CHAPTER SEVEN
LEGSFEELINGLIKE dead weights beneath her, knee throbbing, the toe she’d hurt throbbing too, Kate followed Leander up the winding stairs and onto the dimly illuminated mezzanine.
It was still black outside but the night would soon be over. When she woke, the dying storm would be over too and with it her time with Leander. The dejection she felt at this...
He opened the door of the pretty, neutrally decorated guestroom she’d showered in and stepped aside. ‘If you need anything in the night, food or drink, just dial—’
‘One on the intercom?’
His smile was as bleak as the dejection in her heart.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she asked before he could make the move that would finally separate them that night. As exhausted as she was, she wasn’t ready to say goodnight to him. Not ready for oblivion. Not when to wake from oblivion would likely mean saying goodbye to Leander for ever.
‘You can ask me anything.’
‘Why were you so cold with me after your party?’ This was the one question she needed answered before she left.
‘Because I wanted to throw Dimitri out of a window for dancing with you.’ Leander swallowed the bile that had risen at the gross overreaction of his thoughts that night. ‘Once I went to bed, I tortured myself for the rest of the night that the two of you were in a room alone together. I was...’ Realising he was about to say something forbidden, he cut himself off. ‘Toothpaste.’
The understanding that flashed in her eyes told him she understood what he’d stopped himself from saying. That he’d been jealous. That it had been the night his desire for Kate had smacked him as hard in the face as he’d wished to smack Dimitri.
‘Not my finest hour,’ he admitted wryly.
He’d never been jealous before. Like his cruelty towards Kate, it was a side to himself he would never allow to take control of him again.
‘Nothing happened between us,’ she said softly, and she looked so beautiful and so damned ravishing standing in the doorway with only his shirt wrapped around her naked flesh and the guest bed mere feet behind her that the desire he’d controlled to a simmer while they’d been eating slammed back into him.
‘I wouldn’t think less of you if it had.’ He gave a low laugh. It was time to back away and remove himself from the breathing temptation that was Kate. ‘We both know I am in no position to judge.’ With a bow of his head, he stepped to his own room and was about to open the door when she called his name.
He turned back to her.
She hadn’t moved from the threshold of the guest door. ‘I haven’t slept with anyone.’
It was like she’d thrown a bucket of ice over him. ‘What? Never?’
Beautiful jade eyes locked on his. ‘Never.’
Mind completely blown, he walked slowly back to her. ‘Why not?’
Her lips curved into a tremulous smile and she rested her cheek on the doorframe. ‘Do you remember me telling you about that orangutan documentary I watched with my mum when I was seven?’
He remembered everything she’d ever told him. ‘The one that made you announce you wanted to be a vet?’
She nodded. ‘Everyone kept telling me that only the really clever kids could be vets. I’m not naturally clever like you, Leander. I was the youngest in my class which put me at a disadvantage when I was little and made me feel stupid. I had to work twice as hard as the other kids just to learn my words and numbers, and that’s basically been the story of my life ever since, and always with goals that needed to be reached: working for the scholarship, working for my GCSEs, working for my A-levels and then five years spent working for my degree.’
‘I understand all that but Helena has always spoken about all the fun the two of you got up to over the years.’
Her smile was rueful. ‘I never said I lived as a nun but I went to an all-girls boarding school. The opportunities to go out and live it up were so limited that they didn’t really impact my study schedule. Once I started at university I thought I could cut loose a bit more and I got together with this nice lad studying physics, but seeing Euan made me take my eye off the ball and I stopped studying as hard and came close to failing a module and losing my whole place on the course. It scared the life out of me and I ended things with Euan way before we’d reached the getting our clothes off stage.’ Eyes shining, her chin wobbled. ‘Back then I assumed it would happen once all my studies were over and the time was right.’
Fighting to control the emotions smashing through him, fighting to breathe, Leander backed himself against the mezzanine.
‘What are you thinking?’ she whispered in a small voice.
He smothered a groan and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I’m thinking I wish you hadn’t told me.’
Her silent hurt at this sliced through him.
‘Kate...’ This groan refused to remain smothered. ‘You do know this means I am now destined to spend my life wondering if it has happened?’
Her attempt at laughter sounded like a sob. ‘I can message you when it happens to stop you wondering if you like?’
His own effort at laughter was a failure. ‘I don’t know if the confirmation would drive me more insane.’
Their gazes stayed locked for the longest time before their chests rose in unison.
‘Get some sleep, agápi mou.’
Her chest rose again at his endearment, a sad smile curving her pretty little mouth as she backed into her room. ‘Goodnight, Leander.’
The door closed softly behind her.
Kate hadn’t thought it possible that she’d fall asleep. Her talk with Leander had wiped away her exhaustion. Or so she’d thought. Moments after her head hit the pillow she fell into vivid dreams that all revolved around him, and woke with a sob in her throat, an ache in her heart and a heavy pulse throbbing between her legs. She could still feel the imprint of his mouth on hers.
