Chapter Eight #3
He felt a sudden twinge of anxiety so completely alien to him that for a moment, he didn’t even know what it was.
In the past, with other women, he hadn’t cared about what came next.
He had already moved on in his head. There were no regrets.
With those women, it had been simply a mutual satisfaction of a need, nothing more.
But with Cassie, there were footprints in the sand, a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. The idea that she might not want to follow them pulled his chest tight.
‘I wanted to, but then the sun came up, and I panicked.’
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, and she gave him a small, stiff smile. ‘At home, my mom always used to keep the blinds down until midday. She said it was to stop the furniture fading. But I think it was because sunlight made things real.’
‘Plato’s cave,’ he said softly.
In the cave where they were kept chained up, the prisoners mistook shadows cast by a fire for reality. When one was released into the sunlight, he understood what he was seeing—or, in Cecilia Appleton’s case, what she would rather not see.
She nodded.
He sat up, letting the sheet fall away from his body, and her eyes clung to him as he rose from the bed, naked.
‘This a first.’
Her smile tightened. ‘Discussing Plato after sex?’
He grinned then. ‘Not just Plato. I don’t discuss anything or have to worry about the sun because I don’t stay over.’
It hadn’t been a conscious decision, not at first.
When he was younger, he hadn’t understood why he needed to slip away in darkness.
Hadn’t understood that for him, unlike the rest of the population, the sun wasn’t simply a sign that a new day was starting.
For him, it was a reminder that life could be fleeting, that anyone could be taken away.
Being with someone in the moment made that feeling worse, not better.
It felt too much like a promise he knew he couldn’t keep.
An admission of a vulnerability that he had long since decided wasn’t worth the downside.
He screwed up his face. ‘I know how that sounds. How it makes me look. But I don’t want to lie to you.’
‘Why do you leave?’
Reaching out, he touched her cheek. ‘Because I never wanted to stay. Until now.’
She leaned into his hand like a cat seeking warmth and pressure. A little wary like a cat, too, and that was reassuring. As much as he wanted Cassie in his bed, he was not the man she needed him to be. The man she deserved.
Someone not already so damaged by life. Someone who didn’t see every relationship as inherently fragile and destined to end in pain.
‘Who would have thought we’d have that in common?’ she said slowly.
His hand moved to where the towel was knotted above her breasts. ‘That’s not all we have in common. You liked the vase, didn’t you?’
He felt a wave of hunger as she bit her lip and said slowly, ‘But I didn’t like you then, so I didn’t want you to know.’
There was a beat of silence as each of them replayed her words, both of them a little lost in their implication.
‘But you do like me now,’ he said slowly.
She met his gaze then, her green eyes steady and unflinching, but he could see the pulse beating unevenly in her throat.
‘Yes, I do. I like your hands, and your mouth—’ Now her gaze dropped down his body.
He felt his cock harden with such speed and intensity that he felt light-headed, and his stomach was an empty, open ache of yearning need for her.
‘I like this. What we did. I liked being with you.’
The simplicity of Cassie’s words and the directness of her gaze coalesced into what had to be one of the most intensely sexually arousing moments of his life.
She didn’t offer an explanation. She was simply stating her wishes, and he understood that she’d had enough subterfuge and pretence in her life. She needed honesty to create a safe space within this dangerous territory of desire.
‘So we have something else in common too. And I want to be with you like that again, if that’s what you want.’
Her soft yes made his brain unravel. For a moment, he couldn’t speak or move. He just stood there watching her watch him, his skin on fire.
Then she unknotted the towel and let it fall to her feet, and her hand moved to touch herself between her thighs.
‘Se thelo,’ he said, although his voice sounded strange, hoarse, tangled with heat and hunger.
Still touching herself, she leaned in and caressed his chest, her fingers moving with slow, measured deliberation over the taut skin, bumping over the furrows of his abdominals, lingering on the inguinal crease on either side of his stomach in a way that both soothed and inflamed him.
