One Reckless Decision (Mills & Boon M&B): Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past (Special Releases)

by Crews, Caitlin

  “No.” His half smile appeared again, mocked her. “It is not.”

  “I really feel that we must come to some kind of—”

  “We will not come to an agreement,” he interrupted her smoothly, unapologetically. He rose then, in a show of graceful, careless strength, and moved toward her, blocking out her view of the Mediterranean, the sun, the world. He reached across the scant space between them, and tugged on a stray strand of her hair. It was an oddly affectionate gesture, for all that it was also a naked display of possession.

  “I will not promise you such a thing. I will only promise you that if you do not wish it, you need only say so. Isn’t that enough?”

  It would be enough if he were any other man alive, Tristanne thought with no little bitterness. She had never had any trouble at all before, because she had never combusted before at a man’s slightest touch. She had never had to remind herself of all the reasons why she could not simply surrender herself to a man’s fire; she had instead had to come up with reasons why she should bother to go on a second date or return a telephone call.

  “It is a start,” she said eventually, feeling mutinous as she looked at him.

  “If it helps,” he said softly, still far too close, his hands coming to rest on either side of her, caging her against the boat’s rail, “I believe in a more holistic approach. Mind and body as one. You might wish to incorporate that into your seduction plans.”

  “A good seduction does not simply happen,” Tristanne retorted, aware that her voice sounded cross, when, once again, she’d wanted to appear effortless. Easy. “It requires a certain amount of research, of mystery, of planning—”

  “Of this,” he said. He bent and nipped gently at her chin, then pressed his lips to hers. It was not the consuming kiss of before, but it was no less demanding. It was like a brand. A stamp of ownership. Of intent.

  He pulled back, and laughed again, more softly this time. Then he let his hand drop down, tracing a path from her neck, across her collarbone toward her shoulder, and then squeezed the bicep that he had held yesterday.

  She tried to control her immediate wince of pain, but knew she failed when his dark eyes narrowed. He released her immediately.

  “That hurt you?” He frowned.

  “No,” she lied, shame twisting through her, cramping her stomach. “It was a sudden chill, I think…”

  But he ignored her, and drew the billowing sleeve of her shirt up along the length of her arm. Tristanne did not know why she simply stood there and let him do it, as if he had somehow mesmerized her into compliance. But she did.

  He muttered something harsh in Greek, and stared at her upper arm. Tristanne knew what he would see—she had seen the livid marks after her shower this morning, red and blue and black. One for each of Peter’s fingers.

  She felt a rush of that toxic cocktail of shame, rage and fear that always flooded her when Peter’s aggression came out—and when it was noticed. When she was forced to explain that this was how her only sibling treated her. She felt that blackness roll through her, tears much too close—

  “It is nothing,” she said in a low voice, and then, finally, jerked away from him, pushing her sleeve back down. She tilted her chin up, not sure what she would do now. What she would do if she saw even the faintest hint of pity in those dark gold eyes where there had been so much heat—

  But his gaze was unreadable. He only watched her for a long moment, and then stepped away from her in one of those impossibly graceful movements that took her breath away and in the same instant reminded her of how dangerous he was.

  “I must tend to some business affairs,” he told her, towering over her. She told herself that it was the simple fact of his height that made her feel so small, so vulnerable—not what he had just seen. Not what he now knew, that she had never meant to share. “I suggest that you slip into something significantly more revealing and enjoy your indolence. We will dock this evening in Portofino.”

  He sent her another long, intense, unreadable look, and paused for a moment. A shadow moved across his face, and she thought he might speak, but it passed as quickly as it had come. He turned and walked away without another word, leaving her to the tumult of her own thoughts.

  A proper mistress would have availed herself of the opportunity to flaunt her wares, Nikos thought later that afternoon as he concluded another in a long series of tedious phone conferences with business associates in Athens who could not, apparently, follow simple instructions. A malady that was going around.

