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'It's time you stopped being so shy and learned how to please me… ' Cristos breathed thickly, guiding her down to his hard male heat with an unconcealed urgency that had the most wickedly erotic effect on her.
Touching him, she trembled. The very scent of his bronzed skin was an aphrodisiac to her. She was eager to please and even keener to learn because his response to her was hot and sensual and undeniable.
Tangling long fingers in her Titian hair, he drew her back up to him. 'Fast learner… ' he acknowledged raggedly, claiming her reddened mouth in a fierce, drugging kiss. 'We've been apart too long. I remember the island in my dreams… I could devour you.'
His skilful fingers found the liquid heat pulsing between her thighs. She squirmed, her hips rising in helpless supplication. Her body was tight and aching with readiness and she moaned out loud, controlled by the bittersweet intensity of the pleasure. 'Cristos… '
His smouldering golden gaze connected with the plea in her passion-glazed eyes. In one lithe, powerful movement, he came over her and into her. In the throbbing agony of need, she was gripped by the headiest and wildest excitement. Lifting to him, she clung, intoxicated by the exquisite power of his dominant rhythm and the frantic urgency of her own need. The intolerable pleasure reached a crescendo and hurled her into an ecstatic release. She was full of joy and love and gratitude in the aftermath, hugging him close, dabbing kisses on an angular cheekbone, a smooth brown shoulder, indeed any part of him within reach.
'I gather I was good, yineka mou… ' Resting his angular chin on the heel of one hand, he inspected her with slumberous golden eyes. He rolled back against the pillows and carried her with him, clamping her to his warm, damp body with a possessiveness that turned her heart over inside her.
'I can only compare you and you. But I just think everything's fantastic with you.' By the time she had finished telling him that, her voice had sunk so low with self-consciousness he had to angle his proud dark head down to catch her final words.
'You never will get to compare me with anyone else between the sheets,' Cristos murmured. 'Does that bother you?'
She was delighting in their closeness, thinking back in dismay to the trouble that had been caused when he'd suspected her of hiding out in dark corners with Rory and grateful that she had managed to sort that out. It was a lesson to her, she thought with an inner shiver, a lesson about how easily misunderstandings could occur. Saving face just wasn't worth the risk.
'No… why should it?' she countered softly. 'In fact I wouldn't be surprised if I fell madly ill love with you.'
Lean, strong face hardening, Cristos regarded her with glittering dark eyes. 'Good sex is not love. I found that out as a teenager when the target of my romantic affections invited her best friend to join us in bed.'
Shock shrilled through Betsy. 'Good grief… but why?'
'She thought I might be getting bored with just her and decided to surprise me.'
'She was a slut,' Betsy told him in disgust.
'But honest about what she was,' Cristos traded, cool as ice. 'She didn't pretend to love me. I should add that I'm not looking for love from you.'
Long after he slept, Betsy lay awake watching the thread of moonlight that pierced between the curtains dancing across the ceiling. She felt hollow and hurt. She would not be confessing to true love in an effort to get closer to Cristos. Even though they were married, he had rejected that emotional bond most conclusively. In fact the icy note in his rich dark voice had chilled her. Was it possible that he already suspected her feelings for him? Look at the way she had behaved after he had made love to her! She'd been all over him like a rash. Did he found that kind of enthusiasm a big turn-off?
In the morning she wakened alone but a white rose and a jewellery box sat in a prominent position on the pillow beside hers. She pulled back the curtains and opened the box. Sunlight illuminated the creamy perfection of the pearl necklace, which was brought bang up to date with a glittering diamond pendant in the shape of a daisy.
'Wow… ' she breathed, fastening it round her neck and pausing only briefly to admire herself.
Hauling on the toweling robe on the back of the bathroom door, she sped off in search of Cristos to thank him. If she lived to be a thousand years old, she would never work the guy out! One minute he was telling her that he wasn't looking for love from her and the next he was giving her a rose and a fabulous necklace to wake up to on the very first day of their married life.
