What The Greek's Wife Needs - Dani Collins Page 0,45

thrusts. She scraped her hands from his hair to his neck to his shoulders, down to his lower back and up again, trying to feel all of him at once.

His guttural noise agreed with her. He held himself on one elbow, his hand hooked beneath her shoulder so he could thrust with more power. He watched her with glittering eyes as she gloried in his lovemaking.

She welcomed each gentle slam of his hips, moaning with encouragement when he came back with more strength. She had forgotten this. Or hadn’t let herself remember how utterly overwhelming their lovemaking was. Nothing existed but the sharp lines of his face, the pierce of pleasure that went through her with each stroke of his body into hers. Intense yearning held her still for each return, so the reverberations of pleasure spun out to sting her fingertips and toes.

They were both making animalistic noises, holding back nothing. Hiding nothing. That was the part that made their lovemaking so tremendous and devastating at once. They were watching the other, unable to hide their need, their craving, their rejoicing.

That honesty was too much. She knew her surrender would be written large, too. She couldn’t bear it, yet she couldn’t resist it. The tension between those imperatives couldn’t be sustained.

Her nails dug into his shoulders. His fingertips bit into her hip. She clenched her teeth, trying to hold back, trying to maintain her slippery grip on this plateau of incredible connection. His face contorted with his struggle. He quickened his pace.

“Come,” he commanded in a jagged voice. “Come with me. Do it now.”

She gave in to the abyss. Pleasure detonated within her, sending her spinning in all directions while he slid his arms under her and bucked heavily into her. His head went back and his neck strained as he shouted his release.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HOW HAD HE left that? That was Leon’s first rational thought when he discarded the condom and flopped back onto the bed beside Tanja, completely spent.

His next thought was, It’s still too much. He was so raw his chest felt torn open.

Yet, as the breeze danced across their cooling bodies, he couldn’t make himself do anything but drag her close and tuck her head under his chin. The boneless lassitude in her heavy limbs and the satiated sigh that warmed his collarbone eased something in him.

“Did we wake Illi?” she asked with tremulous humor.

“She’d let us know if she was awake.” The kid wasn’t afraid to use the full capacity of her lungs if she decided to lodge a complaint. When he’d taken her out of the swing this morning, she’d publicly denounced him for human rights violations.

“That was really good.” Tanja kissed his throat, skimming a light touch from his shoulder to his neck, but he felt the shaking that lingered in her. “Thank you.”

That tiny betrayal of how deeply she’d been affected shook things loose inside him.

He wanted to pry at least a mental space between them since he couldn’t make himself do it physically, but he had to say, “Thank you,” because this had been better than good. It had been incredible.

He wished he could blame his powerful release on breaking his celibacy, but he knew it was more than that. He didn’t understand how one woman could strip him down to such an elemental place. Tanja wasn’t particularly unique. He’d met many women who were easy on the eye, smart and funny, tolerant yet assertive. Ones who liked sex as much as he did. Before he’d married, he’d made love with those other women and always enjoyed it, but he had never felt this same deconstruction of his inner self after the fact.

He’d like to think it was only happening because he had changed from the man he’d been, but if anything, he was more guarded, not less. And Tanja had affected him this way before he’d lost his father and left her. He remembered this same postcoital sensation of exposure that warned his defenses were down.

Was this why he’d left her and not looked back?

It was a disturbing thought. He didn’t want to see himself as a child who ran away from something because it was uncomfortable, but that’s exactly the coping strategy he’d employed for his early years. It had been disguised as school exams and regatta trials and whatever pursuits he could conjure as an excuse. It had been an avoidance tactic to escape his troubled home life and the toll it took upon him, plain and simple.

Since