CHAPTER SEVEN
WHAT WERE THE ODDS? Apollo asked himself as he sat on deck swigging from a bottle of Russian vodka, his black hair blowing back from his lean darkly attractive features, his green eyes very bright. What were the odds that he would end up with a woman who had also been abused? Whose attitude to sex had been inexorably twisted and spoiled by experiences that had happened when she was too young to handle them?
Not only had he hurt her physically, he had also shouted at her. Half a bottle further on, Apollo padded barefoot over to the rail. His wife was a virgin and he had acted like an idiot. Why? He was an arrogant jerk proud of his sexual skill and finesse...why not just admit that? He had been so determined to give her the fantasy and it had gone pear-shaped because she hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him the truth. And how could he hold that against her when throughout his whole thirty years of life he had never told anyone but his father what had happened to him? He knew about that kind of secret; he knew about the shame and the self-doubt and the whole blame game. And even though he had seen slivers of low self-esteem and insecurity and anxiety in Pixie it had not once occurred to him that she too could be something of a victim, just like him.
She had deserved better, much better than he had given her. He had treated her like one of the good-time girls he normally enjoyed, confident and experienced women who wanted fun and thrills in and out of bed and as much luxury and cash as they could wheedle out of him. That had suited him because it left him in complete control at all times. But he wasn’t in control with Pixie and that seriously disturbed him. He was clever, he was normally cool and logical and yet instead of being delighted that his wife had never been with another man he had shouted at her.
And paradoxically he was delighted because something about Pixie brought out a possessive vibe in him and that vibe of possessiveness had lit up and burned like a naked flame the instant he’d married her. Furthermore, since she had had the courage to tell him something as personal as what she had spilled out in her distress in the bathroom, he really did owe her, didn’t he?
Apollo wove his path rather drunkenly back to his stateroom where he tripped over the clothes Pixie had gathered up and left in a heap directly in line with the door. The racket he made hitting the floor and his yell of surprise yanked her out of her miserable thoughts with a vengeance.
Fumbling for the bedside light, Pixie switched it on and stared in wonderment at Apollo sprawled in a heap on the floor. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I got drunk, ‘Apollo informed her with very deliberate diction.
‘After a...a crummy night that makes sense.’
‘Don’t be all English and polite and nice,’ Apollo groaned, raking a hand through his tousled black hair. ‘I wasn’t.’
‘But then you’re not English,’ Pixie parried, marvelling at the vision of her very controlled new husband in such a condition. His green eyes had a reckless glitter that unnerved her a little. Sober, he was a lot to handle. Drunk, he could well be more than she could manage.
‘Never been with a virgin before,’ he confided. ‘I wanted it to be perfect and then it went wrong and I was furious. My ego, my pride, nothing to do with you. I was a...’ He uttered a four-letter swear word.
‘Pretty much,’ she agreed more cheerfully after hearing that he had wanted their wedding night to be perfect, which was a hearteningly unexpected admission when deep down in advance of the bed business she had feared that he would not care a jot. She relaxed her stiff shoulders into the pillows while she studied him and decided that even drunk he was heartbreakingly gorgeous.
‘My second stepmother beat me with a belt and left me covered with blood,’ Apollo announced out of the blue.
Her jaw dropped. ‘How old were you?’
‘Six. I hated her.’
‘I’m not surprised. What did your dad do?’
‘He divorced her because of it. He was very shocked...but then he was sort of naïve about how cruel women can be,’ Apollo told her as he drank out of the bottle still clutched in one big bronzed hand, lean muscles rippling to draw her attention to the intricate dragon tattoo adorning his arm. ‘He didn’t appreciate that I was the biggest problem in his remarriages.’
‘How?’ Pixie asked, wondering if she should try to get the bottle off him or just close her eyes to it. He wasn’t acting like himself. He might hate her tomorrow for having seen him in such a vulnerable mood.
‘When a woman marries a very rich man she wants to be the one who produces his son and heir but I was already there and the apple of my father’s eye.’
‘By the sound of that beating you got, he wasn’t looking after his apple very well.’
