away from this idyll, back in London, in Athens and on the corporate world stage, he was known only as Leonidas. Leonidas Vassalio. Hard-headed businessman. Decisive. Practical. Ruthless...
The reminder almost dragged him back to his senses, but not quite.
Her hands had ripped open his shirt, and he gave a deep guttural groan at their caressing warmth over his bared chest, but they were travelling downwards—down and down—in a quest to drive him wild, break his control.
He sucked in his breath, every nerve flexing like tautened wire, until finally, when she touched that most intimate part of him, even through his clothes, he was lost.
He wanted to stop this madness. Come clean about who he was. Because how could he justifiably do this with her if he didn’t?
But as if sensing his reticent moment she was begging him not to stop, and her whimpers of need were all it took to bring about his final undoing.
If he told her who he was now he would be inviting her anger, and he couldn’t face that, he realised in meagre justification. Couldn’t ruin the mood and her artless belief in him no matter how much he knew he should.
It took little effort to remove her shorts, with her lace-edged briefs following them to where he’d cast them aside.
She was beautiful. A natural blonde, he noted with a soft smile of satisfaction as her legs parted before him and she lifted her body in a sobbing invitation for him to claim his prize.
It would be so easy, Leonidas thought, to remove his own clothes and take all that she was offering, assuage the fire that was burning in his groin. Just one thrust could take him to paradise...
He was hotter and harder than he had ever been in his life just from thinking about such damning pleasure, but through the torment of his stimulating thoughts a shred of sanity—of principle—remained.
He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t abuse her trust like that. Not while he still felt it necessary to deceive her. And yet she was slick with wanting, sobbing her need and her craving for release from this passion he had aroused.
She was lying with her face turned to one side and her arms above her head in a gesture of pure surrender. An angel, he thought, inviting him to share heaven with her. Or Eve, tempting him among the grasses of her sensuous Eden.
With torturous restraint he dipped his head and pressed his lips to the heated satin of her pulsing ribcage, his mouth moving with calculated precision over her slender waist to the flat plane of her abdomen and beyond. Very gently he parted her legs wider and slipped his arms beneath her splayed thighs.
Feeling his mouth against that most intimate part of her drew a shuddering gasp from Kayla. That dark hair brushing the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh was a stimulation she couldn’t even have imagined.
It was the most erotic experience of her life. She had been intimate with a man before, but it had never felt like this. This abandoning of herself so completely to a pleasure that promised to drive her wild.
He knew just how to tease and titillate, just where and how to touch, employing his lips and the heat of his tongue to start a fire building in her as he tasted the honeyed sweetness of her body.
She thought she would die from the pleasure of it, and her body tautened in breathless expectation as flames of sensation licked along her nerve-endings and produced a burning tingle along her thighs.
Her juices flowed from her body, mingling with the moistness of his, anointing his roughened jaw with everything she was—until the mind-blowing sensation proved too much and she cried out as the fire consumed her in an orgasm of pulsating, interminable throbs.
Her sensitivity increased until she couldn’t take any more pleasure, and she clamped her thighs around him, trapping him there, holding him to her in a sobbing ecstatic agony of release until the last embers of the fire he had ignited finally died away.
After a while, Kayla looked up at him where he lay beside her, propped up on an elbow. ‘Why didn’t you...?’ Crazily, even after the intimacy they had shared she was too embarrassed to say it.
‘Why didn’t I what?’ Leonidas leaned across her, tracing the curve of her cheek before picking a small windblown flower out of her hair. ‘Take what I wanted?’ he supplied, helping her.
She nodded, closing her eyes against the exquisite tenderness of his touch.
‘Because I don’t think you’re a girl who indulges in casual sex, and you wouldn’t have thanked me for it tomorrow.’
‘Because you think I’m on the rebound?’ Suddenly self-conscious of her nakedness, when he hadn’t even undressed beyond his gaping shirt, she sat up to retrieve her clothes. ‘I’m not—I promise you,’ she said resolutely, wriggling into her panties.
She was well and truly over Craig now. But perhaps there were other reasons for Leon not taking their lovemaking the whole way. Perhaps he was remaining faithful to someone, she thought uneasily. Someone who moved him to anger and roused his passions in a way she might never be able to do...
‘Did you bring her here?’ She couldn’t look at him as she started fastening her blouse.
‘Who?’
‘The woman you won’t talk about?’ she said grievously.
He laughed—a deep, warm sound on the scented air, mingling with the drone of insects and the mellifluous birdsong. ‘You really are a very imaginative little lady.’
‘Not as imaginative as you, with your island mansion and your racehorses,’ she accused, kneeling up to tug her shorts on.
‘Uh-uh,’ he denied. ‘The racehorses were your idea,’ he reminded her with a hint of humour in his eyes, although the slashes of colour across his cheeks were evidence of the passion that still rode him. ‘And now I really think it’s time that we started back.’
‘I’m being serious,’ she stressed, wishing he wouldn’t continue to evade the issue, wondering if he was only doing it because there really was someone else.
‘So am I,’ he breathed heavily, getting up and pulling her with him, and this time his determination brooked no resistance.
LOOKING BACK, LEONIDAS wasn’t sure how he had managed to stop himself making love to Kayla that afternoon. Heaven knew he had wanted to. A fact not made any easier by the knowledge of how much she had wanted him, too. But there were ethics to be observed, and there was no way that he could have taken all she had been offering when he wasn’t being straight with her. It had all boiled down to guilt, he decided shamefully. Guilt because he wasn’t telling her the truth.
But the truth was that he had come here to be alone. Not to indulge in any social or sexual entanglements with a girl who could carry him along with her ridiculous yet infectious sense of make-believe. Well, make-believe to her, at any rate. Because he could afford that island, had it been for sale—and a dozen like it, did she but know it. But it seemed like a lifetime since he had indulged in that childish game, and he had found it oddly refreshing.
In the world he moved in there was no room for fantasising or dreaming. Only for cold hard facts and figures. Securing deals. That was living the dream. Or so he had thought.
Until now, though, he hadn’t begun to realise how deeply and for how long his dreams had been buried. Firstly by his father, and then more recently beneath the weight of his own responsibilities. He had been so busy making money—reaping the benefits of all he had worked for during the past decade or more—that he hadn’t taken the time even to question where those dreams had gone. And now this little nobody had come along, making him question his values. He was annoyed with himself for allowing her to get under his skin to such a degree. But that didn’t change the fact that he wanted her more than he had wanted any woman in a long time—much less one who would have been in her own marriage