Chapter One #2
‘Not long enough, in my opinion.’
‘You are still angry.’
Her brain exploded. She opened her mouth to chew him out, to tell him that there was absolutely no statute of limitations for anger when someone treated you as coldly and cruelly as he had, but pride came to her rescue, reminding her that she had no intention of letting him know how much he’d hurt her.
‘I’m not angry, Aristotle, I just don’t have anything to say to you. We’re not friends.’
‘We’re step-siblings,’ he reminded her, his tone scathing, because they both knew they were no such thing.
While they’d met when Rosie was fourteen and Aristotle eighteen, she’d simply been the daughter of the chauffeur.
Their parents had married some six years later, when they were both well and truly adults in the world.
‘We’re strangers.’
‘Who’ve slept together.’
She sucked in a sharp breath, surprised that he was willing to be so forthright about their experience.
‘Did you think I’d forgotten?’ she said, under her breath. And then, more loudly, for his benefit, ‘So what? That was a thousand years ago—’
‘Four years,’ he ground out.
‘And it meant nothing,’ she finished.
‘Obviously.’
Obviously. Because how could it? How could a gorgeous, sexy, experienced billionaire like Aristotle, who routinely dated stunning heiresses slash Instagram influencers, ever look at someone like Rosie and be genuinely attracted?
Mortification threatened to curl her toes, but she held her ground, her face a study in defiance. ‘Is that all?’
‘No.’
Her pulse fired up. Just being close to him set every cell in her body alight.
‘We need to talk about what happened.’
She felt herself blanch. ‘I beg your pardon, we absolutely don’t.’
His jaw clenched visibly, eyes going from dark to black. ‘Our parents have no idea about that night.’
‘Of course they don’t. I was hardly going to shout it from the rooftops.’
‘Nor was I.’
Yeah, no kidding. As if he’d boast about seducing someone like her.
‘So? Let’s chalk it up to the biggest mistake of our lives and move on,’ she suggested firmly, going to sidestep him once more.
But this time, with a sharp exhalation of frustration, he reached out and curled his fingers around her wrist, drawing her to an immediate stop.
It felt as though he’d poured a whole city power grid’s worth of electricity into her veins in one fell swoop.
So much charge sparked in her veins she saw stars in her eyes.
‘Don’t touch me.’
To her disappointment, he let her go.
‘For my mother’s sake, we have to act as though we are—’
She waited, lips pursed in a mask of mock impatience, when in reality, there was something borderline hypnotic about being close to him again.
‘At least tolerant of one another.’
‘I don’t intend on spending enough time with you for your mother or my father to form any opinion on us whatsoever.’
His jaw tightened at the mention of her father, and she understood why. He didn’t approve of how quickly they’d married, after his father’s death. She didn’t completely blame him for that—the timing had surprised her, too.
‘You think we’re not going to be thrown together at this damned event?’
‘Nice,’ she muttered. ‘It’s your mother’s birthday.’
His expression shifted into a scowl. ‘I’m aware. And she is no doubt going to want photographs of the “happy family”. Particularly given you’ve been absent so long.’
‘Well, whose fault is that?’ she snapped, then immediately wished she hadn’t, because it somehow yielded too much power to him. She tried to reverse the damage with a flippant roll of her eyes. ‘Anyway, I’m sure your mother has bigger things to think about than you and me.’
‘There is no you and me.’ His voice was sharp, a fierce rejection.
She ignored the familiar emotional bruise in the centre of her chest—the sense that the last thing he could ever want was to have anything more to do with her.
‘No kidding.’
‘But for my mother, we should work on at least pretending to be civil to one another.’
‘You wouldn’t know civility if it came and bit you on the—’
He moved quickly, pressing a finger to her lips, startling her body with that same mega-dump of electrical current. ‘You should be careful, mikroúla. The more you taunt me, the more I am tempted to show what a liar you are.’
Heat flooded her cheeks, and her eyes dashed frantically behind him, to the staff. They were far away though, and obscured by the hedge of the courtyard.
‘You think I’m lying when I point out that you are rude, and unpleasant and—’
‘And yet you fell apart in my arms,’ he said smoothly, surprising her then by wrapping an arm around her waist and yanking her against his big, strong body, his hard, firm planes making her mouth go all dry and dusty.
