Mistress: Taming the Playboy. Sharon Kendrick

the lessons were expensive …’ Her voice tailed away as she realised he was looking at her in disbelief.

      ‘Expensive?’ he repeated incredulously.

      She thought he sounded as if he were trying out a new and unknown word. But how could he understand what it was like to have to make every penny count when he had spent a life with an abundance of wealth?

      ‘He has football coaching at the weekends instead,’ she justified. ‘And I couldn’t afford everything.’

      ‘So here we have my son, the pauper,’ he said bitterly. ‘A Karantinos heir living on the breadline!’

      Laura swallowed, suddenly realising how exhausted he looked—as if he hadn’t had a wink of sleep all night. His black eyes were hooded and tired, and the dark shadow at his jaw suggested that he might not yet have shaved. The expensively dressed Greek billionaire was a world away from this barefoot and elemental-looking man in faded jeans and T-shirt who stood in front of her.

      It seemed all too disturbingly intimate and familiar—a glimpse of the old Constantine—and Laura shrank back, suddenly and dangerously aware of his proximity and the fact that while he was fully dressed she was wearing very little. Nothing but a very short wrap over an equally short nightdress that barely came to the middle of her bare thigh. And from the sudden tightening of his features the realisation had begun to dawn on him at precisely the same moment.

      Without another word, Laura turned and walked out of the room and back along the corridor to her own—but to her horror and shameful excitement, she realised that Constantine was right behind her.

      ‘No,’ she whispered ineffectively, as he shut the door behind him and she felt his warm breath on her neck.

      ‘Oh, yes,’ he said grimly, turning her round as if she were a mannequin in a store window. ‘You should not walk around the house half-naked if you don’t want this particular outcome—nor make big eyes at me and allow your body to tremble with such obvious hunger whenever you come near me.’

      Afterwards, she’d try to tell herself that she had done everything to resist him—but that would be a complete lie. She did nothing. Nothing but stare up at him, her parched lips parting with unashamed yearning, a tiny little whimper of desire escaping from them as he moved closer still. And then it was too late. His kiss was like dynamite, his touch the fire which made it combust—and Laura went up in flames.

      ‘ Oh,’ she moaned, clawing at his shoulders as he caught her by the waist and brought her up hard against the aroused cradle of his desire, so that she could feel the shockingly unfamiliar hard ridge of him pressing up against her through his jeans.

      With an uncharacteristic disregard for foreplay, he slid up her nightdress and this time found her bare and ready for him, giving a little groan of delight as he tangled his fingers in her hair and then greedily delved inside her honeyed moistness as she gasped out her fevered response. He closed his eyes helplessly as she swayed against him, her hips moving with sudden instinct against his fingers.

      Laura clung to him, her love-starved body hungry for his kiss and for everything else she knew he could give her. His fingers were moving purposefully between her legs now, and he was driving his mouth down on hers in a kiss which quite literally took her breath away—a kiss she never wanted to end.

      And then she felt a change taking place in her body; the rhythm of his fingers was changing pace—quickening against her blossoming heat. She felt the wild beat of her heart—the momentary lull before she tumbled over—her body spasming helplessly against his hand, his kiss silencing her little gasps of fulfilment as she slumped weakly against him until the last of her orgasm died away.

      ‘Constantine,’ she breathed eventually, her cheeks flushed and her heart beating fast. ‘Oh, Constantine.’

      ‘I want you,’ he whispered fiercely into her ear. He guided her hand to lie over the achingly hard ridge in his jeans. ‘Feel how much I want you.’

      And she wanted him, too. But it was broad daylight in the middle of the morning, and she had responsibilities which were far more urgent that the siren call of her body. ‘N-Not now …’The words stumbled out of her mouth. ‘A-And not here. We can’t. You know we can’t.’

      Through the dark, erotic mists of his desire came her unsteady voice of reason. At first he tried to ignore it—but something at its very heart made Constantine still and pull his lips away from hers, to stare down into the flushed confusion of her face, the tumbled gold of her unbrushed hair.

      His heart was thundering so powerfully he could barely think, let alone speak. ‘You think that it is right to deny me pleasure now that you have taken your own? Is that right?’

      Dumbly, she shook her head.

      Fuelled by a savage wave of frustration, he felt the slow flare of anger begin to burn. ‘You think you can keep tantalising me and that I will be like a tame puppy who will just keep trotting behind you and taking whatever it is that you dish out to me? Letting you turn me down, time and time again—so that I can’t sleep at night for thinking about your pale, curved body? Taking me so far with your sweet, soft promise and then acting outraged? Is that what men usually let you do, Laura?’

      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