Bound to You Read Free Page A

sleazy again.
    ‘No, I already had one before you came home.’ I replied. ‘But I might take all my clothes off and get into bed and wait for you.’
    Quickly, coyly, I pulled off my jersey dress.
    ‘Yes. That is how I like my woman!’
    I rolled my eyes at him once again, and kneeling on the bed in my diaphanous blue underwear, underwear that Christos had bought me, I reached up to plump the pillows. Suddenly, something struck me across my backside.
    ‘Hey! What’s going on?’ I cried, startled, clutching my stinging right cheek.
    Christos stood there in his candy-striped boxers, brandishing the black leather belt. He was laughing uncontrollably. ‘Sorry Nichi
mou
, sorry, I guess I just whipped it off too quickly.’ He had accidentally caught me with the tail end of it as pulled it out of the loop on his trousers.
    ‘Well, do you want to watch what you’re whipping next time, please!’
    ‘Ha ha. I WHIPPED you. Hilarious!’
    When Christos came back he had a question for me. ‘So, Nichi, what do you think about people that like being whipped?’
    ‘Doesn’t do it for me,’ I replied. ‘And I suppose you have to wonder why people enjoy it in the first place. Especially women.’
    ‘I don’t trust it either,’ Christos agreed. ‘But what do you think, is it a kind of self-harm for women, Nichi
mou
?’
    ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘There’s just something about that makes me feel uncomfortable. And anyway, why would you need it if you were having perfectly hot sex in the first place?’
    ‘Exactly!’ Christos grinned and pulled me into him.
    Early the next morning Christos’s phone rang. ‘Mama!’ he murmured, barely forming the word with his lips. As she spoke and he listened, I watched his forehead solidify into creases, until he looked like a pained classical statue.
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘I’ve really got to go help at the garage this weekend. I’ll just fly over on Friday evening after work and come back Monday morning.’
    I felt a prickle of annoyance. It was already Wednesday. ‘Isn’t it a bit of a long way to go just for the weekend? Are they that desperate?’ Christos’s parents worked so hard and I knew that they struggled without him but something about this summoning of him and his readiness to go, set a faint alarm bell ringing.
    ‘They need me, Nichi
mou
. it’s not like it happens all the time.’ He pulled me to him and stroked my cheek. ‘I’ll miss you, Golden Egg, but you’ll be all right. It’ll only be a couple of nights.’
    “OK, well, if they need you,” I sighed.
    “But it means I can’t go to the wedding, Nichi
mou
.”
    Oh. The wedding.

CHAPTER 3
    Later that day, following Christos’s announcement, I decided that I had to try and find a way to attend the wedding alone. I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable ‘where’s your perfect Christos?’ remarks when I turned up without the Greek hero, but it mattered far more that I was there for Laura.
    Since I didn’t have a driving licence, I had been depending on Christos driving us up from London to rural Oxfordshire and back on the day to attend the wedding. I made a new travel plan which involved taking a train, a bus and then a cab to reach the venue. But it would also require me to stay over at a local hotel. I rang around some of them that afternoon, but with just two days’ notice, they were all fully booked.
    On Thursday, I had no choice but to call Laura and tell her I couldn’t make it. It was a slap in the face of our friendship to let Laura down at this stage, and it had sickened me to explain why I could no longer be there. But the fact of the matter was that without Christos, there was just no way that I could get to the wedding.
    That evening when I met Christos at our local pub for a drink, I told him that I’d phoned Laura to officially excuse us. Christos didn’t seem to understand the significance of what I’d just had to do and instead made blithe chat about Laura and her