Savage Seduction

‘Thank you.’ In response, he deepened his accent, his eyes sparking with mischief, and Jade found herself wanting to giggle. So much for icy polite- ness!

‘I’ll fill the jug and fetch another glass,’ she said hastily.

And she scrambled inside as he pulled out one of the wooden chairs, which now looked hopelessly insubstantial if expected to accommodate that large, muscular frame.

Jade filled the jug with water and ice and found the glass with fingers which were still trembling, her eyes lifting reluctantly to the small spotted mirror which hung on the whitewashed walls. A wild-eyed, fey stranger stared back at her. Her pale green eyes were almost unrecognisable as her own, the colour almost completely obscured by the deep ebony of two dilated and glittering pupils. Her mouth looked swollen and throbbing and redder than usual—had she been chewing it while talking to him? she wondered. Even her hair—baby-fine but masses of it—which she hadn’t had a chance to brush since he’d disturbed her; it had dried into a thick, pale cloud—shimmered like an uncontrol- lable halo around her head. The sun had bleached it almost blonde. Did Constantine, she thought suddenly, like women with blonde hair?

She took the jug and glass back outside, half afraid that he might have disappeared, but he hadn’t. He had spread those long olive legs beneath the table and was watching her return.

Walking suddenly seemed a skill she hadn’t yet acquired, and she would have stumbled if a strong hand hadn’t shot out and caught her. She managed to get the jug down on the table, but the tumbler slipped from her grasp; the sound of the glass shat- tering on the grey stone of the courtyard sounding piercingly loud to her ears.

‘Oh, hell! Now look what you’ve made me do,’ said Jade unreasonably, and, crouching down, she began gingerly to pick up the larger fragments.

He was beside her in an instant. ‘Be careful,’ he told her, but it was too late, a shard had pierced her forefinger, and crimson blood began to well and to drop in dark starry splashes on to the grey stone.

Her finger went up to her mouth, but he deliber- ately took it before it reached its destination, the black eyes fixed on hers as he put it into his mouth and sucked the blood away.

If there hadn’t been glass all around them, Jade thought that she would have keeled over. She felt the blood drain from her face as she stared into the night-dark eyes.

‘You—shouldn’t have done that,’ she said shakily.

He relieved the pressure, but her finger stayed firmly in the hot, moist cavern of his mouth. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s dangerous,’ she managed. ‘Blood…’

He shook his head, as if he understood her meaning perfectly. ‘I think not.’

‘How can you know?’ she demanded breath- lessly. ‘We’ve only just met.’

His eyes met hers. ‘I know,’ he said softly.

Another slow and deliberate suck; it was the most erotic thing that had ever happened to her in her life—and then he took the finger from his mouth, examined it and held it up for her inspection. ‘The flow is stemmed,’ he pronounced, and something in the formality of this statement, spoken with all the solemnity of a Victorian surgeon, instead of the more modern ‘it’s stopped bleeding’, made Jade’s lips twitch in amusement.

He saw the movement, and raised his eyebrows. ’What?’

‘You have a very formal way of speaking,’ she said honestly. ‘But your English is absolutely superb.’

He inclined his head. ‘And so it should be. I grew up with it as my second language.’

She shook her head, as if bemused by what was happening. ‘Are you always like this— Constantine?’ She said his name experimentally for the first time. Her tongue had to protrude a little in order to pronounce it properly, in the slightly lisping Greek manner. She liked saying it, liked the way his eyes flared as he watched her tongue snake out and then back in again.

‘Like-what?’

Jade stared back into the glittering black eyes, realising that she actually felt as though she were high on something—if this feeling was ever mar- keted, the world would go into total chaos! ‘So darned assertive!’ she answered crisply.

He looked surprised. ‘But naturally. Are not all men supposed to be assertive? The dominant ones?’

She smiled. ‘That’s not what the feminists would say.’

‘Ah! The feminists! You are one of these?’ He ran his eyes lazily over the bright and filmy covering of her sarong, at the cloud of blonde hair. ‘I don’t think so,’ he observed.

