MELANIE MILBURNE – Mistress: Taming the Playboy: Constantine's Defiant Mistress / Androletti's Mistress / Valenti's One-Month Mistress (страница 18)

She was too busy catching her breath to rise to the taunt.

‘Have you become a tease, Laura?’ he persisted.

Her lips were trembling, ‘No. No.’

‘Just a woman who promises so much, who lets a man touch her so intimately and then freezes up? If that isn’t your definition of a tease, then I’d like to know what is.’

Frustratedly, she shook her head—knowing that he spoke nothing but the truth. She was acting like a naïve little virgin around him, when they both knew she was anything but. The kind of woman who would let a man only go so far … Was that because she thought that her continued resistance to full-on sex might make him respect her? When just one look at the contemptuous mask of his features proved that respect was the very last thing he was feeling?

And what of her own desires? Hadn’t she been living like a nun for the past eight years? Though it had not felt like denial because no one had moved her to passion. But Constantine had. Constantine still did. It was all there for the taking if only she could accept that it would just be no-strings sex.

‘I’m not saying I don’t want you—how could I when I’ve just proved the very opposite?’ she whispered. ‘Just not now and not here—when Alex might come back from the pool and start looking for me.’

His unyielding expression did not alter. ‘So, when?’

Laura could have wept. How matter-of-fact he sounded. It had taken a lot for her to say that, and yet it was as if the significance of her declaration was irrelevant and all he wanted was to pin her down to a time and a place. Her breath came out in a shuddering sigh, but she knew that she couldn’t back out of it now, even if she wanted to.

‘Come to me tonight,’ she whispered. ‘Late. When the house is quiet and when I know for sure that Alex is asleep.’

He felt the urgent leap of anticipation at his groin and he stared deep into the storm clouds of her eyes. Taking her slender waist between his hands, he bent his head to graze his lips over hers, feeling her tremble as he did so. Had she learnt somewhere along the way that a woman’s most effective weapon was resistance? Was that why she had applied it so effectively, making him desire her with a power which set his blood on fire for her?

And yet with Laura it did not feel like a game she was playing with him in an attempt to ensnare him. This felt real—as if she was fighting herself as well as fighting him.

‘I shall spend the whole day thinking about it, agape mou,’ he murmured. ‘Imagining you naked in my arms. Pinned beneath my body as I drive into you over and over again. Yes, I will come to you tonight.’ He smiled as he brushed an indolent finger over her trembling lips. ‘Now, hurry up and get dressed before I change my mind about waiting.’

With a mounting feeling of disbelief, Laura watched as he left the room, hugging her flimsy little wrap closer to her still flushed and trembling body.

She felt calmer after she’d showered and dressed and pulled on the floral pinafore Demetra had given her to wear. Not the most flattering garment in the world—but that wasn’t supposed to be its function, was it?

She stared at her rather drab image in the mirror. It was stupid to feel ashamed of waitressing when it was a job she had done with pride and efficiency during many periods of her adult life. But this felt different, and maybe that was because it was. She was going to have to wait on the father of her child and pretend that he meant nothing to her.

Shutting the door quietly behind her, Laura went outside to find Alex splashing around with Stavros in the shallow end of an enormous swimming pool.

‘Mum!’ he yelled. ‘Look! Stavros is teaching me breaststroke!’

Laura smiled as the seal-dark wet head of the student emerged from the water. ‘Thank you, Stavros.’

The student grinned as he gestured for Alex to come forward. ‘I like to teach, and he shows promise. Young children learn quickly. Come, Alex, show your mama what you can do.’

Alex doggy-paddled over to the edge of the pool and stared up at her, and Laura’s heart turned over as she saw the look of pure joy on his little face. ‘Don’t get tired, will you, darling?’ she said.

‘Mum!’

‘Did you have breakfast?’

‘Yes, I had it with Constantine.’ Alex grinned. ‘We had yoghurt—with honey! And Constantine and me went and picked oranges from the tree and then we squeezed them!’

