The Mills & Boon Ultimate Christmas Collection. Kate HardyЧитать онлайн книгу.
Hector. ‘Mr Metraxis asks that you be ready for nine,’ he told her quietly.
Pixie breakfasted like a king. She loved her food and had always had a healthy appetite. Staying in Apollo’s palatial apartment was even better, she imagined, than staying in an exclusive hotel. After a shower, she dried her hair and took special care with her make-up before getting dressed.
She walked uncertainly into the huge main reception room and Apollo stared.
‘Turn round,’ he told her thickly, turning his fingers to emphasise the order.
Apollo was rapt. She was so incredibly dainty and feminine in that blue dress with the high heels accentuating her delicate ankles that he wanted to lift her off her feet and spin her round, and it was a weird prompting that bewildered him. She had the figure a model would kill for without the height.
‘I like the dress,’ he said, which wasn’t surprising since he had personally selected it.
‘It’s elegant but I’m not used to wearing skirts or heels,’ she complained. ‘I’m more of a tomboy than a fashion queen.’
He took her to see a private gynaecologist. She was questioned, examined and scanned and blood tests were taken. The results would be in by the following morning. As she emerged she saw Apollo standing talking urgently into his phone. ‘Did you have any idea? Well, no, I didn’t think it through either…it’s not funny, Vito. It was gross.’
Apollo finished the call and strode towards her with all the eagerness of a male who could not get out of the plush surgery fast enough. ‘Ready to go?’
Pixie was trying not to laugh because he had honestly sounded so shocked by what being tested had entailed and she thought it served him right after the process she had undergone without complaint. Evidently he did listen occasionally to a voice other than his own and he was playing fair at least.
‘Where to now?’ she prompted.
‘My lawyers, after which you go shopping.’
‘Oh? For what?’
‘For a wedding dress obviously and all the rest of it. I’m putting you in the charge of a professional buyer and fashion stylist. She knows what you need as per my instructions. All you have to do is act like a mannequin.’
‘But you haven’t got the test results back yet.’
‘Think positive…’ Apollo bent down, his stubbled jaw line grazing her cheek a tiny bit, and every nerve in her body tightened like a string pulled taut. ‘And I saw you smiling when you heard me talking to Vito,’ he murmured huskily. ‘No, I didn’t enjoy being handed a porn mag but ne…yes, I had a fantasy and it was about you.’
As Apollo pressed her back into the limo, Pixie twisted her head back to gape at him. ‘Me?’ she repeated in disbelief.
Green eyes roamed over her burning face with dark satisfaction. ‘You, koukla mou.’
Luminous eyes taking on a faint bluish cast from the dress she wore, Pixie stared at him in astonishment. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘Why would I be kidding? If I couldn’t be attracted to you, how could we do this?’
It was a fair point but the idea that Apollo, all rippling male-muscle perfection and stunningly beautiful, could consider her attractive still stupefied Pixie. And while she stared, frozen to her seat, Apollo moved, scooping her off the seat and settling her down into his lap at a speed that thoroughly unnerved her. But then his mouth traced very gently over hers and that instinctive kick of fear that generally made her back away from men was soothed by that subtle approach, which seemed ridiculously unthreatening. Of course, it didn’t dawn on her just at that moment that Apollo had an unequalled sensual skill set that allowed him to read women very easily.
The tip of his tongue traced her upper lip and something deep down inside just melted in Pixie. He followed that tactic up with a nibble at her full lower lip and she shivered, her whole body prickling with awareness to an almost painful degree. No man had ever made her feel anything like that before and she found it wildly seductive not to feel afraid. He teased her lips open and darted his tongue in lightly and a ball of erotic heat exploded in her pelvis and one of her hands flew up into his hair, feathering through the luxuriant strands to cup his well-shaped skull. She felt hot all over and curiously energised, almost as if someone had told her she could fly when all her life she had felt grounded and awkward.
His mouth was hard and yet his lips were soft and she was exploring every sensation with her brain and her body. He tasted so good, like water after a drought, like food after a famine. His mouth claimed hers with increasing pressure and her breasts ached inside her bra, liquid heat pushing between her thighs.
He was so warm she wanted to press into his lean, muscular frame and somehow meld with him. He framed her face with his hands and kissed her with steadily escalating passion and the hungry demand she recognised was thrilling rather than scary. She tipped her head back, allowing him all the access he wanted, jerking at each erotic plunge of his tongue and on fire for the next, which was why it was such a shock when without the smallest warning his hands dropped to her waist and he propelled her back into the seat he had snatched her off.
Blinking with disconcertion and sensual intoxication, Pixie looked at him with a frown of incomprehension as to why he had so abruptly stopped.
‘For such a small woman you pack a hell of a punch!’ Apollo growled accusingly, because he had been within an inch of ripping off her panties and bringing her down on his aching body, satisfying the raw need that had come at him out of nowhere. And he didn’t like it, he didn’t like it one bit because he had never been that close to losing control with a woman since he was a teen, and remembering that time when he had been little more than a boy toy for a mature woman’s gratification brought him out in a cold sweat of revulsion.
‘It was only a kiss,’ she framed shakily between tingling lips, even though her body was telling her different and reacting in all sorts of disappointed ways to that sudden severance from his.
‘I was ready to have you right here, right now!’ Apollo grated through clenched white teeth, his jaw line rigid because he was so furious that for a few wildly exciting moments he had forgotten who he was and who she was and that the very last thing he had been thinking of was the bottom line.
And the bottom line was business, he reminded himself grimly, the business of satisfying his father’s will and making the best he could out of being blackmailed into marriage and fatherhood.
‘Here in the car?’ Pixie gasped, looking ridiculously shocked by the concept. ‘Would you have done that?’
And the very slight widening of his gorgeous green eyes fringed by those outrageously lush black lashes of his told her that he would have and indeed had probably had sex in a limo before. That brought her down to earth again with a timely thump. She was a virgin and he was a man whore and of course he had greater expectations and fewer boundaries than the average person. She wondered how often a first kiss had led into full sex for him and a shudder of distaste rippled through her, chasing off the last of the sexual heat he had evoked.
Aware that he had overreacted and exposed a certain sensitivity he had never ever exposed to anyone before, particularly not a woman, Apollo forced himself to shrug a careless shoulder. ‘I suspect that you’re likely to find living with me rather shocking. I like sex and I like a lot of it. Considering our current situation it’s very positive that we light a fire together.’
Pixie shifted almost imperceptibly away from him to widen the gap between them. I like sex and I like a lot of it. It was quite an intimidating announcement for an inexperienced woman to absorb. Pixie’s biggest secret, kept even from Holly, was that she had never actually wanted a man before. She had always been too wary around men to shake off that inhibition by the time she grew up. Usually the minute a man started touching her she wanted him to stop and feared how far he would try to go. But somehow that instinctive recoil, that fear, had been absent with Apollo and that worried her even while she told herself that it was just as well because