She cuddled tightly into her pillow.
A tear crept out.
The feelings she had for Leander were all wrong. She was only here to take him back to Helena, and...
And Helena didn’t want him.
Not in the way Kate wanted him.
Helena was marrying Leander out of desperation. As soon as the sham honeymoon was over, she’d set the ball rolling to get her inheritance and as soon as she had it, the sham marriage would be over.
Helena loved Leander as a brother, and Kate’s heart panged sharply as she recalled a long-forgotten conversation from a few years ago. Leander had been due to visit London and Helena had, as she often did, invited Kate to join them. She’d been studying frantically for her final exams and had needed a break and so had, for once, agreed, only to get herself into a lather at the last minute and beg off, terrified that the time she’d have to spend eating with the two of them would be the difference between pass and failure. Helena, used to Kate’s last-minute exam time panics, had laughed. ‘One day, I will get the two of you in a room together,’ she’d said. ‘If any man’s going to make you want to throw away your chastity belt it’s Leander.’
‘I thought you said he was a playboy,’ Kate had said, confused that Helena was seemingly trying to play cupid.
‘He’s a playboy but he’s a good guy, and seeing as he won’t settle down until he’s at least fifty and you’re planning to marry an orangutan, does him being a playboy even matter?’
Her heart beating harder than ever, Kate replayed that forgotten conversation again, forgotten because she’d sat her exams soon after and then she’d left university for good and resumed her volunteer role with the vet team at the zoo twenty miles from her family home, a role she’d undertaken every term break since her second year at uni. Her head had been too full praying not to have failed her degree to even think of Helena’s cupid game, and then once it was confirmed that everything she’d worked so hard for had paid off and she’d become a permanent, paid member of the veterinary team, she didn’t give Leander Liassidis another thought. She didn’t give any man a thought, by now too intent on getting the experience she needed to take the final step of realising her dreams. When Helena had confided about her marriage to Leander and the reasons for it, Kate had been in the process of arranging visas and the vaccinations needed for her imminent move to Borneo, too excited that her dream was almost close enough to touch to remember Helena had once implied Leander was the man Kate should lose her virginity to.
This time next week, she would be in South East Asia, finally realising her lifelong dream. All the sacrifices Kate and those she loved had made had paid off. Nothing could derail her from achieving it because it was already done. She’d already reached the finish line.
And now Leander had invaded her dreams. He’d taken them over so effectively that it was like he’d always lived in them, and her heart beat even harder at the realisation that what she was feeling now was so strong that it was impossible to imagine that anyone else could ever make her feel a fraction of what Leander did.
Feeling like she was falling into another one of her Leander dreams, she threw the duvet off and, her heart thrumming, padded to the door.
The sun was starting to rise and still Leander’s brain would not switch off.
He’d brushed his teeth to within an inch of their lives but still all he could taste was Kate. He could still feel the heat of her body in his arms. Could still feel the smoothness of her flesh beneath his fingers.
He closed his eyes and fought harder than he’d ever fought for control of himself.
What madness had let him believe he could sleep with Kate only two rooms away from him?
The worst part was knowing that two rooms away, Kate was trapped in her own tortured awareness of him lying here.
Theós, he wanted her so badly. So badly. More than he’d ever wanted anyone or anything.
And she wanted him too...
The tap on his door was so light he thought his febrile mind had conjured it. It was only the surge of his pulses that made him climb out of bed a few moments later and open his door.
Kate was standing with her back against the mezzanine, facing him.
He swallowed, hardly able to breathe. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘I...’ Her voice dropped so low he could hardly hear it. ‘I don’t want it to be with anyone else.’
His grip on the door tightened and he had to clear his throat to hoarsely speak. ‘What are you saying?’
Her voice might be barely audible but there was no mistaking the clarity in her eyes. ‘I want it to be with you.’
Another of those silences where a falling feather could be heard enveloped them until, with a groan that rose from the pit of his stomach, he took the three paces needed to scoop her into his arms and any remaining fight in him evaporated.
What was he even fighting for? he wondered dimly as he carried her into his bedroom, soaking in the colour heightened cheeks and all the delicate pixie features that made Kate so unutterably beautiful.
He laid her on his bed. The beats of his thundering heart echoed through the entirety of his body.
A trembling hand pressed into his cheek. The warmth of her touch scorched him. Slowly, her fingers tiptoed to cup the back of his head. Her throat moved numerous times before her chest rose. Her lips parted, shallow breaths escaping and she slowly craned her face to him.
God in heaven, he ached to be a part of her.
Dipping his head, the last thing he saw before their mouths locked together was the melting of the jade into liquid.