Apollo closed his eyes, black lashes almost hitting his cheekbones. ‘He married my third stepmother when I was eleven. She was a very beautiful Scandinavian and the only one who seemed to take a genuine interest in me. Never having had a mother, I was probably starved of affection.’ His shapely mouth quirked. ‘She would come and visit me at school and stuff. My father was very pleased and encouraged her every step of the way.’
‘So?’ Pixie prodded, sensing the tripwire coming in the savage tension bracketing his beautiful mouth, the warning that all could not have been as cosy as he was making it sound.
‘Basically she was grooming me for sex. She liked adolescent boys...’
‘You were eleven!’ Pixie condemned. ‘Surely you weren’t capable.’
‘By the time she took me to bed I was thirteen. It went on for two years. She took me out of school to city hotels. It was sordid and deviant and I was betraying my own father but...but she was my first love and I was fool enough to worship the ground she walked on. I was her pet,’ he completed in disgust.
Pixie leapt out of bed and darted across the floor to kneel down in front of him. ‘You were...what age?’
‘Fifteen when I got caught with her.’
‘For two years a perverted woman preyed on you.’
‘I wasn’t even her only one,’ Apollo bit out in a slurring undertone. ‘She’d been meeting up with the son of a local fisherman on the beach. It was his father who went to mine and tipped him off about what she was like.’
Pixie shifted until she was behind him and wrapped her arms round his rigid shoulders. ‘You were just a kid. You didn’t know any better.’
‘I definitely knew it was wrong to have sex with my father’s wife,’ Apollo broke in curtly. ‘I don’t deserve forgiveness for that but he still forgave me.’
‘Because he loved you,’ Pixie reasoned. ‘And he knew his wife was using you for her own warped reasons. I’m so sorry I called you a man whore. You had a really screwed-up adolescence and of course it affected you.’
Apollo reached behind himself to yank her round and tumble her down into his lap. ‘I never told anyone about that before...until you told me tonight about growing up in care with men trying to hit on you or spy on you or whatever,’ he mumbled into her hair, the words slurring. ‘Now I think I need to go to bed before I fall asleep on top of you, koukla mou.’
Pixie got up and removed the bottle while he stripped where he stood and, only staggering very slightly, fell like a tree into the bed. He slept almost immediately and she watched him in the half-light for long minutes, thinking how wrong she had been about him once and how much better she now knew him. Yet with what he had revealed he seemed more maddeningly complex than ever and without a doubt the man she had married in a business arrangement absolutely fascinated her. She brushed his tumbled black hair back from his brow and slid into the other side of the bed, hesitating only a moment before edging closer to take advantage of Apollo, whose natural temperature seemed to be the equivalent of a furnace.
She surfaced to dawn very, very slowly, the insistence of her body awakening her to a sweet flood of sensations. It was still so novel for her to feel such things that she knew instantly it was Apollo touching her and just as quickly she relaxed. Her nipples had tightened into needy little buds and the delicate place where his clever fingers were playing was embarrassingly sensitive and wet.
‘You awake now?’ he prompted gruffly in her ear.
‘Yeah...’ she framed weakly, her hips moving all on their own because the magical way he touched her made her ache, need and want all over again.
Apollo shifted over her, all rippling muscle and ferocious control. Green eyes glittered down at her, his lean, strong face taut and dark with stubble. She felt him at the heart of her and anxiety screamed that there was too much of him for what little there was of her so it was a struggle to force herself not to stiffen. Fortunately, he went slow—achingly slow—and she gradually stretched around his fullness, tender tissue reacting with unexpected pleasure to the source of that amazing friction. He shifted his hips, moved and a rush of exhilarating feelings engulfed her and her head fell back, eyes wide with surprise.
‘Didn’t want to give you the chance to get all nervous again,’ Apollo admitted. ‘Like it was likely to be some sort of punishment.’
‘Definitely...not...punishment,’ she gasped breathlessly, her body rising to meet the gathering power of his, excitement pooling like liquid fire in her pelvis.