The Greek's Ultimate Conquest
He took a deep breath and decided he’d call it something more mundane—convenient. Or he would once he got his rampant, raging libido under control. It took another few deep breaths to think beyond the heat that had streaked down his body and settled painfully in his groin.
His cognitive powers were clearly working on the reserve battery. He had no idea how long he stood there paralyzed, it could have been a second or an hour, before, like a man waking from a trance, he finally shook his head.
The air trapped in his lungs hissed out as in a single urgent sweep his dark, penetrating stare took in every single detail of her. The soft shiny blonde hair falling from a slight widow’s peak down her back and cut shorter at the sides to frame a vivid beautiful face, the sinuous curves of her lush body outlined by the flowing lines of blue silk.
She was stunning.
He’d sometimes wondered, generally around two a.m., if he exorcised the woman, would he finally exorcise the nightmare? The two seemed so intrinsically linked, maybe they were interdependent? It had been an intellectual exercise he’d never really taken seriously as he hadn’t expected their paths to cross again.
Well, it was no longer intellectual, and neither was the roar in his blood, and he knew that not to explore the theory now that he had the opportunity would be insane!
* * *
Chloe knew Nik was standing there even before Spiros’s glance moved past her, alerted by the fine invisible downy hairs on her body rising in reaction to his invisible presence.
She emptied her glass carefully, wiped her expression of anything that could be interpreted as a desire to dig a big hole and jump in it and mentally circled the wagons against attack.
If she refused to be defined by the scars she wore, she was definitely not going to be defined by a past mistake, even if he was six foot three and sinfully gorgeous!
Her defensive stance wasn’t against anything he might say or do, as there was a very strong possibility that he wouldn’t even remember the night they had spent together, but against her own indiscriminate hormones, which still, it seemed, responded independently of her intellect to his rampant animal magnetism.
Oh, for God’s sake, Chloe, you need to get a life!
While she was silently chastising herself Nik had moved level with her. ‘Spiros.’
His voice had the same rough velvet, almost tactile quality she remembered...but this time she was only shivering because she was standing in a draft, she told herself stubbornly.
They were actually standing level, side by side as he stretched out a hand to the older man, but Chloe didn’t turn her head. She didn’t need to, because she could already feel the sheer physical power of his tall, muscled frame.
‘No Petra tonight?’
‘No, she’s resting up. She sprained an ankle during training.’
Nik made a sympathetic noise in his throat. ‘For another marathon?’
The older man gave a rueful nod. ‘I think it’s addictive.’
‘You not going to join her?’
‘I know my limitations.’ Chloe, who felt as though her casual social expression could do with some work but needed all her focus to control her too rapid breathing, took encouragement from the fact that Spiros didn’t seem to notice anything amiss as he touched her arm and looked at Nik. She was still working her way up to it. ‘Do you know Chloe?’
She held her breath.
‘Of course; we go way back,’ Nik said smoothly.
‘Royal connections—you kept that quiet, Nik.’
No longer able to delay the moment, Chloe turned her head, her features arranged in a smile that was intended to project polite indifference, although she had a horrible feeling that a touch of the hunted animal had crept in!
Her first hope had been that he wouldn’t remember her; the second was that up close he would have some flaw she had forgotten, but again her fairy godmother had not granted her wish.
So Plan B it was, then: be polite, be distant, be... Oh, God, on an intellectual level the dark, predatory, raw animal magnetism stuff did nothing for her, only it seemed the message hadn’t filtered through to the non-intellectual parts of her that were only listening to the hormonal clamour—but then it was pretty loud.
His male beauty, and beauty was no exaggeration, hit her at a purely visceral level. She had never experienced anything like it before—well, just the once.
His high knife-sharp cheekbones, strong aquiline nose, and angular jaw even dusted with stubble gave his face a patrician cast, though this was offset by the overtly sensual outline of his mobile mouth, twisted at that moment into a faintly cynical smile. The same emotion was reflected in his eyes, his quite simply spectacular eyes; deep set and heavy lidded, and fringed with dense, straight, spiky lashes, they were a stunning dark chocolate brown.
Pinned by those dark eyes, she experienced a ‘rabbit in the headlight’ moment and froze.
