Leah blinked. Of course he wasn’t, she registered belatedly. Stavros was only a relative by marriage, a brother-in-law, and furthermore...and furthermore... ‘But you’re not related to any of them!’ she heard herself exclaim, and the minute she said it she knew what she had done and she wanted to bite her tongue out after one glimpse at Nik’s shattered face.
Ten seconds later she was being forced to stay upright on her own power after Nik strode into a bedroom, kicked the door shut with violence and practically dropped her from a height.
‘Say that again,’ he invited rawly.
Leah gave up the fight and backed off to sink wretchedly down on the foot of the bed. Her eyes swam with sudden tears. ‘I’m sorry...I forgot I wasn’t supposed to know.’
‘Obviously...and for how long have you known?’ Nik raked down the length of the room at her.
‘If I tell you, you have to promise me that you won’t be angry with the person who told me you were adopted.’ She practically whispered the word since Nik’s reaction to her even knowing was so explosive. ‘She thought I knew, you see—’
‘She?’
Alcohol didn’t aid diplomacy or secrecy, Leah registered dismally.
‘Nobody in my family would have told you!’ Nik continued harshly.
‘Ponia did—’
‘Ponia?’ Nik surveyed her in blatant disbelief.
Reluctantly, Leah recounted the conversation that the teenager had initiated. Nik shook his dark head in visible shock. ‘All this time she has known? Theos mou, I never dreamt she knew!’
‘I told her that it was a private matter and I honestly don’t think she’ll mention it again. She was terribly cut up about it,’ Leah hastened to tell him, swallowing back her opinion that it was surely unnecessary for such desperate secrecy to be observed.
After having met the Andreakis clan, she could well imagine them behaving as though adoption were a dreadful, never-to-be-revealed revelation, and if Nik had been raised with that same kind of attitude—which he clearly had been—then it would be an extremely sensitive subject which he was not accustomed to talking about.
He was silent for several long minutes, his handsome dark head slightly bent, his eyes hooded. He was very disturbed by what she had told him and several times she thought he was about to speak but then his lips would compress again as though he didn’t trust himself to do so. Leah would have loved him to share his thoughts but she quelled her urge to probe. It wasn’t the time. But he still looked so shaken that she couldn’t stop herself rising and crossing the room and closing her arms around him.
Briefly he went rigid in surprise.
‘Forget about it,’ she urged, dimly astonished by her own daring and the strong current of protectiveness which had propelled her to him. ‘It’s so unimportant—’
He startled her by laughing and placing his hands on her slim hips to haul her into the hard heat of his lithe frame. ‘If you say so.’
She wondered how many hugs he had got growing up with that set of frozenly repressed individuals downstairs. Maybe it had been her own presence which had soured almost everyone’s response. But in the back of her mind Leah suspected something far nastier.
Did his sisters and their families resent Nik’s power and success because they did not consider him to be a true Andreakis? Was that because Nik had been adopted by his parents so late in life? His siblings had already been adults and the adoption could well have come as an unpleasant shock, she reasoned. Yet that was so hatefully unfair when Nik was so generous towards them all and willing to go to such lengths to protect them!
And which one of them...which one of that unlovely bunch was Nik protecting? Suddenly, Leah burned to know that secret, in defence of which Nik had sacrificed his own freedom. Now that his family had been personalised, she was eaten by her own curiosity, a raw need to know who in Nik’s eyes was worth that level of protection.
‘You look as though you’re a thousand miles away.’
Drawn from her introspection, she met his dark eyes and faint pink highlighted her cheeks.
‘And I want you here,’ he completed softly.
Her heartbeat shifted up in tempo, her mouth running dry on the brink of a sudden quivering surge of intense awareness. Instinct made her move against him with the sinuousness of a cat seeking a caress and she heard the catch of his breath in response a moment before he devoured her mouth with the hot, hard heat of his own.
His passion caught her unawares but the irresistible force of desire washed over her, leaving her pliant in his strong hold. On every level her body recognised him, reached out to him with a need she could not control. Her jacket fell to the carpet as he stripped it from her. Fingers brushed against her spine and deftly released the fastening on her bra and his hand closed around the pouting swell of one breast, making her breath sob in her throat.
