Chapter Three
SENSATION EXPLODED INSIDE of Aikaterini, like a catastrophic system failure—
Except it didn’t hurt. She wasn’t in pain. Nothing was wrong, really.
It was just that she had never felt anything like this in her life.
His mouth was as she remembered it from the Cathedral. Stern and firm and with the power to make her forget herself in the presence of half the island.
But this was nothing like that public kiss.
His mouth opened over hers and it was a shocking, carnal heat that made her whole body shiver. She felt his mouth everywhere, like there was a kind of wildfire that seemed to spiral down from the place where their mouths touched to pool deep in her belly.
He didn’t move closer. He didn’t touch her with those surprisingly capable hands of his.
He simply…moved his mouth over hers until she found herself pushing back against him, but not because she wanted to push him off.
If anything, she found herself trying her best to mirror what he was doing. He licked into her and she licked back, and when their tongues touched it was as if every single part of her became a kind of firework.
Everything was that same explosion, like a linked chain, and her body seemed to be in some kind of revolt—
But no, she tried to tell herself. It was just that she’d never felt these things before.
Her breasts ached and her nipples drew tight.
Her belly felt as if it was quivering, and every time it did, it seemed to set off that fire further down.
And she couldn’t seem to keep herself from pressing her legs together.
And everything in her was yearning, longing, and a desperate kind of passion—
He pulled away then.
And Aikaterini had spent a long time looking at this man over the years. Sometimes furtively. Sometimes defiantly. Sometimes hoping that he would see and understand how little she thought of him.
But she’d never seen him this close.
She felt as if she could feel every place he’d touched her. Her hand when she had knelt before him. Both of her hands from when they had exchanged rings.
That kiss during their wedding.
And now. Also a kiss, though nothing like any kiss she’d ever been a part of.
Her mouth felt ravaged and soft and his, somehow.
Aikaterini couldn’t breathe. Or she was breathing too fast. She couldn’t tell the difference.
This close, he was somehow beautiful. As if all of those impossibly masculine, brutish features she had picked apart from afar made sense at this short distance.
Or maybe it was simply that her body understood something she didn’t.
Like it knew exactly what a man like this was for.
This time when she sucked in a breath, she could actually hear it.
But so could he.
“It appears chemistry will be no problem at all,” he said, and his voice was so calm, so even, that she felt a different kind of fire flash over her.
She didn’t recognize it at first, even though she felt her cheeks grow hot and her temperature rise.
It was only when he pushed away from the wall and turned his back on her, prowling back across the room, that she understood what was happening to her.
This was temper. Her temper.
She was pretty sure that the last time she’d felt anything like it was when she’d been a child. And had been scolded unfairly by her tutor, an injustice it had taken her a long time to get over.
Temper, she thought again, in a kind of wonder tinged with horror. How on earth had this man managed to get to her like this? She’d had heads of state say things to her that should have started wars and she’d barely reacted.
But all Kyriakos had to do was kiss her, apparently.
His back was still turned toward her, so she lifted up her fingers to touch her lips—expecting to feel them like wounds, somehow.
They were still just her lips. It was just that they were oversensitized now. And really didn’t seem to belong to her.
When he turned again, she dropped her hand from her mouth. She was aware that she was acting something like guilty, and that was astonishing all on its own.
“I was told that there would be clothes to change into,” he was saying as he moved over to the bed.
She hadn’t looked at it, because she already knew that it was far larger than the one in her bedroom. It was elevated on its own dais, and she and Venediktos had always laughed and called it the true throne room.
But she didn’t feel much like laughing as she watched Kyriakos walk toward it and then pause when he got there.
There was a large, intricately carved trunk that spanned the foot of the bed, and when he reached it, he gathered up the clothes she hadn’t even noticed were placed into two separate baskets.
He turned again and nodded toward the other end of the long trunk. “I believe those are here for you.”