‘How are you... Chloe?’ He seemed to roll the word over his tongue as though he were tasting it.
As he’d tasted her... Chloe pushed the thought away but not before her body’s core temperature had raised a few uncomfortable degrees. She lifted a hand to her neck to feel the dull vibration of her heavy pulse, and she fingered the uncut gemstones that felt cold compared to her skin.
From somewhere she manufactured a smile but the effort made her cheek muscles ache while she silently struggled to keep the door locked against forbidden memories. It wasn’t about wanting to forget him, she thought, but more not wanting to remember and be reminded of the things she strongly suspected she might never experience again.
And maybe that was a good thing, she rationalised. Yes, head-banging, uninhibited sex was good—it was pretty excellent—but so was waking up with someone who actually cared for you, or for that matter was physically still there in the morning.
Refusing to acknowledge the sense of loss that still lay like a heavy weight in her chest, she reminded herself that she was looking, or she would be when the time came, for more in a man than his knowledge of the female anatomy... Hell, clumsy with feeling was infinitely preferable to the refined torture of a skilled touch with no emotion behind it.
‘How long has it been?’ he asked coolly.
‘I’m not sure,’ she lied, thinking, Eighteen months, eight days and thirty-one minutes...not that I’m counting.
She stiffened when without warning he bent his head and brushed her mouth lightly with his. His lips were warm, reminding her of when they had been even warmer, when he had tasted of her... The muscles low on her pelvis cramped as she stood as still as a statue, fighting with all her might the shameful urge to lean in and kiss him back.
The gasp she locked in her throat ached as she breathed in the warm male scent of him through flared nostrils.
It wasn’t until he lifted his head that she realised she was holding his sleeve, though she had no memory of grabbing it. Disturbing, but there was no point reading too much into it, she decided as she let it casually fall away, ignoring the tingling sensation in her fingertips.
Nik smiled. The quiver he’d felt run through her body as he’d kissed her reminded him of just how receptive she’d been that night...how giving she’d been. And he’d taken... He countered the irrational slug of guilt with a reminder that she was the one who had taken the initiative that night, she’d made all the running and she hadn’t acted like a woman who would take no for an answer.
His smile, the glimmer of dark danger glittering deep in his eyes, elicited an involuntary spasm of excitement in her belly that made Chloe feel ashamed.
‘You look well.’ She looked incredible, though up close there was less of the outdoorsy golden glow he remembered. Her skin was creamy, the faint touch of colour in her cheeks highlighting the smooth contours, the freckles along her cheekbones paler too, but she was, if anything, even more delicious than he remembered.
‘Thank you, and how are you—sorry, Nik, wasn’t it?’
The composed words aimed somewhere close to his left ear were prim, but the message shining in her deep cobalt-blue eyes as they glittered up at him was neither prim nor polite.
They said quite clearly, Go to hell!
Her reaction threw him off his stride, in the same way he realised he’d have been thrown if he’d reread a favourite book and found a main character had suddenly been given a different personality.
Except the woman in his dreams had never had a personality beyond being warm, giving, passionate and available when he had needed her, and he had not been curious about what lay beyond those qualities.
Realising that there was a beyond came with a sense of shock as Nik struggled to consider her negative reaction to him dispassionately, but got sidetracked by his own reaction to her.
The problem being there was very little room left for dispassion after the explosive blast of primal desire that obliterated everything else when he looked at her. It was like walking...no, running full pelt into a ten-foot wall of lust.
The time it took his stupefied brain to push past this fresh blast of raw hunger was only moments but it felt longer, and the mere fact that he had to make the effort deepened the frown lines in Nik’s broad forehead.
In his previous life, he had cultivated dispassion until it required no effort, and it was second nature. He’d seen men and women in his old line of work who hadn’t managed to do that, and the personal toll it had taken on them had not been good to see. You needed to be able to keep an emotional distance.
He had witnessed acts of bravery and self-sacrifice that were humbling, but for every one of those inspiring acts there were a hundred acts and images of suffering and inhumanity. You carried those nightmare images around with you and they ate you from the inside.
