Page 24 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
Thanasis could hear nothing above the roar in his head, could barely hear his own urgent commands to resist, to unclasp the hands clinging so tightly to his head and push Lucie away before he gave in to the hunger and melted into her honeyed temptation.
He must not fall into it. He must resist. Resist, resist, resist, and with this one thought pushing through the growing cacophony in his brain, he lifted his hands with every intention of pushing her away but instead found his fingers cupping her face as his head tilted to fuse their mouths into one. The tips of their tongues collided and a burst of lust like he’d never experienced in the whole of his life smashed into him, its force so shocking that, with a hoarse groan, he buried his fingers into her mass of soft curls and opened his mouth to her.
Fire raging through his veins, his tongue swept into her hot, sweet temptation.
Theos, she tasted even better than their few fleeting kisses had promised, a potently dark sweetness that fed and stoked his hunger, the gentle softness of her mouth an aphrodisiac that punched straight into his heavy, aroused loins.
His senses consumed with a ravenous hunger he’d never felt before, Thanasis swept his hands down the curve of her back, and crushed her flush against him, holding her tight as he laid her down, the searing fusion of their mouths and tongues deepening into something primitive as he feasted on the beauty who had taunted and haunted him for so long.
Fingers dug tightly into his skull scraped lower, through the hairs of his neck and over the planes of his shoulders, and he shuddered at the sensations scorching his skin, shuddered again when her thighs parted and she wrapped her legs around him, and as he dragged his mouth over the delicate skin of her throat and felt the heavy thump of her pulse beneath his lips, he cupped a breast frustratingly covered in her tight swimsuit and felt the arousal of her hardened nipple against his palm at the same moment she circled her hips and his own arousal jutted into her pelvis.
God help him, he had never known desire could be this swift and this potent and this greedy, and he brushed his lips lower, his tongue sweeping over a collarbone that was as perfect as the rest of the body writhing beneath him…even her moans of pleasure were perfect, soaking into his ears like music, close to drowning out the voice in his head distantly shouting that he had to stop this, right now, before things went too far.
The voice cut through again, even louder.
Stop.
Summoning every ounce of his strength, Thanasis wrenched his mouth from the nectar of Lucie’s flesh and pulled himself away from her.
The silence that followed was stark, the thumps of his weighty heart the only sound to cut through.
Theos, he could hardly breathe.
The sudden pleasure withdrawal of Thanasis’s ravenous mouth and the glorious heat of his body left Lucie completely disoriented. Dazed, she blinked up at him, hand fluttering to her pounding heart, barely able to snatch the smallest of breaths. Her body was on fire. There was a deep, throbbing ache between her legs as though the very core of herself had turned into lava.
Dear heavens, so that was what a real kiss felt like. Like your bones were melting into liquid.
As she watched the rapid rise and fall of Thanasis’s perfect chest and the pulse throbbing in his tight jaw, her other hand absently fluttered to her mouth, fingers exploring the delicate skin his lips had just ravaged. The trail his tongue had made against her neck burned deliciously.
‘That should not have happened,’ he stated heavily, breaking the stunned silence.
It was like he’d tipped a bucket of ice water over her head. All the heady, joyous zings careering through her blood froze in their tracks.
He twisted back to face her with a dark, forbidding expression. ‘Your feelings for me are false.’
Utterly confused, she scrambled upright and swallowed. ‘How can you say that?’
There was an implacability to the way he was looking at her. Only the heaviness of his breaths betrayed the effect their moment together had had on him.
‘Listen to me,’ he said roughly before taking her hands and placing them flat on top of his palms. ‘You feel that, yes? The touch of our hands?’
She almost wanted to deny it. It felt like Thanasis had given her a glimpse of heaven and was now denying it even existed.
‘You feel it because it is true and quantifiable. Whatever else you think you feel for me, it doesn’t exist because it can’t—without the memories, there are no feelings because there cannot be because there is nothing for the feelings to touch on.’
‘But they’re there.Ifeel them,’ she protested, and wrapped her fingers tightly around his hands. ‘I feel them the same way I can feel your skin against mine.’
He shook his head with that same implacable assurance. ‘No. You feel them because that is what you want to feel, because you feel you must for my sake, but they are not true. In time your real feelings for me will develop organically and they will be true, but you cannot force them and I will not take advantage of their absence.’
‘You can’t tell me I didn’t feel what I just felt then,’ she said, searching his eyes with something close to desperation. Could he be right?Wasshe trying to force feelings on herself? Whether he was right or wrong, all the sensations she’d just experienced in his arms… She had never,everexperienced anything like that before, a kiss that had made her come close to spontaneously combusting. ‘Or tell me you didn’t feel it too.’
God damn that Thanasis wished he could. And God damn that he wished he could just tell her the truth, and it unnerved him to know how close he’d come to telling her exactly that in the moment before she’d blown his mind with a kiss. A whisker. He’d been a whisker away from telling her the truth and blowing up his life.
He couldn’t tell her the truth but nor could he let her believe that any feelings she might have for him were ghosts of her past feelings, because those feelings had never existed.
A man had his limits and Thanasis had just found his.
‘Of course I felt it too.’ He groaned and tugged his hands away from hers, running them furiously through his hair.
