The Konstantos Marriage Demand (11 page)

‘And I will stick to that agreement, no matter how I feel about you personally. I’ll give you every last bit of my expertise. I’ll do the best job I can. Because that’s what I promised.’

She had no other choice. If she didn’t fulfil her side of the bargain, then what was to stop Nikos from reverting to the ‘no way, no chance…go home and pack’ stance that he had taken with her at first. Before his unexpected and almost unbelievable change of heart.

‘But I’ll not do it for you. I’m doing it for your bride, so
that she can have a wonderful day even if—even if she is marrying you. And in order to do that…’

What had changed in his face, altered his expression? Some shift in his muscles or a different light in those searing eyes. Something very subtle but definitely there. And it changed everything in the space of a single heartbeat, disturbing the atmosphere so that she felt herself floundering, suddenly gasping for air as if she had gone down under water and her lungs were filling up with liquid.

‘In order to do that?’ he prompted smoothly as she fought to find her voice again.

‘In order to do that I will need to meet her—talk with her.’

‘No way.’

Leaning back in his chair, Nikos laced his hands behind his head, lifting his legs so that they rested on the polished wood surface, feet crossed at the ankles.

‘But that’s ridiculous. Impossible!’

His one-sided shrug dismissed her protest as totally irrelevant.

‘That’s how it’s going to be.’

‘But there’s no way I can do my job if you won’t tell me anything, not even her name.’

But once again they had reached a sticking point. She could see it in his eyes, in the set of his stubborn jaw. She had had all the factual information he was going to allow her.

But there was one more thing he wanted to tell her.

‘All you need to know is that she is the only woman I have ever wanted to marry.’

Nikos was still lounging back in his chair, feet still on the desk. He looked supremely at ease, totally relaxed. But there was nothing comfortable or casual about the way that he added that final comment. Instead, he slipped it into her hard-won composure like the sharpest stiletto blade, sliding in between two of her ribs, aiming straight for her heart.

And it hurt so much that it destroyed every last trace of the already precarious self-control that she had been fighting to maintain ever since this conversation had started.

‘I can’t do this!’ she declared, shaking her head in despair at the situation in which she found herself. ‘I really can’t! You have to see that. Here I am, trying to arrange a wedding for a bride who to all intents and purposes doesn’t seem to exist.’

A stunning thought hit her, and she turned to glare into Nikos’s watchful face, green eyes clashing with gold in deliberate challenge.

‘She does exist, doesn’t she?’ He couldn’t have brought her here on some sort of wild goose chase, could he? And if he had, then why?

Nikos adjusted his position, taking his hands from behind his head and raking both of them through his hair, ruffling its sleek darkness in a way that was dangerously appealing. Sadie’s hands itched with the recollection of how it had felt to have the freedom to smooth through the black silky strands, curling them round her fingers.

‘Oh, she exists,’ he assured her. ‘She’s very definitely real.’

‘Then I want you to get in touch with her.’

Reaching for the phone, she snatched it up and held it out to him.

‘Get her on the phone—talk to her. You don’t even have to let me speak to her. I’ll just ask you the questions I need and you can get me her answers. At least that way I’ll know she’s been consulted—go on!’ she insisted, when Nikos simply stayed where he was, watching her without moving.

But now the relaxed sprawl of his long body had changed, much as his expression had changed only moments before. There was a new tension in the muscular limbs, a tautness like that of a wary hunting animal, waiting and watching before it pounced upon its prey.

Furiously, she waved the telephone receiver in his face, not caring that the wildness of the gesture gave away far too much of the turmoil raging inside her.

‘Talk to her!’

Another of those long silences, then at last Nikos shook his head, slowly and adamantly.

‘No,’ was all he said, making her stare at him in stupefied bewilderment.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean, I cannot call my prospective bride on the phone.’

‘Why not? Where is she?’

‘Right here.’

‘What?’

The answer was so totally unexpected that Sadie actually jumped, looking round in shock. She almost expected to see Nikos’s fiancée standing right behind her.

‘There’s no one—just me.’

A terrible, unbelievable thought dawned on her as she spoke, and slowly she turned back to face Nikos again.

‘There’s no one else here,’ she said again, but this time it was a challenge.

‘Exactly.’

Nikos removed his feet from the desk, stretched lazily and stood up, every moment slow and leisurely.

‘The woman I want is right here.’

‘But your fiancée…’

‘There is no fiancée.’

