AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He walked her up into a huge bedroom with patio doors opening out onto a balcony. The room was decorated in pale aqua colours, providing a fitting frame for the glorious panoramic view of the starry night sky above the dark shadowy ocean below while the white sandy beach glowed even in moonlight.
‘Help me with the hooks,’ she urged him, shifting her slight shoulders.
Ari undid the dress and she shifted her arms and let it drop to the rug beneath her. Hearing the catch in his breath, she smiled and turned round, refusing to allow herself to be self-conscious in a lingerie set she had chosen to wear.
Ari took a step back to fully appreciate the short peacock-blue corset cupping her plump breasts, the silk panties lovingly moulding the rounded swell of her derrière and the suspenders adorning her slender thighs.
‘You were worth waiting for...the perfect wedding present to unwrap,’ Ari husked. ‘No sultan could greet his harem favourite with greater appreciation than I at this moment,glykia mou.’
Cleo sent him a speaking glance, amused and not at all surprised at the way he was throwing her crack back in her teeth like a challenge. He cast off his jacket, jerked loose his cravat and began unbuttoning his dress shirt, a sliver of bronzed muscular torso catching her eye as he shifted his lean hips to kick off his shoes. His exotic eyes connected with hers and he grinned. ‘I love the way you watch me.’
Cleo went red as fire. ‘I can hardly avoid watching you when you’re right in front of me...’
‘You watch me the way I watch you. With desire,’ Ari contradicted, dropping down to his knees in front of her. ‘I like it.’
He made that confession as he gently tugged her panties down her slender legs and her breath caught in her throat as she stood there, willing herself not to go into embarrassed retreat. There was nothing to hide, she reminded herself irritably, when he was already familiar with her body and all its flaws. He had none of her innate inhibitions.
‘I’d take off your shoes, but that would make you too short for me to appreciate like this,’ Ari muttered intently.
‘It’s all right,’ she said in a voice that sounded as though her vocal cords were being squeezed, even though her fancy bridal shoes were torturing her toes, because when Ari smiled up at her, she was as muchhisas if he had branded her. She was discovering that she really liked being needed and wanted. His hunger for her made her feel empowered,necessary.
He ran his hands lightly up and down her thighs, gently spreading them, and she quivered. His lips grazed her heated core and she jerked, suddenly the party most wanting, most needing, and as he ran his tongue through that honeyed heat, she moaned his name. A jolt of feverish pleasure gripped her as he flicked her sensitive bud. Her hips bucked as he continued his sensual assault. Her legs trembled as the flaming heat at the juncture of her thighs roared higher. Her hands lifted in a silent seeking gesture of unbearable arousal and then her body detonated in an explosion of wild, seething delight.
Catching her up in his arms while she was still quivering, Ari spread her on the bed, flipping off the shoes and the stockings, unzipping the corset and then bending over her to capture a straining bullet-hard nipple in his mouth. She gasped out loud, liquid and boneless. He paused only to strip off what remained of his clothes, leaving them lying where they fell with uncharacteristic untidiness.
He came down to her hungry and urgent, tipping her legs over his shoulders, rising above her to penetrate her with one fluid stroke. She cried out in response to that sudden fullness, hips writhing as heavenly longed-for sensation shimmied through her pelvis, bringing a wash of heated excitement in its wake. He tilted her back even further, thrusting deep and sending her pleasure to an unholy height. Her body surged with the sheer thrill of it, and in the passionate minutes that followed, she finally plunged over the edge into another climax.
‘I’m never going to move again,’ she mumbled weakly as he hauled her with him under the sheet.
Ari leant over her and dropped a careless kiss on her cheekbone, tawny eyes smouldering over her with immense masculine satisfaction. ‘You’re my personal kryptonite.’
‘Not feeling too much like a superhero right now...but my goodness, I’m starving,’ she confided.
Stark naked, Ari sprang out of bed within seconds of that announcement. ‘I’ll go and fill a tray.’
‘You’re in a helpful mood,’ she remarked in surprise.
‘Maybe I don’t want you flagging in energy this early in the evening,’ Ari contended.
Sitting up, Cleo swallowed a yawn. ‘Weddings are incredibly exhausting,’ she warned him.
‘I’m as hungry for you as you are for food,’ Ari explained almost apologetically.
He knew she was tired. She was pale and her eyes were shadowed. But he had told her the truth. He had a hunger for her that seemed to have no limits and it had made him a little uneasy before he married her. Now, however, that he had acquired Cleo on a permanent basis, that amazing hunger for her no longer bothered him in the same way. There was nothing dangerous or worrying about lusting after his wife. In fact, he now thought it was healthy.
That comment of hers about harems had hit him harder than she could even appreciate. His sex lifehadbeen highly organised, he acknowledged grimly. He had been careful not to spend too much time with any one woman, not to favour one over another, and for years that cool, logical approach had paid dividends by keeping his life smooth and free of strife. Of course, there was always the occasional hiccup in even the smoothest, slickest schedule, he reflected wryly, recalling Galina, the gorgeous but slightly unhinged Russian supermodel, who had revealed stalking tendencies after only one dinner date.
He had backed off fast, blocked the woman’s repeated phone calls and ignored her appearances in his favourite haunts. To the best of his ability, he had protected himself from that kind of nuisance. And now he was married, and he felt remarkably content with the bargain he had struck with Cleo, but possibly rather more aware now that his niece, Lucy, would not be the only party to benefit from their official status as a couple. A wife who attracted him as much as Cleo did was a find, a huge and wonderfulfind...
Thinking that he was now a married man still shook him. In a matter of weeks his life had changed course to an extraordinary degree. Lucy had come along, of course, a totally unexpected but decidedly cute development in his world, but before her had comeCleo. Ari struggled to choose food and concentrate at the same time as he thought about Cleo.
Two weeks later, the afternoon before their return to London, Cleo stretched in the warmth of the shade. She was reclining on a shaded and padded lounger in more comfort than she had ever known, and she had a wonderful view of the beach in front of her.
After the first couple of days of their honeymoon on Spinos, Cleo and Ari had reached an agreement that covered their radically different approaches to what constituted a break. Ari always had to bedoingsomething, while Cleo liked to sunbathe with a good thriller or go for a not-too-strenuous stroll. It had had to work after Ari had dragged her huffing and puffing in the heat to see the remains of the Greek shrine at the top of the island’s only hill. She had been on the brink of expiring on the peak of that hill, while Ari had barely broken a sweat. Now, one day they went out and didphysical stuff—as she termed it—and the next she got to be lazier, aside of the daily swimming lessons he insisted on, and that combination worked. She had finally learned how to swim and she was hugely proud of herself for conquering her former fear of deep water.
Today, Ari was out diving in the bay.
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ she had said to him anxiously.
