by Tara Pammi
If she’d had any doubt what he thought of her, he’d just decimated it.
She had fallen in love with a man who thought she was good for sex and nothing else.
A need to claw back pounded through her. “I’m shallow and vapid, si, but what you see is what you get. I don’t make false promises, Kairos.”
The silence reverberated with his shock. “I’ve never made a promise to you that I didn’t keep. I promised your brother to keep you in style when I agreed to marry you and I did. I promised you on the night of our engagement that I would show you pleasure unlike anything you’ve ever known and I believe I kept that promise.”
I never said I loved you.
His unsaid statement hung in the air.
No...he hadn’t said it. Not once.
It had all been her.
Stupid, naive Valentina building castles of love around this hard man.
She found no bump on Nikolai’s thick skull and sighed with relief. His head lolling onto her chest, he fell asleep with an undignified snore. She’d have gagged at the sweat from Nikolai’s flushed head trickling down her meager cleavage if all her reactions weren’t attuned to the man behind her.
The small hairs on her neck stood up before Kairos spoke. “Leave him alone.”
Ignoring him, she rose to her feet, and planted her hands under Nikolai’s arms.
“Move, Valentina.”
Before she could blink, Kairos hefted Nikolai up onto his shoulders and raised a brow at her.
He had carried her like that once, the hard muscles of his shoulders digging into her belly, his big hands wrapped around her upper thighs, after she had jumped into the pool at a business retreat in front of his colleagues and their wives because he’d ignored her all weekend.
He’d stripped her and thrown her into the cold shower, rage simmering in his eyes. And when he’d extracted her from the shower and rubbed her down, all that rage had converted into passion.
She’d been self-destructive just to get a rise out of him.
She looked away from the memory of that night in his eyes.
Masculine arrogance filled his eyes. “Now that the poor fool has served his purpose, shall I throw him overboard?”
“His purpose?”
“You used him to make me jealous—laughing at his jokes, dancing with him, touching him, to rile my temper. It is done, so you don’t need him anymore.”
“I told you, Nik is my friend.” She jerked her gaze to his face and flushed. “And I did nothing tonight with you on my mind. My world doesn’t revolve around you, Kairos. Not anymore.” She wouldn’t ask whether his temper was riled.
She wouldn’t.
With a shrug, he dumped Nikolai on the bed like a sack of potatoes.
Nik’s soft snores punctured the silence. If she weren’t so caught up in the confusing cascade of emotions Kairos evoked, the whole thing would have been hilarious.
But nothing could cut through her awareness of six feet four inches of pure muscle and utter masculinity. She pressed her fingers to her temple. “Please leave now.”
“Enough, Valentina. You’ve got my attention now. Tell me, did you really sign up with the escort service or was that just a dramatic touch to push me over the edge?”
“Are you asking me if I’ve been prostituting myself all these months?” She was proud of how steady she sounded while her heart thundered away in her chest.
“I thought perhaps no first. But knowing you and your vicious tendencies, who knows how far you went to shock me, to teach me a lesson, to bring me to heel?”
She walked to the door and held it for Kairos. “Get out.”
He leaned against the foot of the bed, dwarfing the room with his presence. “You’re not staying here with him.”
She folded her hands and tilted her head. The sheer breadth of his shoulders sucked the air from the room. “I’ve been doing what and who I want since the day I left you nine months ago, since I realized what a joke our marriage is. So it’s a little late to play the possessive husband.”
Hadn’t she promised herself that she’d never stoop to provoking him like that again?
She cringed, closed her eyes at the dirty, inflammatory insinuation in her own words.
But she saw the imperceptible lick of fire in his gaze, the tiny flinch of that cruel upper lip. At one time, the little fracture in his control would have been a minor victory to her.
Not anymore.
“It is a good thing then, is it not, Valentina—” the way he said her name sent a curl of longing through her “—that I did not believe all your passionate avowals of love, ne?”
Something vibrated in the smooth calmness of his tone. The presence of that anger was a physical slap. Her eyes wide, she stared as he continued, his mouth taking on a cruel tilt.
“No more pathetic displays of your jealousy. No grand declarations of love. No snarling at and slapping every woman I’m friends with. Now we both can work with each other on the same footing.”
Dios, she’d always been a melodramatic fool. But Kairos, his inability to feel anything, his unwillingness to share a thought, an emotion...it had turned her into much worse. “Non, Kairos. No more of that,” she agreed tiredly.
She didn’t even have cash for a taxi, but if she’d learnt anything in the last nine months of this flailing about she’d been doing in the name of independence, it was that she could survive.
She could survive without designer clothes and shoes, she could survive without the adulation she’d taken as her due as the fashionista that Milan looked up to, she could survive without the Conti villa and the cars and the expensive lifestyle.
She picked up her clutch from the bed, her phone from the floor. “If you won’t leave, I will.”
He blocked the door with his shoulders. “Not dressed like a cheap hooker, strutting for business at dawn, you’re not.”
“I don’t want—”
“I will throw you over my shoulder and lock you up in the stateroom.”
It should have sounded dramatic, emotional. But Kairos didn’t do drama. Didn’t utter a word he didn’t mean. And if he so much as touched her...