He couldn’t have said…Sadie found it impossible to believe that she had heard right. Desperately she shook her head, trying to clear her muddled thoughts.

‘You brought me here to plan your wedding,’ she protested, knowing she was grasping at straws. Nikos’s blank, emotion
less face told her that he was not going to help her out in any way. ‘You told me you had a fiancée…’

‘If you remember rightly, I never said anything of the sort,’ Nikos put in, with the sort of cold reasonableness that made her head spin in disbelief. ‘I said that I wanted you to come here to arrange a wedding. But I never said who I planned to marry. And I never said that there was any other woman involved.’

The room seemed to be swirling round Sadie, blurring dangerously, setting off a terrible nausea in her stomach that she could barely control. Fearfully, she pressed her hands to her head, fingers tight against her temples, feeling worryingly as if her head might actually explode.

‘You can’t mean—You don’t…’

‘I can and I do.’

Nikos prowled closer, silent, deadly…And Sadie could only watch transfixed as his hand came out and touched her cheek, cupping her jaw softly as he lifted her face so that their gazes locked and held.

‘What you are saying,’ he said quietly, even gently, ‘or trying to say, is that you are here because the one woman I have ever planned on marrying is you.’

T
HE ONE WOMAN
I have ever planned on marrying is you
.

The words pounded against Sadie’s skull, making sense in a literal way, and yet stopping short of any possible sort of reality.

The one woman I have ever planned on marrying is you
.

How could Nikos say that when it was so blatantly obviously not true? He had never really meant to marry her in the past, so why should anything be different now?

‘No.’

She shook her head violently, but that only seemed to make the spinning sensation so much worse. It didn’t even free her head from Nikos’s grasp. Instead it seemed to bring her into closer contact with the warmth and strength of that hand, those long, powerful fingers closing over her jaw, firmer but not harder, warm and strong and shocking sensual. Shockingly welcome.

In the middle of all the chaos of her thoughts, the only thing that she could grab hold of was the way she wanted that hand to be there. She wanted to turn her head, her cheek, into the warmth of his palm, and feel the heat of his skin, taste it against her mouth.

And that was the exact opposite of how she thought she should be feeling. The way that she wanted to be feeling. The way that, rationally, she felt it was safe to be feeling.

It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t wise, it wasn’t even damn well rational. But rational was so far from the way she was feeling that she frankly didn’t care.

She only knew that all the time they had been in this room, when he had been standing or sitting so far way from her, she had wanted, needed to bridge the gap between them. Had longed to come close and feel the heat of skin against skin, the pressure of hard bone under cushioning flesh. But it was only now, when he had made the move, that she actually realised that was what she had been feeling.

‘No…’ she tried again, but her voice had no more strength than the first time she had tried the word, less if anything, so that it croaked and broke in the middle as she spoke. ‘You can’t mean that.’

‘Can’t mean what,
glikia mou?’
Nikos questioned softly, the words seeming to shiver over her skin.

You can’t have brought me here to—to…’

That word wouldn’t form, and she didn’t know whether it was because she didn’t dare to face it or because of the way his thumb began to move, stroking slowly, delicately, over the angled line of her cheekbone and down the line of her jaw. Her legs were trembling, turning to cotton wool beneath her, and she felt as if the heat from that one small touch was radiating through her body, firing her blood, melting her bones. With a raw, jolting effort, she wrenched her head up and away from it, green eyes blazing into cloudy gold.

‘You brought me here under false pretences!’ she accused him furiously. ‘You conned me—you’ve
kidnapped
me!’

‘Kidnapped?’

Those beautiful eyes were deliberately wide and deceptively clear, with the look of the devil’s innocence.

‘Kidnapped you,
agapiti mou?
So tell me—when did I
force you, drag you on to my plane? When did I hold you hostage—lock you in your room, imprison you in the house?’

Strolling across the room to the door, he flung it open, gestured to indicate that she should walk past him if she wanted, out of the room, out of the villa…

And she very nearly took the option he offered. It was only as she made a single step forward that the rush of realisation came. He hadn’t forced her in any way except mentally. He had told her that if she came with him to Greece he would let her mother and little George stay in the house that meant so much to them.

‘You may leave any time you want.’

‘No, I can’t—and you know it! You made sure of that from the start. But I also know that I can’t go through with what you have planned. And I really don’t think that you can, either.’

‘Why not?’