‘Yeah, well, I didn’t know what I was doing, obviously,’ she said, in a valiant attempt at bravado that came out shaky.
‘So you’re saying it was just your inexperience?’
‘What else explains it?’
He pulled on her again, pressing her tighter to his body. All the breath seemed to leave her lungs. She felt weak at the knees and her stomach flipped as though it had developed an inbuilt trampoline.
‘You might not like me, Rosemary, but you have always wanted me, haven’t you?
’ he asked, in a voice that sounded serious but couldn’t help but be interpreted as anything other than a massive flex.
Because yes. She’d always wanted him. As a lovestruck teenager, then when she’d come back for her father’s wedding, thinking she’d finally grown into the kind of woman he might look at, she’d learned it had all been a cruel dare.
Her stomach went from flipping to tightening with knots. ‘We should focus on the first part of that statement. I don’t like you. No, I hate you,’ she spat. ‘And everyone like you.’
Her insult didn’t appear close to hitting the mark. If anything, he just looked more determined. More dangerously, darkly handsome.
‘Is that so?’ he asked, his head swooping down suddenly so he could kiss her, hard and fast, his mouth claiming hers as though the whole world’s survival depended on it.
It was a kiss that knocked every bit of sense and fight from her, knocked everything like control, rational thought and reason totally from her mind.
A kiss so much like their last first kiss, a kiss that had fundamentally and swiftly reshaped everything she thought she knew about the world, so all she could do was surrender to it completely.
‘Then tell me to stop,’ he challenged, pulling up to stare into her eyes.
‘Tell me to stop,’ he repeated, taking a step forward and propelling her with him, and then another step, guiding them around the corner, behind the tall wall, without breaking eye contact.
He spun her then, so her back connected with the bricks, the surface cool despite the heat of the day.
Here, in the shade of the house, it was saved from the Greek sun.
Another reason she—and her pale English skin—had liked this hiding spot so much.
‘Well, Rosemary? What’s it to be?’
She glared up at him, searching for something pithy to say, something withering and insulting. Any one of the epithets that had been flying around her head for years, in response to how he viewed her, the way he’d treated her that night.
‘Oh, go to hell,’ was all she could get out. And the effect of the words was entirely ruined by the way her hand reached up and curled in the fabric of his shirt, holding on as if for dear life.
‘I have no doubt that I will,’ was his short response, before he dropped his head once more, claiming her mouth with his.
Now, shielded completely from even an accidental view, he didn’t hold back.
His hands roamed her body as though he were a starving man finally brought to food, running over her fast and desperately, mapping her, tracing her, in a way that was so thorough there was no room to feel self-conscious about the curves that were undoubtedly the polar opposite of his usual conquest.
Stop this, a voice of reason cautioned as she moaned softly, deep in her throat.
When he swore in his native tongue, she felt it spread through her whole body, lighting fires in places she hadn’t known she possessed.
It was a curse, and a calling, a seeking of her response, so suddenly her hands were roaming his body with every bit as much desperation as his own, pushing his shirt from his jeans so her fingertips could connect with warm, bare flesh, running over him in the same frenzied state he was employing, until they were both breathing hard in between kisses.
His mouth then was roaming to her jaw, kissing her there, his stubble hard, his mouth demanding, and his hands were pushing her skirt up, so his fingers could cup her bottom, pressing her against his unmistakable hardness, his arousal pressing to her sex so she whimpered low in her throat, the plea swirling around and around in her mouth before finally ejecting on a final cry.
He pulled up then, eyes finding hers, latching to them.
If she was going to pull back from the brink, this would have been the moment, for in his gaze there was an unspoken question: a need to confirm she meant what she said.
She simply tilted her head back and stared at the bright blue sky overhead, her body flushed from head to toe.
It was madness. A wild, utter surrender to a state of abandon, but that didn’t matter.
Because for all she understood that, she also knew that if she didn’t give into this, she would live to regret it.
It had been four years, and she’d spent every day since then hating and avoiding him. But here, now, nothing mattered more than giving her body what it clearly sought, to hell with what came next.
Except there would be no ‘next’. This was as meaningless to him as it had been four years earlier.