The sheer absurdity of comparing a war zone to a dinner party where people were toting glasses of wine instead of automatic weapons almost dredged up a smile. Almost.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I’M—’
‘With Lucy Cavendish...’ Chloe paused, head tilted in challenge, to let the reminder sink in and had the satisfaction of seeing an expression of shock chase across his handsome face.
‘Lucy...hell, I forgot about her!’ A quick glance located the model, who was deep in conversation with another guest. Nik dragged a hand across his hair-roughened jaw in annoyance; he must have left her standing there looking like... He gritted out a curse. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of this.’
The wrathful, choking gasp of sheer disbelief that escaped Chloe’s lips drew his attention back to her face.
If there had been even the faintest suggestion of guilt in his reaction, she thought it would have gone some way to redeeming him...actually, no, it wouldn’t!
Wanting to make excuses for him made her even angrier—as if there could be any excuse for a man who arrived with one woman and then came on to another with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer!
It made her wonder whose bed he had walked straight into after being in hers.
There had been a time when the thought would have hurt...now it simply made her stomach quiver queasily.
‘It’s so inconsiderate of a woman to expect you to remember that you came with her.’ She produced a saccharine-sweet sympathetic smile, waiting until he frowned slightly in response to her comment before slinging out sarcastically, ‘I suppose she even expects you to be there when she wakes up in the morning.’
The words hung there, every syllable oozing with exactly the sort of subtext Chloe had wanted to avoid. She sounded just like what she hated most: a victim.
Someone to pity.
Her narrow-eyed glare dared him to show it, but, although her comment had surprised a flicker of reaction, it was something else she saw move at the backs of his eyes. Fine, she could deal with something else, actually anything else, but pity.
‘You were asleep.’ This was the reason he avoided one-night stands; there was the potential for the stranger you went to bed with assuming that one night of sex connected you in some deep and meaningful way.
‘I’m not talking about me.’ She lifted her feathery brows in an attitude of mild surprise that he should think otherwise, then, willing herself not to blush, she pronounced bluntly, ‘We had sex but we were not in a relationship. Although it would have been useful if you had woken me as I had somewhere I needed to be.’ She wrinkled her brow, giving the impression she was trying to recall the sequence of events—events that couldn’t have been more indelibly imprinted on her had someone branded them into her soul. ‘I’m pretty sure I was late.’ In her head she clutched the invisible award to her chest as a voice pronounced, And the award for most convincing liar goes to... Chloe Summerville!
The dream had once more become a nightmare before he’d ever reached the moment where he’d made the choice to leave her sleeping, not that waking her had ever really been an option. Good manners versus getting to his dying father’s bedside after receiving the call about his stroke had been a no brainer.
And yes, he’d been relieved not to have to speak to her again.
Relieved to avoid the potential morning-after awkwardness and recriminations. It hadn’t been his first one-night stand, but those other encounters had all been with fellow journalists, and there had been some mutual respect on a professional level between him and the smart, independent women who had shared his bunk. There had been no need to explain the desire he had felt to escape the sights and sounds of war for a few hours and let passion drown it all out. The connections had been brief, pleasurable, but nothing deeper remained.
He wouldn’t have cared if any of them had forgotten his name, or implied that the memory they’d walked away with after sleeping with him was that they’d had somewhere else to be but had overslept! His ego took a few startled seconds to recover from the blow while recognising the irrationality of his reaction. Chloe Summerville’s cool attitude was exactly what he looked for in women he gravitated towards. Women who had a male approach to sex; women who did not expect or even welcome sentiment in their liaisons, but enjoyed sex in an uncluttered and simple way.
‘Sorry, I had someplace I needed to be too...but unlike you I wasn’t too late.’
His father’s prognosis had been grim. The doctors had been all for calling time and letting nature take its inevitable and cruel course, but his mother had insisted they try a third lot of clot-busting drugs. When Nik had walked into the room, his father had been sitting up with nothing but a slight hesitation in his speech to show he’d even had a stroke and people had been talking about miracles.
‘Well, it’s...nice to see you again, lovely to catch up...’ Chloe said absently, adopting the tone you used when you bumped into someone whose name you kept forgetting. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, tonight is about work and I need to circulate.’ Giving her best impression of a woman with her priorities firmly sorted, she flashed him a generic smile and turned back towards where Spiros stood talking to a small group of guests.
