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If she’d thought he’d turn away from her silence, she was wrong.
Instead, he pressed closer to her, crowding her, tempting her.
‘Ask for what you want, Anna. It is your right.’
‘As your wife?’ she spat at him, desperate to cling to anything she could use to maintain the barriers she had put around her heart three years before, longer even. The barriers he was bashing through with the force of a storm.
‘No. Theos,’ he growled. ‘As a woman.’
It was as if he had let loose a battle cry to everything feminine inside her, begging, pleading with her to reach for him, to take what she wanted. And it was so tempting in the darkness of the empty island home. What he was asking her. What he was telling her to demand from him. He was right—she had been using their daughter as an excuse, as a shield from the simmering tension that had always, always been there between them. It seemed like the simplest of things, but Anna felt the decision like a pendulum, swinging either way, weighed down, but pushing them forward to an undeniable conclusion.
* * *
Dimitri could feel her need, so strong he could almost taste it. He cursed himself to hell and back because by illuminating her desire for him he had served to increase his own. His arousal pressed hard against the dark linen trousers he had worn for the wedding.
Her eyes flared and he could see her wavering. He could feel the struggle going on inside her, he could see it in her sea-green eyes. He’d promised her that she would beg—the irony was not lost on him. In that moment he would have given almost anything to have her succumb to him. In that moment, it was he who was poised on the brink of begging.
‘You did that first night,’ he reminded her. ‘You demanded everything from me and I gave it willingly and I would not refuse you this, ever. So—’ Dimitri took a step towards her ‘—you want me?’ he demanded.
She looked almost mutinous, but finally said the word he’d been longing to hear. ‘Yes.’
‘Say it.’
‘I want you.’
The thrumming that had unsettled the air about them stilled. She could still walk away. And he honestly couldn’t have blamed her, but he saw her fingers hesitantly reached for the back of her dress. Christe mou, he was going to die if she had to undo all those buttons. He closed his eyes and heard the sound of a zip sliding down its fastener.
When he opened them again he watched the slow slide of the dress as it slipped, first from her shoulders, revealing her naked chest, the slopes of her breasts perfect as they rose and fell in time with her rapid breathing. She pressed the dress over her hips and it fell from her waist, pooling in a white silk puddle at her heeled feet.
Her chin rose defiantly as she stood there in nothing but her shoes and a white silk thong. He took her in all at once, the sight of her nearly undoing him completely. He felt the tremors of his own arousal begin to threaten his control.
‘All of it. Take it off.’ He gestured towards her thong. He watched her eyes widen a fraction. Good. It was good to see her as unsettled by this thing between them as he was. A masochistic part of him wanted her to stop. To refuse his last demand. Because if they took this step...there would be no going back. He would be making her his wife, in more than name only. And once he had what he wanted, he wouldn’t let go.
Her thumbs slid down her hips and hooked under the thin lace of her underwear. Fire burned his lungs and Dimitri realised that he’d forgotten to breathe. This was what she did to him. As if she knew it, her hands hovered at her sides, waiting, taunting almost.
‘Take. It. Off.’
His voice shredded the last of her uncertainty and he watched, heart in mouth, as she slid the flimsy material down over her hips, lifting long, lean, tanned legs, sweeping it down over her ankles, and she tossed it to the side.
‘Say it,’ he commanded.
‘I’ve already told you... I—’
He shook his head slowly.
‘You bastard.’
‘That may be, but I still want you to say it.’
She started to tremble then—not with fear, no. Desire and want was clearly written in her gaze and satisfaction spread through him to see her as much at the mercy of their attraction as he. She bit her top lip as if to prevent her from saying the one thing he needed to hear. The one thing that would start what they had both wanted from the very first moment they had laid eyes on each other.
He wanted to take that lip within his own teeth. He wanted to lave it with his tongue, taste her cries as she found her pleasure in his arms. It was an all-consuming want that he wouldn’t be rid of until he had her beneath him again.
He closed the gap between them with the last step he would take.
‘Say it.’
Her white teeth loosened their grip on the plump pink lip.
