Head banging hard against the wall, Eleni let out a low sound. Pleasure exploded inside her body. The graze of his lips moved to the upper swell of her breast while his hands molded the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips. “You were made to be loved, Princesa. This body, every whimper and moan that comes out of your mouth...they belong to me.”
Rough hands rucked her dress up and up until his palm pressed between her clenched thighs. “Let me in, Princess,” he uttered roughly.
But her legs were already spreading of their own accord, making a space for him at the innermost core of her.
The slide of his abrasive palms over the tender skin of her inner thighs, the stroke of his hot breath over her neck, the way he had pressed her into the wall with his hard body—Eleni was in heaven and hell.
The sensory input was too much, her body breathing hard to play catch-up.
She wanted to beg him to go slow, to give her a second to get used to the invasive intimacy of his caresses, but she was new to this sharp pleasure, was floating away in it and the required words would not form.
His palm covered her mound and her breath hissed out of her in uneven jerks.
“Your hair glints like burnished gold, Princesa. Are you the same here?” Wicked whispers brushed against her swelling flesh, while his fingers boldly opened her up for his exploration. “Shall I kiss you here, Eleni?” One finger dipped inside of her and she arched against him. She had never been so aware of her flesh there, tight and throbbing. Wet and aching.
Then he rubbed a finger over the swollen hood crying for his touch.
Shivers bunched in her muscles making her fevered and achy all over. She tried to reach for him but he was far too strong as he caged her in place with his body. When he flicked that bundle with deft, continual strokes, all breath left Eleni.
“Please, Gabriel...”
His mouth moved over the swell of her breast, toward the achy center that had hardened into a knot. “I shall make you as crazy as you did me today, Eleni. I shall make you beg.”
A sharp cry left her as he tore the bodice and closed his mouth over her nipple. “Oh...” Eleni bit her lip hard. It was the only way to stop herself from begging.
“I warned you, Eleni. I abhor lies and deceit.”
The bitter anger in his words barely registered on the sensual haze that filled her mind and body. Stretched taut against the wall, Eleni lost her grip on her will.
Moans and whimpers fell from her mouth, erotic sounds that seemed to fuel her husband’s dark demands of her.
His strokes deepened in speed and rhythm until she was riding his hand, grinding her wanton flesh against his palm with a madness she had never known.
His wicked lips pulled at her sensitized nipples while his fingers set a punishing rhythm she couldn’t fight. He let the sensitive flesh go with a popping sound that vibrated in tune with the throb at her core. Teeth digging into his shoulder, Eleni sobbed as pleasure splintered in her lower belly and poured through her muscles in deep, clenching spasms.
Turned inside out, she felt raw, utterly spent.
She fell onto him like a rag doll, shattered and bare, tears crowding her throat.
The most intense, earth-shattering experience of her life and he had given it to her in anger. Ice frosted her heart even as tendrils of heat filled her muscles.
While she was still trembling, her heart thundering in her chest, while her muscles were still struggling to return from that heightened state, his hands moved to her thighs and he picked her up, as if she were a china doll.
Pressed against the granite wall of his chest, her breasts felt sore, heavy. Sleep battered her in waves and Eleni struggled to stay afloat.
She’d triggered some emotional reaction in this hard man. Yet the woman in her caved to the man in him, to the masculine possessiveness with which he carried her off. To the deep want etched in the strong planes of his face.
No one had ever wanted her like that. No one had ever shown her a hundredth of the emotion he showed. But even through the lingering waves of her climax, she knew he didn’t trust her, that whatever this was between them, it was far from what she’d imagined for them.
When he threw her onto his bed, she tried to move back and tangled her legs in her own dress. When she tried it again, his hand held on to the edge of her skirt. The loud rip of the fabric punctured the sensual web.
Heart thudding, Eleni looked up. “Gabriel?” She said his name, half surrender, half retreat.
Masculine challenge glinting in his eyes, Gabriel leaned his torso toward her. His rough hands crawled up her skirt, on top of it. Knees, thighs, belly, the hollow between her breasts, his broad palm touched her everywhere.