‘This is real, isn’t it?’ she said, and he felt her touch deep inside. Her fingers slid down to where he needed them, and she swallowed audibly as his hand closed over hers.
‘Nothing has ever felt more real to me.’
Her face tightened, relief jostling with doubt. ‘That doesn’t make it right, though, does it?’
He could see the conflicted emotions in the intense greenness of her eyes, and he knew that she was trying to decide if her desire was a betrayal.
Was it a surrender or a new kind of strength?
He knew he had to be the one to answer her question.
To prove this was no weakness but a truth they had both earned.
‘Right and wrong. That’s our fathers talking. But we’re not them.’ His thumb found the indent at the base of her neck. ‘And I don’t care about the past anymore. I don’t care about right and wrong. I only care about you.’
‘Am I still your prisoner?’
Her eyes were fierce and direct, and he nodded, mesmerized, captivated. Her captive.
Leaning in, he nipped her collarbone. ‘It seems only fair as you’ve made me yours.’
And there was something about the way her breath staggered from her mouth, something not quite in control. The idea that she was unravelling faster than him was a whole new erogenous zone.
‘Yes.’ It was the answer to a question she hadn’t asked.
But it was the only answer he would ever give this woman, and he leaned in and kissed her with an urgency that blotted out everything beyond this space they’d made, crowding her body with his, his other hand reaching between her thighs, fingers interlacing with hers in the slick heat.
Pulling herself out of the water, Cassie rested her arms on the lip of the infinity pool and stared at the view.
It was a paradise. A real paradise, not the travel brochure variety with white sand and palm trees.
This was what paradise was meant to be like.
It was rawer, more elemental. It was nature with all her rough edges on show.
Both resilient and vulnerable and all the more mesmerizingly beautiful because of it.
A bit like Antaeus.
Her captor.
Her lover.
Thinking his name made her miss him with a pain that jarred her breathing.
She swam to the shallow end and walked up the steps and over to where he was dozing in the sunshine on the daybed.
As she gazed down at him, her need for him burned her.
She should hate him for what he had done to her, to her business, to her life.
He was her enemy, committed to her downfall.
Except it turned out that he wasn’t.
A memory of Antaeus in the helicopter. Focused, resolute, his arm reaching across to shield her as they lurched downwards.
And his first thought when they landed was not for himself but her.
Then his hand firm around hers as she told him the truth about her so-called gilded life.
She had stripped herself naked metaphorically, hidden nothing, exposed herself to his judgement.
Because in some ways, his father and grandfather were right.
Henry had tossed Andreas to the wolves. But he hadn’t judged her.
Instead he had slept with his door open in case she woke in the night in distress and needed him.
She had needed him, but not because she was in distress.
As she remembered the dark, lush blue of his gaze, her breasts tingled, nipples tightening painfully. It had been a conscious choice. And yet there had been no choice, because this time the storm was inside both of them.
‘You got out.’ Antaeus was looking up at her. ‘I was going to come and join you.’ Sitting up, he reached for her hand, pulling her onto his lap.
For a moment, she was so lost in his beauty that she didn’t register the change in him. But as he leaned in to kiss her, she felt the tension in his body.
‘What is it?’
‘What is what?’ He met her gaze, appearing casual, but she knew him now. She could sense a stillness at his core as if he was holding something tightly.
‘You seem tense. Has something happened?’ Giota had called him into the house as she was swimming, and he had been gone some time. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she added quickly. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’
‘I’m the one who’s intruded.’ His voice was taut suddenly like the E string on a violin. ‘You didn’t invite me to take over your business. Or upend your life. Or keep you a prisoner.’
‘We’ve both done things we regret. I’ve spent most of my life lying to everyone I met. I knew what my father was like, and I did nothing to stop him. I protected him.’
‘You were protecting your mother.’
‘I was protecting myself too.’ She could admit it openly. ‘And I’m not proud of that, and I wouldn’t do it now. Because I’m stronger, I know I can cope. But I didn’t know that then. I made bad choices.’