Secret Souls (3 page)

There was a firmness in his voice, a certainty in his words, and an underlying passion. This was not a man with whom to toy. He was honest and true and as hard as he was soft, a sensual and
hyper-sexual being who was reaching out to her in love. She raised their hands to her lips and kissed his, sucked the smooth tawny skin into her mouth and bit into the flesh on the back of his hand before she turned it over, licked and kissed the palm. That kiss had sealed their fate. They were sharply aware of that as Manoussos pulled her into his arms.

Manoussos and Chadwick were standing on a wooden dock several miles down the coast from the restaurant. Manoussos knew the place. It was owned by a friend of Max’s who leased it out by the day to yacht owners who wanted a safe harbour while visiting Knossos. He recognised the three-masted schooner,
Black Narcissus.
It was owned by one of the Athenian Greek ship owners who, off season, rented it out with its crew of eight. It was an ideal spot known for its deep harbour and the yachts that would tie up there for several hours, sometimes days. A deserted place of infinite beauty with its scrubby bushes, old twisted and gnarled olive trees and buff-coloured cliffs, plunging steeply to the sea. Manoussos had been there many times with Max when he sailed his fishing
caique
over to this side of the island from Livakia.

Manoussos watched this woman, this mysterious beauty, as she spoke with the captain of the boat. Until then he had not had time to be objective enough to study Chadwick. How well dressed she was in her beige suede skirt; the waist-length jacket trimmed in inch-wide bands of glossy black patent leather she wore over her shoulders to reveal a low-cut silk-knit jumper. A narrow black silk scarf was tied in a minute bow at the side of her long slender neck. At the table he had been unaware of the long, finely shaped legs, the elegantly slim feet shod in flat-heeled black alligator shoes, the chicness of the large black patent leather shoulder bag she carried with such style over her shoulder.

How luscious and lovely she was, this lady with the voluptuous body of an intensely sexual woman and a face that still had the bloom of a young girl. Standing there on the weather-worn wooden dock, surrounded by the rocky terrain, she looked that
lethal combination so attractive to men: the child-seductress and the woman. A siren, as in Greek myth – the woman living on a rocky isle to which she lures unwary seafarers with enchanting music – came to mind. The sound of her voice, that something in her eyes, the way she used her body, that was her song. Chadwick was a dangerously fascinating woman, a temptress tempting pursuit. He had known that the moment he saw her and that was what he had fallen in love with: the danger of loving her – and other things. The magnificent rewards he would reap seeking his pleasure with her, the deep sense of delight from knowing that he could make her happy as she had never been before. For that a man might risk a great deal, possibly even his life.

All that he sensed instinctively and therefore nothing about Chadwick could be a surprise. It would be a matter of knowing her as she unfolded herself, or not, to him. He didn’t mind if she kept her secrets, and had no doubt that she did harbour secrets she revealed to no one. You had only to look at her once to know that. It was Manoussos’s nature and the nature of his work to take things at face value and deal with them, even love.

At the moment when they rose from the table and he took her in his arms, their lust for each other demanded somewhere to go, a place to be alone in, to make love, to have glorious sex. Max had even made provision for that: the restaurant bill had been paid and a note left for Manoussos telling him where the key was to a small romantic house Max owned down the coast. Manoussos had been relieved because he wanted nothing tawdry such as a hotel room for a few hours of sex for their first time together. When Chadwick rejected Max’s house in preference to taking him to where she was staying, it made no difference to Manoussos. But the point did come home to him that she had taken over this liaison.

All she had said in the taxi was that she had a wonderful place for them to go. He was more amused than surprised when he saw where that place was. She had rented the
Black Narcissus
to sail from Athens to Crete. Manoussos listened to Chadwick explaining to the captain of the schooner that she had a guest and that he and the crew could keep the taxi and take some time off in town,
in fact, she insisted. It was to no avail. The captain was quite unbending. The crew could go off for a few hours but the captain never left his vessel unattended when someone was on board. Manoussos knew, as Chadwick did not, that she would get nowhere trying to change the man’s mind. It was time to step in and settle things. He opened the taxi door and stepped on to the dock.

The moment that Dimitri Cronos saw Manoussos walking towards him, his face broke into a smile. The two men had known each other for years, he had even assisted Manoussos once in entrapping a smuggler of antiquities. The two men hugged each other in greeting. Then the captain turned to Chadwick and told her, ‘You should have said your guest was to be Manoussos Stavrolakis. I have no problem leaving the schooner with him on board.’

