Page 23 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
‘Until you were hospitalised, the only members of your family I’d had face-to-face contact with were Alexis and Athena.’
She chewed morosely before she brightened and sat up a little straighter while at the same time straightening her right leg.
Her toes were now barely an inch from his thigh. Sexy toes painted blood orange.
God help him, when had he ever found toes sexy? But Lucie’s were. Pretty, sexy feet topped with pretty, sexy nails painted a colour filled with erotic imagery.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, clearly oblivious to the torture he was suffering, ‘I suppose it’s going to take time for the families to properly bury the hatchet.’
‘There is not going to be any burying of any hatchet. Once we’re married and the pictures of the two parties breaking bread together have been printed across the world, both families will return to their respective lives and go back to despising each other. The feud will be over on paper but not in hearts.’ He said all this in as even a tone as he could manage, and then, using sheer force, wrenched his stare away from her sexy toes…
Only to land it straight onto her beautiful face at the same moment the tip of her moist, pink tongue darted out to catch a flaky crumb stuck in the corner of her exquisite mouth, and he found himself suppressing a groan as a wave of desire he could neither staunch nor deny to himself punched through him and his body twisted closer to her before he was even aware of what it was doing.
Theos, every inch of her was exquisite. Every damn inch. She didn’t need to wear sexy clothes to be sexy or to spray perfume onto her skin to smell heavenly. She was Aphrodite, the goddess not just of beauty but of pleasure…of desire.
The eyebrows first plucked by her mother at the age of nine—what kind of mother did something like that? he wondered dimly—drew together as her gaze dipped to his mouth. ‘Do you really believe that?’
He leaned closer still. ‘Do you mean that you don’t?’ he whispered.
The black eyes flickered back up to meet his stare and widened. How had he never seen the flecks of gold in her eyes before, and now that he saw them, they were all he could see, tiny flecks of gold fire burning… hypnotising him.
Colour heightened her exquisite cheeks, the flecks of gold swirling. Her lips parted and she hitched a small breath. ‘I…’ She shook her head slowly, her voice barely audible even though her face was craning towards his. ‘I don’t know…but if you and I can…’
Her words tailed away as another thick throb of desire pulsed through him, all his senses soaking in the flawless beauty of the goddess who was drinking him in with the same dazed intensity with which he was drinking her.
He could smell the heat of her skin and the sweetness of her breath.
Barely aware of what he was doing, Thanasis wrapped his fingers around the warm, silken calf of her leg. A groan rose up his throat.
Theos, even her skin was flawless.
Her lips parted and released a quiet gasp, her wide eyes pulsed and her knee made the lightest of jerks.
That lightest of jerks was strong enough to snap him back to his senses, and in an instant he snatched his hand away and, heart pounding like a jackhammer, pulled his face away from the flawless beauty he’d been barely an inch away from kissing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUCIE SHOOK HERhead in a futile attempt to clear it of the blood rushing through it and sucked on lips that barely a moment ago had been alive with anticipation of Thanasis’s kiss. She was trembling. Every part of her. Trembling and aching.
He rubbed a giant hand over his face and took a long breath.
Even through all the dazed sensations consuming her, Lucie had just enough wits left to recognise the torture Thanasis was putting himself through, and her ragged heart swelled at the control he must be continually exerting for her sake.
Pulling herself together as best she could, she shuffled over, closing the distance his sudden lurch away had created between them, and took hold of his hand. It stiffened at her touch.
The shutters were back in his eyes, his expression once again unreadable, and she gave a tremulous smile to see it…and to see the tic pulsing in his jaw.
On impulse, she scrambled unsteadily onto her knees and palmed his cheeks…her whole hands fitted on them, the thick stubble brushing deliciously into her skin…and brought her face even closer, dizzily breathing in the scent of coffee lacing his breath.
‘You don’t have to walk on eggshells or treat me like I’m breakable, Thanasis,’ she whispered. ‘My memories of us might be gone but something of what we shared must have imprinted in me because the feelings haven’t.’
Something flashed in the green eyes before they closed and his strong throat moved. ‘Lucie, I…’
She slid her fingers over his mouth and shook her head. ‘You don’t have to explain anything. I can see how hard this whole situation is for you.’ And then, because she could do nothing else, she slipped her fingers away from his lips and replaced them with her mouth.
If Thanasis had been still before, every muscle in his powerful body now tensed, and as her eyes closed and she sank into the sensations dancing over her mouth and into her skin at the compression of the lips she couldn’t stop fantasising about against hers, the control he was exerting made her swollen heart expand to fill every crevice inside her. Sighing into him, she slipped her hands round to clasp the back of his head and slowly dragged her fingers through hair softer than silk.
She sensed rather than heard the groan in his throat before the unyielding mouth flexed and his lips parted, only a fraction but fraction enough for his breath to fill her senses with a taste and heat so delicious that her brain shut down completely under the weight of sensation flooding her.
