Page 145 of Love Among the Ruins
CHAPTERTHIRTY-NINE
DOMINIC
He couldn’t risk her seeing his trombone sized erection.
So he’d jumped into the pool to hide his boner, but Eleni had only gone and jumped in after him. He backed away from her as if she had a contagious disease.
“You jumped in fully clothed,” he managed to say, stating the obvious.
“Would you rather I took everything off?”
Fuck, yes. NO.
What had possessed her? He wondered if Xenia might have accidentally added vodka to the lemonade. “You can swim in your shorts?”
“They do feel kind of heavy.”
He backed further away, scared she might strip them off and come for him. She had suddenly turned into a seductress. She moved towards him, and he moved back a few steps away until they were walking around one another, their steps slow and cautious, him eyeing her as if she were a predator.
She lifted her arms and made an exaggerated show of sniffing her armpits. “Do I smell?”
“No.” He backed away a few more steps until he was in the middle of the pool. She had him trapped.
“Then why are you trying to get away from me?”
Eleni’s doleful eyes searched his face. He’d seen that look in women’s eyes. It was pure want. He scrubbed his face, unsure if the water was blurring his vision.
“I’m not. It’s hot.” There was no explaining it, so he began to swim again, taking long, purposeful strokes from one end of the pool to the other. The easy-going conversation from earlier now replaced by a prickly silence. After two lengths, he stopped in the middle of a stroke, a few yards from her. “Why don’t you swim?”
She leaned back, splaying her slender arms out on the pool ledge. “My shorts feel tight and heavy.”
He swallowed, wishing he could erase her words and the visuals they imprinted on his mind. She was breaking his balls and she had no idea.
He swam away again because his lust-hazed brain was struggling to stay calm. When he turned around to do another length, she waved at him, with her denim shorts in her hand.
Oh.Fuck.
She threw them on the pool ledge and started to swim while he stared up at the sky and prayed that she’d keep her tank top on. He felt like he was in danger. Uneasy with her proximity. She wouldn’t be able to see his hardness, but if she stared at him long enough, she’d be able to tell and he would no longer be able to hide the effect she had on him.
So, he continued with his lengths. The silence and the swimming saved him. With his face in the water, he was vaguely aware of Eleni doing her laps on the other side, but he forced himself to concentrate on every stroke as he glided through the water.
When he next came up for air, he saw that she had stopped swimming and was standing still in the pool, the water coming up to just under her breasts. She was panting, sweeping her hair back from her face. Her knot had come undone and her dark mane clung to her skin. It was impossible to miss the rise and fall of her chest.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Was she deliberately trying to give him death by blue balls?
“We were having a conversation,” she stated, her eyes a question mark. “Then you got up and started to swim. Did I bore you?”
He had never heard her sound so needy before. Maybe something else was going on. Something that the prickass, douchbag Ioannis had done ...
He allowed himself to move a few inches closer. “I didn’t get a chance to do my exercise today.”
A line formed between her brows. “You were swimming this morning.”
Surprise opened his mouth. So he had. This morning seemed so far away.
He tried to find another explanation. “Swimming calms me down. Takes away the tension.”