Then he tossed the clothes he’d picked up onto the bed, and Aikaterini found herself watching in something she decided to call horror—though it was too hot for that and seemed to coil tight, deep in her belly—as he stripped off his shirt and left her staring at the wide expanse of his smoothly muscled back.
She wasn’t sure she could have turned away if she tried.
But she also didn’t try.
He continued to change, and she continued to watch him as if she was pinned to the wall where he’d left her. She wasn’t sure she was breathing. She didn’t seem able to blink, either.
He stepped out of his formal trousers and let them drop, and then he was standing there in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs. And it was as if everything she’d thought about this man for all of these years scrambled up in her head.
Not only in her head. Her whole body seemed to be involved.
As if, suddenly, she not only knew what the point of all his muscular hugeness was, she could feel her own body’s wildly enthusiastic reaction to him because he was shaped this way. Big. Hard. Indisputably male.
The man wasn’t simply fit. He didn’t simply look like he worked out as a job, or any of the other things she’d heard said about him in that arch, wittily disparaging way of aristocratic circles.
He looked like a sculpture. Like one of the gods. If she hadn’t touched him, she would have sworn to anyone who would listen that he was made entirely of marble. She felt moisture in the corners of her eyes, as if she was actually being blinded in real time by the sight of him.
And everything she’d thought brutish and too big made sense now.
She’d gotten the scale wrong.
He was perhaps the most perfectly beautiful and shockingly masculine man she had ever beheld.
Never had she seen such a pleasingly aesthetic collection of muscles, planes, and dips, all of it singing hosannas for the heretofore unknown glory of the male form. Or unknown to Aikaterini, anyway.
Her mouth was dry.
And then she felt as if she might cry, perhaps, because he wasn’t lingering there, like a static statue on a pedestal in a museum. He was literally changing his clothes. A more pedestrian act she could not imagine, and yet she still couldn’t seem to launch herself into action.
He pulled on a pair of loose lounging trousers that had been laid out for him. Then he covered up that astonishing back and chest with a T-shirt that strained over his pectoral muscles and did something that should have been unseemly around his biceps.
She had the sudden urge to paint him in thick, lush oils—when she’d never picked up a paintbrush in her life.
And she had no idea what expression could possibly be on her face when he turned back around and found her staring at him.
He studied her for what seemed like an eternity, and those dark brows rose. Slowly.
“Are you not planning to change?” he asked in that sardonically inflected mild tone of his that now seemed to shiver through her with intent. “You look beautiful, of course, but I cannot imagine that would be a comfortable dress to sleep in.”
“Oh,” she said. She felt flustered. She felt as if he’d left her pinned to the wall like some unfortunate insect experiment, but no matter how many times she told herself to simply step away, she didn’t. “Well. It took three attendants to put me into this dress. I don’t think it’s coming off.”
“Happily,” he said as he moved toward her, “I have a 100 percent success rate when it comes to the removal of women’s garments.”
If he had said that in a different way, she might have ordered him to stay where he was. She might have screamed, even. But there was none of that blistering heat in his gaze. He hadn’t sounded the least bit suggestive.
It was a statement of fact.
Somehow, that made her comfortable enough to turn around when he came over to her. She offered him her back, where a line of delicate buttons followed the path of her spine all the way down to just above her bottom.
This, she realized almost immediately, was a huge tactical error.
Because now her face was to the wall and she had her hands braced there too, as if she thought she might topple off the side of the world if she didn’t keep a grip on it.
But the worst part was that his hands were both on her and not on her at the same time.
She felt her eyes drift closed, though her heart was beating entirely too fast for her to imagine that she was being lulled into some sense of safety or sleep.
His fingers moved surprisingly adeptly despite their size—he had not been joking about his abilities.
Kyriakos seemed entirely capable as he moved down the line of her dress, and as he went, she could feel the fabric… opening.
Meaning, he was exposing her. He was looking at her—looking at an intimate part of her body that she had never seen herself, except in pictures.
She found herself heating up again, because she knew that he could also see what she was wearing underneath.