Page 20 of The Cozakis Bride

Olympia's face shuttered, bitterness choking her. No longer did she regret her own failure to defend herself against Katerina's lies. What hope would she have had of being believed with a blood relative lying in the role of a witness?

'Katerina lied, and so did Lukas. They both had their reasons, reasons you don't seem to want to find or exam­ine!'

Untouched by that accusation, Nik regarded her with reflective cool. 'There's only one thing which doesn't add up for me—'

'And what's that?'

'No Greek woman would have failed to defend her own reputation. Why didn't you proclaim the fact that you were still a virgin when I confronted you the next day?'

Olympia studied him with incredulous eyes. 'You're kid­ding me...do you really think I still cared enough about you to demean myself to that level?'

'So you did see me in the club with that blonde.'

Twin spots of red mantled her cheekbones as she belatedly realised how much she had revealed with that outburst

'And you were out for revenge when you went with Lukas.'

Infuriated, Olympia began to turn away again, but Nik forestalled her by closing a strong hand over her forearm.

'So I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. Why not? I have very little memory of that night.' 'I beg your pardon?'

'Someone spiked my drink. If you saw me with Ramona, it must have been shortly before I passed out.'

Olympia nodded slowly. 'Mr Innocent...Mr Clean. You know, my mother may have fallen for that storybook ex­planation, but I'm a lot less easy to impress!'

Nik's level dark brows drew together in a frown, a disconcerted light in his brilliant dark eyes. 'Are you saying you don't believe me?'

'Got it in one. Not a nice feeling, is it?' Taking advan­tage of his loosened grip, Olympia rolled over and stuffed her face in the pillow.

He swore in guttural Greek.

'Oh, you're so sensitive...' Olympia raised her head to comment, tongue-in-cheek.

Hard dark eyes struck hers in a raw collision. 'You are one calculating little witch—'

‘There's the door...use it,' Olympia suggested, her fu­rious eyes glittering like jewels.

Instead, Nik knotted his long brown fingers into the glossy mahogany strands of hair tumbling down onto the pillow beside him, effectively imprisoning her.

'Nik...wh-what?' she stammered, taken aback.

'Nik, yes—but say it in Greek. Ne,' he intoned, smoul­dering dark golden eyes gazing down into hers. He found her still reddened lips with his mouth and tasted her with hungry, driving intensity. On a scale of one to ten it was an eleven-plus kiss. Her head spun; she could think of no pressing reason why she should breathe if it meant sepa­rating from Nik for a single second. Her heart hammering, her pulses racing, she was simply overwhelmed by the ex­plosive excitement channelling through her.

'We don't talk about the past from now on,' Nik in­structed thickly as he ripped off his T-shirt and snaked up his lean hips to unzip his jeans beneath her bemused gaze.

Olympia was utterly disconcerted by a danger she had not foreseen. 'No...we shouldn't...we can't,' she stressed, pushing out that more forceful negative, one hand palm down, fingers splayed on the warm, hard muscular wall of his chest. She could feel the steady thump of his heart. Without any prompting from her brain, her fingertips were already flirting with the curling black springy hair hazing his bronzed chest.

'No problem...' Nik murmured silkily, reclining back against the pillows all lithe and dark and dangerous.

She made the mistake of meeting his eyes: a jaguar-gold challenge. Her breath feathered in her dry throat and her breasts tingled, their sensitive peaks pinching into taut little buds. She was shaken to realise that the sort of hunger she had only ever experienced when Nik was actually touching her could now surge through her in a mortifying instanta­neous tide even when he wasn't.

Like a sleek jungle predator biding his time while an unwary prey circled round him, Nik began to smile. It was the smile of the male who knew exactly what effect he could have on her sex. It was unashamedly primal. Her mind recoiled and urged her to slap him hard, but it was an incredibly sexy smile which made her agonisingly aware of her own femininity.

'I think...' Olympia began tremulously. 'I think...'

'Yes, what do you think, yineka mou?’ Nik lazily coiled one fine strand of her hair round an indolent forefinger, regarding her with glinting dark eyes semi-screened by spiky black lashes.

Dear heaven, she wanted him. The answers came in a flood inside her own head! She wanted to rip his jeans off, she wanted him everywhere at once, she wanted to relive every glorious, greedy minute of the ecstasy he had given her the night before.

‘I'm not thinking...I'm not thinking anything right now,' Olympia swore in feverish haste, her cheeks burning. 'I am...' Pillowing his tousled dark head back on one elbow with a relaxation that shrieked in comparison with her own frantic tension, Nik watched her steadily with a world of intimate knowledge in his slumberous gaze. 'Why fight what you're feeling?'

'Is this like your... er... standard seduction routine?' Olympia enquired, struggling to get her mind and her body back under safe lock and key again, failing miserably in an atmosphere so alive with sexual awareness she was trembling.

'At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I've never needed a routine.'

The awful thing was that she believed him, which in turn drew her attention to all the reasons why Nik had never needed to go to that much effort. Those stunning dark good looks, that high-voltage sexual aura, the charismatic per­sonality which had been noticeably absent with her in re­cent times but which she recalled from the past with a deep hurting ache of loss. The teasing, the warmth, the easy smiles...

And suddenly out of that memory came an absolutely unbearable longing to be in Nik's arms again, the kind of sharp, desperate craving which she had no hope of resisting that close to him. She lifted her hand almost clumsily and pushed her fingers slowly, almost fearfully into his luxu­riant black hair, leaning over him awkwardly, her heart banging against her ribs as if she was about to plunge off a cliff.

Nik was gracious. He didn't laugh. He didn't speak. He reached up and drew her down to him and let the tip of his tongue dart and flicker between her parted lips in an erotic invitation that turned her bones to water and made her shiver as if she was in a force ten gale. He set her back from him then, and peeled off his jeans with the sort of loaded, unhurried cool that somehow excited her even more. He kicked back the duvet she was still sheltering beneath and came down beside her with fluid predatory grace.

'I might have asked what you like...' Nik husked in his accented drawl, burnished eyes blazingly intent on her as he spread her out beneath him with a care that sent tor­mented little ripples of anticipation down her taut spine. 'But you don't know what you like yet, which means we have so much to discover together, yineka mou.'

Olympia was already boneless, but she was halfway to mindless as well by the time he finished speaking. Breathing took major concentration. Nik teased the corner of her mouth with his own. Unable to bear that teasing, she twisted her eagerly parted lips under his and kissed him with all the untutored eagerness that was flaming through her like an attack force. Fantasy was running riot in her brain. She imagined flattening him to the bed, forcing him to do exactly what she wanted him to do.

'On the other hand, we could race for the finishing line...just this once,' Nik qualified raggedly.

'Please...' was all she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When stray sounds penetrated Olympia's slumber, she would have ignored them but for the extra-sensory mental jab that urged her to take heed.

She was so exhausted it took huge will-power just to lift her eyelashes. The curtains were wide, sunlight spilling in. She was tense until she found and focused on Nik. Happiness bubbled up inside her with the force of an unrestrained oil gusher. It didn't strike her as odd that she should be happy. Every time she had stirred in Nik's arms d

uring the night she had experienced that feeling and she had become accustomed to it before she had had the chance or the need to question the sensation.

A stray shard of sunlight gleamed over blue-black hair still wet from the shower, curved like a caress over a powerful shoulder and darted down over the long sweep of Nik's back, gilding his bronzed skin to pure gold. His classic profile was hard, very masculine, until that playful sunshine accentuated black lashes as long and lush as silk fans. And she smiled then, a sleepy, secretive smile, while she watched him haul on his jeans. She just adored those lashes; she always had.

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