Chapter Five #2
How could she let this happen? After Gray, she had promised herself that she would never be dazzled by a beautiful man again.
It should never have happened with him either.
But three years ago, there was still a part of her that believed or at least wanted to believe that love was not simply a weakness to exploit.
She had still thought, hoped, that there was a man out there she could trust. A man who kept his word.
So it felt like fate when she met Gray at a charity auction of promises.
He was supposedly a friend of a friend. Afterwards she wondered if that, like everything else, had been a lie, but at the time she was intoxicated by his good looks.
And when she found out that he was offering his services for free, promising a day of social media domination to the highest bidder, she had been curious.
Three weeks later, when his posts popped into her social media feed, showing him working with the CEO of the company who had won his bid, she was more than curious. She was captivated, enough to question her doubts about the inherent untrustworthiness of men.
Here was a man who made promises he kept.
A month later, when he suggested working for her firm on a freelance basis, she agreed without a moment’s hesitation, lured by the irresistible proof of his integrity.
And by the fact that unlike Henry, Gray was more interested in giving rather than taking.
They had started dating, and soon he was spending most nights at her apartment.
So it was crushing to discover that he had been quietly and methodically siphoning off clients from Trojan Princess. As soon as his own business was up and running on the side, he vanished.
It had all hurt horribly, but what stung the most was that she had invited him in.
And like the vampire he was, he had bled her business and her heart dry.
She had been hideously naive, but she wasn’t entirely to blame. She was young and hopeful and in love, and crucially, Gray had disguised who he was. That was why she had let him get close enough to deliver such a devastating blow.
Her eyes flickered down to the dark suit jacket.
Antaeus had hidden nothing. From the moment they met, he had made it quite clear that he wanted to punish her for the part her father had played in his father’s downfall. It was clear, too, that he disliked and distrusted her.
He was openly ruthless, unforgiving, and yet she had opened her body to his.
Reaching up, she pressed her fingers against the back of her neck.
It ached, probably from the way she’d been thrown around in the storm.
Or possibly from the contortions required to have sex on the floor of a helicopter.
Then again, maybe it was whiplash caused by the jarring disconnect between how she should and had responded to her ‘captor’ last night.
Was that what he was? He was certainly her tormentor.
What then was her excuse for sleeping with him?
What kind of woman had sex with the man who was currently in the process of dismantling her life? A man who had also threatened to teach her a lesson by imprisoning her at his home.
And why would that man want to have sex with her?
Her chest felt like it was in a vice. It all felt so real, so urgent. Antaeus had been so urgent, his need for her almost clumsy. Surely that couldn’t be faked. Then again, how could she prove that it wasn’t? She only had proof that historically her judgement was flawed, that she could be duped.
But was that what had happened?
The answer to that question, to all her questions, was forgotten as there was a tap on the window behind her.
She spun round, eyes widening as she saw Antaeus.
And then her fingers were fumbling for his jacket, pulling it up in front of her breasts.
Although really there was no need for such modesty. He had seen all of her body last night.
Seen it. Touched it. Kissed it. Licked it.
Her skin did that tightening thing that made her feel breathless and as if she was about to burst.
‘May I?’
Antaeus jerked his head toward the door. She nodded, her pulse stumbling as he slid it open. She could only imagine what she looked like. Hair all mussed up, face still puffy from sleep, wearing his jacket like he was her prom date.
Basically a mess.
Whereas aside from a slightly darker layer of stubble, he looked exactly as he had yesterday at the storage facility. Minus the jacket.
In other words, he looked like a model on an into-the-wild photo shoot for some upmarket men’s lifestyle magazine.
‘Good morning.’
‘Kaliméra.’ He didn’t smile, so she didn’t either.
It was impossible to read his expression. Had he simply filed last night away? Was having sex with women on the floor something he did on a regular basis?
And how did one man provoke so many unaskable questions?