  An enterprising mistress might have indulged in topless sunbathing, perhaps. Or in the lengthy and comprehensive application of unnecessary lotion while in deliberately provocative poses, having known full well that he was watching. A mistress would have known that a day on a yacht was meant to be spent securing her position, and the best way to achieve that was to make certain her every word and deed served to arouse her protector.

  Tristanne Barbery, yet again, proved that she had no concept at all of what made a decent mistress. She had spent the entire day with her face pressed into a novel. A large, heavy paperback, with exceedingly dense and small print. The sort of novel that announced its reader had thoughts. Deep and complex thoughts, no doubt, which no man sought in his mistress—as she might look to share those deep and complex thoughts with him when he wished only to be soothed and eased and pampered. Still, the book might have been marginally acceptable had she been wearing something appropriate to her station. A miniscule bikini, perhaps, to soak in the Mediterranean sun. One of those gauzy so-called cover-ups that clung to each curve and begged to be removed. But Tristanne, despite what he had told her earlier, quite clearly, he’d thought, had not changed her clothes.

  He would assume she was defying him, deliberately, had he not had the lowering suspicion that she was genuinely caught up in her reading and had forgotten him entirely.

  He had no earthly idea why he found her so entertaining, when she was meant to be no more than the key to his revenge. The means to a long overdue end.

  “Arketa,” he said into the telephone now. “Teliosame etho.”

  He did not need to give the conversation more than a shred of his attention to know that it should end, and now. After some back and forth regarding the details of a particular contract he had expected to have signed weeks before, he finished the call. He rubbed his hands over his face, leaning back in the great leather chair that sat behind the highly polished wood of his desk. He knew that if he turned around and looked out the window, he would see Tristanne as she had been for hours now—curled up on one of the bright white loungers beneath an umbrella out on the deck, her attention entirely focused on the book in her hands.

  But he did not need to turn, because the image was already seared into his brain. Why should he find her so arousing? So amusing? Why did he feel a smile on his own lips, even now, when he was alone?

  His reaction to her was unusual. He had never experienced anything like it—it was intriguing as much as it was unwelcome. He had had women who fulfilled every last “requirement” he had laid out for Tristanne this morning. Many of them. And none of them had interested him half as much as this one, who was, if today was any indication, shaping up to be, quite possibly, the worst mistress of all time.

  He turned without meaning to do so, and sure enough, she was still in the same position on the plush lounge chair. Her knees were pulled up, and she frowned as she read, oblivious to the world around her—and to his gaze from the window above. Her dark blonde hair was back in another forbidden twist, though strands flew free in the breeze from the ocean, and she nibbled gently on one finger with that lush mouth of hers that he was not nearly done with, not yet. He felt desire pulse in his sex, low and insistent.

  He wondered what game she thought she was playing, still. Did she think she would win it? Did she imagine that Nikos Katrakis was the posturing, toothless dog that her brother was? She would learn soon enough that he could not be leashed.

  His mo
od darkened immediately at the thought of Peter Barbery—but not, for once, with thoughts of the damage Peter had wrought so long ago on what had passed for Nikos’s family. Instead he thought only of those bruises on Tristanne’s otherwise flawless flesh—bruises he had no doubt whatsoever Peter had put there.

  He was surprised at the smoldering rage that rolled through his gut, and the possessive edge to it that fanned it on. It was no more than any man must feel when faced with evidence that another of his sex was no better than an animal, he told himself resolutely. He did not prey upon the weak and innocent like Peter Barbery.

  Except for Tristanne—

  But he did not allow himself to finish the thought, because it was impossible. Tristanne Barbery, sister of his sworn enemy, had not walked up to him and demanded he kiss her in front of some seventy witnesses by divine accident. She had had an agenda from the first—one that was very obvious to Nikos, for all that she tried to weave her desperate webs to conceal it. She had no interest in the role she’d claimed to want, and no talent for it, either. Nikos didn’t know yet what she did want, but he did know that the fact she was not what she claimed to be meant she could not possibly be an innocent in all of this. She could not.

