The more she touched, the more she craved and the farther she strayed past the boundaries of self-preservation. She tested the washboard strength of his midriff-hard, powerful, just like the rest of him. An incorrigible demon of need made her whimper into his mouth.
She heard the sharp intake of his breath and knew she was lost; that in being too daring herself, she'd tacitly invited him to return the favor. His fingers skimmed the length of her torso to search out the sensitive triangle between her thigh and her hip. His thumb strayed inside the leg of her bikini. Circled insolently. Exquisitely. And found its quarry.
Against her will and every shred of common sense at her command, a spasm of tortured pleasure streaked through her. "I hate you," she moaned, her legs falling slackly apart.
"I know," he purred, and touched her again. "I hate you, too."
Rampant desire consumed her. Her entire body contracted in a flood that made an utter mockery of any show of resistance she might have wanted to portray. She was so ready for him, so desperate to feel him skin to skin, heat to heat, that she tore at his shirt like a mad woman.
With a muffled growl, he swept her off her feet and carried her into the palm tree's dense shadow which neither stars nor moon nor man-made light could penetrate. She heard the rustle and rasp of fabric and zipper as he shed his clothes. Modesty and self-preservation lost in the rapacious demands of a hunger at last acknowledged after too long a fast, she kicked off her bikini bottom, tugged loose the strings holding her top in place and flung it aside.
She reached for him, wanting to touch him as he'd touched her. Intimately, audaciously. She wanted to close her hand around him and hear him groan in an agony of pleasure. She wanted to punish him as he'd punished her and leave his control hanging by a thread, his flesh so tight and yearning for release that he begged for mercy. All this ran through her mind in a molten stream of desire.
But he was not to be so easily subjugated. Closing in on her, hot and naked, he cupped her breasts in his palms and grazed his teeth lightly over her nipples. Teasing and taunting them, with his lips and his tongue until, defeated, she uttered his name on a soft cry, and dissolved in a wash of ecstasy that robbed her of her remaining strength.
He caught her as she collapsed, eased her onto the soft grass and drove into her in one long, hot urgent thrust that sent her over the edge a second time. She clawed at his back. Sank her teeth into the curved muscle of his shoulder. Wrapped her long legs around his waist and clung to him-anything to anchor herself to him as the world tilted on its axis.
He muttered in her ear, Greek and English words jumbled together in graphic exposition of how often he'd imagined this moment, of what she was doing to him.
He called her darling and sweetheart, and told her she was the most beautiful woman on earth, and he the luckiest man.
He cursed her for making him come too soon, and within minutes grew hard inside her again and drove them both to new heights of delirium. And when the demons of passion finally were satisfied, she lay tangled with him, a breath of night-cool air teasing her limbs. The storm had passed and taken the anger with it.
The problem, though, still remained, and for all that she tried to dismiss it, it circled restlessly in her mind, tainting the warm afterglow of loving. Easing herself out of his arms, she stood up and went to retrieve her towel and bikini.
He stopped her with a hand around her ankle. "What are you doing?" he inquired lazily.
"Making myself decent again. I can hardly walk into the house stark naked, and nor can you."
"Is our truce so soon ended?"
"What just happened wasn't a truce, Dimitrios."
His fingers drew mesmerizing circles up her calf. "What would you call it then, agape mou?"
"A gross error of judgment," she said.
Sensing her disquiet, Dimitrios tightened his grip. "What is it, Brianna? Am I not the lover you thought I was? Did I disappoint you?"
"You know you didn't," she said. "But that doesn't change the fact that what just happened was a huge mistake."
Chapter 9
Very carefully he removed his hand and propped himself up on one elbow. Her lovely pale shape glimmered in the night, her skin like polished ivory against the dark lush growth of the shrubbery behind her.
"Are you worried I might have left you pregnant?" he asked gently.
"There's that, of course," she said, wrapping herself in her towel as though ashamed to let him see her naked body. "I'm not on the pill, and you didn't use anything."
"I wasn't expecting to make love to you. But, Brianna, what does it matter if you have conceived? A child born of love is cause for celebration, and we'll be married soon enough that no one need know we didn't wait until our wedding night to pledge ourselves to each other."
"A hasty marriage isn't the solution to everything."
"There's another problem I don't know about?"
"There is, and you know very well what it is."
No sweeping stuff under the rug with her, he thought wryly. She wouldn't let him get away with a damned thing. "You're still angry with me."
"My anger isn't the issue. It's yours that worries me. Deny it all you like, but this business with your parents is eating you alive. Put an end to it, Dimitrios, please. I've had enough in-fighting with my own family to last me a lifetime. Don't ask me to take on yours, as well."
If ruining the moment was her intention, she was succeeding admirably. All traces of passion as dead as last year's roses, he pulled on his pants and drew up the zipper. "And exactly how do you propose I go about doing that?"
"Swallow your pride and talk to your father. Declare a truce. If you could do that with me, you can do it with him."
"It'll be cold day in hell before I grovel to Mihalis Poulos, my dear."
"Come on, Dimitrios, be the bigger man," she persisted. "You need your family at this time. Poppy needs her grandparents."
"She has you and me and everyone else in my house. We are all the family she needs."
"What if your parents need her?"
"They do not. My father refuses to acknowledge her, and my mother-"
"Would defy him, if she knew she had your support. Instead you go through her to try to punish him and it's not working, Dimitrios, because he doesn't care. The only one hurting here is the person least able to arm herself against you."
"Leave it, Brianna," he said harshly. "Don't push me on this. My mind is made up."
Her sigh gusted into the night, rife with frustration. "Is this the example you want to set for Poppy, Dimitrios? To hold on to a grudge at any price?"
"If it's justified, yes."
"Even if she turns on you one day? You're human, after all. You make mistakes, just like the rest of us. What if you do something she decides she can't forgive? How will you live with yourself?"
"It won't happen. I won't allow it."
"You won't allow … ?" She lapsed into a silence that hung in the air, an implicit threat. Then she spoke again. "What if I can't live with a man who thinks he's God?"
He didn't like what he heard in her voice. "Are you saying we're at an impasse, Brianna? That this is a deal breaker and if I don't give way on it, you won't marry me?"
"Yes," she said. "That's exactly what I'm saying."
"I don't deal well with ultimatums."
"Of course you do," she shot back scornfully. "As long as you're the one issuing them. And if, in the process, you trample all over a few hearts, well that's just the price of doing business, isn't it?"
"Whose heart am I trampling? Yours?"
"Sorry to disappoint you, but no. Mine is made of sterner stuff. I've lost you once and lived to tell about it. I can do it again, if I have to. Your mother, though, she's a different story. Between the pair of you, you and your father are going to end up putting her in her grave."
"So let me get this straight. Either I agree to your terms or you walk. May I ask where Poppy fits in the picture?"
"Exactly where she deserves to be-as my top priority. She isn't the problem here, Dimitrios. You are. In your own way, you're as dysfunctional a parent as Cecily was, and our mother before that."
No one else would have dared speak to him so bluntly, laying bare truths he didn't want to acknowledge. But she was different. She always had been. Beneath that delicate exterior lay a tempered-steel core of integrity that refused to be compromised. How could he not respect that?