And he understood. His shirt was ripped open, his pants undone only to free his arousal. Before he took her again, she wanted to take him, own him as he’d owned her.
He rose to expose himself fully to her ownership, make her an offering of his body and potency, all the while pledging, “Yours, Selene. Yours, agape mou, never anyone else’s.”
Selene lay back, struck mute, dizzy with the aftershocks of what Aris had done to her, yet ready for more. For anything.
And there he was, Aris, stripping for her, piling arousal on arousal. The sudden wildness of the sea and wind outside plunged them into a primal realm. The light flickering from the brass lamps and the tent’s flapping opening drenched the flower-filled interior in a mystical ambiance. It all synergized to echo the vigor of his vibe, the power of his sexuality and the endlessness of his stamina and magnanimity, to offset his physical wonder, worshipping the perfect sculpture, strength and grace of his body.
He came to stand over her and the sunbeams cascading from the tent’s seams caught him in their crisscrossed spotlight, illuminating slashes and slopes of dark magic across his beloved face and honed, glistening, dauntingly aroused body.
She could barely believe it. All this was hers?
Before she begged him to reassure her, he bent, groaned in her ear, “Yours, Selene. Own me.”
She flung herself at him, buried her face into his ridged abdomen, breathed and tasted him, her itching hands seeking the hot, steel length of him.
He stabbed his fingers into her hair as she opened her lips over the silky crown, lapped the addicting flow of his arousal.
He thrust himself deeper into her possession, growled his pleasure. “Hurry and take your fill of me this way, Selene. I need to take my turn in owning you, filling your needs.”
She didn’t hurry, took her time, possessed him in every way she’d been going crazy for. Then, when she thought she’d drained him, he proved her wrong, remained ready to fulfill his promise.
And for the rest of the night, he did. How he did.
Selene spent the next days wondering if this could be real.
But it was. Beyond real. Vivid. All encompassing.
Their intimacy escalated, on all fronts. Aris opened up more every day, letting her into his past, his mind, his business. She felt happiness so acute it scared her. The world never let bliss like this continue, always conspired to shatter it.
As if to validate her fear, one afternoon while they lazed around the inside pool, Aris received a phone call.
She was bending to pick up Alex when he answered.
He did so only to fall silent for a long, long moment.
A frisson of foreboding slithered down her spine.
She looked over at him, found him looking at her, his eyes filled with something…terrible.
Next second, his eyes went blank. He looked away, ended the phone call on some curt orders.
But she still felt it. Something…dark, mushrooming inside him. Anxiety burst in her chest.
Then it all happened at once.
She started to move toward Aris. She heard the sickening thud. She saw Aris jerk as if he’d been shot. Then the wail exploded.
She looked down, found Alex on his back, screaming his lungs out. At the periphery of her vision, she saw Aris streaking toward them. Her mind streaked, too, making sense of what had happened.
While she’d been preoccupied with Aris’s reaction to the phone call, Alex had managed to take off his nonslip sandals. And he’d slipped on a wet patch. That terrible sound had been his head hitting the roughened marble.
The next second, his wails stopped. And he started convulsing.
Nine
During the nightmare that followed, Selene learned the meaning of terror. And of having Aris with her.
When she’d thought she’d always be a single parent, she’d realized that, especially in times of crisis, she would miss the support Alex’s father could have provided.
But Aris wasn’t just a father to Alex, or a partner for her. As someone who’d created and commanded his own empire, he possessed powers of almost inhuman efficiency, of limitless and levelheaded intervention. He was the best person on earth to deal with whatever life threw at them.
And this was the worst life had dealt her.
As she realized Alex was having a seizure, macabre scenarios attacked her with paralyzing viciousness. Alex could suffer permanent brain damage, could die. They might lose him.
And it was her fault.
But Aris wouldn’t let her go to pieces. His soothing commands and assurances defused her havoc, insisted that accidents happened. Even the unconscious Alex seemed to respond to his father’s support, as he told him that he’d never let anything bad happen to him, that he’d take care of everything. And he did.
Within minutes, he had her, Alex and Eleni onboard his helicopter. He arranged everything during the flight. When they landed at the hospital’s emergency helipad, an ambulance and a team of doctors were waiting.
Alex’s resuscitation and tests were concluded in less than thirty minutes. During which Selene would have fallen apart if not for Aris being there, holding her, murmuring encouragement and imbuing her with his power and stability.
Then Alex was brought out of the emergency room, awake but disoriented. He whimpered at the sight of them, threw himself toward her first, but then he wanted to be in Aris’s arms, burrowing deep into his father’s power and protection and promptly fell asleep.
Each doctor told his specialty’s story. Alex had suffered a concussion but the danger was past and he was expected to bounce back within a day without complications, and at worst a period of fussiness due to possible headaches. The advised forty-eight-hour hospital stay was just for further observation.
Even with their assurances, and with Alex waking up as if nothing had happened, Selene still counted the time until their discharge as the most harrowing of her life.
Then they were back on Aris’s estate, and she realized the nightmare hadn’t ended.
At first she chalked it up to still being shaken, that she was imagining tension where none existed. Or that Aris’s disturbance was, like hers, due to lingering worry about Alex.
But she could no longer believe that. That phone call had borne him terrible news. News he didn’t share. This disturbed her as much as anything else. She couldn’t bear to think he was suffering alone, that he thought he couldn’t come to her with any worries, halve them by letting her bear the burden with him.
But something she couldn’t define kept her from asking. Something huge that she felt hanging over them, over their future. And she was scared to look it in the eye, let it be real, let it wreak its devastation on them.