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Thaata was right. Nothing had been real in her life. Not the endless dates she’d gone on in the last decade based on some app’s algorithm, not the men who were supposed to be her perfect matches on paper. And definitely not the way she’d locked up her heart so tight that she could feel no pain.
Only Aristos’s touch made her feel the pulse of something real. Something so effortlessly carnal that a kiss had shattered the icy frost she’d encased her desires in, fractured the fortress she’d built around herself for so long.
And he was here, now.
Sending her possessive, smoldering glances that said he hadn’t forgotten the kiss. That said they were still bound by contract and something else. Even with grief and loss tossing her about, it was the first spark of life she’d felt in months.
What if for one evening, one hour, one moment, she allowed herself to feel something real? If she let herself drown in sensation and pleasure and forgot her plan and her rules and everything rational?
Aristos Carides willed himself to last just a few more minutes under the blisteringly cold spray. Despite his grandfather Leo’s twenty years’ worth of speeches and sometimes downright threats, he’d never quite learned how to control his baser instincts. Had never learned how to temper the yawning emptiness within him that wanted more and more. More thrills to prove he was alive. More high-stakes cases. More status and wealth.
As if he could never rid himself of the hunger and thirst he’d known on the streets.
But even as a child, on the streets of Athens where he’d grown up until twelve years of age when Leo had found him and dragged him home to be civilized, fighting for scraps to live on, he’d always been a master at deception. He’d simply used those skills and pretended that he had everything under control. That there weren’t any moments when he saw himself in the mirror and only a sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness looked back at him.
The entire world thought he had something to prove, that it was an unquenchable need to defy nature, physics and his demanding grandfather that drove him. Instead it was something else he relentlessly pursued under extreme conditions. Something else that he wanted to purge.
Not that anything had ever helped keep his needy desires in check when it came toher.
Mira Reddy, the golden princess with large brown eyes that sized up everything with a look, with lush curves that had sent his adolescent body into fits of lust, with a kind smile so broad and so big that one felt drenched in it. The fiercely magnificent lioness who’d been dangled in front of him as the ultimate prize he hadn’t imagined he could have in his wildest dreams fifteen years ago. Only to be told that he came secondary to her ambition to become a doctor.
Except he’d known in his heart, as had Leo, that the golden princess had found him inadequate at the end. He’d been good enough to be her pity project as a wild, almost feral teen, but not enough to share her life.
He’d never forgotten the feeling—like offering a feast to a starving man and snatching it away just when the scent of it drove him wild with hunger.
She’s yours now, though, that same feral voice whispered.She’s Mira Reddy Carides and you’ve got her where you’ve wanted her for years.
Even with the cold water freezing his skin and other important parts, a hot rush went through him at the mere thought. He pressed his forehead to the cold tile, scoffing at himself.
Wanting his wife with a desperation that bordered on unrequited longing was not a good feeling. It was the same “not good” feeling he’d indulged in on and off for over two decades now. Ever since he’d seen Mira when he’d been twelve, awkward with his sudden birthright and inheritance and she’d smiled at him, he’d lost a part of himself to her and gained an impossibly ridiculous dream.
A dream that had come close to being real, only to be snatched away, again and again.
For all the media claimed him to be a playboy who changed partners as fast as he won litigation cases, every woman he’d taken to bed, every thrill he’d chased, had been to seek escape from that blasted feeling. A chase to rid himself of that “longing.”
Ergo, even now, he was failing to drown out the intemperate reaction he had to seeing her after months. To seeing her hanging on to the Brazilian Caio Oliveira’s arm, looking like they were made for each other.
Even though she belonged tohim.
Seeing her large brown eyes shine with wetness, knowing that she was brokenhearted over her grandfather but wouldn’t welcome any kind of comfort he offered, made him feel helpless. Inadequate. Like the runt Leo had picked off the streets two decades ago. Like he’d never measure up, where it mattered. Like he’d always be the poor little boy who’d been neglected by his mother in favor of her drink.
And Aristos hated feeling helpless. Hated remembering how small and powerless he’d once been. Hated that even after she’d abandoned their arrangement yet again, he still felt this pull toward her, this gnawing need to...
With a filthy curse, he turned off the shower.
Enough was enough. He’d given her enough time to look after her grandparents, given himself enough time to cool down after she’d run again.
It was time to bring her home where she belonged. Time to make her his in a way that would kill this ridiculous longing he felt, once and for all. He’d locked her tight in an arrangement for five years, hopefully enough to extinguish the hold she seemed to have over him. Enough to make sure she was tied to him for the rest of their lives through their child even when it was over between them.
The white lie he’d told her to entice her didn’t bother him one bit. He’d never take their child from her but neither would he simply fade into the background as he’d let her believe.
Christos, the elaborate scheming it took to get her into his life... He hadn’t seen such handiwork in the wildest cases he came across in his corporate career.
Walking into the room he’d been shown into for the night, he was shaking his wet hair like a mongrel when he felt that telltale tension that always took root in his body when Mira was close. Like a rubber band being stretched tighter and tauter in his abdomen, threatening to snap at one more breath, and yet continuing the burn endlessly.
The room was in relative darkness, but the moonlight spilling through the open French doors was more than enough to make out Mira standing there. Inside his room. Like his wildest wet dream coming true.
With her back pressed up to the closed door. With one side of a loose robe hanging off her shoulder, baring the smooth arch of her long neck. Open wide at the front, the robe taunted him with a hint of those lush curves he’d dreamed of far too often for his liking, white lace kissing the flesh he wanted to mar with his mouth. The silky material stopped mid-thigh, fluttering at the breeze that seemed to have poured in just for his benefit. Thick thighs he wanted to bury his face between and shapely calves that he wanted around his back, with white-tipped toes peeping out of slippers.