The first brush of her lips against his melted him into liquid.
Kate’s heart was racing so hard and so fast she could no longer feel the individual beats. Everything—everything—had become Leander, and she scraped her fingers through his soft hair to knead his skull as the tender caress of his mouth deepened, her nerve endings zinged into life and the entirety of her senses were filled by his dark taste and musky scent.
She couldn’t stop this even if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to. She wanted this, wanted Leander with every fibre of her being. Nothing else mattered. Nothing in the world but this. Him. Her. Them.
Who else could she give the whole of herself to? Who else could make her feel like this?
She wanted it all. Needed it all.
When he lifted his face to stare back into her eyes, the hooded desire she found contained in the dark depths made her heart catch.
‘Leander, I...’ She only just caught herself from saying words that could never ever be taken back.
His gaze flickered, lips tightening as if he too were having to stop himself from speaking. Seeing the mirrored torture only made her heart crash to a stop all over again.
Bringing her face back up to his, she stroked her soft cheek against his stubbly cheek and whispered, ‘Make love to me. Please, Leander, make love to me.’
His breaths were ragged and heavy in her ear. ‘You have no idea what you do to me,’ he muttered hoarsely before his hungry mouth recaptured hers and sent flames burning through her.
Her core and heart on fire, Kate closed her eyes and sank into the pleasure of Leander’s assault of her senses.
Sensuous lips brushed the swan of her neck, stubble scratching her sensitised skin as he slowly kissed his way down to the top button of her—his—shirt.
Loath though he was to tear an inch of his flesh away from her, Leander dragged himself to his knees and gazed down at the woman who’d become the only woman in existence for him. Never had he seen such open passion in the eyes of a lover. Never had the heat of a touch turned his body into liquid.
But it wasn’t just the unadulterated desire radiating at him that made his heart feel so weighty. The trust radiating from Kate’s beautiful eyes landed with equal weight.
This gift she was bestowing on him...
Hooking his thumbs in the sides of his boxers, he pulled them down past his hips, lifted his knees to skim them down his legs and chucked them aside with no further thought.
She opened her arms for him.
Painfully aware of how close he already was to the edge, Leander swooped to recapture her mouth.
Kate dissolved into the dark taste of Leander’s hard hungry kiss and then the whole of her dissolved into a fever of sensation as he stripped the shirt from her.
Working from the top, button by button was undone, his lips trailing kisses over every millimetre of exposed flesh all the way down to her pubic bone where the shirt had ruched around her waist.
He pulled it apart.
Fully naked beneath a male gaze for the first time in her life, Kate’s throat caught tightly at the expression on Leander’s face. He was gazing at her like he’d unwrapped a personal gift from the heavens.
How could she have mistaken that look for disgust? she wondered in dim amazement, then stopped wondering about anything when he covered her breast and the sensations that careered through her felt like their own gift from the heavens. When he replaced his hand with his mouth, head spinning, blood on fire, Kate became fully lost in Leander’s worshipful touch.
Hands and mouth roamed her body, kissing, stroking, licking, biting, kneading, the delicious scratching of his stubble against her skin only intensifying the pleasure.
So lost in the sensations had she become that when he gently spread her thighs and rested his face in between, it felt like the most necessary and natural act in the world.
She wasn’t his gift from the heavens, she thought hazily as she writhed into him. He was her gift, and the more he gave the more she wanted. Her hunger for him was limitless. Every inch of her body was aflame, burning for more of his kisses, more of his touches and when their mouths fused back together and he put his hand where his tongue had just been, she kissed him deeply and arched into him, incapable of doing anything but obeying her body’s demands. All of its demands were for Leander. Just him.
Leander was hanging on by a thread. The need to take full possession of Kate had become an agonised fever in his blood, his arousal tipping into unendurable, but through it all, words repeating over and over to keep his passion leashed, she’s a virgin.
He could scarcely believe how much it felt like his first time too, as if her succulent breasts were the first breasts he’d ever caressed... Theós, her body could have been created especially for him, her scent, taste and texture aphrodisiacs designed purely for his own chemical makeup to respond to, everything about her so much more than he’d ever imagined possible.
‘Theós, Kate, you’re so beautiful,’ he groaned into her mouth. ‘I want you so much.’
Her mouth slanted against his with such passion it spoke louder than any words could that everything he was feeling was shared.
It took the last remaining fragment of his sanity to murmur, ‘Let me get protection.’
Her hold around him tightened, her eyes begging him not to let go of her. ‘I’m protected.’
Swallowing hard, trying to control the beats of his heart, he clasped her hip, fingers sinking into her bottom, then shifted himself so his erection pressed between her legs. Just knowing he was so close to being where he so desperately needed to be made his arousal throb hard enough to pulse blood to his head.
This was it. The point of no return.
