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In the milky, golden light of the early morning, the distant sea glittered like sapphires and everything looked sparkling clean and fresh. Sprinklers had been spraying the flowers overnight so that their petals were still dowsed with tiny droplets of water.
The pool was cool when she dived in but Lexi was glad for the shock to her senses. Shock was good. It brought her thoughts back to the present instead of letting them meander off into a dreamy and unrealistic future. It reminded her that this tryst with Xenon was purely temporary. Well, maybe pure was the wrong word, but it was definitely temporary.
He had been curiously quiet after his sister had left yesterday and had remained quiet all through dinner—politely batting away the conversational gambits of his mother and swirling his wine round in his glass, without actually drinking any of it. He had seemed preoccupied, the way he used to be whenever he had some big problem at work. Mulling things over in that clever brain of his until he had identified the exact cause of the problem and how best to deal with it.
At one point she had asked him if something was wrong and he had looked at her, his blue eyes narrowed with an expression she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, and had said, ‘You tell me, Lex.’
She’d felt uncomfortable then and had lapsed into silence herself and not long afterwards she had excused herself from the table and gone off to bed. And when he had followed her he had seemed reluctant to have any kind of conversation. Instead he had started to kiss her in a hungry, almost angry way and she couldn’t prevent herself from kissing him back and after that it had just rocketed out of control.
But now she couldn’t get that kiss out of her mind, or the explosive love-making which had followed. And she needed to. She needed to forget the slide of his fingers on her flesh and the way his lips sought out her most sensitive places. She remembered the way his head had burrowed in between her thighs last night. She’d put her hand on his hair to stop him because at that moment it had seemed almost too intimate an act, especially when she was trying to distance herself from him.
But he hadn’t stopped. He had just moved his tongue all the way along the trembling skin of her inner thigh and she had let him. He had ignored her little gasp of outraged pleasure when his lips first located that hot and aching little bud. He’d pretended he hadn’t heard her muffled question about whether this was such a good idea. And then she had fallen back against the bed, her thighs parting wide and her fingers clutching at him greedily as she soared up into an intense orgasm which left her body racked with exquisite spasms.
How did he do that? she wondered. Dominating her so utterly and completely and turning her into both a compliant and active lover. She thought how easy it had been to slip back into the physical compatibility which had always been a huge part of their marriage. Yet when she stopped to think about it, even that side of their relationship had never really been equal. He had come to the marriage with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the opposite sex while hers could have been written on the back of a postage stamp. He was the only man she’d ever been intimate with and that had pleased him far more than it should have done. She knew that because he’d told her, in that unashamedly boastful Greek way of his.
She’d once asked him if he would have married her if she hadn’t been a virgin and there had been a momentary hesitation before he had reassured her that, yes, of course he would. But Lexi had never really been convinced by that reassurance. Her virginity was all tied in with Xenon’s desire for a wife-on-a-pedestal. The textbook partner for a fundamentally old-fashioned man.
And she was not that wife. She could never be that wife.
Diving beneath the surface of the pool, she opened her eyes to the bleached blue light as she swam almost an entire length underwater before emerging, spluttering, into the fresh air.
She wondered what would lie ahead when she left here, with Jason’s debts paid off and her whole life in front of her. She had her career and her home, but no emotional security. She wondered if she would ever find happiness with another man or whether she was doomed to become one of those women who always carried a torch for their first and only love. A little like Marina...
Hauling herself out of the pool, she squeezed the excess water from her hair and rubbed herself dry with a giant towel before walking back to the villa.
Xenon was standing in the doorway as she approached, a cup of coffee in hand and an inscrutable expression on his face as he watched her. Wearing nothing but a pair of faded jeans, his big body looked tense and powerful. Sunlight gleamed on the muscular arms and honed torso and Lexi was suddenly filled with an almost unbearable sense of lust. She was going to miss this. Damn it, she was going to miss him.
