Adonis in Athens - Page 16

“Shh.” He put a finger over her lips. “I have a house. You can stay with me—in the guest room if you want. No pressure, no sex if that’s a hard limit, and enough time for us to reconnect.”

“I, I can’t…my job…” she faltered.

“It’s summer,” he protested. “Hockey teams can’t be busy right now.”

“The team isn’t, but I sell a lot of season ticket packages in the summer.”

“I have a plan on my landline that allows unlimited calls to the U.S. for one flat fee—both at home and at the office—you could work for a while every day to keep up with that. You can use my computer and do what you need to do. Give me a month, Paige.”

“I…” She didn’t even know how to say no. She wanted him so bad it hurt, and his selflessness made her heart yearn for him even more.

“Thirty days,” he whispered against her ear, his lips gently sucking the lobe into his mouth, earring and all.

“Apollo…” His name came out choppy, gooseflesh breaking out on her skin despite the heat.

“I know, koukla…I want you too.” He brought her legs up around his waist again, adjusting her so that his erection pressed against her crotch. “Look what you’re doing to me—you can’t leave in four days, Paige.”

“I don’t think they’ll give me a month,” she murmured. “I can try to get a couple of weeks.”

“We’ll take care of that tomorrow,” he said, gently untangling their bodies and putting a few feet between them in the water. “Right now, I have to get my dick under control. Later, when we’re not in public, we’ll talk about this again.”

“Apollo…” She reached out a hand and he immediately grasped it in his, pausing to look at her quizzically. “I went three years without your touch—I don’t think I could stand not touching you while I’m here.”

His eyes darkened with a plethora of emotions she couldn’t quite identify, and then he was yanking her against him again, his mouth taking hers like a man possessed. “Keep this up,” he growled, “and after I get done with you, we’ll be spending your vacation in that Greek jail we talked about.”

“I’m beginning to think you were right about it being worth it.”

5

They rented two lounge chairs with a shared umbrella and alternated between getting in the water to cool off, sunning themselves, and putting up the umbrella to stave off the midday sun. They talked and ordered drinks, catching up on a lifetime of stories, funny anecdotes from their jobs and random topics that seemed to make conversation flow easily. By the time the sun had gotten a little lower in the sky, they were sunburned and hungry, but Apollo had one more thing he wanted to do before they left Sounion.

“Where are we going?” she asked as they drove up the winding road that led to the Temple of Poseidon.

“I told you we were going to watch the sunset from up there and that’s what we’ll do.”

“It’s late—is it still open?”

“It’s a quarter of eight and they’re open until sundown, which will be in about ten minutes. I may be able to convince them to let us stay a bit longer.”

She just smiled, not really caring about the details. It had been a spectacular day, and though the sexual tension was so thick between them it was hard to think about anything else, at some point in the afternoon she’d decided to let it all go. Her doubts about him, concern about the potential for leaving Greece with a broken heart, and her resistance to her quickly growing hunger for him simply drifted into the ether as she lost herself in his deep, slightly accented voice and those damn captivating green eyes.

They parked and walked up another hill, their hands linked between them. Apollo gave the man at the gate some money and they breezed past him, heading up an incline towards the temple.

Standing in front of the large ancient structure, Paige felt a moment of overwhelming awe. She’d known these buildings existed, but being right in front of one was breathtaking. She remembered reading about it in Homer’s ‘The Odyssey,’ and then hearing about its history in high school. She’d been fascinated by the idea of a god of the sea, and though Poseidon was only a mythological figure, she could picture some sort of ethereal being haunting these incredible marble columns.

“What are you thinking with such a serious face?” Apollo asked before wrapping his arms around her from behind.

“Wondering what Poseidon looked like, if he ever existed, and what kinds of parties he would have had in a temple like this.”

Apollo smiled at her imagination, captivated by how much his country’s history enthralled her. “I’m sure they would have been wild,” he chuckled. “Although all those things you hear about the Greeks and Romans being orgy-crazy perverts is mostly untrue. A lot of our ancient artwork depicts plenty of that stuff, but historians are fairly sure it was more fantasy than reality.”

“Personally, I think reality probably falls somewhere in between the evidence left behind and the way the historians and scientists interpret it,” she said, leaning against him.

“I agree.”

“So let’s pretend the parties were wild!” she laughed.

“Okay.” He let her guide them along, as she circled the building, studying the columns, the pediment and even the cracks in certain pieces of marble. “What has you so fascinated?” he asked.