“Fine. Let’s talk.” She threw her clutch back on the bed and faced him. “Even better, why don’t you call your lawyer and have him bring divorce papers? I’ll sign them right now and we won’t see each other ever again.”
He didn’t exactly startle. But again, Tina had the feeling that something in him became alert. She had...surprised him? Shocked him?
What did he think her leaving him had meant?
He stretched out his wrists, undid the cufflinks on his right hand—platinum cufflinks she’d bought him for their three-month anniversary with her brother’s credit card—and pushed back the sleeve.
A shiver of anticipation curled around her spine.
He stretched his left hand toward her. Being left-handed, he’d always undone the right cuff link first. But the right hand...his fingers didn’t do fine motor skills well. She’d noted it on their wedding night, how they had felt clumsy when he tried to do anything.
For a physically perfect specimen of masculinity, it had been a shock to note that the fingers of his right hand didn’t work quite right. When she’d asked if he’d hurt his hand, he’d kissed her instead. The second time she’d asked, he’d just shrugged.
His usual response when he didn’t want to talk.
She’d taken his left hand in hers and deftly undone the cufflink on their wedding night. And a thousand times after that.
It was one of a hundred rituals they’d had as man and wife. Such intimacy in a simple action. So much history in an everyday thing.
Tina stared at the blunt, square nails now, her breath ballooning up in her chest; the long fingers sprinkled with hair to the plain platinum band on his ring finger; the rough calluses on his palm because he didn’t wear gloves when he lifted weights. It was a strong, powerful hand and yet when he touched her in the most sensitive places, it was capable of such fea
thery, tender movements.
A sheen of sweat coated every inch of her skin.
Dios, she couldn’t bear to touch him.
Without meeting his gaze, she took a few steps away from him. “What do I have to do to make you believe that I’m done with this marriage? That my behavior is not dictated anymore by trying to get you to acknowledge my existence?”
He smirked, noting the distance she’d put between them. “Is that what you did during our marriage?”
She leaned against the opposite wall and shrugged. “I want to talk about the divorce.”
“You really want one?”
“Si. Whatever we had was not healthy and I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
“So Leandro enlightened you about the fat settlement you will receive then.”
“What?”
“Your brother made sure you would receive a huge chunk of everything I own should we separate. Bloody insistent, if I remember correctly.” His shrug highlighted those muscle-packed shoulders. “Maybe Leandro knew how hard you would make it for any man to stay married to you.”
“You think that will hurt me? Leandro...” Her voice caught, the gulf she had put between her brothers and her a physical ache. “He practically raised me, he loved me when he could have hated me for our mother deserting him and Luca. And I still cut him out of my life because he thought so little of me that he had to bribe you to marry me. In the grand scheme of things that I’ve lost and learned, this marriage and anything I get by dissolving it...they mean nothing to me, Kairos.”
He was upon her in the blink of an eye. The scent of him—a hint of male sweat and the mild thread of his cologne—hit her first. Awareness pooled low in her belly. He didn’t touch her, and yet the heat of his body was a languid caress.
“How will you afford your haute couture and your designer stilettos then?”
“I haven’t touched your credit cards in months. I haven’t taken a single Euro from Leandro or Luca. Even the clothes I wear belong to Nikolai.”
“Ah...” His gaze raked down the length of her body. The edge of cruelty in it stole her breath even as her skin tingled at his perusal. He nodded toward the happily snoring figure behind him on the bed. “Of course, your pimp dresses you now.”
“Nikolai is not a pimp and he tricked me into believing tonight was just a party.”
“I have to admit, only Valentina Constantinou could make a tacky, slinky dress look stylish and sophisticated. But that skill is not really helping, is it? Paris chewed you out and threw you back to Milan after a mere two months. Since then, you’ve been licking the boots of everyone at that fashion magazine. Fetching coffee for those bitchy socialites, when you had once been their queen bee, running errands in the rain for photographers and models that salivated over you for years...” His gaze swept over her in that dismissive way of his. “Have you had enough of reality? Are you ready to return to your life of luxury?”
She wasn’t surprised he knew what she’d been up to in the last few months. “I don’t care how long it takes, I mean to—”
“Is that why you decided to try your hand at the oldest profession in the world?”
“You’re the one who bought me from Leandro, remember? If anyone made me a whore, Kairos, it was you.” Every hurt she felt poured out into her words, all her promises to herself to keep it civil forgotten.
“I did not pursue you under false pretenses. I did not take you to bed, hoping that a good performance would bring me closer to the CEO position of the Conti board.”
A blaze lit up in his silvery eyes, tight lines fanning around his mouth.
He tugged her and Tina fell onto him with a soft gasp. Hard muscles pushed against her breasts, sending shock waves through her. “Believe me, pethi mou, if there is one aspect of our marriage that both of us agree on, it is in bed.”
His fingers wrapped around her nape in a possessive hold, a flicker of arousal and something else etched onto his features.
