Cathy Williams - Greek Mavericks - His Christmas Conquest

‘There. Now, isn’t that better? Warmer too, with the heating off. It’s a known fact that the best way to keep warm is through close proximity to another body. You would be surprised the amount of heat we give off.’

Sophie made a strangled noise and then lost herself in his indecently sexy eyes—the purest and deepest of greens, fringed by lashes that were thick and dark and ridiculously long for a man. She felt her body melt a little and the hands around his neck imperceptibly moved upwards so that she could feel the texture of his black hair.

‘So…I was saying…’ He rested the flat of his hand on her thigh and gently massaged through the denim of her jeans. ‘The boy—Robert—he may have proposed and perhaps, just perhaps, he’s deluded himself into thinking that the two of you would be good for one another, but you know and I know that that wouldn’t be the case, would it?’

Sophie hoped that he wasn’t expecting an answer to that because she was incapable of doing anything near as coherent as that at the moment, when his hand was managing to send urgent messages to her brain that told her to open her legs just slightly, enough for him to move upwards, while his eyes remained pinned to her face.

‘I mean…’ Theo mused softly, taking his time because his body wanted to race ahead and just take what it had missed for so long. ‘That man’s no good for you, whatever story he spins about being your knight in shining armour.’

‘Every girl needs a knight in shining armour…’ The observation ended on a gasp as his questing hand found the zip of her jeans and tugged it down, exposing her sensible black cotton underwear. Still talking in that lazy silky voice, Theo slipped his hand under her pants and he groaned when she arched back, eyes closed, enjoying his fingers as they played with her.

‘I think we should go somewhere where there’s a bed,’ he said.

Through the blurred mist of her thoughts, Sophie knew that this was her last chance to pull away. At this point, she could use any excuse she wanted. They would both know the truth of the situation and there was no excuse that wouldn’t reek of hypocritical emptiness.

Sophie had never been a risk-taker. She had never rebelled during her teenage years. Her minor disobediences had been along the lines of feigning illness to skip a test or refusing to carry on with piano lessons even though her parents wanted her to continue. She had been a goody two shoes, content to watch from the sidelines while other girls broke the rules.

Going with Theo would constitute the biggest risk she could take.

‘Let’s go,’ she heard herself say, peppering his mouth with kisses.

Two words and she metaphorically jumped off the side of the cliff. It wasn’t just that she was going to sleep with him. No. Deep inside her she knew that it was much more than that. She was going to sleep with a man she barely knew, someone to whom she responded, often antagonistically, on a gut level. There had been no courtship, no dating, no romance and it was a situation that was going nowhere. She was willingly going to go against everything she had always believed in and she was looking forward to it!

That realisation made her walk just that bit more provocatively as they headed to the bedroom. With each step, she could feel her excitement increasing until they were finally in the bedroom and the double bed was staring them in the face, screaming an invitation.

Sophie, released from a lifetime of conformity, moved towards the window and drew the curtains, shutting out the weak, intrusive winter sunlight. When she turned round, it was to find Theo standing by the door, looking at her.

‘It’s basic.’

‘It’s perfect,’ Theo told her roughly. When she began to hitch her jumper over her head, he stopped her and began walking towards her.

‘Body heat. Remember?’

‘Meaning…what?’ It was madness, but for a one-night stand, or rather a one-morning stand that was going nowhere, he was making her feel incredibly sexy and very, very wanton.

‘Meaning we should get naked…when we’re in very close proximity to one another…’

He placed his hands in the hollow of her back and ground her against him so that there was no escaping the reality of his erection and, when she felt as if she was going to faint from what it was doing to her, he began kissing her—long, sweet kisses that left her breathless and weak.

The soft willingness of her body was, for Theo, like a life raft to a drowning man. Had he realised how much he had missed this most basic of human contact? After Elena, he had willed himself to feel nothing and so he had felt nothing. Not a twinge of sexual awareness in the presence of a woman, no matter how beautiful or physically desirable or even available the woman in question had been.

And, even when he had been with Elena, sex had not been on the menu. Her ultra-feminine fragility had not encouraged the more rampantly male side of him and Theo had been content to wait until such time as she dictated.

It had been a very long time since his body had been satisfied. Theo buried his face in her Sophie’s fair, silky hair and breathed in that beautiful fragrance, a mixture of shampoo and hair conditioner, that always struck him as essentially female.

And, miraculously, he felt no sense of betrayal. On no front did this woman constitute a threat to his precious memories. She was a safety valve. He heard her moan softly as he pressed her still harder against him.

‘I’d carry you to the bed myself, but…’

‘But you’d like to spare me the embarrassment of being responsible for you ending up in hospital with a broken back…?’

Theo laughed. She had a sense of humour, which was good. It meant she wasn’t making this into a big deal.

‘I think, in a case like that, we’d both be embarrassed.’ But, actually, he really would have liked to have carried her over to the bed and very gently deposited her on it. It was an amusing notion considering he thought himself the least romantic man on the face of the earth.

But one thing he wouldn’t let her do was take her clothes off. That was something he intended to do himself so that he could savour every second of the experience very slowly.

Sophie found herself luxuriating in the experience, feeling like the cat that had suddenly and unexpectedly landed the jug of cream. In that part of her brain which was still operating—just—she puzzled over the enigma of how she could enjoy, with such perfect blissful abandonment, the touch and feel and scent of a man who was also capable of rousing her to real anger and frustration. Like one of those nasty maths problems she could never work out for exams, Sophie dismissed the niggle and sighed as Theo began tugging down her jeans.

The drawn curtains had managed to block out most of the light but it was still far from dark in the room. Sophie watched, fascinated and turned on, the ripple of muscle along his arms and shoulders as he discarded her jeans and, kneeling at the bottom of the bed, removed his jumper. His body was as lean and as honed as any finely tuned athlete and bronzed—as perfect a male specimen as she had ever set eyes on. It briefly crossed her mind that she was taking on way more than she could handle but, like the insoluble maths problem, she shoved aside the worry.

More pressing was the thought that her underwear was simply not up to scratch. She was pretty sure that the women he had slept with, and Lord knew how many of them there had been in his life, would have worn sexy, lacy underwear. Expensive exquisite silk as opposed to bargain buy cotton.

But that little anxiety lasted all of three seconds and then there were no more thoughts as he pulled down the functional briefs and positioned himself squarely between her thighs.