Cathy Williams - Greek Mavericks - His Christmas Conquest

‘I’m not even going to pretend to be listening.’ She turned and stuck the rice into the microwave, pushing the numbers hard to drown out the sound of his voice. Not that he was saying anything. At the moment. He was looking at her. She could feel his eyes boring through her top and the sensation was like having her breasts touched by him, a feathery soft caress that made her redden.

For some reason she wished she had worn a bra, but then she hadn’t expected to be staying on for dinner—just fixing the heating and clearing off—and it was comfortable not having her breasts constrained. Although she was slight in build, she was not flat chested. The opposite, in fact. She now felt the weight of her generous breasts bouncing under the loose jumper, swaying as she dished out the food.

‘Dinner,’ she said flatly, nodding to his plate and sitting down at the kitchen table opposite him.

‘And the end of our conversation, I take it?’

Sophie watched him, hunkered over his plate, eating the chicken with his fork, every inch the kind of alpha male who could walk into a room and have the ladies swooning. She would have to be as thick as a plank of wood not to realise that the man’s massive ego and staggering self-assurance would have come from the power he probably exerted over the opposite sex. Did he think that his extraordinary looks somehow qualified him to be a judge of what made other people tick? Whatever he said, she couldn’t believe that his contact with the rest of the world was particularly huge, never mind how many books he had had published in the past. Writing was a solitary profession. Yes, if he wrote real adventures about real people, then he would have to interview them, but after that he would be on his own, transcribing. Transcribing at a desk somewhere in London certainly didn’t qualify him to offer advice on one of her closest male friends.

She wondered whether he assumed that she must be completely ignorant of the opposite sex, living in this backwater as she did.

Suddenly, Sophie felt an unusual protective urge towards Robert. She thought of his little kindnesses recently and bitterly resented Theo’s sweeping assumption that he could insult the man without compunction.

‘You can say what you like about Robert, but he’s gentle and kind and considerate. In fact…’ she allowed a few seconds of silence to stress the importance of what she was going to say ‘…he’s even offered to help bail me out of this financial mess…’

‘Really,’ Theo drawled.

‘Really.’ Sophie shot him a smug little smile, which he greeted by raising his eyebrows in apparent amusement.

‘Maybe he just wants to get you into bed and buttering you up with an offer he knows you’ll probably refuse seems the quickest way.’

Sophie recovered quickly. ‘Maybe that’s it. Although maybe I wouldn’t need buttering up to get into bed with him…’ She gave a shrug which she hoped displayed the wealth of worldly wisdom which was definitely not at her disposal. Whether it was the wine or a combination of the wine and the dangerously intrusive conversation, she was beginning to feel heady. She was twenty-six years old and she couldn’t remember ever having a conversation like this before. The boys in her circle, most of whom were doing post grad courses, would never have dreamt of challenging her in this way. She didn’t know whether she liked it or not. And she didn’t know whether she liked the excitement that was fizzing in her veins as she met his stare. If someone had asked her what she was eating, she would have had to think about it, even though she had been the one to dish it up.

‘Somehow he strikes me as a bit too tame for a woman like you. Unless, of course, you like the role of dominatrix,’ Theo mused aloud, finishing his chicken and shoving the plate away from him. He leaned back into his chair and looked at her steadily. There was a little drop of sauce from the chicken on her chin, by her mouth, and he allowed himself the rogue thought of wondering what she would do if he covered the three steps towards her, bent down and licked it off.

Guilt followed hard on the heels of the wayward image, but there was none of that savage longing he had had in the past to hold on to the image of Elena. The steady drumming of rain outside, the bursts of wind clawing against the window panes, was like a lullaby, easing his tortured conscience, leaving him free to indulge himself in the sight of her playing with the food on her plate.

‘You’ve got some sauce on your chin.’

‘Oh!’ Sophie wiped it off and licked her finger. For some strange reason, Theo found the innocent gesture intensely erotic. The erection he had put to rest earlier on was once more reminding him that he was still a man and one with very real physical needs.

‘Mind you, if you don’t really know whether the man actually wants you or not, then his technique can’t be very persuasive…’ Theo murmured, returning to the conversation and enjoying the faint flush of colour that spread along her cheekbones. There was nothing masculine about that reaction, he thought. In fact, it was very, very feminine.

Before his body decided to do something of its own volition, he stood up and began clearing away the plates, insisting she stay put while he tidied.

‘I’m a twenty-first century man,’ he said, which was enough to make him grin. Dinosaur was one of the labels an ex-girlfriend from years back had once told him and certainly, however much he was in favour of equality of the sexes in the workplace, he still saw almost every chore to do with the house as something firmly planted in a woman’s domain. In fact, if he thought about it, he really couldn’t remember the last time he had ever done what he was now in the process of doing, namely clearing the dishes from a table after he had shared a meal with a woman.

In fact, thinking even harder on the matter, he realised that sharing a meal with a woman anywhere other than a restaurant or, at a push, her place, was not something that had ever been on his agenda. Women fussing in his kitchen had always made him feel slightly uneasy. Until Elena. Although…

Had she ever cooked for him? No—not enough time to enjoy the pleasures of domesticity before tragedy had taken her away. Their relationship had been frozen in the courtship stage.

Before he could travel down the usual inexorable path, he realised that Sophie was saying something about his twenty-first century man observation and in a particularly acerbic tone of voice, he realised.

‘What am I doing?’ he demanded, temporarily distracted. He brandished one plate in his hand and looked meaningfully at the sink.

‘You’re putting your dirty plate into the sink and you’ve been polite enough to take mine as well. I wouldn’t,’ she added with scathing sarcasm, ‘be too hasty to enter any Man of the Year competitions based on that…’

Before she could continue, Theo had swept round to face her and leant over her, bracing himself on the arms of her chair. He was so close to her, in fact, that she could see the golden specks in his eyes, was horribly aware of the thickness and length of his eyelashes, acutely conscious of the sexy contours of his mouth.

She was also very very conscious of her own body and the way it was shrieking in response. Her nipples, grazing the thick cotton of her jumper, had tightened into buds and every part of her seemed to be melting.

She could breathe him in. His uniquely clean male scent filled her nostrils and she blinked away the temptation to sigh and close her eyes.

‘And, in your opinion, what would qualify me to enter that Man of the Year competition…?’ Theo drawled. His eyes dropped to her heaving breasts and he hurriedly fastened them safely back on her face.