The two men exchanged news of mutual friends as they and Chadwick boarded the
Black Narcissus.
Two of the crew, obviously men who knew Manoussos, greeted him enthusiastically and joined in the conversation. Chadwick sat down in one of the deck chairs, watched and listened. This outward affection Cretan men showed for one another had always astounded her. It was rich and it was beautiful in the same way as their passion for honour and their fierce pride; they swaggered rather than walked, masters of maleness unbound.

Chadwick had hardly realised the captain and crew were gone until she saw them all happily piling into her hired taxi. Manoussos came to stand next to her. She rose from her chair and together they watched the taxi pull away, stop at the end of the dock and the captain alight to close the iron gates. They swung off roughly honed pediments carved out of the cliffs that sheltered this private piece of coast and bay. The gates and the weather-worn ancient Venetian lions capping those pediments stood guard against intruders from the outside world.

From the moment Chadwick heard the gates clang shut, the chain run through them and watched the captain snap shut the padlock, it was as if her mind had done a somersault. She felt born anew, a whole different Chadwick was surfacing and a new life
was just about to begin. She turned to face Manoussos, who made no excuse for taking over the
Black Narcissus
and her life. She had after all already changed his.

Chapter 2

The autumn sun was a dull pink-orange and low in the blue cloudless sky. There was no breeze and it was incredibly still and quiet, except for the sound of the sea lapping against the boat, breaking against the cliffs, the occasional cry of a bird. It was no longer uncomfortably hot but definitely warm enough for Chadwick to feel the waning sun’s rays teasing her cheeks, the tip of her nose, her chin. Sexual tension vibrated between her and Manoussos as they gazed into each other’s eyes. She sensed the god Eros, Greek mythology’s god of love, hovering over their lives and this place: protecting, inciting, blessing.

Chadwick slipped the jacket from her shoulders and it fell on to the deck. She pulled the silk-knit jumper up over her head and casually laid it on the chair next to her. There appeared to be no urgency in her passionate desire for sex; hers were deliberate acts to excite this man who was already the most important thing in her life. She eased her skirt down over her hips and let that too fall to the deck round her ankles. Chadwick slipped out of her shoes as she stepped over it and closer to Manoussos. She was naked except for her sexuality which she wore like a cloak of diamonds. She sparkled in the sun for him as no other woman ever had, not even D’Arcy.

Chadwick had about her a sexual luminosity, a more raunchy carnality than he could have imagined. Her breasts were high and fully rounded, much more than merely ample. The nimbus encircling her nipples was large and pale mocha in colour, shaded deeper towards the nipples which were dark, a more plummy colour altogether, and pronounced, giving her breasts a strangely depraved look. Her nakedness and particularly her breasts, like
her face, held a certain quality of seductive sexuality that Manoussos found irresistible. She triggered his sexual fantasies. Breasts to caress and lick, that demanded more: to be cupped in his hands so that he could feel their weight and firm flesh overflow his fingers as surely they would from their size.

Manoussos could almost hear the slap of his hands against them. He had no doubts that
they,
as
she,
demanded sex to be hard and fierce as well as soft and loving. Her entire body was firm-fleshed and shapely, her skin like satin, scented with aromatic oils and creams. Chadwick Chase was a woman honed for erotic love making, sexual demands. The narrow waist, and just the right amount of flesh on the hips and lusciously rounded bottom, accentuated how very voluptuous she was. Her sexuality demanded: Take me, use me, for our mutual pleasure. Even her mound of Venus had been groomed to tantalise: her pubes shaved away to leave just a narrow strip of luscious, dark and silky clipped hair. From her long, slender and elegant feet, her manicured hands, to the crown of her head, here was a sexual woman, moulded and cared for, who had been taught by someone to use her sexuality for a man’s as well as her own pleasure. Manoussos had had enough women to sense that about Chadwick. Instinct told him that was her past; together they were her present.

He reached for the first button of his shirt and told her, ‘I’ve never seen a woman more beautiful, more perfect, more mine.’

She reached out and took his hand from the button, smiled at him and told him, ‘Every woman should be told that at least once in her lifetime,’ and continued to undo his shirt.

Manoussos slipped out of his shoes. He tried to assist but she stopped him. ‘No, please. Just stand very still, let me.’ And she continued undressing him.

