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“You were discussing me with Aristos?”
“He brought it up, not me. He finds it impressive how you will take a deal to the very edge to win. Is that what you were doing earlier, Nik? Now? Telling me what I want to hear to solve your problem before it blows up in your face?”
“I meant what I said.” He raked his gaze over her. “You were attracted to him.”
“I wish I was. At least Aristos is an open book. What you see is what you get. God only knows with you.”
Blood pounded his temples, frustration and jealousy mixing in a volatile combination. He’d had enough. Quite enough. He snared his fingers around her waist and dragged her onto his lap. His gaze speared hers as her lush bottom made intimate contact with his hard thighs. “You would be wise,” he bit out, “to never discuss me with Aristos again. Or,” he added deliberately, “to flirt with him as blatantly as you did tonight.”
She didn’t heed the warning. Instead her eyes went even blacker. “I thought that was the point of the Akathinian tradition... To enjoy the free members of the opposite sex before you are tied down for all eternity.”
A surge of adrenaline picked him up and carried him past the point of no return. “Yes,” he agreed. “It is also tradition that the bride-to-be ends up in the groom-to-be’s bed. Pleasuring him.”
She caught her lip between her teeth. “Not this bride-to-be.”
The flare of excitement in her eyes convinced him otherwise. Bending his head he tugged her lip between his teeth, taking over the job. She pushed her palms against his chest in a halfhearted shove, but her breath was coming too rapidly for him to put any stock in her protest, her luscious body in the sensational red dress plastered against him too great a temptation to resist.
His teeth sank deeper into her lip, punishing her. “You should know better than to bait me, Sofi´a mou. Or maybe that was the point?”
“As if I—” He cut off her sputter, taking her mouth in an aggressive possession designed to get to the heart of the matter. Her underneath him where she should have been for the past two weeks.
Her nails dug into his biceps in a punishment of her own. A soft sound emerged from the back of her throat, her mouth opening under his. He took advantage of it, burying his fingers in a chunk of her hair while he slid his tongue inside her mouth to taste her, stroke her. Another low moan as her fingers relinquished their death grip on his flesh reached right inside of him.
A push of his palm sent her back on the bed, her sexy red dress riding up her thighs. His hands pushed it up farther, his only intention to be inside of her. Her eyes were molten dark fire as they met his. But there was also indecision there. It made him curse low in his throat.
“There isn’t one inch of you that doesn’t want me to take you right now,” he rasped. “Allow us what we both want.”
“I need time to think.
“About what?”
She pushed herself into a sitting position. “About whether I give you that power over me.”
His brutally aroused body protested loudly. “I have made a promise to you, Sofi´a. I am committed to making this work.”
“Then prove it.” She shimmied to the side of the bed and slid off, the silky red dress covering up her delectable thighs. A dark brow winged upward as she turned to him. “We have all weekend, don’t we?”
CHAPTER NINE
SOFÍA SPENT TWO DAYS with her mother and Benetio before they flew home to New York. They toured Akathinia, went for a cruise to the neighboring islands and spent considerable amounts of time in the jewelry shops in the Akathinian capital, where her mother fell in love with a local designer.
It was with mixed feelings that she walked her mother and Benetio down to the helicopter pad on the palace lawn for their trip to Athens. She had made an effort to connect with her mother, not an easy thing for her to ask of herself, but something in Nik’s speech the night of their engagement party had resonated with her. She could either keep the shell she had built around herself intact, or put herself out there, make herself vulnerable, with the hopes of restoring her relationship with her mother. She had realized she couldn’t not try.
She had told her mother about the baby. It had made her mother cry, as if breaking through some of her mother’s own walls. It had been a step in the right direction for them and she’d invited her mother to come back by herself to spend some time together before the wedding.
