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Her defensive stance wasn’t against anything he might say or do, as there was a very strong possibility that he wouldn’t even remember the night they had spent together, but against her own indiscriminate hormones, which still, it seemed, responded independently of her intellect to his rampant animal magnetism.
Oh, for God’s sake, Chloe, you need to get a life!
While she was silently chastising herself Nik had moved level with her. ‘Spiros.’
His voice had the same rough velvet, almost tactile quality she remembered...but this time she was only shivering because she was standing in a draft, she told herself stubbornly.
They were actually standing level, side by side as he stretched out a hand to the older man, but Chloe didn’t turn her head. She didn’t need to, because she could already feel the sheer physical power of his tall, muscled frame.
‘No Petra tonight?’
‘No, she’s resting up. She sprained an ankle during training.’
Nik made a sympathetic noise in his throat. ‘For another marathon?’
The older man gave a rueful nod. ‘I think it’s addictive.’
‘You not going to join her?’
‘I know my limitations.’ Chloe, who felt as though her casual social expression could do with some work but needed all her focus to control her too rapid breathing, took encouragement from the fact that Spiros didn’t seem to notice anything amiss as he touched her arm and looked at Nik. She was still working her way up to it. ‘Do you know Chloe?’
She held her breath.
‘Of course; we go way back,’ Nik said smoothly.
‘Royal connections—you kept that quiet, Nik.’
No longer able to delay the moment, Chloe turned her head, her features arranged in a smile that was intended to project polite indifference, although she had a horrible feeling that a touch of the hunted animal had crept in!
Her first hope had been that he wouldn’t remember her; the second was that up close he would have some flaw she had forgotten, but again her fairy godmother had not granted her wish.
So Plan B it was, then: be polite, be distant, be... Oh, God, on an intellectual level the dark, predatory, raw animal magnetism stuff did nothing for her, only it seemed the message hadn’t filtered through to the non-intellectual parts of her that were only listening to the hormonal clamour—but then it was pretty loud.
His male beauty, and beauty was no exaggeration, hit her at a purely visceral level. She had never experienced anything like it before—well, just the once.
His high knife-sharp cheekbones, strong aquiline nose, and angular jaw even dusted with stubble gave his face a patrician cast, though this was offset by the overtly sensual outline of his mobile mouth, twisted at that moment into a faintly cynical smile. The same emotion was reflected in his eyes, his quite simply spectacular eyes; deep set and heavy lidded, and fringed with dense, straight, spiky lashes, they were a stunning dark chocolate brown.
Pinned by those dark eyes, she experienced a ‘rabbit in the headlight’ moment and froze.
‘How are you... Chloe?’ He seemed to roll the word over his tongue as though he were tasting it.
As he’d tasted her... Chloe pushed the thought away but not before her body’s core temperature had raised a few uncomfortable degrees. She lifted a hand to her neck to feel the dull vibration of her heavy pulse, and she fingered the uncut gemstones that felt cold compared to her skin.
From somewhere she manufactured a smile but the effort made her cheek muscles ache while she silently struggled to keep the door locked against forbidden memories. It wasn’t about wanting to forget him, she thought, but more not wanting to remember and be reminded of the things she strongly suspected she might never experience again.
And maybe that was a good thing, she rationalised. Yes, head-banging, uninhibited sex was good—it was pretty excellent—but so was waking up with someone who actually cared for you, or for that matter was physically still there in the morning.
Refusing to acknowledge the sense of loss that still lay like a heavy weight in her chest, she reminded herself that she was looking, or she would be when the time came, for more in a man than his knowledge of the female anatomy... Hell, clumsy with feeling was infinitely preferable to the refined torture of a skilled touch with no emotion behind it.
‘How long has it been?’ he asked coolly.
‘I’m not sure,’ she lied, thinking, Eighteen months, eight days and thirty-one minutes...not that I’m counting.
She stiffened when without warning he bent his head and brushed her mouth lightly with his. His lips were warm, reminding her of when they had been even warmer, when he had tasted of her... The muscles low on her pelvis cramped as she stood as still as a statue, fighting with all her might the shameful urge to lean in and kiss him back.
The gasp she locked in her throat ached as she breathed in the warm male scent of him through flared nostrils.
It wasn’t until he lifted his head that she realised she was holding his sleeve, though she had no memory of grabbing it. Disturbing, but there was no point reading too much into it, she decided as she let it casually fall away, ignoring the tingling sensation in her fingertips.