Her bare feet made no sound on the antique rug in the elegant flagstone hall. She could hear Cristos speaking in his own language and his voice was coming from the room next door to the library. Catching a glimpse of him through the ajar door, she suppressed a loving sigh. Had he been born with a phone in his hand?
'Petrina… ' he was saying with low-pitched urgency.
Betsy fell still, her skin turning clammy. She heard every word he said after that but understood nothing because it was all in Greek. What she did grasp was that Cristos sounded concerned and strained and that he was definitely trying to soothe and comfort the woman at the other end of the line. How selfish and blind she had been, Betsy thought then in a sick daze of shock.
All along she had been ridiculously reluctant to contemplate the personal dimension to his broken engagement. She had not even wanted to think about Petrina Rhodias. Why? She had been too jealous. She had never wanted to credit that Cristos might genuinely care for the Greek woman. Now that she was being forced to accept that Cristos did have feelings for the gorgeous blonde, she could finally understand why he didn't want his shotgun bride to love him. He knew that there was not the slightest possibility of his returning her feelings…
CHAPTER EIGHT
ELEGANT in a short sleeveless dress that had a tiny flower print on a yellow background, Betsy carne down to breakfast.
'Thanks for the pearls… ' she said woodenly, taking a seat at the dining table.
Cristos waited while the manservant tried to attend to her needs before she attended to them on her own account and then dismissed his employee with a nod. 'I think it would be a good idea if you didn't read any newspapers today,' he imparted.
Betsy was no great fan of reading newspapers but in one sentence he had ensured that she would spend the whole of the day perusing the printed word. 'Why?'
'I've always attracted a lot of press coverage. I'm used to it. It doesn't bother me.' Concerned dark golden eyes rested on her delicate profile. 'But you have no experience of how the tabloids sensationalize personalities and #vents. I don't want you to be distressed.'
Chin at an angle, Betsy was already standing up. 'Where are the newspapers?'
'Betsy-'
'Don't try to tell me that I can't read what's been written about us!' she exclaimed. 'I'm not a little kid!' – 'OK… but first I have to explain something about the kidnapping. A member of my own family was behind it,' Cristos delivered grimly.
That did grab her attention. 'You're joking me… a relative of yours?'
'I wish I were joking.' Cristos told her about Spyros Zolottas, who had, she now learned, been one of the men who had died in the helicopter crash with Joe. Tyler. 'Unlike my grandfather, I believed that the leopard could change his spots. I was wrong. Spyros decided to use his knowledge of my movements to stage a kidnapping and extract money from Patras. He was with me the first time I saw you. Obviously he realized how he could use my interest in you to his advantage. '
'He's the man you said arranged for me to pick you up that weekend as a surprise,' Betsy recalled.
'To meet you, I was prepared to overlook my security team's concerns and expose myself to a degree of vulnerability that made the kidnapping more likely to succeed.'
'So it was your cousin who was responsible for it all…' For a wordless moment she sat there slowly shaking her head, but deep down inside more turbulent reactions were being born. 'But you're only telling me this now because the newspapers have got a hold of it… am I right? When did you find out that Sp
yros whatever-you-call-him was behind it all?'
'When I made my first phone call to Patras after we had escaped.'
'But you didn't tell me. We had spent almost a week living together. We were lovers facing the same fears and challenges… and yet you dido' t think that I had the right to know who had put us on that island?' she demanded shakily, her temper and her hurt rising by equal degrees.
'It was a family matter,' Cristos countered with measured care. 'When Spyros was killed, my grandfather felt that his family had suffered enough. He saw no advantage and neither did 1 in publicly exposing Spyros' wife and daughters to the disgrace of his criminal behavior.'
Betsy was barely listening. Her mind was hopping like a rabbit from mortified peak to peak. 'Was Petrina excluded from the same information?'
'No.'
A bitter laugh fell from her lips. 'That says it all.' 'Theos mou…it says what?' Cristos demanded,
plunging upright in an expression of mounting frustration.
'Even though 1 went through that kidnapping with you, 1 was nobody on your terms. 1 really was just the silly slapper you seduced to amuse yourself!' Betsy vented painfully.
