Kate Hewitt - Greek Affairs - To Take A Bride

‘I should have locked you up in a box years ago,’ he muttered as he looked down at her lying there like a golden offering. ‘When did you get to be so blatant about what you want?'

‘You taught me,’ she said and watched his response flare like lightning in his eyes as he came back to her.

‘As long as it was only me,’ he growled.

There was a single split-second when Louisa wanted to pick up that comment, then he was burying his mouth in her creamy throat and the moment was lost in the hot, deep, sensual journey of his mouth anointing her skin with warm, moist, gliding kisses on his way to her breasts. She released a soft cry and arched beneath him as he claimed a tight, rosy nipple, fingernails biting into his nape as he suckled and teased with his tongue and his teeth until she could bear the pleasure of it no longer and grabbed at his hair to pull up his head.

His eyes were as black as midnight, his skin the colour of sun-warmed bronze, smooth and sleek and sensationally tight.

‘Tell me what you want,’ he demanded.

‘You know,’ she groaned, running restless fingers over him and loving the way he flexed and shuddered then took the other breast like a marauding pirate, raiding the eager pink tip until she writhed like a wild thing beneath him. Then he came back to raid her mouth, one set of long fingers searing into her gold silk hair to keep her still while the other set stroked and teased in a torment of expert caresses until he reached the soft, springy curls at her thighs. The kiss broke as he delved deeper, his dark eyes intense on her as he watched her whole length stretch out on a sensation-packed sigh.

He aroused her with smooth, slow, expert patience until she was swollen and wet and he was trembling, a long, sleek mass of passionate male holding her trapped by his weight and the knowing stroke of his fingers as she fought what he was trying to make happen to her. He delved deep into her warm gasping mouth, he suckled the soft fullness of her lower lip. He moved with her and on her, every powerful inch of him playing its part to drive the whole thing on. The tight peaks of her breasts throbbed to his kisses. She scored her nails into his back and into his hair, she gripped the bunched muscles in his arms, latched hungrily on to a taut, muscled shoulder and ran hunting fingers down between them to capture the hard, jutting column of his sex.

‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘please …’

He shuddered on a wave of violent pleasure yet still he held it—controlled it and her, stretching out the fabulous torture until with a suddenness that took her by surprise, he came between her thighs and, on a whispered hot curse, thrust his full length into the morass of sensitised flesh she had become.

No part of her missed out on the glory of it. It swept through her in a wild, heated shimmer from her hair roots to the tips of her toes. No part of him missed out as she moved with him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her legs wrapped round his waist. His hands were kneading her hips and her buttocks, his mouth hot with urgency as he suckled her lips. When her explosive cry came with the first rippling wave of climax he let the helpless sound spring around the room and watched with fiercely possessive, glinting black eyes as she lost herself in its screaming-pitch power. Then he joined her, a long, sleek assembly of rippling male muscle taking the reward for his patience in those final grinding surges that spurred her own pleasure on and on.

Afterwards was like floating above the planet, Louisa didn’t even feel the need to breathe. Yet he was hot and heavy on her, a golden-skinned weight still experiencing the aftershocks of what they had shared with his strong arms wrapped around her and her legs still wrapped around him.

It felt like an age before he released his grip on her and levered himself up, tender fingers combing the damp strands of her hair from her face. ‘Now that,’ he kissed her softly, ‘was a lot more than just sex …'

Opening her eyes, Louisa looked into the cavern-darkness of his and quivered out a rueful smile. ‘In a dominant-male kind of way.'

An ebony silk eyebrow lifted. ‘You preferred me to be subservient?'

Lifting her hand, she let her fingers trace the silk arch as she slowly shook her head. She loved the way he took such masterly control of her. He knew that. She loved the way, when he finally surrendered his own control, he did not hold anything back.

‘Then why the pensive look?’ he questioned.

‘Because,’ she said, only to stop and frown while she tried to decide what the because actually was.

Drifting her eyes over his face, unaware of the stretching silence, Louisa tugged in a breath then wished that she hadn’t when that old familiar scent of his loving curled through her senses. Andreas, she thought bleakly, her first lover, her only lover. The man she had spent five long years trying hard to forget, yet, as she lay here with him heavy on her, she had to ask herself now how she had managed to exist so long without him when it had taken hardly any time at all to bring them back to this point.

‘Not sure you enjoyed it?’

The silken purr in his voice brought her eyes into focus to discover that his had narrowed, the darkened softness of sensual satiation gone from his face.

‘You know it was fantastic,’ she told him drily.

‘No.’ He shook his dark head. ‘You still look uncertain, so I think we had better try again, only slower this time—perhaps draw out the agony a bit longer until you beg me even more?'

Louisa tensed beneath him. ‘I did not beg!’ she objected.

‘You begged,’ he repeated, ‘but clearly it was not good enough to stop you from going wherever it was you just wandered off to.'

‘I did not wander off anywhere,’ she denied in exasperation. ‘What’s the matter with you, Andreas? You never used to be unsure of your mighty prowess!'

The corners of his mouth flexed. ‘Perhaps I’m losing my touch—'

‘I think you’ve gone crazy!’

If the black jealousy burning a hole in his chest was crazy then that, Andreas decided, was what he was.

He knew what it was that was bothering him—Max Landreau, Andreas thought grimly. Had Louisa been daring to think about Landreau while she lay here beneath him looking all pensive and bleak? Had she been comparing the old lover with the new?

Louisa gave a push at his chest. ‘Let me up,’ she instructed, stunned by how quickly he’d turned the most amazing loving of her life into another battle—and all because she’d let herself think!

‘Not a cat in hell’s chance.’ He caught hold of her hands and pinned them to the bed.

‘I don’t like you in this mood,’ she gasped, wriggling beneath him.

‘You love me in this mood,’ he drove her back onto the pillows with the bruising hot pressure of his kiss, ‘dominant and primitive and giving you no options. A few days of this and you will be so much my woman again you won’t want to wander off anywhere.'

Her eyes widened. ‘What do you mean—a few days of this?'

‘Well, you are not exactly fighting to get away from me …'

It was a taunt that hit right at her pride and her ego because she wasn’t trying to get away—not from this villa, not from this bed … not from him.

Chagrin turned her sparking eyes a deeper shade of blue.

‘I am going to love watching you fight the next battle with yourself when the ferry comes back in …'

It took a few seconds for his meaning to click then she sparked all over again. ‘If you’re daring to think I’m going to stay on here with you after this week then—'

Too late—too late, she thought as he crushed the protest from her lips and the breath from her body. Heat flared in the pit of her abdomen as thirty seconds later and true to his dominant promises he was sinking her right back down into the whole hot, sensual quagmire and to fight him she knew she had to want to, but she didn’t.