LITMIR.BIZ

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I’m not…’ She gasped as he began to drive up deep inside her. ‘I’m not a virgin any more.’

      ‘Always,’ he contradicted as his body took on an exquisite rhythm. ‘Always to me.’

      Did his raw words intensify her pleasure? Possibly. Again, Lucy came very quickly and so did he—and all her fears about the amazing chemistry they shared being some sort of fluke were banished. Afterwards she lay sleepy and sated in his arms but she felt him stir almost immediately and they did it all over again. And again. They did it so many times that she lost count and she must have dozed off, because the next thing she knew she was being woken by the sound of Big Ben chiming out midnight. But as the last chime faded into the night, Lucy knew she had to ask him the question which was still gnawing away at her—because otherwise wouldn’t she just keep torturing herself with fevered imaginings?

      She waited until he had poured two glasses of champagne and brought them back to bed, but her own drink lay untouched on the nightstand as she glanced over at Drakon’s autocratic profile. He had picked up his phone and was reading something off the screen and Lucy cleared her throat, trying to make her words sound as nonchalant as possible. ‘You seem very close to Amy,’ she observed.

      ‘Mmm…’ he said absently as he put the phone back on the locker, screen side down. ‘We’ve known each other a long time.’

       Make it casual. All you’re doing is finding out a bit more about him and the people in his life.

      She tried to keep her voice bright but her words sounded as forced as the last bit of toothpaste you tried to squeeze from the tube. ‘So how did you first get into partnership with her?’

      There was a pause as he turned to look at her, his black gaze mocking. ‘You really want to talk about this right now?’

      Of course she didn’t. She wanted him to put his glass down and pull her into his arms and tell her he was starting to fall in love with her, but that was never going to happen, not in a million years. And in the meantime she had to face down her nameless fears or allow them to grow. To grow and run the risk of dominating her thoughts and ruining her relationship, even if it was a relationship which fell short of her dreams. ‘I’m just interested,’ she said blandly. ‘And as your wife, it’s useful if I find out as much as I can about you. There’s loads about your past which is a mystery to me.’

      Drakon took a sip of champagne and leaned back against the bank of feathered pillows. He didn’t particularly feel like talking—but the sex had been so damned hot that he was feeling unusually accommodating towards his new bride. ‘Me and Amy,’ he mused. ‘I guess it was one of those lucky meetings.’

      ‘Sort of…star-crossed?’ she ventured casually.

      He shrugged, wondering why women always complicated things—or was she just trying to impress him with overblown quotes from Shakespeare? ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, a little impatiently. ‘We were both working at the same office in Hong Kong and one night I decided to ask her out for dinner.’

      ‘Because you fancied her?’

      Drakon frowned. She might have been a virgin until very recently, but surely she wasn’t that naïve? Because Lucy was practical. A practical and realistic woman who’d experienced her own share of bad stuff. Surely one thing which could come out of this unplanned marriage was the ability to be completely honest with her, because wasn’t honesty the quality he valued above all else?

      ‘Who wouldn’t fancy her?’ he questioned, barely registering the way she flinched, because by then his jaw had tightened with the memory of those turbulent days. ‘I was in a bad place,’ he admitted. ‘My father’s will had just been read to reveal that he’d basically blown the entire Konstantinou fortune during his lifetime. And my brother had gone ballistic when he’d discovered there was nothing left for him to inherit.’

      ‘And you must have been disappointed to discover that you’d lost your own expected share of the family fortune?’ she suggested.

      He shook his head. ‘That would never have been the case. The laws of primogeniture meant that, as the eldest son, Niko would have inherited everything.’

      ‘And you never minded that?’

      ‘Of course I minded! I’m not some sort of saint, Lucy.’ His mouth twisted into a hard smile. ‘But I’d resigned myself to my fate a long time earlier. And underneath it all, I discovered I was less like my father and more like my grandfather, who had worked his way up from the bottom to the very top. I knew I could make my own way in the world and that’s exactly what I was doing. I’d been to university and got myself a decent degree and was a petrochemical engineer, working for a big company in the Far East.’

      ‘But employees of big companies don’t tend to make billions of dollars,’ observed Lucy slowly. ‘They don’t own private jets or private islands or spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on last-minute weddings in luxury hotels.’

      ‘No, they don’t. And that’s where Amy came in.’ Drakon’s voice became thoughtful. ‘She was a geologist—the best geologist I’ve ever come across. After she’d explained she wasn’t interested in me romantically, she told me that she’d seen the potential for oil on one of the Indonesian islands, but didn’t have the wherewithal to explore it. And that’s where I came in.’ He paused. ‘I believed in her passion and enthusiasm and my gut feeling told me she was onto something big. I’d just received a huge bonus from the company but I was growing bored and frustrated with working for someone else. I told Amy I was prepared to back her hunch but that we needed to really go for it. So we chartered a small company to do the drilling for us, and within six months we’d struck oil.’ He took another sip of champagne and sighed. ‘Best feeling in the world,’ he reflected.

      ‘I’m sure it was,’ she said woodenly.

      He turned to look at her. The rosy flush which had made her skin glow after a rapid succession of orgasms might never have happened, for her face was as pale as it had been just before she’d taken her wedding vows. He felt a flicker of irritation, because surely irrational mood swings had no place in what they had both agreed was to be a purely functional marriage. ‘Is something wrong?’ he questioned coolly.

      Lucy wanted to jump up from the bed and rail at him for his insensitivity. To tell him that yes, of course there was something wrong. It was the first night of their honeymoon and not only had he confided that discovering oil was better than having sex with his new bride—he’d also confessed that the gorgeous Amy had once turned him down!

      But one thing puzzled her more than her very natural feminine outrage at his reaction. Because Drakon was a determined and charismatic man who attracted women like ants to honey. Who was to say that Amy mightn’t have lived to regret her impetuosity in refusing a relationship with someone like him—especially once he had decided to adopt Xander?

      ‘So when Xander was orphaned, you weren’t at all tempted to ask Amy to marry you, just in case she’d changed her mind?’ she questioned slowly. ‘Seeing as how you know each other so well and clearly get on.’

      He narrowed his eyes and seemed to be running something over in his mind because it took a moment or two before he answered. ‘That was never going to be on the cards, because I needed not just a mother, but a wife in the fullest sense of the word.’ There was another pause. ‘Amy’s gay, Lucy,’ he said eventually. ‘She explained that at the time. She just hadn’t come out to her family about it yet. She still hasn’t. Like I said, you were my first choice. My only choice, really.’

      Lucy supposed he must be paying her a compliment but somehow it didn’t feel like one. Somehow it felt like being second-best and that wasn’t such a great way to start married life. She turned to pick up her champagne glass but the fizzing bubbles only seemed to emphasise the flatness of her mood, when she realised that Drakon was sitting up in bed and pointing out of the enormous picture windows opposite.

      ‘Will you take a look at that?’ he exclaimed

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