Jade could not let that pass. ‘You think that I couldn’t possibly be a feminist because I haven’t got cropped hair and am not wearing dungarees?’

A light flared in his eyes. ‘But those are your words, Jade,’ he said softly. ‘Not mine. No, I made the comment because I could imagine you soft, and pliant, loving and giving. Very feminine, but not a feminist. There is a subtle difference, you know.’

Jade realised that she was letting him get away with statements she would have emphatically dis- agreed with if she’d been back at home in England. Persuasive kind of guy. She tried again. ‘But men being so dominant and assertive,’ she said, ‘it isn’t really the modern way.’

‘But I,’ he answered proudly, ‘am not a modern man. At heart all Greeks are ruled by the very same passions which have existed since the beginning of time.’

This was totally new, uncharted and terribly ex- citing territory, men talking quite openly of passion. Jade shivered.

‘But perhaps,’ he said deliberately, ‘you are not used to assertive men?’

Oh, but she was—she most certainly was! But there was a world of difference between the way all the men at her office behaved, and the way that Constantine was behaving. Her editor rode roughshod over all the staff. However, perhaps that was less like assertion, and more like bullying! Cer- tainly there was none of this man’s cool assurance in her boss’s behaviour.

‘Well, are you?’ he persisted.

She wasn’t used to men at all, not in the sense that he meant. Which was probably why she was responding in such a pathetic way towards this par- ticular man. Men had been deliberately put on ice until the career which had meant so much to her had had a chance to develop properly—the career which she was now thinking of chucking in because she was so disillusioned with it. A cynic already— and at the tender age of twenty!

She stared into the black eyes, blinked, then looked down at the thick fragments of glass which glittered by their feet. Mostly from a desire to steer the conversation away from her shameful lack of experience with the opposite sex, she began to turn away. ‘I’d better go and fetch a dustpan and brush’

‘No.’

There he went again, dishing out the orders! Jade stared up at him, half in anger, half in admiration, marvelling that it actually felt extraordinarily good to be around such a masterful man. Shame on her!

‘You put some covering on your finger. Go! I will deal with the glass.’

She found herself obeying him without question. In the tiny bedroom she found the box of Elastoplast she had brought with her from England, and, after removing the wrapping, she shakily ap- plied one to her thumb. She could hear him moving around in the kitchen, presumably looking for the dustpan and brush. She didn’t doubt for a moment that he’d find it!

She wondered fleetingly whether she had a touch of sunstroke. Surely normal women of her age didn’t allow half-clothed perfect strangers the run of their house? And yet, given the outstanding at- traction of the man, she didn’t feel in the least bit threatened. She examined her finger carefully. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She felt a threat, all right, but it had absolutely nothing to do with thinking that he might be some mad axeman. It was more an interested kind of wondering just what would happen if she caught him in a judo stranglehold. That expressive little ‘whoosh’ sound he’d made… implying… mmmm…

She went outside to find him disposing of the last of the glass. It was strange to see such a self- proclaimed non-modern man doing it so com- petently, and yet to see Constantine brushing up the fragments of glass… it almost emphasised his masculinity, rather than detracting from it. Con- fusing, she thought fleetingly. He’d talked about the man assuming the dominant role, and had teased her about feminists, and yet he didn’t seem to mind lending a hand. Interesting.

As she appeared, he straightened up.

‘I will wrap it up tightly in newspaper,’ he in- structed. ‘So no more cut fingers.’

Jade nodded, acknowledging the perverse sinking of her heart. There was something of the farewell in the way he spoke. Surely he wasn’t going?

She ventured a smile. ‘You didn’t have your drink.’

‘No matter. It is time I was going.’

She had been right. ‘Yes.’ Disappointment crept through her veins like a debilitating drug.

‘I shall collect you at seven.’

‘Collect me?’ squeaked Jade, only keeping the excitement from her voice with the most monu- mental of efforts. ‘What for?’