Manoussos felt sexual urgency: to be naked and in her arms. He wanted her hands on his flesh, her caresses, her kisses, to be licked all over by her warm moist tongue. He had found the woman to take possession of his body as no other woman ever had. He felt on the verge of laughter, tears: reactions to such intense sexual emotion, the discovery of being in love. He reached out to take a breast in his cupped hands and caress it,
lower his head and lick the nimbus with his tongue and nibble on the already erect nipple. The moment he touched her naked flesh he set her aflame. He actually felt her lose herself, her body go limp. Roughly he pulled her into his arms, tilted back her head. She closed her eyes and he kissed them, and then the tip of her nose; he licked the hint of a cleft in her chin and then he bit into her lips. They opened at once and Manoussos kissed her, a deep and passionate kiss, a kiss of life, one where they flowed into each other urgently and with powerful need.

His hands roamed over her body with teasing caresses, and with one arm wrapped round her waist he lifted her off the deck and held her close to him. Briefly his fingers toyed with the narrow strip of pubic hair, before they searched between her more intimate lips. He used his long slender fingers seductively to excite her. Here were caresses that completely undid Chadwick; her body tensed and she came. Exploring, caressing fingers. She called out in passionate anguish and clung to him with her arms round his neck and sucked on his ear lobe. She wanted more, much more. To be riven by him: deep, powerful thrustings to a sexual rhythm created by their mutual lust. Once she would have hidden such sexual yearnings, from the men deliberately chosen to enhance her and Hannibal’s erotic life together. Hannibal had enjoyed orchestrating those sexual games. All that was over. Here was a man whom she had deeper feelings for; a stranger who made it easy for her to express her sexual self because he held nothing of his own feelings back from her.

Clinging together thus, he carried her down to the master cabin. She turned the door handle and he kicked open the door. Her hands were trembling as she helped him to undress. She explored his body not with her hands but her mouth. She kissed his chest and his nipples, sucked on them, licked his muscular flesh, bit into one of his broad shoulders. Chadwick worked down his body. She caressed his erect and pulsating sex, licked it lovingly before she wrapped her lips round it and slowly, deftly, took him deep into her throat. Only then did she allow herself the luxury of caressing the large, loose and very sensuous sac at its base that she found so thrillingly sexy.

Chadwick’s rendition of oral sex was too sublime. Manoussos was transported into an erotic world from which he knew there was no return, not at least until they were sated with sex. He was on the edge of orgasm, but: Not yet, not now, he told himself. He tried to raise her off her knees but instead she took him down to the carpet to join her. From his knees he rolled on to his back, taking her with him. He placed his hands gently on either side of her head and firmly but slowly eased himself from her warm and sensuous mouth.

Manoussos pulled her up along his body until she blanketed him with her sexuality. She wrapped her arms round his neck and teased and taunted him with a subtle, lazy pelvic rhythm of her own. Though Manoussos was lost in lust for Chadwick, he was not unaware that she was a woman born to seduce, to intrigue men. Body and soul, she was indeed the sexual siren who drew men to her and for which they were prepared to ruin themselves. Lust. Chadwick Chase was pure, irresistible lust.

He bruised her lips with his kisses as together they rolled over so that he was once again in control of this, their first sexual adventure. Together they reached that moment of passion gone wild, sex unbound. She called out as she came in a series of short but violently strong orgasms and begged him, tears in her eyes, to take her.

They were base sexual demands. Chadwick wanted to be ravaged by Manoussos. Her erotic needs were Manoussos’s sexual fantasies come true. Adventurous, dangerous even, they were sexually thrilling, and more so because she and Manoussos knew that he was the man who would take Chadwick where she wanted to go, give them both the pain and the pleasure of sex and orgasm more fulfilling than either of them had ever had before.

Manoussos stroked her hair and kissed her more gently, but never stopped inciting her lust with his caresses and explicit verbal descriptions of the sex they were about to have. She was trembling, on the edge of another orgasm, but now marginally more calm, less fearful that he was not going to answer her heart’s desire. Here was his moment, they were ready for each other. Chadwick was rigid with sexual tension. Suddenly she went
quiet, watching his every movement. He leaned forward and lowered his mouth to graze his lips over hers as he parted those other more intimate lips, making her ready to receive him. ‘And now it really begins for us,’ he told her.

Their kiss was deep and passionate and he took possession of Chadwick, slowly and with infinite joy. His impressive phallus thrilled her as he eased it slowly and in such a seductive way as to give them both the greatest pleasure in this their first intercourse. Chadwick searched for words to express how exquisite, how perfectly blissful it was, how he was transporting her into sexual nirvana. But she was lost for words, all she could do was clench her fists and try and hold back from shouting, ‘Yes, oh God, yes, and more and more.’ She gasped, she whimpered, as he set the pace for his thrusts, created a beat to fuck by. Manoussos was an experienced libertine, but how could Chadwick have known that? She was lost to him, wholly submitting herself so that he might master her sexually.

