Billie felt the change in atmosphere with every fibre of her being but could no more have stepped away than she could have stopped breathing. His gilded gaze was mesmeric in its power to hold her. Her mouth ran dry, frantic tension holding her fast. The pool of liquid heat forming in her belly was sending an electrifying surge of responsiveness through her entire body, pinching her sensitive nipples taut, creating heat and dampness at the secret heart of her.
Alexei closed his arms round her. Cupping her hips with an intimacy that shocked her, he drew her up against his hard muscular length and kissed her. It was a kiss full of a passionate demand that rocked her where she stood. It was like being hit by lightning as she sizzled like meat under a grill
and her knees almost crumpled beneath her weight.
It was Alexei's strong arms that kept her upright while he lightened the pressure of his intoxicating mouth and teased her reddened lips with tiny provocative caresses. Having reduced all resistance to rubble, he finally went in for the kill, dipping his tongue between her lips in a piercingly sweet invasion of her unbearably sensitive mouth and provoked a series of whimpering shivering gasps from somewhere inside her. It was the very first time she had experienced true sexual hunger and it was a raw need so powerful it rolled through her like thunder, blanking out all thought and control. For those split seconds she was both defenceless and aggressive, clinging to his lean hard physique, angling her head back to enable him, her entire body yearning for much more of the same.
'Will I be the first?' Alexei prompted in a roughened undertone.
'Yes,' she answered before she retrieved her wits and intelligence came back in a floodtide of anxiety and anger and regret. As she pulled free in response to those promptings the slivering pain of sudden separation from him cut through her as sharply as a knife.
Retaining a controlling grip on her slender hand, Alexei walked her back towards the car.
Billie hauled her fingers free of his. 'No!' she protested strickenly. 'I don't want this!'
Alexei stilled and sent her a frowning look of incomprehension. 'What don't you want?'
'I don't want to be another notch on your bedpost. Just roll back time a few minutes, please! The kiss didn't happen, forget it. You're my boss. I work for you…Neither of us wants to change that relationship!'
'You sound almost hysterical.' Hot golden eyes semi-screened by luxuriant black lashes, Alexei squared his aggressive jaw line. 'Everything changes, nothing stays static—that's life and you can't control it. You can't turn the clock back either. I want to take this attraction to its natural conclusion, moraki mou.'
Only because you're not accustomed to any woman calling a halt…but I am calling a halt. I'm not like your other women…I don't do casual,' Billie proclaimed with proud vehemence.
'The spark we fired between us is too hot to douse,' Alexei delivered thickly, dark golden eyes locked to her like an incoming missile attack, making it clear that nothing she had said had impressed him.
'It was just sex,' she argued. 'And sex you can get anywhere with women far more beautiful than I am, so forget it and me in that line!'
'While I can still taste you in my mouth,' Alexei murmured huskily, shooting her a shockingly sensual appraisal that burned through her like a hot burning coal. 'I won't forget how you made me ache.'
'Stop it…' Billie raised her hands to silence him in a rare physical show of eloquence. 'Stop it! It was a stupid kiss, a mistake, but it's not important and it's never going to happen again.'
Alexei stretched out his arms without warning and hauled her back to him, reconnecting her to the lean, tensile power of his muscular thighs and the potent thrust of his erection. Holding her entrapped, he stared down at her with all the cool of a predator stalking prey who knew he had all the time in the world. 'You can't tell me it's not going to happen again—that will only make me want you more.'
Awesomely conscious of the deep desperate longing still whirling inside her and crying out for satisfaction, Billie rested pleading green eyes on him. 'You know this is wrong. You know you would much rather have me working for you than having sex with you,' she told him feverishly.
'But having you fulfil both functions could well be an amazing tour de force,' Alexei countered with single-minded conviction. 'I would cut down on the other women.'