With a sigh, Bastien scooped up the dog before it skidded off the desk and broke its legs, and settled it on the floor. Then, lifting the toy with distaste, he flung it—sending Skippy into a race of panting pleasure.
‘I will only throw it once,’ he warned the animal.
Unable to get back to work, he walked out onto the balcony and groaned out loud as he paced in the warm evening air. His muscles were stiff.
Banishing Skippy, who was showing annoying signs of wanting to follow him, Bastien went down to the basement gym in an effort to work off some of his tension. A marathon swim, followed by a long, violently cathartic session with the punch bag, sent Bastien into the shower.
All he needed was a good night’s sleep and a clear head, he told himself urgently when he was tempted to approach Delilah. He did not need or want her...
Lilah sat up late in bed, reading, and fell asleep with the light on, wakening disorientated at around three in the morning. On her way back from the bathroom she thought she heard someone cry out, and she went to the window and brushed back the curtain to look down at the moonlit garden below. Nothing stirred...not even the shadows.
When the sound came again she realised that it had come from Bastien’s room, and she crossed the polished wooden floor to listen behind the communicating door with a frown etched between her brows.
The sound of a shout galvanised her into opening the door. Bastien was a dark shape, thrashing about wildly in the bed, and choked cries interspersed with Greek words were breaking from him.
There was no way on earth that Lilah could walk away and leave him suffering like that. He was having a nightmare, that was all, but it was clearly a terrifying one.
She hovered uncertainly by the side of the bed, and then closed her hand firmly round a sleek tanned muscular shoulder to shake it.
‘Wake up, Bastien...it’s just a dream,’ she told him gently.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ARMS FLAILING AND eyes wild, Bastien reared up and closed a hand round her throat, dragging her down to the bed on top of him as he struggled to focus on her.
‘Bastien...it’s Lilah!’ she gasped, in stricken dismay at the effect of her intervention. ‘You were stuck in a bad dream. I was trying to wake you up.’
‘Delilah...’ Bastien framed dazedly, shifting his tousled dark head in confusion, his eyes glittering dark as night in the faint light emanating from her room. He blinked. ‘What are you doing in here?’
‘You were having a really bad nightmare,’ she repeated as she levered herself away from him and settled on the empty side of the bed. The dampness of perspiration sheened his lean dark features and he was still trembling almost imperceptibly. ‘What on earth has got you that worked up?’
‘I put my hand round your neck... Did I hurt you?’ Bastien demanded, switching on the bedside light and tipping up her chin to examine the faint red fingermarks marring her slender white throat. ‘Diavelos, Delilah... I’m sorry. I could have seriously injured you. You should never have come near me when I was like that. I’m very restless. That’s why I always sleep alone.’
‘I’m fine... I’m fine... I was worried about you,’ she admitted.
‘Why the hell would you be worried about a guy who doesn’t treat you with respect or consideration?’ Bastien prompted grimly.
‘I was really concerned about you,’ Lilah countered, ignoring that question because she could not have answered it even to her own satisfaction. ‘What on earth were you dreaming about?’
His lean dark features were shuttered. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to know.’
In an abrupt movement that took her by surprise, he pulled her backwards into his arms. Little tremors were still running through his big powerful frame.
Lilah released her breath in a bemused hiss. ‘Try to relax,’ she urged him, aware of the shattering tension still holding his muscles taut in his big body.
‘Don’t try to mother me, glikia mou,’ Bastien growled warningly, resting back against the pillows and breathing in slow and deep before exhaling again. ‘That’s not what I want from you.’
‘Well, you’re not getting anything else,’ Lilah warned him bluntly.
At that tart response unholy amusement quivered through Bastien’s lean, powerful frame and he laughed out loud.
‘So, what was the dream about?’ she prompted again.
In the low light, Bastien rolled his eyes and laced his fingers round her abdomen as she relaxed back against him. ‘I was getting beaten up... It’s something that happened when I was a child.’
Taken by surprise, Lilah twisted round in the circle of his arms and lifted her head to look directly at him. ‘When you were a child?’
