The Mills & Boon Ultimate Christmas Collection. Kate Hardy

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      ‘Don’t be all English and polite and nice,’ Apollo groaned, raking a hand through his tousled black hair. ‘I wasn’t.’

      ‘But then you’re not English,’ Pixie parried, marvelling at the vision of her very controlled new husband in such a condition. His green eyes had a reckless glitter that unnerved her a little. Sober, he was a lot to handle. Drunk, he could well be more than she could manage.

      ‘Never been with a virgin before,’ he confided. ‘I wanted it to be perfect and then it went wrong and I was furious. My ego, my pride, nothing to do with you. I was a…’ He uttered a four-letter swear word.

      ‘Pretty much,’ she agreed more cheerfully after hearing that he had wanted their wedding night to be perfect, which was a hearteningly unexpected admission when deep down in advance of the bed business she had feared that he would not care a jot. She relaxed her stiff shoulders into the pillows while she studied him and decided that even drunk he was heartbreakingly gorgeous.

      ‘My second stepmother beat me with a belt and left me covered with blood,’ Apollo announced out of the blue.

      Her jaw dropped. ‘How old were you?’

      ‘Six. I hated her.’

      ‘I’m not surprised. What did your dad do?’

      ‘He divorced her because of it. He was very shocked…but then he was sort of naïve about how cruel women can be,’ Apollo told her as he drank out of the bottle still clutched in one big bronzed hand, lean muscles rippling to draw her attention to the intricate dragon tattoo adorning his arm. ‘He didn’t appreciate that I was the biggest problem in his remarriages.’

      ‘How?’ Pixie asked, wondering if she should try to get the bottle off him or just close her eyes to it. He wasn’t acting like himself. He might hate her tomorrow for having seen him in such a vulnerable mood.

      ‘When a woman marries a very rich man she wants to be the one who produces his son and heir but I was already there and the apple of my father’s eye.’

      ‘By the sound of that beating you got, he wasn’t looking after his apple very well.’

      Apollo closed his eyes, black lashes almost hitting his cheekbones. ‘He married my third stepmother when I was eleven. She was a very beautiful Scandinavian and the only one who seemed to take a genuine interest in me. Never having had a mother, I was probably starved of affection.’ His shapely mouth quirked. ‘She would come and visit me at school and stuff. My father was very pleased and encouraged her every step of the way.’

      ‘So?’ Pixie prodded, sensing the tripwire coming in the savage tension bracketing his beautiful mouth, the warning that all could not have been as cosy as he was making it sound.

      ‘Basically she was grooming me for sex. She liked adolescent boys…’

      ‘You were eleven!’ Pixie condemned. ‘Surely you weren’t capable.’

      ‘By the time she took me to bed I was thirteen. It went on for two years. She took me out of school to city hotels. It was sordid and deviant and I was betraying my own father but…but she was my first love and I was fool enough to worship the ground she walked on. I was her pet,’ he completed in disgust.

      Pixie leapt out of bed and darted across the floor to kneel down in front of him. ‘You were…what age?’

      ‘Fifteen when I got caught with her.’

      ‘For two years a perverted woman preyed on you.’

      ‘I wasn’t even her only one,’ Apollo bit out in a slurring undertone. ‘She’d been meeting up with the son of a local fisherman on the beach. It was his father who went to mine and tipped him off about what she was like.’

      Pixie shifted until she was behind him and wrapped her arms round his rigid shoulders. ‘You were just a kid. You didn’t know any better.’

      ‘I definitely knew it was wrong to have sex with my father’s wife,’ Apollo broke in curtly. ‘I don’t deserve forgiveness for that but he still forgave me.’

      ‘Because he loved you,’ Pixie reasoned. ‘And he knew his wife was using you for her own warped reasons. I’m so sorry I called you a man whore. You had a really screwed-up adolescence and of course it affected you.’

      Apollo reached behind himself to yank her round and tumble her down into his lap. ‘I never told anyone about that before…until you told me tonight about growing up in care with men trying to hit on you or spy on you or whatever,’ he mumbled into her hair, the words slurring. ‘Now I think I need to go to bed before I fall asleep on top of you, koukla mou.’

      Pixie got up and removed the bottle while he stripped where he stood and, only staggering very slightly, fell like a tree into the bed. He slept almost immediately and she watched him in the half-light for long minutes, thinking how wrong she had been about him once and how much better she now knew him. Yet with what he had revealed he seemed more maddeningly complex than ever and without a doubt the man she had married in a business arrangement absolutely fascinated her. She brushed his tumbled black hair back from his brow and slid into the other side of the bed, hesitating only a moment before edging closer to take advantage of Apollo, whose natural temperature seemed to be the equivalent of a furnace.

      She surfaced to dawn very, very slowly, the insistence of her body awakening her to a sweet flood of sensations. It was still so novel for her to feel such things that she knew instantly it was Apollo touching her and just as quickly she relaxed. Her nipples had tightened into needy little buds and the delicate place where his clever fingers were playing was embarrassingly sensitive and wet.

      ‘You awake now?’ he prompted gruffly in her ear.

      ‘Yeah…’ she framed weakly, her hips moving all on their own because the magical way he touched her made her ache, need and want all over again.

      Apollo shifted over her, all rippling muscle and ferocious control. Green eyes glittered down at her, his lean, strong face taut and dark with stubble. She felt him at the heart of her and anxiety screamed that there was too much of him for what little there was of her so it was a struggle to force herself not to stiffen. Fortunately, he went slow—achingly slow—and she gradually stretched around his fullness, tender tissue reacting with unexpected pleasure to the source of that amazing friction. He shifted his hips, moved and a rush of exhilarating feelings engulfed her and her head fell back, eyes wide with surprise.

      ‘Didn’t want to give you the chance to get all nervous again,’ Apollo admitted. ‘Like it was likely to be some sort of punishment.’

      ‘Definitely…not…punishment,’ she gasped breathlessly, her body rising to meet the gathering power of his, excitement pooling like liquid fire in her pelvis.

      ‘Just sex,’ he told her.

      And had she still had breath to disagree she would have done but she couldn’t breathe against the rising tide of intoxicating excitement. Little undulating tingles of intense arousal were travelling in tightening bands through her trembling length. He was inside her and over her and nothing had ever felt that good or that powerful. Apollo smiled down at her, a smile ablaze with male satisfaction and, for once, she didn’t mind his assurance. He gathered up her legs and angled her back, rising higher, thrusting faster, deeper, forcing little СКАЧАТЬ