She gazed down at him, thinking how easily her son had slotted into life here—already. And how easily he seemed to be slotting into a relationship with Constantine, too. Why, he must have felt as if he had landed in heaven with all the space and beauty which surrounded him

The dark flicker of fear invaded her heart once more. Fear that Alex might just fall in love with Greece and the powerful man who had fathered him—and might not want to return with her to their grey and penny-pinching life back in England …

‘Lovely, darling,’ she managed to say. ‘Well, I’m supposed to be working, so I’d better go and see what Demetra wants me to do.’

Laura made her way to the kitchen to find Demetra, who seemed to have assumed the role of mother hen. First she insisted that Laura sit outside and eat some bread and honey, and drink some of the thick, strong coffee.

‘You are too thin,’ Demetra commented as she pushed a bowl of bread towards her. ‘A woman needs her strength.’

Tell me about it, thought Laura wryly, as she sliced a peach into gleaming rose-tinged slices. But mental strength was surely just as important as the physical kind—and you couldn’t build that up with bread and honey! But she felt oddly moved by the older woman’s kindness—because it had been so long since someone had fussed over her like this.

And at least working was therapeutic—it was hard to stay troubled when your fingers were busy chopping salads and stuffing vine leaves. Demetra showed her how to make a sweet pastry dish which was soaked in lemon syrup after baking—as well as a pudding studded with nuts and raisins and flavoured with cinnamon and cloves.

Laura leaned back against the range. ‘Where did you learn how to cook like this, Demetra?’

‘Oh, I have cooked all my life,’ answered Demetra simply. ‘First for my husband and then for my living. You see, I was widowed when Stavros was just a baby, and so I came here to work for the Karantinos family. They have been good to me. And Kyrios Constantine is a good man,’ she added fiercely. ‘He used to fish with my husband—and when he died he put Stavros through school and university and made sure the boy wanted for nothing.’

The housekeeper’s words of praise for Constantine preoccupied Laura as she began to lay the table on the terrace, beneath a canopy of leaves. But the last thing she needed was to hear praise lavished on him. She wanted to put him out of her mind—at least until tonight.

‘Do you know, I could stay here all day watching you do that?’ murmured a deep voice from the shadows, and Laura whirled round to find Constantine at the other end of the terrace, his black eyes fixed on her. Clearly fresh from the shower, with tiny droplets of water bejewelling the black hair, he had changed from jeans and T-shirt into dark trousers and a thin silk shirt, and he had shaved, too.

‘How long have you been standing there?’ she accused, her heart beginning to race with a ridiculous excitement.

He began walking towards her, his progress made slow by an exquisitely painful arousal. ‘Long enough to see that delightfully old-fashioned pinafore dress stretched tight over the delectable curve of your bottom,’ he murmured. ‘Making me want to touch it again, quite urgently.’

Laura sent an agonised glance in the direction of the kitchen, even though the rattle of china told her that Demetra was not within earshot. ‘Constantine, don’t. Please. Somebody might hear.’

His black eyes mocked her. ‘Ah, Laura! You see how already we are colluding like lovers—even though we are not yet lovers? For that pleasure I must wait—and I am not a man who is used to waiting.’

‘No, I can believe that,’ she said quietly, holding the tray in front of her as if it were a shield.

He lowered his voice until it was nothing but a silken caress which whispered over her skin. ‘Do you know that I feel as a man in prison must feel, ticking off the seconds and the minutes and the hours?’

Laura swallowed. ‘Constantine—’

‘So that the whole day seems stretched out in front of me like a piece of elastic,’ he continued inexorably. ‘Which is tightening unbearably—tighter and tighter—until the time when it snaps and I can once more feel your lips on mine and your honeyed heat as it welcomes me into your body.’

‘Stop it,’ she whispered as the siren song of desire began a slow pulsing through her veins ‘Please, stop it. Or how will I compose myself in front of the others?’

‘You didn’t think through the potential problems of making such an erotic date with destiny, did you?’ he taunted.

She hadn’t counted on being on such an erotic knife-edge, no. ‘Do you think your father’s going to ask me anything?’

‘If he does, then just answer his questions truthfully,’ he said, his whole mood suddenly sobering. ‘If you think you can manage that.’