‘I walked in on my mother, in bed with her drug-dealing boyfriend. She didn’t intervene. She was terrified that I would accidentally let it drop to Anatole that she had other men because Anatole paid all our bills.’
Lilah frowned down at him in disbelief. ‘For goodness’ sake—what age were you?’
He shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘Five...six years old? I really don’t remember. But I almost died because Athene didn’t take me to hospital until the next day—and then not until she had coached me to say that I’d fallen down the stairs.’
‘Damaged’—that was how Marielle Durand had labelled Bastien. And for the first time Lilah truly saw that in him, recognising the angry defensive pain in his eyes. His mother had neither wanted nor loved him, and by the sound of it had been a cruel and selfish parent.
Lilah recognised his discomfiture under her continuing scrutiny and she looked away, twisting round to give him back his privacy. Her eyes were smarting with tears, though.
As a teenager she had felt so sorry for herself when her father had been bringing a string of different women home for the night and she’d had to occasionally share the breakfast table with strangers. In retrospect, though, she was realising that she could have suffered much worse experiences, and that no matter how much her father’s sex-life had embarrassed her he had always looked after her and loved her.
Bastien had not been so lucky.
‘I don’t know why I told you that,’ Bastien breathed in a harsh undertone.
‘Because I’m very persistent when I want to know something,’ Lilah declared, with deliberate lightness of tone. ‘And because you’re shaken up.’
‘I don’t get shaken up,’ Bastien asserted predictably.
‘Of course not,’ Lilah traded, tongue in cheek.
Without warning Bastien sprang off the bed, carting her with him.
‘What—?’
‘I need a shower,’ he ground out.
‘I’ll go back to—’
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Bastien contradicted, striding into the en-suite bathroom and straight into the spacious shower with her still in his arms.
‘Bastien...what on earth...?’ she exclaimed in angry disbelief as he elbowed a button and warm water cascaded down on her from all directions, instantly plastering the nightdress she wore to her body.
Bastien knew he was acting like a mad man, but he was on automatic pilot and he didn’t care—because his hunger for Delilah at that moment was overwhelming. He hauled her dripping body up against him and closed his mouth hungrily to the luscious soft pink enticement of hers, long fingers stroking her wet hair back from her face.
Lilah’s hands closed over his broad shoulders, clenching there to steady herself as the hot, demanding intensity of the kiss took her by storm. His tongue delved deep into the moist interior of her mouth, plundering a response from her.
She recognised the force of his need, suspecting that Bastien was not in control the way he usually was. Rather than dismaying her, that suspicion excited her beyond bearing—because Bastien was generally so controlled that he unnerved her. In fact, the unashamed passion he was unleashing now was much more to Lilah’s taste, and it went to her head even more strongly than the wine that afternoon.
Her hands skimmed down over his lean, strong torso. She could feel the hard urgency of his erection against her midriff, and before she could even let herself think about what she was about to do she had dropped to her knees. The warm water teemed down, somehow separating her from the world and from all the anxious self-judgement that kept her from experimenting. For the first time ever she felt free to do simply as she liked. As she liked and as she wanted. And she was proud of that inner spur of passion for the first time.
Slender fingers roved up over Bastien’s hair-roughened muscular thighs, and she was smiling at his sudden ferocious tension as she bent her head—all woman, all feminine power.
Bastien groaned, threw his head back against the tiles and arched his hips to facilitate her, making no attempt to hide his pleasure as she worked magic with her mouth and her tongue and her agile fingers.
His potent reaction gave Lilah a high. For once she was in charge, and what she lacked in experience she more than made up for with creativity and enthusiasm.
Allowing himself to be out of control in any way was a dark and seductive novelty for Bastien. And when he could no longer withstand the hot, all-encompassing pleasure of her mouth, he bent down and hauled her up to him, bracing her against the tiles as he hitched up her nightdress and clamped her slim thighs to his waist. He plunged into the glorious tight wet heat of her body with a raw groan of masculine pleasure.