Even if he’d taken everything else out of the equation the dismissal would have awoken his interest, if only for the fact that it was new territory for Nik. Women did not usually walk away from him. His curiosity overcame his irritation... So, all right, it was something a lot stronger than irritation, but he didn’t need to waste energy trying to identify it as it morphed seamlessly into the much easier to deal with lust and his eyes became riveted on her long, sinuous curves and the gentle sway of her hips.
If sleeping with her again was the way to finally lay his nightmares to rest, great. If not, the trying was going to be fun. Not trying at all had stopped being a possibility the second he’d set eyes on her.
The frustration raging through his veins made it hard for him to formulate a plan of action, as there had been no plan required in his dreams. On a conservative estimate he’d been making love to Chloe every other night for the past year...except this wasn’t a dream, it—she—was the real deal! And Chloe Summerville was more in every way than the woman he remembered. A halfwit could have worked that out in thirty seconds.
And Nik was accounted to be quite intelligent.
She had been pulled into a group several feet away from where he stood alone, and he watched like a hawk as she lowered her lashes over a smile in response to something Spiros had said. In profile he could see the little quiver of the fine muscles in her throat and along the delicate line of her jaw, and he wondered why he found it so fascinating.
Was he finally losing his mind?
* * *
Chloe’s legs were still shaking but, as there was no longer any imminent possibility they would give out beneath her, she let go of the image of herself lying on the floor and people staring down at her. Sad, they’d say, she used to be able to stand on her own two feet... She suddenly realised a moment too late to avoid awkwardness that the extended silence was one she was meant to fill. Chloe gave an apologetic smile.
‘Sorry. I wasn’t following; I was just trying to remember if I put an aspirin in my bag.’ She delved into the limited depths of her bag, her hair falling in a concealing curtain around her face.
Still she couldn’t quite escape the conversation replaying in her head... When he had asked her how long it had been since they’d met, she’d had a nasty shock. Up to that point she hadn’t known that she knew the answer even to the day and hour, but she clearly did... God, but it was terminally depressing.
What, she asked herself, had she ever seen in him?
Beyond of course the face, the body, the high-voltage charge of raw, scalp-tingling sensuality he had oozed... Beyond that, nothing at all!
Other than the dark brooding aura tinged with danger and a touch of vulnerability.
Well, he wasn’t vulnerable now and she was no longer the romantic little fool she had been, but, considering her reaction to Nik just now, it was lucky that she had decided celibacy was the way to go... Not for ever—just short term. Who knew what the future held?
But one of the advantages of celibacy was that she could stand here now and look at this incredibly...really incredibly sexy man, and remember, in a way that sort of felt as if it had happened to someone else, how it had felt to have his warm, no, hot flesh slide over hers and it wasn’t a problem.
God, you are such a liar, Chloe Summerville.
In fact, if she had truly believed she was cut out for celibacy long term, it would have simplified life in general, she concluded, studiedly ignoring the scornful voice in her head.
‘You have a headache?’ a woman whose name Chloe couldn’t recall, despite being normally good about that sort of thing, asked.
‘It’s not that bad.’
Then Nik touched her arm. She knew it was him without even looking at his long fingers brown against her skin, and suddenly it was extremely bad. The thump, thump in her temples was keeping time with her heartbeat as Chloe felt a primitive thrill run along her nerve endings. Deeply ashamed, she waited for the fluttering inside her to subside and, under cover of looking in her bag again, calmed her breathing.
‘Lost something?’ he asked.
‘Just an aspirin; I’m getting a headache.’ And I’m looking at it. But she wasn’t. She looked everywhere but at the tall dynamic figure towering over her, which was not something that happened often when you were five feet ten.
Eyes she had control over, but not her thoughts that drifted back to the moment she had first seen him, as if she were stuck in some sort of mind-destroying time loop. The last thing she had anticipated when they had crowded into the almost empty bar was that she would leave with a total stranger. She’d never been a person who was led by her hormones and, while she’d had any number of male friends, she’d not had a lover.
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