“You’re the one who broke our marriage vows, Valentina. You’re the one who avowed her love in passionate statements and sensational gestures, ne? Again and again. All I wanted was a civil marriage. Then, the fickle, spoilt brat that you are, you ran away because your little fantasy world where you rule as a queen and I fall at your feet crumbled. You leave no note. No message. You tell my security guard you’re visiting your damned brothers. I imagined you kidnapped and waited for a ransom note. I imagined your body lying in some morgue because you met with an accident. I imagined one of the women or men you insulted with your cruel words may have been pushed to the limit and wrung your pretty neck.”
Heart thundering, Valentina stared.
His fingers dug into her tender flesh with a grip she was sure would leave bruises. She’d never seen him like this, smoldering with a barely banked fire. “Until Leandro took pity on me and informed me that you had simply walked out on me. On our marriage.”
Tina sagged against the wall, a strange twisting in her belly. He had been worried about her safety. Terrified for her. “I’m... I’m sorry. I didn’t think...”
“Too little, too late.”
He was right. If nothing else, he deserved an explanation. “I was furious with you and with Leandro. I had just learned that I was not a Conti but a bastard child my mother had with her chauffeur. That you married me as part of a bloody deal. You’ve had nine months to come after me.” The words slipped past her tongue, desperate, pathetic.
And just like that, any emotion she had spied in his eyes was wiped away. He stared at his fingers pressing into her flesh, his other hand kneading her hip.
His eyes widened fractionally before he stepped back. Stopped touching her. “The moment Leandro informed me what you’d done, I stopped thinking of you. I had other matters—urgent, important matters—to deal with rather than chase my impulsive brat of a wife through Europe.”
A fist to her heart would have been less painful.
But this was good, Tina reassured herself. She’d needed this talk with him. She’d needed to hear these words from Kairos’s mouth. Now, she could stop wondering—in the middle of the night, alone in her bed—if she’d made a mistake.
If their marriage deserved another chance.
After tonight, she wouldn’t have to see him again. Never hear those hateful words again. “Bene. You had important matters and I had enough time to think my decision through. I had nine months to realize what I did on impulse was right. I do not care whether you pay me alimony or not because I would not touch it. I intend to make something out of myself.”
“By whoring yourself out to Russian investors? By dressing like a cheap tramp? Admit it, Valentina. You’ve gotten nowhere in nine months except ending up with that buffoon who wants to get in your pants. You have no talent. No skills. Your connections were the only things of value about you.”
“I know that. Believe me, I have learned a lifetime’s worth of lessons in these nine months. The only good thing about this is that whatever connections you thought I would bring you as the Conti heiress are now lost.”
“Your brothers haven’t disowned you.”
“I have cut all my connections with them. With that life. I’m of no more use to you.”
“Ah...so that is your petty revenge? To deny what I planned to get by cutting yourself off from your brothers temporarily?”
“You give both me and your role in my life too much credit, Kairos. I love my brothers. Every day I spend away from them tears my heart. But it is the price I have to pay to face myself in the mirror.”
Finally, it seemed that she was getting through to him. And still, ruthlessness was etched onto his every feature. “This marriage is not done until I say it is done.”
“All I want is a teeny signature on a piece of paper. Ask me to sign away that alimony Leandro set up and I will. I will do anything you ask of me to be released from this marriage. You already wrote me out of your life when you decided not to come after me nine months ago, Kairos.
I was nothing but a disappointment to you. So why drag this on? Is it just because your masculine pride is dented? Is it because, once again, I made you lose your rigid self-control?”
“Whether you want it or not, whether you touch it or not, half of what is mine will be yours for years to come. If I’m going to pay through the nose for the mistake of indulging you in your foolish fantasies of everlasting love, for putting up with your temper tantrums, for the pleasure of having you in my bed, I would like three more months of marriage, agapita. And maybe, a little more of you for that price tag.”
“A little more of me for that price...” Tina whispered, his words gouging through her already battered heart.
Her hand flew at him, outrage filling her every pore.
His lightning-fast reflexes didn’t let her slap land. With a gentleness that belied the hard, wiry strength of his body, he held her wrist between them, crowding her body against the wall until it kissed the line of her spine.
Hardness and heat, he was so male. Her five-inch stilettos made up for the height difference between them until she was perfectly molded against him. Muscular thighs straddled hers. His granite chest grazed the tips of her breasts, making her nipples tighten and ache. And against her belly... Maledizione, his arousal was lengthening and hardening.
Damp heat uncurled between Tina’s thighs. A whimper flew from her mouth—a needy and desperate plea for more. She clenched her thighs on instinct. “I do not even use my hands or my mouth. Yet you’re damp and ready for me, ne?”
Breath shallow, she fought for control over her body, over the hunger he lit so easily. “As you said, it’s why other men follow me around. I’m hot and uninhibited in bed, si? I could always match your sexual appetite and we both know it’s insatiable. That I’m like a bitch in heat right now is not a point in your favor. You give good sex, Kairos. It was the one place where I was happy as your wife.”
A lick of temper awakened in his silver eyes. “Tell me, Valentina. Do you get hot like this for any other man? For the fool lying in the bed behind us?” He twisted his hips in that way of his.
His erection rubbed against the lips of her sex and she jerked.