Tariq closed the distance between them, his expression unreadable. But this was not about sex, explosive as it had always been between them. This was about something bigger.
That must be why she wanted to collapse into sobs.
“Don’t!” Jessa whispered, though she did not move—did not make any attempt to avoid him. “This is hard enough, Tariq! Please do not—”
He silenced her with his mouth upon hers, his hand fisting in the mess of her curls. He kissed her until she melted against him, soft and pliant against his hardness despite everything, until her arms crept around his neck and she kissed him back with a matching ferocity. He kissed her until she couldn’t tell who moaned, who sighed, while the fire of their connection raged between them, incinerating them both in a delicious blaze.
“I love you,” he told her in a low voice when he tore his mouth away from hers, his gaze dark and green and so serious it made Jessa gasp.
She searched his face, not daring to believe she had heard him right. She even shook her head, as if to refute it.
Tariq smiled.
“I have never loved another woman,” he said. “I never will. How can you doubt it? I longed for you for five long years. I hunted you to the ends of the earth.”
“York is not the ends of the earth,” she said, absurdly. He traced a line down her jaw, still smiling.
“That depends where you start.” He sighed. “Jessa. What are you so afraid of? Did I not tell you what would happen if I brought you here?”
She remembered he had been angry, but she also remembered what he had said—that he would keep any woman he brought to his palace. But she could not seem to get her head around it. She could not seem to believe.
“That was a long time ago,” Jessa whispered.
“I will marry you,” he said, as if there had never been any other possibility.
“You cannot!” she cried, hard emotions racking her, fear scraping through her, leaving her trembling in his arms. “I do not deserve you! Not after—” Her eyes swam with tears, blurring the world, but she could still see him, so strong and intent. “I gave him away, Tariq. I gave him up.”
“And we will miss him,” Tariq replied after a moment, his voice thick with his own emotions. “Together.”
Jessa let out a breath and, with it, something tight and frozen seemed to thaw, letting light and hope begin to trickle through her. Letting her wonder, what if?
He pressed his lips against her forehead. In a softer tone, yet no less demanding, no less sure, he said, “And we will have another child, Jessa. Not as a replacement. Never as a replacement. As a new beginning. This I promise you.”
The tears spilled over now, wetting her cheeks. She touched his face, an echo of that cold day when Tariq had finally understood the magnitude of what she had given up, and why. Jeremy would be an ache they carried with them for the rest of their lives, day in and day out. But for the first time, she dared to hope that they would carry it together across the years, making it easier to bear that way. And someday, only if he wished it, they would tell Jeremy the story of how much he was loved, and how well.
“Yes,” she breathed, her heart too full to let her smile. “We will be a family.”
“We will,” he said gruffly, and something powerful and true swelled between them then, and seemed to spread out around them to fill the room.
The thought of making a child with Tariq—deliberately—in joy and in love, and then raising that child together as she had always wanted to believe they were meant to do…It was almost too overwhelming.
Almost.
“I haven’t agreed to any marriage,” Jessa told Tariq then, with a small smile, while an intoxicating cocktail of hope and joy surged through her. She could feel it inexorably changing her with every second. Could dreams come true after all, after everything they had been through? After all that they had done? Was it possible?
Looking at him, she dared to believe it for the first time.
She was still twined around him, her legs astride one of his and her sex pressed intimately against his thigh. He moved slightly and made her groan as that sweet, delirious heat rocked through her.
“I suggest you get used to the idea,” Tariq said, a smile in his voice, his eyes. “This is my country. I do not require your agreement.” He kissed her again, capturing her lower lip between his teeth for a moment before releasing her. He smiled. “Though I would like it.”
“Yes,” she said softly, wonder rolling through her, making her feel as incandescent as the desert sun. Only with Tariq. Only for him. “Yes, I will marry you.”
“You will be happy, Jessa,” he vowed, fiercely, sweeping her up off the floor, high against his chest. She wrapped her legs around his waist and gripped tight to his shoulders, looking down at him as he held her. At the jade eyes that so consumed her that she had bought a necklace to match, so she might have something like him to look at when he was away. At this man she had loved for so long, and in so many different ways. Her playboy lover. Her king. Her husband.
“You will be happy,” he said again, frowning at her as if he dared her to disagree.
“Is that your royal decree?” she asked, laughing as he whirled her around and tipped her backward onto the soft bed behind them. He fell with her, following her down and then bracing himself on his arms before he crashed into her.
“I am the king,” he said, leaning over her. “My word is law.”