His question was so impossibly pleasant-toned that it was obvious the smoothness of his voice was hiding the dark, dangerous bite of something else. Something that Sadie shrank away from and yet was irresistibly drawn towards like a needle drawn to the most powerful magnet. She couldn’t take her eyes from the sexy mouth that spoke those words, couldn’t pull away from the sensual aura of his long, lean body that seemed to reach out to enclose her, holding her fixed as if her feet were nailed to the floor.

‘Because what you said just does not make sense. You can’t possibly want to marry me.’

‘I can if that’s what it takes.’

That had her frowning her total lack of understanding.

‘Takes to do what?’

‘To deal with what is between us.’

‘There’s nothing between us! Nothing at all.’

‘Oh, but there is.’

When had he moved again, coming even closer, those soft boots making no sound on the polished floor?

‘No!’

Sadie’s hands came up between them, trying to push him away. But Nikos simply smiled and curled his fingers around hers, twining them together, soft and warm.

‘There’s this…’

Sadie’s breath hitched in her throat as he lifted her hands to his mouth and pressed kisses on to each finger in turn. Her heart thudded hard in response to each warm, soft pressure of his mouth and she slicked a soft tongue over her own lips, easing the sudden disturbing dryness there.

‘And there’s this…’

Still holding both of her hands enclosed in one of his, he lifted the other to her head, stroking it down softly over her hair until she arched her neck to press herself against the caress, practically purring like a contented cat.

‘And this…’

With a gentle but powerful tug, he jerked her close, so that the softness of her breasts was crushed against the hard wall of his chest, her hips cradled against his pelvis. The heat of his body flooded hers, making every nerve tingle into life, the pressure and the closeness making it impossible to be unaware of the swollen evidence of his arousal so close to where an answering need was already beginning to uncoil low in her body.

‘Nikos…’ she murmured, and her voice had changed, softened, the dryness of her throat making it husky and raw.

‘Yes,
glikia mou?’

Nikos sounded much the same, his words almost seeming to fray at the edges in the soft roughness of his tone. And, hearing it, Sadie knew that she had used up her ability to speak, her voice totally deserting her as she shook her head slowly, uncertainly. Unable to meet the fierce burn of that
golden gaze, she lowered her eyes to look away. But that only meant that she was now staring straight at where their hands were still linked between them, his strong and dark against the paler slenderness of her own.

For a moment she froze, aware of the man who held her with every cell of her body, of the heat and hardness of him that seemed to surround her totally. If she breathed she inhaled the warm musky scent of him. She could see nothing but him. The bulk of his body enclosed hers so that she couldn’t look past him to any other part of the room. And even though he hadn’t kissed her she almost felt that if she ran her tongue over her lips once more she would taste the essential flavour of him.

‘Sadie?’

Nikos’s voice was a warning and an invitation all rolled into one. The same warning, the same invitation that his body held for her. The warning said that if she backed away now then this chance would never come again. The invitation was to all she wanted and more.

Deep in a corner of her mind some tiny shred of common sense cried a warning. But Sadie crushed it down until it was buried completely. She had no intention of heeding it or going along with common sense. This was what she had wanted from that moment in Nikos’s office, and again in the plane on the way to Athens.

Then, the kiss, the caresses had been forbidden to her, because she had believed that he had a fiancée. Now there was no one to come between them, nothing to stop her. And she didn’t want to stop.

The invitation was what she wanted. And the invitation was what she was going to accept.

Slowly, she lifted her head. This time her eyes met his full on and she didn’t blink or look away.

‘All right,’ she said softly, but clearly, angling her head even more so that her mouth was his for the taking. ‘Let’s deal with what there is between us.’

The words were barely out of her mouth before they were crushed back under the pressure of his lips. But where she was expecting hard force, powerful passion, what she actually felt was slow, sensual enticement. The taking of her mouth with knowing skill. The wicked exploration of every inch. The slide of his hot tongue along the division between top and bottom lip, into the crevice at the corner and then back again, probing softly but insistently until she had no option but to let her head fall back and open to him completely.

And as she did so everything took fire. The slow, seductive moments were gone and all was heat and hunger and blazing, stinging passion that had her whimpering underneath his kiss, writhing up against him. Her breasts were crushed against his chest, her hips against the heat of him, and she flung her arms up and around his neck, holding his proud head down and close to her to prolong the kiss.