Tucking the jacket more tightly under her arms, she said with a calmness she didn’t feel, ‘How long have you been up?’
‘An hour. I thought you needed to rest, so I let you stay sleeping. It was quite a night.’
Quite a night. His words jostled clumsily inside her head, tripping over one another as she replayed them. Was he talking about the storm? Or the sex? Or both?
She swore silently as she realised she had added to her list of unaskable questions. And clearly Antaeus had no intention of asking them either. The silence between them stretched.
‘Yes, it was,’ she said at last. ‘What have you been doing?’ Her foot had gone to sleep, and it was now tingling painfully enough that she had to move. As she did so, she almost overbalanced. She had to reach out and grab the seat, and the jacket slid free.
Antaeus blinked as if he had forgotten where he was. ‘I was checking the rotors,’ he said after a moment. ‘They look fine. But I’ll check everything again just to be sure.’
‘I’ll get dressed.’
He stared at her intently and then nodded. ‘Good idea. Then we can get out of here.’
Good idea, she repeated silently as he slid the door shut. It took longer than expected to get dressed. Obviously there were no curtains, so she had to put on her dress crouching down. Then, as she felt for the zip, she kept having flashbacks to the moment when Antaeus had pulled it down her back.
Finally she was fully clothed, and her hair was twisted into a low knot at the base of her neck.
As she stepped out into the warm, peaceful sunshine, her heels slithered sideways.
Antaeus was leaning against the cockpit door.
He wasn’t looking at her, but she could feel his gaze, so she didn’t look at him. Instead, she stared at the landscape.
It looked like Zeus and the other Olympians had been wrestling with the Titans.
The ground was pitted with holes. Branches had been snapped off the trees and tossed randomly in every direction. Debris was strewn everywhere, presumably carried there and then dumped by the rain running off the mountain.
She tried to breathe normally, but seeing the devastation in daylight made her realise how close a call it had been.
How had Antaeus managed to land here?
He’d had so little room for manoeuvre. Too far to the right and he would have hit those trees. Too far to the left and there was an outcrop of rock that would have punctured the underside of the helicopter. Another five feet further forward and there was a steep drop.
‘Ready?’
She nodded.
As the helicopter rose up into the sky, she could see that Antaeus had found what was quite possibly the only place to land. Not quite a needle in a haystack, but it would have taken more than luck for him to get them down safely.
And he had been telling the truth about the weather being localised. They had been flying for perhaps three minutes, and the landscape here looked untouched.
She glanced over her shoulder to where the peak was shrouded in a wispy mist. From here it looked majestic but placid. It was hard to imagine it as the stage for last night’s terrifying drama.
‘They’re like a world within a world.’ Antaeus’s voice pulled her back into the present, and she nodded.
‘I had no idea,’ she said slowly. ‘They look so… I don’t know, so solid, so unchanging. I had no idea that they could create so much chaos.’
‘At a distance they do look immutable, but that ability to create chaos is part of what they are.’
She met his gaze. ‘Like the gods.’ No wonder the ancient Greeks thought that the tallest peak was their mythical home.
Antaeus stared at her intently with those dark, drowning eyes as if he was trying to see inside her head.
Finally he nodded. ‘They are like gods. You have to treat them with respect. Understand that they can’t always be appeased.
They inspire awe, but they don’t want to be fawned over.
They can be harsh and unforgiving and unpredictable.
But they’re also strong and steadfast. You have to accept those contradictions. That’s what makes them beautiful.’
The sun had burned off the fluttering wisps of mist now. At this distance, the mountains were beautiful. And yet still not as beautiful as the man sitting next to her, his hand resting lightly on the joystick between his legs.
The same hand that had moved over her body with such impossible freedom.
Her throat was suddenly dry, her pulse muddied. It didn’t help that Antaeus was one of those rare people whose beauty was undiminished by the harsh light of the morning after.
Not that she was that experienced in one-night stands.