, I assume this is my Athena. You didn’t come halfway around the world to ask your questions and then fall into bed with the first slut who climbs up on your deck, did you?”
Evan glared back to see Stavros peering at the bed.
At that, Andrea pushed at his shoulders and he relented, rolling off her so she could sit up, dragging the top of the sheet with her to cover her nakedness.
Stavros smiled a crocodile grin and murmured something in Greek.
“Fuck you,” Andrea responded calmly in English.
“Athena, how I’ve longed to see you. I knew here,” he gestured dramatically to his chest, “in my heart, that your own heart still beat, my angel.”
“Oh? Did the goons you sent after me tell you that?”
Evan sat fully up in bed as well, glancing around. He wondered if the investment banker had kept any handguns on board, like maybe under the pillow or something he hadn’t noticed.
This wasn’t turning out to be exactly a good setup for what he originally had in mind for an ending to all this, which was Stavros dying, not him and not, God forbid, Andrea.
Chapter Ten
Fredrico Stavros looked the same as every nightmare she no longer had about him. Big. Prosperous. Powerful. Like some mythic monster, he didn’t even seem to have aged in the eight years since she had seen him. He was just there. Like Zeus. Or death and taxes.
God, how she hated this man.
“I was going to kill you anyway, Reynolds,” Uncle Freddie was saying amiably, “but under the current circumstances any Greek court would call it justifiable homicide since I’ve found you in bed with Athena, defiling her. Legally, I’m her closest relative, you know.”
Evan pulled her closer. “You piece of filth. You raped your own niece.”
“Bah! She was no Stavros. My brother was a poof. Everybody knew that. Angelica knew that. That’s why she married him. That’s why she passed another man’s child off as his. A Stavros! You see these pale cheeks, these blue eyes.” He gestured expansively toward her. “You think she’s half Greek?”
“I’m not sure I trust your assessment of family attributes.”
“How about DNA? Do you trust that? Because that proved conclusively there’s no blood relationship between me and Athena.”