He brought his own mug, stood there feet from her, hand in pocket, focus inward. Suddenly he started talking.
“We’ve had too many confrontations to count, but our last one was different. It wasn’t like him. It was a…rant.”
He’d brought it back to her father. To what had driven him to crash his funeral. Guilt? Was he capable of feeling it? Her father had been adamant that Aristedes had no human components.
“You think you pushed him too far,” she whispered. “Caused his death.”
He exhaled, shook his head. “I think he pushed himself too far, in his need never to let me win, or at least to never let me go unpunished for winning.”
“You still feel responsible.” This was her own statement.
He didn’t refute it. “I never understood his enmity. We weren’t rivals. We worked in complementary fields. We should have been allies.”
“That’s what he said…once.”
This was news to him. Disturbing news. The bleakness gripping his face deepened. “But he disapproved of me and my origins too much to accept that he could put his hand in mine.”
Her gaze, her voice, sharpened. “My father wasn’t a snob.”
He shrugged, unaffected by her sudden resentment. “He wouldn’t have considered it snobbery. Certain things are too deeply engraved in the Greek persona. But you wouldn’t know that. You were born here.”
“That might mean I’m more American than Greek, but my father remained mostly Greek. I knew him.”
“Did you?”
Two simple words. They fell on her with shearing force, stripping away a confidence she could have sworn her life on. And it made her mad.
She sat up to bring him into the searing immediacy of her displeasure. “I wasn’t only his daughter, I was his protégée, then his business associate.”
“Ne.” Suddenly something that felt spiked in danger and molded of darkness and compulsion rolled from his chest. The amusement it transmitted was only vocal, didn’t tinge his expression. Accompanying it was the first glance that was all hers, as if he’d suddenly realized she was there. “And a worthy warrior he added to his ranks. I struggled for a way out of those traps you laid in that last set of so-called negotiations.”
A wave of heat cascaded through her. She’d been confident she’d had him where they’d wanted him. His own legal team, the best of the best, had been stymied. But not him.
“You eventually found it.” She licked her lips, remembering how chagrined she’d felt when he had. How excited. How she’d worked her butt off to place more roadblocks in his way.
The first thing resembling a smile attempted to melt the cruelty of his masterfully sculpted lips. “Not that you just let me walk out of your maze of hurdles.”
She almost shuddered as the new heat in his eyes enveloped her, bringing with it the intoxication she’d experienced whenever he’d lobbed her best shots back at her, the exhilaration of dueling with him, even if through long-distance legal swashbuckling. She’d won against him almost as much as she’d lost. Until this last time, when she’d felt he’d finally figured her out, would never lose against her again….
He suddenly put down his mug, straightened to stroll toward her with those languid, goose-bump-raising, purpose-laden strides of his. He didn’t stop until his legs almost touched her knees.
The look he gave her now almost made her collapse back on the couch. Hot with appreciation, with challenge. All for her.
“You’re good. The best who ever tried to trip and shackle me. And you’ve cost me big. But I’ll always win in the end. I have a decade on you in age, and about a century’s worth of experience and wiles. Unlike you, I learned the law for one purpose—to find out how to play dirty and come out the other side clean.”
She coughed a ridiculing huff. “And you don’t understand my father’s enmity.”
“So I understood. Doesn’t mean I accepted it. He should have used my abilities. I complemented him.”
“His vision in business clashed with yours diametrically.”
“And therefore mine is wrong and evil?”
“You’re bent on success, no matter the price.”
“That is what business is all about.”
“You take ‘business is business’ to a new realm. That wasn’t his way.”
“No.”
After that monosyllable of resignation and finality, a long silence unfurled.
When it got too heavy, too suffocating, she decided to tackle another bleakness, air another heartache.
“I heard about your brother,” she whispered.
His youngest brother had died in a car accident five days ago. She hadn’t thought it possible, or even acceptable, for her, the daughter of his enemy, to offer condolences, let alone attend the funeral.
He sat down beside her. His thigh burned hers through the fabric of their pants. His eyes turned into twin lightning storms.
“Are you going to say you’re sorry he’s gone, too?” he rasped.
She felt the breakers of his pain collide with hers, shook her head. “Beyond a human sorrow for the death of someone so young, there was no personal connection for me to mourn. Not like the one you evidently had—and maybe never realized you had—with my father. I can only give you the same honesty you gave me when you didn’t pretend to be sorry for my loss. I can only tell you the one thing I do feel. Sorry for yours.”
His arm suddenly clamped around her waist.
Her lungs emptied on a soundless cry of surprise as she slammed against his steel-fleshed body. He gave her a compulsive squeeze and her flesh turned to a pliant medium that melted into his hard angles from breast to hip.
He held her eyes for a tempestuous moment, declaring his intent, demanding her surrender. Then his lips crashed over hers.
He swallowed her cry, poured a growl of hunger inside her, his lips possessing hers, moist, branding, his tongue thrusting deep, over and over, singeing her with pleasure, breaching her with need, draining her of reason.
And it was like a floodgate exploded. She went under in his taste and ferocity and domination. His hands joined in her torment, gliding all over her, never pausing long enough to appease, until she writhed against him, whimpered, begged, not knowing what she was begging for, not knowing what to offer but her surrender.
Pressure built, behind her eyes, in her chest, loins. Her hands convulsed on his arms until he relented, took it to the next level. He freed her blouse from her pants, his hands dipping beneath, feeling like lava against her inflamed skin, undoing her bra, releasing her swollen breasts and a measure of the pressure suddenly about to make her explode.