  She was a Barbery. How could anything else matter? She was a Barbery—and that was all Nikos needed to know. That was all there was to know.

  She might entertain him in a way he had not imagined a woman could, but that was of no matter. He might want her in a way he had not expected, but then, he had never been one to deny his appetites, no matter how inconvenient. He could use all of that for his own ends.

  It would in no way prevent him from taking his revenge.

  “Tell me,” Nikos said that evening, his low voice making the fine hairs all over Tristanne’s body stand at attention. “Does your brother often leave his mark upon your skin?”

  It was the first time he had spoken since they’d left the yacht, and his voice seemed to echo off of the cobblestone street around them, ricocheting off of the famous yellow and pink pastel buildings of Portofino that clustered in a sparkling curve around the pretty, tiny harbor, and stood out against the green hills of pine, cypress and olive that rose steeply behind them. Or perhaps she only thought so, as she flexed her bruised arm slightly in response and felt that twist of shame roll through her again. That deep, black despair.

  Tristanne took a quick breath to dispel it, and snuck a glance at the striking man who walked so quietly, so deliberately, at her side. His mood had changed considerably over the course of the day. Gone was the mockery and the sly insinuations; the man who met her for dinner after the sun had set in a red and orange inferno above the turquoise sea was quiet and watchful now. Brooding. He walked beside her with his hands thrust into the pockets of his dark trousers, a crisp white shirt beneath his expertly tailored jacket, which hugged the contours of his broad, muscled shoulders intimately.

  “Of course not,” Tristanne said. She was surprised to hear her own voice sounded so hushed, as if she expected to hear it tossed back from the hills, her lie repeated into every passing ear. She frowned at her feet, telling herself that she was concentrating on walking in her high, wedged sandals over such tricky, ancient ground. That was all. That was the only reason she felt so unsettled, so unbalanced.

  She wished she had not dressed for him. She wished even more that she did not know perfectly well that she had done so. At first she did not understand how she had found herself in this particular dress, an enticing column of gold that reminded her of his eyes. It poured over her curves from two delicate wisps of spaghetti straps at her shoulders and swished enticingly around her calves as she moved. She did not know why she had left her hair down, so that it swirled around her upper arms and her naked back, nor why she had dabbed scent behind her ears and between her breasts, so that it breathed with her as she moved. Why she had so carefully outlined her eyes with a soft pencil, or why she had darkened her lashes with a sooty mascara. It was as if someone else, some other Tristanne, had done those things, made those choices.

  Until she had walked out onto the deck, and seen him, and then she’d known exactly what she’d been doing, and why. That knowledge poured into her, filling her and washing through her, nearly making her stumble as she walked. Her motivations were suddenly as clear to her as if she’d written them out in a bullet-point list. As if they were glass. It had been all for that quicksilver gleam in his eyes when he looked around from his position at the railing and saw her. That sudden flare of heat in his old coin eyes, quickly shuttered.

  And what did that make her, already far too susceptible to the one man to whom she could never, ever surrender herself? What in the world did she think she was doing with him—when she should have thought of nothing but her necessary goal? Her poor mother? She should have dressed in sackcloth and ashes—anything to repel him.

  But she did not wish to repel him, a traitorous voice whispered. Not really. Perhaps not at all. She pulled her wrap closer around her shoulders, and frowned intently at the cobblestones beneath her feet as they made their way along the harborside quay toward the bustling center of the small village.

  “That is all you have to say?” Nikos asked, a certain tenseness in his voice. Tristanne looked at him then, no less imposing in the soft, Italian night than he was in the stark light of morning.

  “Must I defend my family?” she asked, with a casual sort of shrug that she did not feel. She had perfected it over the years, to deflect exactly this kind of attention. “All families have their little skirmishes, do they not? Their bad behavior and regrettable scenes?”