Need coiled deeper and tighter in her again, for this time she knew what he could give her. Her body was desperately eager for another explosion. Somehow Eleni found the sense to still his hands when they reached the bodice.
“Wait, Gabriel,” she whispered, the words coming as if through a long tunnel, as if from a rational mind disjointed from the yearning desires of her body.
He sat at her feet, every inch of his rugged face taut and rigid. “Ah... I did not take you for a tease, Eleni.”
Sweat beaded her forehead, her body unwilling to let go of him. Through sheer will, Eleni pushed herself onto her elbows. Her dress billowed around her legs as she leaned her forehead against his shoulder.
He stiffened, his fingers pushing at her shoulders.
She clasped his bristly jaw willing him to listen. “I don’t want our first night together to be spent in doubt and mistrust. I don’t want a child conceived like this.”
“We have nothing but that, Princesa. You’ll never have a child if you want us to come together in some sort of transcendent emotion that doesn’t exist.”
“Don’t say that.”
“All we have is this mindless lust.”
“Because I angered you?”
He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes, and then sighed. Resignation in his gray eyes pierced deeper than his anger. “Because you lied, Eleni. Because you proved that for all the moral pedestal you stand on, you’re just like every other woman on the planet. That you’re what I thought you that first night.”
“What are you talking about?”
He shook a phone in her face. A sick feeling climbed up her throat as he pressed Play. A clip of Spiros and her played like a reel from some ghastly nightmare.
Whoever had shot it should be given a prize, Eleni thought hysterically, for they had shot them from the side. His gaze devouring her, Spiros held her still form in his arms so tight that no one could doubt the meaning of it. He was frantic, almost mad as he ran his hands over her body.
It looked like a lover’s caresses, and yet she knew in her heart, he hadn’t touched her like that at all.
Bile filled Eleni’s mouth as he pressed fevered kisses all over her face all the while muttering things no one could hear. But the shock in her face, that was not visible.
The clip seemed to go on interminably until Eleni grabbed the phone from Gabriel and threw it across the room.
“Gabriel, listen to me. It’s not like that at all. Spiros and I—”
Gabriel stood up from the bed, his face set into cold lines. “You had your chance. Now that I have your measure, I feel better about this whole arrangement. To think I felt guilty that you deserved better! That you were being cheated out of everything in this stupid arrangement. Of course you have a nice little lover on the side. Now I see why you were so ready to sacrifice yourself on the altar of Drakon.”
Eleni pushed back from him, the depth of his bitterness like a stinging slap against her flesh. “Gabriel, you make me sound positively Machiavellian.” A bitter laugh fell from her mouth. “It is no wonder you couldn’t forge a bond with Angelina, is it? You have nothing but a stone for a heart. Nothing but poison filling your veins.”
Utter frost dawned in his eyes as he stepped away from her. As if she had contaminated him. “I don’t give a damn who you cavort with...but one word of it reaches the press, one word of your duplicity reaches Angelina’s ears, you will regret the day you walked into my life.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
WARM SUNLIGHT KISSED Eleni’s face when she opened her eyes. An achy awareness pulsed between her legs. The sheets seemed to caress her very skin; she’d never felt such delicious languor.
The smile fell from her face as the events of the past night came back to her. She ran the back of her hand over her eyes and came away with smudges from her mascara and tears, she was sure. If not for the unfamiliar awareness between her legs, she’d have thought the whole thing a bad dream.
But Spiros had stolen her away from her own wedding reception. And Gabriel had known and been furious about it.
Eleni sat up in her bed and rubbed her eyes with a groan. Thoughts came and went, like pictures in a kaleidoscope. And suddenly she saw things with a clarity that had been lacking last night. How could she have seen clearly when Gabriel’s barbs had wounded her so deep?
But why had he been so angry, so irrational? Why, when he’d always seemed so uncaring, so blasé about their impending nuptials?
She’d expected anger, yes, even his derision. But his reaction had been personal, as if she had somehow disappointed him? As if she had hurt him?
She snorted and cursed herself. As if anything she did or didn’t do could affect the blasted man.