He pressed her back on the bed and let his mouth travel between her urgently sensitive nipples. The fire consumed her, heat pooling in his loins, every centimetre of her slim form trembling with the hunger he had unleashed on her. She looked up at him through passion-glazed eyes as he stood over her, removing his own clothing with hard, impatient hands, his glittering dark gaze pinned to her with primal purpose.
And she sensed the wildness in him, read it in the stark lines of his taut features, the slashing curve of his lips. He couldn’t take his eyes off her and she felt wanton lying there with her breasts bare and her skirt rucked up round her hips, the slender length of her thighs exposed. But the excitement emanating from him kept her still, powerless to fight the most basic of all human drives.
‘This moment was all I could think of while I was making polite conversation and drinking coffee,’ he revealed, staring down at her with unwavering intensity, hunger blatantly stamped in his strong face. ‘I couldn’t concentrate. Now the feeling surpasses even the anticipation.’
She looked up at him, her breasts rising and falling with the rapidity of her breathing. Naked, he was magnificent, a masculine symphony of sleek bone and muscle and golden skin. A flush of quivering heat enclosed her as he bent to unzip her skirt, slide it off, and she lay there submissive, pliant in a honeyed languor, but with every sense at fever pitch.
His tongue dipped into the shallow indentation of her navel. Her eyes shut, she reached out blindly for him, desperate for the physical contact she craved. He came to her and her mouth found his, her heart hammering madly inside her ribcage as her hands closed over the bunched muscles in his shoulders. His skin was hot, slightly damp, and he rolled over, taking her with him, one strong hand dispensing with the last barrier of clothing that separated her from him.
‘Yes,’ she moaned, arching her back in sudden delicious torment as he skimmed his knuckles down over her taut stomach and then spread his hand, holding her where she most needed to be touched but denying what every skin cell longed for.
‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he muttered thickly against her swollen mouth, and she could feel him, hard and hotly aroused against her thigh. ‘I want...I want everything you have to give.’
Dazed sapphire eyes met incandescent jet and an almost terrifying excitement imprisoned her. He said something rough in Greek and pressed her back, plundered her mouth with his tongue and then drove her wild with every burning caress until there was nothing—no thought, no feeling beyond an overpowering, shattering need for more.
‘Now,’ he said, lifting from her, pressing back her thighs and filling her with one, hard thrust.
The intensity of her pleasure was mind-blowing. ‘I need you...’ she sobbed, at the peak of a wave of ecstasy more intense than anything she had ever experienced, and from that point on she was lost in a world of sensation that clawed everyday reality aside, leaving only the surging demands of her own body beneath his in control.
* * *
‘Time to wake, pethi mou.’
She swam up through the lightening barriers of sleep and smiled contentedly. Nik’s mouth brushed against hers but when she reached for him he wasn’t there. She opened her eyes. He was standing by the bed, his hair still wet from the shower. He gave her a dazzling smile. ‘Dinner is in one hour,’ he delivered.
No way could she summon up a sense of urgency even though she knew she needed to wash her hair. She was lost in memories of the afternoon and the intimacy of watching Nik dress absorbed her as much as a brilliant and enthralling soap opera. Her cheeks warmed as memory served up the length of time they had spent in bed, the new skills she had been expertly taught, the amount of practice she had put in and the sheer exquisite pleasure of learning that Nik could be as helpless in the grip of passion as she was.
‘Dress formal,’ he told her, sliding his arms into a white silk shirt. ‘I believe there is to be dancing. Since my mother is not a fan of the pastime, I can only assume she is pulling out all the stops to impress the Kiriakos clan.’
Leah sat up, pushing a hand through her wildly tousled hair, watching him with a wealth of tenderness in her still sleepy eyes. ‘Why would she do that?’
Nik laughed wryly. ‘Our families stopped socialising together when the engagement was broken off. There has been a definite coolness ever since.’ He shrugged with fluid grace and then his mouth tightened. ‘However, I cannot say that I admire the timing. Good manners should have dictated that this be a family evening alone.’