  “I am no expert on families,” he said, with a derisive snort. “But I am fairly certain most restrain themselves from physical displays of violence. Or should.”

  “I bruise very easily,” Tristanne murmured dismissively. Better Peter should take out his rage on her than on Vivienne, Tristanne thought, as she always had. She did not want to think about the way Peter’s fingers had dug into her flesh, nor the words he had thrown at her, his face contorted in fury. And she did not want to talk about this. Not with Nikos. Not ever. She felt the punch of something edgy and heavy in her gut, but she struggled to repress it.

  Not now, she ordered herself fiercely, blinking back the heat behind her eyes. Not with him. It does not matter what I dreamed of when I was seventeen—he can be nothing to me!

  Nikos stopped walking, and she did, too, turning toward him warily. He stood with his back to the famous Piazzetta, the faint breeze from the water playing through his thick, black hair. His gaze was dark, troubled.

  “What kind of man is your brother, that he would put his hands on you in this way?” he asked, condemnation ringing in his voice. “Surely your father would not have countenanced such behavior, were he still alive.”

  It was the certainty in his voice that did it, somehow. It was all…too much. Tristanne flushed hot with that toxic mixture of shame and fury, and it was all directed at the man who stood there before her, beautiful and disapproving in the lights that spilled from the restaurants that lined the Piazzetta.

  It was all his fault! He was beguiling when he should have disgusted her, and she hated that he knew what Peter had done. That he knew exactly how little her own brother thought of her. What did that say about her? About how worthless her own brother found her?

  And what did it say about her that she cared what this man thought about it? About her? When his thoughts should not matter to her at all?

  “What kind of man is Peter?” she asked, her temper kicking in again, harder, and scalding her from within. At least it was better than tears. Anything was better than tears. “I don’t know how to answer that. A typical man? A normal man? They are all more or less the same, are they not?” She felt wild, as if she careened down a narrow mountain pass, out of control and reckless.

  The elegant arch of his dark brows did nothing to stop her. “Careful, Tristanne,” he said softly, but she did not wish to be careful.

&nb
sp; “They control. They demand. They issue orders and care not at all for the feelings or wishes of anyone around them.” She threw her words at him like blows, for all the good it did her. He did not move. He did not flinch. He only stared at her with eyes that grew darker by the second. And still she continued. “They crush and flatten and maim as they see fit. What is a little bruise next to everything else a man is capable of? Next to what you are capable of, for that matter?”

  It seemed as if the world stopped turning. As if nothing existed save her labored breathing and the sounds of la dolce vita all around, spilling out of the cafés and trattorias and somehow failing to penetrate the tense, tight bubble that surrounded them.

  She did not want to feel this way. She wanted to play her part the way she’d planned—bright and easy and seductive—and instead she kept tripping herself up on her own jagged emotions. Was it him? Was he the reason she could not control herself the way she wanted to—the way she had prided herself on doing the whole of her adult life? Her control had saved her in tense interactions with her family—why couldn’t she summon it now?

  Nikos did not move, and yet he seemed to loom over her, around her, filling her senses and her vision. Filling the whole universe with his smooth muscles, his dangerous mouth, his molten gold eyes with that hard edge within. Just as she feared he would do. Just as she knew he would.

  He reached over and brushed her hair back from her face with a gentleness that belied the tension she could feel shimmering between them, then followed a long strand down toward her neck, pulling it between his fingers as if he could not quite bear to let it drop. His mouth moved as his hand returned to his side, but then he shook his head slightly, as if thinking better of whatever he had been about to say.

  A couple strolled too close to them on the narrow quay, almost jostling into Tristanne. But Nikos shot out a hand again and moved her out of the way, his touch shocking against her skin for all that it was protective, even kind. He did not speak, but he did not drop his hand from her forearm, either. Tristanne imagined she could see the force of his touch, the feel of it, dancing over her like light, illuminating all of her hidden places, her shadows.