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“It was very much my pleasure.” He discarded the condom into the wastebasket and fell back onto the bed beside her, too sated to move more than that.
“I should leave.” She sat up and her hair fell forward to hide most of her profile.
He studied her curved spine and couldn’t resist setting his thumb and middle fingertip against the dimples at the top of her backside.
“You don’t have to,” he heard himself say. “Unless you need to get back to your party?”
“Can you imagine?” She kept the bedspread secured to her breasts, but braced a hand behind herself so she twisted to face him. “What do I look like right now? A ghoul from the crypt? A drunken clown?”
He likely wore more of her lipstick than she did. Her eyes were smudged and smoky and heavy lidded.
“You’re sexy as hell.” It was only the truth, but saying it caused a strange tremor in his chest. “I’m sure you know that.”
“It’s still nice to hear it. When it’s sincere.” Her pensive gaze lifted to the closed drapes.
He was equally disturbed. This had been the best sex of his life, which made it a purgatory of sorts. It was a memory that could imprison him for eternity.
He dismissed that melodramatic thought, attributing the heightened eroticism to their being strangers, and reminded himself she had only slept with him to irritate her parents.
Which didn’t bother him, but didn’t not bother him.
“I’ll stay long enough for a shower, if you don’t mind.” Whatever blue mood had started to take hold in her was discarded with a careless smile. She threw off the bedspread and rose to walk into the bathroom.
He heard the toilet and the tap and imagined she was using the complementary makeup remover pads. When the shower started, he quit pretending he wasn’t going to join her.
“Oh, hello,” she said when he opened the glass door and joined her inside the marble-tiled enclosure. It was more than big enough for both of them with nozzles and sprays from all directions.
“Hello to you. Blue eyes.” He cupped her face, looking into irises that were now the color of a clear sky over a mountain lake.
She reacted to his touch with a grasp of his wrists and a dazzling sparkle inside those pretty eyes. Her lips parted in invitation.
“I’m Rafael,” he told her.
“Alexandra.” The minx guided one of his hands down to shake hers. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Isn’t it?”
It really was. For the next seventy-two hours, they barely left each other’s sight. They shared the bed and the robes, the shower and meals and bottles of wine.
The concierge delivered more condoms and a handful of other necessities, but housekeeping was turned away and all calls ignored. Occasionally, Alexandra shrugged on one of his shirts, but more often than not, they were naked on the wrecked bed, dozing, talking about innocuous topics—movies and travel and whether horoscopes had any basis in reality, but mostly, they made love.
He learned that her feet were ticklish and she was not only the stepdaughter of a Very Rich Man, she was rich in her own right. Her father’s family had amassed a fortune in publishing over several generations. Her mother’s family were also Old Money with ties to industrial age railway tycoons.
“My father died when I was young. I don’t remember him,” she said with a philosophical shrug. “Humbolt pounced on Mother like a hyena on a wounded wildebeest and took control of her, her fortune, and my trust. That money he was being lauded for donating? Mine. What a paragon.” Her lip curled in contempt.
“But he doesn’t control you.”
“Not for lack of trying, believe me.” She quit tracing the pattern in the headboard and rolled onto her stomach so the sheet twisted around her. “What about you? What will I learn when I stalk you online after this?”
“I was born in Romania. My mother brought me to Greece to find my father who was Greek. We never found him. She passed away when I was five. I went into foster care, bounced through some group homes, then landed with a Greek couple who chose to adopt me. I grew up on the outskirts of Athens.”
“Were they nice? Your adoptive parents?” She was giving him doe eyes, which made him uncomfortable.
“Yes.” They’d tried to be, not that he’d known what to do with it. He’d had many a hard knock by then. His mother had barely scraped by, then died overnight. He’d been teased at school and scrapped his way through it. His adoptive parents had been withdrawn for their own reasons so Rafael had never fully seen himself as their son.
“My father died when I was seventeen. Heart attack.” Rafael couldn’t help the bitterness that invaded his voice and quickly averted his thoughts from that day. “I took over the family business, but there were vultures who wanted it for themselves. They tried to use the fact I was adopted against me, saying I wasn’t legitimately my father’s son, that I wasn’t Greek, or not Greek enough. So I keep that information in my bio online, next to my brief arrest for breaking and entering.”
“Oh.” Her brows went up. “You are colorful.”
