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Totally disconcerted though he was by her attitude, Alexandros gave not an inch, and breathed with icy restraint. ‘Whose fault is that? You concocted the grossest lies to sell that tripe.’
Katie felt something snap inside her. Her angry despair at his refusal to believe her claims rose to such a choking peak of emotion that she couldn’t trust herself to speak. Instead she shifted her hands in a clumsy gesture of dismissal.
‘Katie…’
Ignoring him, Katie turned on her heel to walk towards the door.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m leaving.’
‘Where do you think you’re going to go?’ Alexandros demanded with rampant incredulity.
Katie opened the door. ‘Back where I came from!’
In a move that took her entirely by surprise, Alexandros reached over her head with infuriating ease to flip shut the door again.
‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ Katie whirled back to face him in a fury. ‘I’m not staying here!’
‘At present, there isn’t a better option.’
Her green eyes shone with defiance. ‘You can’t make me stay—and do you want to know something? I really do wish I had sold that story! It’s what you deserved, but I was too nicely brought up to do it. I didn’t have the guts.’
‘If that is true, then I would owe you an apology. But the devil is in the detail. Where did your friend get the photos?’
‘Leanne is storing a lot of my stuff in her flat right now. That included those photos.’
‘But there were certain facts that only you knew—’
‘She was my friend…so I talked to her,’ Katie said defensively.
A level ebony brow climbed. ‘Yackety-yack…what happened to discretion?’
‘So I’m not as inhibited as you are!’
‘Who are you calling inhibited?’ Alexandros planted his lean powerful frame so close that she could not turn round to reopen the door. ‘You only make love in a blackout…lights off, curtains closed, sheet to throat!’
Her face aflame with furious chagrin, Katie backed up against the door. ‘Get out of my way, Alexandros!’
‘No. I’m thinking for both of us right now.’
Outrage shone in her flushed face. ‘Tell me I didn’t hear you say that—’
Alexandros rested lean brown hands either side of her head, so that she could not escape his circle of entrapment. ‘I remember this like it happened yesterday,’ he breathed soft and low. ‘You get so mad you don’t think about what you’re doing—’
‘And you’re the insulting, scornful voice of all-knowing logic, are you?’ Katie hissed, standing up on tiptoe, the better to fire back those disdainful words at him.
Alexandros gazed down at her with shimmering dark golden eyes full of molten appreciation. Her tummy flipped, and a little frisson of heat curled low in her pelvis. ‘I know what you want now…’
Her mouth ran dry, and she felt her heart thumping a little too fast for comfort behind her breastbone. ‘You just think you do. You always think you are one step ahead.’
‘If I wasn’t one step ahead, you’d be on the other side of that door right now.’ Alexandros let his hands slowly slide down to her shoulders. It was a caressing move, and wholly confident. She quivered, green eyes welded to his with an electric anticipation that she couldn’t hide. Only with her had he ever experienced that kind of non-verbal communication. It gave him the most incomparable sense of power and heightened arousal.
‘Please don’t…’ Katie whispered shakily, stealing a quick shallow breath and fighting what she was feeling with every weapon in her armoury. She knew that she should lift her hands to push him away, but she didn’t trust herself to make physical contact. Even as she held her slim body still she was extraordinarily conscious of the taut swell of her breasts and the ache of almost unbearable tension at the heart of her.
‘Don’t what?’ Alexandros murmured, soft and low as a purring tiger, his entire concentration bent on her. ‘If you want me to back off, tell me.’
His dark golden eyes were as hot and bright as strong sunlight. He knew she wasn’t going to tell him to back off. Rage rose in her, but she knew it too. Her palms tingled, for she would dearly have loved to slap him for his audacity. But when she focussed on those lean, darkly handsome features, more primitive responses took precedence and made nonsense of all thought and restraint.
Alexandros smiled and her heart danced. Long brown fingers tilted up her chin and she shifted almost infinitesimally closer, her pupils dilated. He let his wide, sensual mouth graze the merest corner of hers, his breath fanning her cheek, and a faint gasp of disappointment was wrenched from her. He bent down, dropping his hands to her waist and lifting her to him with an easy strength that sent a burning river of desire snaked through her.
‘Theos mou…I want you.’
‘We can’t…we mustn’t,’ Katie gasped as he brought her down on a sofa and leant over her.
But a hot-wire sensation that almost hurt tightened in her pelvis, and her fingers spread and speared into his black luxuriant hair. She drew him down to her, controlled by a helpless hunger that paid no heed to more sensible promptings.
He tasted her generous pink mouth with the provocative sensuality that was so much a part of him.
‘I hate jeans, pedhi mou,’ Alexandros reminded her hoarsely, skimming a censorious hand down over a slender thigh sheathed in denim.
His second kiss was slow and deep, and she shivered violently, breathing in shallow bursts. Pulling back from her with the predatory grace and assurance of a hunter who enjoyed the kill, he pushed the T-shirt she wore up out of his path and bared her narrow ribcage.
‘Alexandros,’ she breathed shakily, on the edge of an exhilaration so intense she was terrified.
‘Your skin is very white…’ Scorching golden eyes fiercely focussed, Alexandros inched up the garment that still concealed her from him. When he finally exposed the pert, rounded swell of her breasts, his attention lingered on her taut rosy nipples and a gruff little sound of masculine appreciation was drawn from him. He bent his head and employed his mouth on a single throbbing peak, and a low keening moan of pleasure was wrenched from her.
Across the room, a phone rang. ‘Ignore it,’ he told her thickly.
But the phone rang and rang and rang, and it had no sooner fallen silent when a few moments later a knock sounded on the door. With a splintering Greek curse on his lips, Alexandros vaulted off the sofa and raked his hand through his hair in a gesture of fierce frustration. ‘Whatever you do, don’t move—and don’t start thinking, pedhi mou.’
For several seconds she lay there obediently, still ensnared by the flood of excitement he had released inside her. And then the low murmur of voices from the door at the other end of the room, allied to that suspicious injunction against thought, combined and exploded her out of her waking sensual dream with a vengeance. Hauling her clothing back into place with clumsy hands, Katie sat up and scrambled upright. She was shaking like a leaf inside and out. How could she have forgotten herself to that extent? Her heart-shaped face turned a slow painful pink. How could she have lain there, revelling in what he was making her feel, as if the past had not happened?
Lean, powerful face clenched taut, Alexandros closed the door again. ‘Apparently the nanny I engaged is having trouble with Toby and Connor. I can’t believe that the children can’t do without you for five minutes. It may well be that my staff have hired some over-zealous nurse—’
Katie’s guilt went into mega-drive. ‘Where are they?’
‘The housekeeper will take you to them.’
As Katie surged past him to yank open the door again, Alexandros caught her hand unexpectedly in his and wound her back to him as easily as if she had been a toy. ‘Don’t keep me waiting too long…’
Katie stiffened, and refused to meet his smouldering gaze. She was at the mercy of a seething discomfiture that told her she could be justly accused of blow
ing hot and then cold. ‘I don’t want anything to happen between us…okay? Been there, done that—’
‘And can’t wait to do it again?’ Alexandros slotted in, impervious as a brick wall to that suggestion of caution and moderation.
‘No, I’m serious. I don’t like being in your house,’ Katie admitted tightly. ‘It feels wrong. I’ll feel much more comfortable somewhere on my own—’
‘On your own?’ Alexandros repeated drily.
