The Mills & Boon Ultimate Christmas Collection. Kate HardyЧитать онлайн книгу.
knew that in the same circumstances she would have panicked and ended up saying no.
Only no wasn’t quite an option with a wedding ring on her finger on their wedding night, particularly not with a male programmed to try and get her pregnant as fast as possible. She practised smiling in the mirror as she renewed her make-up and straightened her hair. She breathed in deep and strong as she dressed and tried not to fret at the trailing hems of the pant legs, which she had expected to wear with six-inch heels. The stewardess provided her with deck shoes and she thrust her feet moodily into them to be escorted to the dining saloon.
And there was Apollo awaiting her, resplendent in a tailored white dinner jacket and narrow black trousers that moulded long, powerful thighs, long black hair flaring round his lean, darkly handsome bronzed face. Gorgeous as a movie star and very, very sexy, she told herself bracingly, but complex as an algebraic equation to someone who had never got the hang of algebra.
She looked like a kid in the trailing pantsuit, Apollo reflected with hidden amusement. Why hadn’t it occurred to her to wear something short? Her starlight eyes flickered with nervous tension over him and moved away hurriedly and he wondered why she was on edge because a woman expecting to share his bed had never been on edge with Apollo before. In fact most were enthusiastic, sparkling and downright impatient because he had a reputation for never sending a woman away dissatisfied.
He could see her nipples through the fine fabric because she wasn’t wearing a bra and the tiny pouting shape of her breasts made him unexpectedly so hard that he ached, and he was forced to shift position to ease his discomfort while the wine was poured.
‘How long will we be on the yacht for?’ Pixie asked tautly.
Apollo shrugged, striking green eyes veiled. ‘For as long as it takes us to get bored. I set up Circe to enable me to work wherever I am. We’ll go to Nexos when we leave the yacht.’
‘Nexos?’
‘The Greek island my grandfather bought for the Metraxis family,’ he extended. ‘Of course, he had six children, of whom my father was the eldest, and the family was much bigger in his day. My father only had me. I have hundreds of cousins.’
‘Didn’t your father want any more children?’
‘It wasn’t an option. He eventually discovered that cancer treatment he had in his thirties had left him sterile. Had he had a check sooner, all his wives wouldn’t have wasted their time pursuing fertility treatment,’ Apollo admitted wryly. ‘That’s why I had the check.’
Pixie finished her first glass of wine and watched it being refilled by the silent waiter attending them. It unnerved her having a conversation with staff around but Apollo contrived to act as though they were alone.
The food was out of this world but Pixie felt that for all the enjoyment it was giving her she might as well have been eating sawdust. As the waiter left the saloon to fetch the dessert course, Apollo dealt her a frown. ‘That’s your fourth glass of wine.’
‘You’re counting?’ she gasped in dismay.
‘Should you be drinking at all with the project we have in mind?’
‘I didn’t think of that.’ Pixie set her glass down. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We have a doctor on board. I’ll ask him. Aside of that aspect, I’m not having sex with you if you’re drunk. That’s something I would never ever do, regardless of whether or not we are married,’ Apollo declared grimly.
Pixie reddened as if she had been slapped. ‘I’m just a little nervous.’
Apollo stared at her with clear incomprehension. ‘Why would you be?’
And Pixie knew that it was her moment to tell him the truth. After all, hadn’t she urged him simply to be honest with her? Yet here she was covering up something very basic about her. But how could she tell a legendary womaniser that she was a virgin? He would think she was a freak or that no man had ever asked. It would be horribly humiliating. But worst of all, it would give Apollo a glimpse of her most intimate insecurities about herself and that was what Pixie couldn’t bear. He would see her fear, her weakness, and he was ruthless and cold and he would use it against her, she thought wretchedly.
‘Are you still hungry?’ Apollo prompted softly.
‘No,’ she told him truthfully.
In a split second, Apollo rose from his chair and strode down to scoop her up out of hers, depriving her so thoroughly of breath and brain power that she merely stared up at him in astonishment. ‘Time to make a start on that project, koukla mou,’ he teased.
‘You can put me down to walk.’
‘I don’t want you tripping and breaking a leg.’
‘Of course…that would interfere with the project,’ Pixie voiced for herself.
‘I’m not that cold-blooded,’ Apollo parried with a sudden husky laugh, glancing down at her with brilliantly striking green eyes. ‘At this moment all I’m thinking about is that you’re my wife and I want you.’
Pixie didn’t believe that and an edge of panic infiltrated her. ‘I’m not that experienced,’ she told him abruptly.
Apollo smiled down at her, his wide sensual mouth tilting. ‘How many guys?’
‘A few,’ she lied hastily, her face colouring, eyes veiling. ‘I’m kind of fussy.’
Apollo liked being told that and rationalised that far from liberated thought with the reminder that she was his wife and naturally he didn’t want a wife who had anything like his own track record. He knew that was sexist but it was the way he felt and it was a knee-jerk reaction that took him by surprise.
It was beginning to bother him that Pixie inspired such uncharacteristic urges. She was his wife but not a proper wife, he reasoned, merely the wife he had never thought he would have in the matrimonial step he had sworn never to take. And she was only with him in the first place because he had saved Patrick from the thugs her cowardly little brother had chosen to tangle with. It was a timely reminder but something visceral inside him denied that reminder because all of a sudden he discovered that he didn’t like that either. He liked it much more when he looked down into Pixie’s luminous grey eyes and read the same hunger that he was experiencing.
As he settled her down on the huge bed Pixie studied him, loving the strong angle of his jaw line, the starkness of his well-defined cheekbones and the classic jut of his nose, not to mention the lush black velvet sweep of his lashes shadowing those riveting emerald-green eyes. Looking at Apollo had the strangest intoxicating effect on her and her lips tingled as if in recollection of the kiss they had shared earlier.
He backed off a step and shed his jacket, embarked on his shirt and her heart started beating very, very fast inside her ribcage as he exposed the hard slab of his stomach and the incredibly defined muscles indenting his broad chest. He was drop-dead beautiful to her wide gaze. The shirt went flying. There was nothing inhibited about the speed with which he was stripping and she tried and failed to swallow as the trousers were unzipped and Apollo got down to boxers that revealed almost more than they concealed. He was already aroused, which shook and surprised her, indicating as it did that he did want her as he had declared he did.
But then, he clearly suffered from a high libido, she reminded herself, and possibly he was merely in the mood for sex and she was the only woman available. Yes, that made more sense to her. She would just be another nick on a bedpost already so full of nicks that hers would vanish into the woodwork. She tugged at the sleeves of her catsuit but he forestalled her, lifting her up in an infuriatingly controlling way to turn her round and unzip the garment, sliding it off her stiff shoulders, tugging it down with all the smooth expertise of a male who could have stripped a woman out of the most intricate clothing in the dark without breaking a sweat.
Pixie trembled. He had even blocked her attempt to get a little tipsy. She was way more sober than she had planned to be, having assumed that the alcohol would make her less nervous.