Jackie Braun - Greek Bachelors - Tempted To A Fling - A Greek Escape / Greek for Beginners / My Sexy Greek Summer

His kiss was passionate, yet tender. Dominant, yet testing. And the mind-blowing expertise with which he lured her mouth to widen for him was the technique of a man who had studied and understood women—a far cry from a man who had such a laid-back attitude to life. A wanderer. A drifter. Without purpose or design.

He smelled of the earth and of the pines that clad the higher slopes of the hillsides. He was burning with everything wild and unfettered, unrestrained. And yet she felt his restraint—a purposeful holding back—as he held her loosely within the exciting circle of his arms.

That was until the hands that were still clutching her camera and the sunscreen bottle against his wide, cushioning shoulders suddenly slid around his neck. Then, with a groan of defeat, his restraint fell away, leaving only raw passion in its wake as he tossed her hat aside and pulled her hard against him.

Kayla heard a gushing in her ears and wasn’t sure whether it was the heavy pounding of her blood or whether she was being captured and submerged beneath the relentless power of the sea.

She could feel the whole hard length of his body—every last inch of it—and she could feel her own responding to the drugging hunger of his mouth.

His back was firm and muscled, and she wished she wasn’t encumbered by her possessions so that she could slide her eager hands across it. There was no such encumbrance though in the way her body locked with his. His chest was a wall of thunder, crushing her aching breasts, while the potent evidence of his hard virility was making her pulse with need.

When he put her from him, holding her at arm’s length, she uttered a strangled murmur of breathless shock and disappointment.

‘Why did you do that?’ she quavered. Why had he kissed her when he had just claimed he had no intention of trying to get her into bed?

He was breathing as heavily as she was, and a deep flush was staining the olive skin across the strong, hard structure of his cheeks.

‘Because you were wondering what it would be like if I did.’

Still trembling, and perturbed by how easily he could not only read her mind but also by how easily he could bend her to his will, she challenged brittly, ‘So why did you stop?’

‘Because, as I told you before, I have no intention of taking advantage of a woman on the rebound,’ he reminded her, even though his breathing was still laboured and his strong face racked from the passion he was struggling to keep in check.

‘And—as I told you before—I’m not on the rebound,’ Kayla protested adamantly, shamed by her response when he was showing such self-control, and when she seemed to have relinquished all of hers in one experimental kiss!

‘Aren’t you?’ he disputed, although there was a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth that softened his challenging remark, before he went on to add, ‘You had a relationship with him, didn’t you?’

‘Well, of course I did,’ Kayla returned. ‘Of sorts.’

‘Of sorts?’ He tilted his head, his brows drawing quizzically together. ‘How am I supposed to interpret that?’

‘Any way you like!’ Kayla tossed back at him, too embarrassed to tell him that Craig’s enthusiasm for her had seemed to go off the boil for several weeks before their break-up, and that she was ashamed of herself now for not suspecting the truth. She had believed him when he had blamed work overload for his not showing enough interest in her. When he’d assured her that things would be different when they were married. When he had got the precious promotion he’d spent all his time working for.

‘Were you living with him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? If I ever set my mind on a woman I want to become my wife, then she will be firmly in my life—and my bed—before I even ask her.’

‘I didn’t want us to move in together. Not until we were married,’ Kayla emphasised. ‘And Craig was in full agreement with that.’

‘Really?’ Mocking scepticism marked that hard masculine face. ‘You could do without each other that much?’

‘Not that it’s any concern of yours,’ Kayla pointed out, hating having her relationship with her ex scrutinised so closely by this man she scarcely knew, ‘but we wanted to start married life properly. In a place that was our own. I didn’t want to just move into his flat. Anyway, there’s more to a relationship than jumping into bed with each other at every given opportunity,’ she stressed, unconsciously wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips still felt bruised and swollen and, like her susceptible body, burning from Leon’s wholly primal, earth-shattering kiss.

‘Is there?’ he asked, and she could feel those perspicacious eyes following her involuntary action, mocking her, disconcertingly aware.

‘Yes!’ She was trembling, knowing that the way she had just behaved with him made nonsense of everything she was saying. And the worst thing was he knew it too. ‘The type of man I let myself get involved with doesn’t just give in to basic animal lust.’

He chuckled under his breath. ‘Is that what I was doing? Then you must forgive me if I fail to live up to the constraints of the type of man you are obviously used to. Although I could hazard a guess that your relationship was sadly lacking in what was required to make a lifetime commitment, and that the lack of passion between you could have been why he was getting his satisfaction elsewhere.’

The reminder hurt, stinging her pride and giving rise to that same feeling of inadequacy she had felt after she’d got over the initial blow of Craig’s betrayal—especially coming from someone who oozed the sort of sexual potency that this man did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, surprising her suddenly. ‘I didn’t mean to rub it in.’

‘Didn’t you?’ she accused, hiding her hurt pride and dignity beneath the burnished gold of her lowered lashes.

‘Well, all right.’ A self-effacing smile touched that mouth that had the power to drug her. ‘I did. But until it stops hurting, Kayla, you aren’t ready for an involvement with any other man. And even if you were, the last thing a sensitive girl like you would want is an involvement with a man like me.’

Why not? Crazily, she heard the mortifying question spring to her lips and was half-afraid that she had actually spoken it. Wasn’t he just the type of man she needed right now to drive the bitter after-taste of Craig and all his shallow-minded smart set out of her mind?

‘Believe it or not, I’m not looking for one,’ she responded, to assure herself as much as Leon. Well, she wasn’t, was she? Wasn’t she better off—as her mother had always claimed to be—on her own?

‘Sensible girl,’ Leonidas drawled and, stooping to pick up her hat, deposited it gently and unceremoniously on her head.

‘Thanks.’ Kayla pulled a wry face. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sketch me like this?’ she challenged broodingly, relieved, nevertheless, that the disconcerting subject of her love-life had finally been swept aside.

What wasn’t so easy to sweep aside, however, was the memory of what had transpired between them a few moments ago.

Why had she responded to him so shamelessly if, as he’d suggested, she was still affected by what Craig had done? Was she so wanton? So desperate for a man? Any man? she wondered. Might she have let this virtual stranger take her here on the shingle without a thought for how it might leave her feeling afterwards?

‘I won’t be sketching you at all,’ he said dismissively. ‘For the simple reason that you are wrong. I’m no artist. But if I were, and if I had to keep looking at you looking like this...’ His gaze slid over her tantalisingly wet top, making her quiver inside from the powerful impulses generated by the naked need in his eyes, ‘then—old boyfriend or no old boyfriend—I definitely would wind up taking you to bed.’