A kiss that now was no longer slow and seductive but hot and hard and demanding. A demand that she met willingly, gave back willingly. She felt Nikos’s heart kick against his ribcage, lurching into a heavy pounding that she heard echoed in her own bloodstream as the heat of hunger flooded through her. Her hands clutched in his hair, her body writing against his as she felt the burn of his fingers trailing over her naked shoulders, down the length of her spine. His palms clamped over the swell of her buttocks, drawing her closer than ever before.

‘Nikos…’

This time his name was a whimper of need against his mouth. A sound of encouragement driving him on. And she heard him mutter something in raw thick Greek as he adjusted his position, made it possible for him to obey her needy urgings.

She was spun round, lifted from her feet. The next moment she found that she had been deposited on the polished surface of the desk, the skirts of her red dress pushed up around her waist, the smooth wood cool against her legs. Nikos took advantage of her change in position as, one hand supporting her back, the other worked fast and urgently to unfasten the black buttons that held the sides of the dress together. And all the time his mouth followed the path of his hand, imprinting burning kisses over her skin.

The red linen fell away, exposing the creamy slopes of her breasts in the soft blue bra. Nikos’s breath hissed in sharply between his teeth and he lifted his head slightly, one long finger reaching out to trace the outline of the scalloped edge, making her shudder in agonised response.

‘Nikos…’ she said again on a sound of protest, of need, and the shivers came again, harder, fiercer, as he cupped one aching breast, slipping his thumb inside the lacy material, stroking over her breast, circling a tightening nipple until she cried out in shocked response.

That cry was captured in his mouth again, swallowed down as he pulled her closer once more, angling her halfway down to the desk, supported only by the strength of his arm at her back. The heat of the other hard palm burned against her sensitive flesh as he pushed the pale blue cup aside, wrenching the straps of the bra over her shoulder and partway down one arm, imprisoning it against her side.

But her other hand was free and could reach out to the buttons on his shirt, wrenching them open with rather less finesse than the way he had dealt with unfastening her dress. She heard the material of his shirt rip slightly, the clatter of a button landing on the table, but couldn’t find it in herself to care. All she wanted was the feel of his skin, hot and silky, hazed with body hair, underneath her questing fingertips. A gasping
sigh escaped her as she clawed at his chest, fingernails scraping lightly over the tight buds of his male nipples. Her mouth curled into a knowing smile as she heard a muttered imprecation in his native language, felt his strong body jerk in uncontrolled response.

‘Yes,
gineka mou,’
he told her roughly, the movement of his mouth tormenting that achingly aroused tip of the breast beneath his lips, the heat of his breath feathering delight over the sensitised bud, making her writhe in delicious torment on the desk.

She heard the clatter of something—perhaps the pencil pot—being knocked aside, the thud of something landing on the floor, and Nikos’s dark laughter against her skin was just an intensification of all the sensations that assailed her already.

‘You are my woman,’ he repeated. ‘Mine.’

‘Yours.’

It was a whispered echo, one that was choked off on a note of abandoned ecstasy as that hot and hungry mouth found her pouting nipple, sucking it deep into its moist heat and swirling a tormenting tongue around its yearning peak.’

‘Yours!’

She arched up towards him, needing to intensify the sensations, the pressure, and felt his teeth gently scrape the distended tip. For a moment she completely lost herself, almost swooning away in pleasure and only coming back to herself when another new and stunning sensation hit.

Those knowing fingers had reached the heart of her, stroking tormentingly along the fine stretch of fabric between her legs, making her gasp aloud, her one free hand clutching at the fine cotton of his shirt, holding him when she feared he might move away. But all he planned to do was hook his fingers in the sides of her knickers, tugging them down along her thighs to expose her to him more openly. At first it was easy, but when they caught and tangled just below her knees
he swore roughly and gave up trying for any sort of finesse. A couple of hard tugs and they had ripped apart at the seams, tossed away in an impatient, careless movement.

His mouth was where his fingers had been, kissing a burning path through the dark curls clustered between her legs, the wicked torment of his tongue swirling over delicate, receptive tissue, making it unfurl and respond like a rosebud opening towards the sunlight.

But she had had enough of waiting, had enough of the sensual agony of anticipation, delicious though it was. Her hands were shaking as she fumbled with his belt, clumsy with need and a desperate urgency. She was making a total hash of things when he laid a restraining hand over hers, and his hot mouth kissed the moans from her lips.