The pleasure he took in her orgasms as well as his own spurred her on to ask for her own sexual fantasies to be satisfied. After the first few hours they were lost to all worlds except an erotic one where egos die and sexual desire is fulfilled. Through early-evening, the night, and well into the morning, Manoussos and Chadwick died many times for each other in lust and sexual depravity only to rise again fresh and anew until sated. Finally, on returning to the real world of everyday life and some kind of normality, they found themselves committed in love.

Chadwick had always found those first few hours of morning after a night of thrilling sex embarrassingly uncomfortable. Not so this morning. She was happy, at ease with herself and Manoussos, who they were, where they had been, what they had done. Here was a new world for her: one where she was a free sexual being who had met her match. Manoussos was emotionally uncomplicated about sex with her, a man who showed the greatest joy in coming together with her.

In one night he had swept away Chadwick’s years of guilt for being the sexual creature she was. Hannibal had created in her a
heightened sexuality to satisfy both their voracious libidos but at the same time had laid sexual guilt upon her for their lust. He had continued to do so during all the years they had been married. It was Hannibal’s inability to accept his lust and love for her, his so-called morality, that caused him to lay the blame for their sexual appetites at her feet. For years she had begged him to put them both out of their misery and give her that one and only thing that had stopped them from being complete with one another. But after their first sexual encounter, when for several days he had allowed his orgasms to caress her womb, he withdrew absolutely and only ever came over her outer vaginal lips. In all else he had given her everything, they had been each other’s lives. And so she had to satisfy herself with nothing more than the taste of Hannibal.

Manoussos breathed new life into her; together they raised her level of sexual self-esteem. It was as if life had begun again for her the very moment he walked through the door of the restaurant only the afternoon before. Chadwick felt a new woman. How thrilling it was going to be, discovering herself with Manoussos. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

He placed an arm round her shoulders and pulled her to him. They were in a large bed, sumptuous for the many white linen and lace-covered pillows they were lying against. ‘Let’s get dressed and raid the galley. Are you as famished as I am?’ he asked.

‘I could eat a bear.’

‘But could you cook one?’

Chadwick began to laugh. ‘I went to a Cordon Bleu cookery class, part of a finishing school education, but they never mentioned bear. How about eggs, an omelette, one that will make you fall in love with me that little bit more?’

Manoussos liked the teasing note in her voice, the happiness in her eyes. Here was his moment to tell her ‘That’s not possible, I could never love you more than I do now and will never love you less.’

‘You know, I believe you.’

For several seconds they remained silent and locked in togetherness. Neither could hide their happiness, it was there
shining on their faces as bright as a beacon. So this is love, he mused to himself.

It was midday when the crew returned to the
Black Narcissus
and found Manoussos and Chadwick dining in the sun on mushroom, bacon, and chicken liver omelettes, toast and marmalade, and drinking glasses of vintage Krug champagne. There was the usual boisterous Cretan meeting: shaking of hands, slaps on backs. It was difficult to miss the twinkle of envy and respect for Manoussos’s having conquered Chadwick Chase, though no one dare be rude enough to say anything about it to him. They knew the power that Manoussos had and could wield if he so wanted.

It was only when the captain asked Chadwick, ‘What are your plans, Kiria Chase?’ that the lovers realised they had none.

It took Chadwick several awkward minutes before she answered, ‘We will be staying in Crete for some length of time, making it our home base.’ Only then did she dare to look directly at Manoussos. There was an enigmatic smile grazing her lips and her happiness made her lovely seductive looks even more enticing.

Manoussos went directly to Chadwick, placed an arm round her waist and drew her hard against him. ‘I think this calls for a celebration.’

He began refilling their glasses with what was left of the champagne. Chadwick ordered two more bottles and glasses for the captain and crew to be brought up on deck. The crew had their drink and then went about their business on board. The captain asked Chadwick, ‘What are your more immediate plans?’

Once more she looked puzzled, but then turning to Manoussos asked, ‘Well, what do you think? Shall we remain moored here and take excursions by car and boat round the island?’

‘That would be very nice but I’m a working man. We’ll see more of each other if the
Black Narcissus
makes her home base on the other side of the island, in the port of Livakia, my village and the headquarters I work from. Dimitri knows the port well. It’s deep enough for this schooner and is by far the more interesting and wild side of the island.’