‘Diavole...you’re driving me crazy here, koukla mou,’ Xan growled, curving both his hands to her triangular face to gaze down into her beautiful but evasive eyes. ‘What is it?’
But he didn’t wait for her response. He fell for the enticement of those soft pink sultry lips, nibbled sexily along the bottom one, groaned out loud as she gasped into his mouth and bundled her right off her feet to kiss her.
The devastating urgency of that first plunging, ravaging kiss sent an earthquake of burning hunger travelling through Elvi right to the very heart of her. She hadn’t thought, hadn’t dreamt, hadn’t even imagined that she was capable of feeling anything that powerful. But that hunger was like a seductive, sweet-talking infiltrator in her treacherous body, battling every thought, every other instinct and sweeping the floor with her. He blew her away with the sheer raw energy of his mouth on hers, unlocking her defences, connecting with her in a way she had never connected to a man before, making her want him and his body so badly, she felt shell-shocked by the experience, and that very small awareness reawakened her brain again and reminded her of what she had to do...what she had to say...
In a valiant effort, Elvi struggled out of Xan’s powerful arms, sliding down the front of his lean, strong body, learning that there was not a shade of doubt that he was as ready for her and that bed as he could ever be, and embarrassment and regret washed over Elvi in a horrible wave.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said jerkily, stepping back from Xan, much as if he were contagious. ‘But I can’t do this yet—’
Xan surfaced faster to study her in disbelief. ‘Can’t?’ he queried. ‘But you said—’
‘You didn’t give me the chance to explain,’ Elvi reminded him resolutely, struggling to rise above her chagrined regret over her wanton weakness of body and brain. ‘My mother hasn’t told me yet that the charge has been dropped and nothing, absolutely nothing, is happening between us until I receive that confirmation from her—’
Incredulous as only a young, handsome billionaire could be at meeting with the word no for the first time, Xan raked a slightly shaky hand through his tousled black hair. ‘This is you joking...right?’ he pressed hopefully.
‘No, I’m only returning the same favour you gave me,’ Elvi assured him without the smallest sense of triumph. ‘You said you wouldn’t act and drop the theft charge until I moved in here and I had to do that. Now I’m saying that when my mother tells me the charge has been dropped, I’m yours but not before it—’
A line of dark colour flashed over Xan’s exotic cheekbones. ‘That’s outrageous!’ he shot back at her angrily. ‘The charge has been dropped! I don’t break my promises. It’s scarcely my fault if the police haven’t yet got around to informing her—’
‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Elvi cut in, trying to pour oil on troubled water a little late in the day, she sensed, registering the blaze of frustrated fury smouldering in Xan’s amazingly eloquent gaze and the fierce clenched set of his strong jaw. ‘But it’s the way it is. It’s my only safeguard in this arrangement—’
Xan was so outraged, he swung away from her and breathed in deep to muster self-discipline. He wanted to behave like a caveman, gather her up and throw her bodily on the bed and keep her there until she understood who she was dealing with. But he knew he couldn’t behave like that, which infuriated him even more. Her only safeguard, he reflected in fuming disagreement. Did she really think he was about to break his word when she was standing there with a small fortune in diamonds around her neck and living in his apartment?
Or was it more payback time than safeguard? Payback for the manner in which he had forced her to immediately move in? That made better sense to him, integrating as it did the kind of cunning slyness he hated in her sex but had often experienced. There had been a stepmother who’d tried to seduce him to hit back at his father for his infidelity. There had been mistresses who tried to play games calculated to increase his interest in them, several who told him outrageous lies in an effort to charm more money or jewels out of him. So great was his ire at the suspicion that he had been played by Elvi, he couldn’t even bring himself to look at her again or trust himself to speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ Elvi muttered in the pulsing silence, her hands twisting nervously together in the tense atmosphere. ‘I should have told you when I got into the car earlier but I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t feel comfortable talking about having sex with you because you’re a stranger. I don’t suppose you understand but it would be a lot easier if you would allow me to get to know you first.’
Xan’s lean brown hands clenched into fists. ‘I don’t get to know women I have sex with. That’s not my style,’ he admitted grittily, involuntarily forced out of silence by that naïve little speech of hers. ‘Maybe I missed out on asking the one question I should’ve asked in my office last week...are you a prude? Because, to be brutally blunt, you sound like a hell of a prude and that’s not going to work for me at all.’
Very pale now, Elvi chewed her lower lip and decided not to respond because silence was safer. Not a prude, a virgin, she almost said, and who could tell how he would react to a surprise like that? Perhaps he was already thinking of letting her go again but would that mean he would reinstate the theft charge? Could he even do that? She had no idea and she was scared and apprehensive, plunged into a relationship she had not the smallest idea how to handle with a man that said stuff that chilled her to the marrowbone.
Xan strode back out of the apartment, still maddeningly taut with an arousal unlike anything he had ever felt before and unnerved by it. Let her go, his intelligence told him, cut her free now before it gets even more messy. He wanted her but she could be a disaster waiting to blow up in his face.
He ignored his security team’s open surprise at his almost immediate reappearance, climbed into his limousine and tried to think about walking away fast from Elvi Cartwright because she had taken him to a level of rage he had never felt before and that was disturbing.
Or merely normal? he reasoned, given his sexual frustration. The very last thing he had expected was to end the night with a cold shower. He was beginning to suspect that Elvi might not have even indulged in a one-night stand. Some nauseating romance with a long-term boyfriend struck him as the more likely base of her sexual experience, he decided cynically. She wanted him to get to know her? Was she a throwback to the Victorian era? Where did she get a weird idea like that when he had asked her to be his mistress?
* * *
Elvi got into the vast bed alone and shivered, still shaken by that confrontation and the kiss that had preceded it. When his mouth had crashed down on hers, she had been overwhelmed by his electrifying sensuality, her physical responses wildly out of her control, but she had pulled back, mustered her strength and finally said what had to be said. And not surprisingly, Xan had been furious because she should have made her position clear at the start of the evening, not at the end, she acknowledged guiltily.
Xan Ziakis wasn’t accustomed to the word no. He was selfish, arrogant and obsessed with sex. Well, work and sex, she adjusted ruefully. He had expected to take her straight to bed and she had dealt clumsily with those expectations, probably because she was the prude he had labelled her. But the concept of sharing her body with someone she didn’t even know properly had proved too much for Elvi to cope with on the spot. When she couldn’t even imagine taking off her clothes for him, she was in trouble and way outside her comfort zone. Why, oh, why had she ever believed that she could give him what he wanted? That she could simply have sex as if it meant nothing?
And even more inexplicably, why was she just a little disappointed that he hadn’t managed to persuade her to change her mind? He hadn’t even tried to persuade her, had he? Had simply announced that she didn’t suit him, rejecting her because she had dared to reject him. Was that it, then? Were they over before they had even begun?