Threading his fingers through hers, Leander captured Kate’s mouth for another heady taste of paradise and slowly pushed into her tight velvet heat.
The shock of Leander’s huge arousal pressing into her was matched only by the thrills fluttering through her entire body.
It felt like she’d waited her whole life for this moment.
With one of his hands holding hers, the other gripping her hip, the security of his touch would have doused any fear. But she had no fear, not with Leander, and she submitted her body, soul and trust in their entirety to him.
Lips brushing like feathers, he inched inside her, setting off nerve endings buried so deeply inside her she’d never known they were there waiting for his touch to awaken them from dormancy until, finally, their groins were fused as one.
For a long moment they stayed locked like that, Kate gazing with wonder into dark eyes filled with equal wonder until he groaned her name and kissed her tenderly, withdrawing to the tip.
With a half-stifled groan, he filled her again, withdrew, filled her, his movements intense but unhurried, giving her all the time she needed to become accustomed to his possession.
Slowly, the tempo increased. Slowly, Kate felt the core of herself unfurl and bloom as the pleasure of his possession intensified. So slowly did they go that when she instinctively raised her thighs and the friction increased where she most needed it, she was unprepared for her climax, one moment luxuriating in the bliss of being made love to by Leander, the next caught in a rollercoaster of pulsations that had her clinging tightly to him and crying out his name as the rollercoaster shot her to the stars.
Never in his life had Leander witnessed anything as beautiful as the widening of Kate’s eyes as she thickened around him and pulled him deeper into her tightness. Her cries of his name echoed dimly in ears that were drowning in the roar of blood as he fused himself as tightly to her as it was possible for two humans to be and cried out at the almost violent pleasure of his own desperately needed release.
Kate had never believed that time really could stand still, but in those seconds or minutes or hours of silence, broken only by the pounding of her heart in her ears that followed their lovemaking, she finally understood what it meant. Time had ceased to have any meaning. There was no meaning left in the world. Only Leander.
She had never imagined it could be like that, that it wouldn’t be just her body that she gave to him but the whole of herself. And that he’d given the whole of himself to her too.
It had been so beautiful.
He’d made her feel beautiful.
Whatever happened when time reset itself, this was a night she would keep close to her heart and cherish for the rest of her life.
Leander could have stayed wrapped in Kate’s arms, the beats of their hearts smashing together, breathing in the sweet scent of her hair and cheek for eternity. Only the fear of his weight suffocating her gave him the impetus to move. Even then, he could only bring himself to shift slowly, clasping her hand to pull her with him so she rolled into him.
Nuzzling his mouth and chin into the top of her head, he stroked her back, marvelling anew at the soft silkiness of her skin, marvelling too at how damn pleasurable Kate’s delicate fingers making tiny circles over his chest was.
There was no need for words. No need to rehash what had just taken place.
He could barely comprehend how incredible it had been.
‘When is your flight to Borneo?’ he murmured after the longest, most peaceful time he thought he’d ever spent had passed.
She lifted her face to meet his stare. ‘Monday evening.’
He kissed her gently. ‘Then stay. Stay with me until Sunday.’
Her jade eyes swirled starkly. ‘And then you’ll go back to Greece?’ she whispered.
‘I gave my word,’ he said heavily, the weight in his stomach at the thought of returning to his homeland pulling at his vocal cords. Pulling at all of him.
Tears filled her eyes. ‘Then give me your word that if I stay, you’ll go back to Greece on Sunday. You and me... It can’t go anywhere. I’m starting a new life thousands of miles away and your place is with...’
To Kate’s horror, she couldn’t say Helena’s name, and suddenly it hit her, the depth of her betrayal of her best friend.
Concern flickered in Leander’s stare and then he must have read her thoughts for in seconds he’d rolled her onto her back.
‘Listen to me, Kate,’ he said, staring intently into her eyes. ‘You have done nothing wrong. Helena feels nothing for me. You know that.’
‘I know, but—’
‘There is no but,’ he told her firmly. ‘You and I are both free, consenting adults. If she knew about us she’d be pleased, you know that.’
She blinked frantically before taking a deep breath. When she’d gathered herself together, she forced firmness to her own voice. ‘You have to be her husband.’
His jaw clenched then loosened. ‘I know. And I will. When you fly back to England to pack for your new life, I will return to Greece.’
It hurt more than she could have believed to say, ‘You promise?’
‘I swear.’ Leander kissed the tip of her nose. ‘We will go back to the real world on Sunday.’ Whatever it cost him. ‘But until then, let this time be for us. Just us. Let us pretend the real world doesn’t exist.’
She inhaled slowly before the tiniest smile played on the corners of her little pixie mouth. ‘I thought it was impossible for you to pretend.’
He kissed her again, harder, arousal stirring back to life. ‘For you, my little pixie, I will pretend anything.’