Page 49

They had become as comfortable as dance partners as they were in bed, but she felt wooden as they moved, aware of his lingering tension.

“I’m sorry,” she said, both because her foot caught, but also because of who she was.

“She’s the one who should apologize. What nerve.”

“But it bothers you.” She had looked into finishing her secondary schooling, but was suddenly hit by how unfair it was to make a child with him when she had so many strikes against her, not least of which was the fact her heritage was such a mystery. He could tell their child his family history. He knew where his ancestors had lived and who had had heart disease or asthma. He had a watch and a company he could pass along to their child.

She had nothing but a sensational story about being found on a beach.

“It only bothers me if it bothers you,” he said crisply. But after a few moments, he asked gruffly, “Have you ever thought of doing a DNA test, though?”

It did bother him!

“A few times,” she admitted. “I don’t know that I would learn anything good, though. Either my parents are dead, which is what I prefer to believe, or they abandoned me, exactly as I was always told. There were never any reports of a lost child. No one looked for me.”

“Maybe they are looking for you and one of those sites would help them find you.”

“I’ve lived next to the beach where I was found for twenty years, Spiro. It was national news when it happened.” She kept her voice low, but it shook with emotion. This was a very sensitive topic for her. “They’re not looking for me. Even if I found some relatives, what would I do? Leave Yaya and go live with people who never wanted me? No, I’ve always known I would stay with her as long as she needed me, then I would go off and make my own life, not try to pick up the pieces on one that I was kicked out of.”

He frowned in concern and his hand drifted across her back in a soothing caress.

They didn’t talk about it again, but a kind of desperation gripped her that night. A need to feel their connection into her soul. To know she had a place with him because she was losing her grip on the only place she did have.

When they made love, she grasped at him, more assertive than she’d ever been, running her hands and lips over every part of him until he was nothing but tensile steel.

“What are you doing to me?” he growled, tangling his hand in her hair and dragging her mouth back to his.

She straddled his hips and rode him, trying to set a hard pace, but his hands gripped her hips, controlling her.

“Harder,” she cried, allowing her nails to scrape his chest. “I want all of you.”

He released a feral noise and lifted his hips in sharp thrusts that made her shatter and melt onto him, but he wasn’t finished. He rolled her beneath him. His teeth scraped her throat and he moved down to her breast and farther, claiming her body with the same thoroughness she’d claimed his, until she was arched against his mouth, crying out with abandon.

Then he was in her again, throwing her legs over his arms, making her scream under the power of her climax, then rolling her over and surging into her again and again.

It was primitive, but pure. Animalistic in the way of beasts bonding through mating and it made her heart sing.

She would always belong to him, she thought as she was drifting in the aftermath, body singing with satisfaction. Always.

Even if he didn’t keep her.

Her eyes snapped open and it took her a long time to fall asleep.

* * *

“I was too rough last night,” Spiro said in the shower the next morning.

Their explosive culmination after all that unfettered, thorough lovemaking had knocked him out, but his gut knotted as he saw fingerprint bruises on her hips and thighs. He’d left a love bite on her breast and another on her neck. There was a shadow around her mouth and her lips were chapped and swollen.

“Sometimes I forget how small and delicate you are.” Her spirit was boundless and laugh contagious, her passion bottomless. It made her seem bigger and stronger than she really was. “I won’t behave like that again.”

“I liked it.” She ran a soapy cloth over the marks on her hip, but they couldn’t be scrubbed away.

“Nevertheless, I need to be more careful with you.” What if she was pregnant?

He had been feeling threatened last night, driven by that moment when the woman had approached and brought up Alia’s past. He still couldn’t help thinking Lambros had something to do with it. It was just like him to attack where he least expected it. To try to drive a wedge between him and Alia by promising her something she must want that Spiro could never possibly give her.

All he’d been thinking last night was mine, mine, mine. He knew that was wrong, though. He ought to be trying to give her a baby like a civilized husband, not unleashing the full power of his sexual appetite on her, while wanting to keep her chained in his cave like a dragon hoarding gold.