“I am to be the queen,” she said, shivering slightly as the idea of it began to truly take hold. She would have this man forever. She would be able to hold him like this, love him like this. She felt her eyes well up as she reached between them to trace his mouth, the hard planes of his face. Harsh, forbidding. Hers.
“So my word should also be law, should it not?” she asked.
“If you wish it.”
Jessa smiled and lifted her head to kiss him, sweet and more sure than she had ever been of anything.
“Then we will be happy,” she said and, for the first time, truly believed it, with all of her heart and soul. “Because I say so.”
Katrakis’s Last Mistress
Caitlin Crews
To Liza, who dreamed of gold-eyed dragons, Jane, who knew I couldn’t pull that punch, and Jeff, who makes it easy to write about heroes.
Chapter One
NIKOS KATRAKIS was by far the most dangerous man aboard the sleek luxury yacht. Ordinarily Tristanne Barbery would take one look at a man like him—so dark and powerful her breath caught each time she gazed at him from her place within sight of the elegant marble-topped bar where he stood—and flee for her life in the opposite direction.
Any man who seemed to dim the sparkling blue-green waters of the Mediterranean Sea with his very presence was far too complicated, far too much for Tristanne. This is not about you, she told herself fiercely, then ordered herself to release the fingers she’d clenched into fists. She willed away her nausea, her shakiness. Her panic. Because this was not, indeed, about Tristanne. It was about her mother and her mother’s crippling, impossible debts. And she would do whatever she had to do to save her mother.
There were other rich and powerful men aboard the boat, rubbing expensively clad shoulders together while gazing at the glittering shores of the Côte d’Azure: the olive-clad hills and pastel waterfront facades of Villefranche-sur-Mer to the left, the red-topped villas of Cap Ferrat to the right, and the sparkling sweep of Villefranche Bay spread out around them in the late afternoon sun.
But Nikos Katrakis was different from the rest. It wasn’t simply because he owned this particular yacht, though his ownership was as clear as a brand—almost visible, Tristanne thought; almost seeming to emanate from him in waves. It wasn’t even the undeniable physical power he seemed to just restrain beneath his deceptively calm surface, even dressed as casually as he was, in denim trousers and a white dress shirt left open at the neck to display a swathe of dark olive skin.
It was him.
It
was the way he stood, commanding and yet so remote, so alone, even in the center of his own party. There was a fierce, unmistakably male energy that hummed from him, attracting notice but keeping all but the most brave away. He would have been devastating enough if he were unattractive—he was that powerful.
But of course, Nikos Katrakis was not, in any sense of the word, unattractive. Tristanne felt a shiver of awareness trace its way down her spine, and she could not bring herself to look away. He was more powerful than her late father had been but not, she thought, as cold. And somehow she could sense that he was no brute, like her brother, Peter—a man so cruel he had refused to pay her mother’s medical bills, a man so heartless he had laughed in the face of Tristanne’s desperation.
Yet something about Nikos made her think he was different, made her think of dragons—as if he was that magical and that dangerous; as if he was epic. He was too virile. Too masculine. His power seemed to hum around him like an electric current. Dragon, she thought again, and her palms suddenly itched to sketch the bold, almost harsh lines of his face—though she knew that was exactly the sort of thing Peter so scorned. There was no explaining creativity to her overbearing brother.
But all of that was precisely why Nikos Katrakis was the only man who would do. She was wasting time simply gazing at him, trying to get up her nerve, when she knew Peter would be searching for her before too long. She knew he did not trust her, no matter that she had agreed to go along with his plan. And she would go along with it, or seem to, but she would do it on her terms, not his. And she would do so with the one man Peter hated above all others—the one man Peter viewed as his chief business rival.
She had moved beyond nervous into something else—something that made her pulse flutter and her knees feel like syrup. She could only hope that it didn’t show, that he would see what her brother, Peter, claimed everyone saw when they looked at her: nothing but Barbery ice.
It’s about time you used your assets to our advantage, Peter had said in his cold voice. Tristanne shook the memory away, determined not to react to him any further—even in her own mind. Not when so much was at stake. Her mother’s survival. The independence she had fought so hard to win. Tristanne sucked in a fortifying breath, sent up a little prayer and forced herself to walk right up to Nikos Katrakis himself before she talked herself out of it.
Nikos looked up from his drink at the polished wood and marble-topped bar and their eyes met. Held. His eyes were the color of long-steeped tea, shades lighter than the thick, dark hair on his head and the dark brows that arched above, making them seem to glow like old gold. They seared into her. Tristanne’s breath caught, and a restless heat washed over her, scalding her. The sounds of the high-class partygoers, their clinking glasses and cultured laughter, disappeared. Her anxiety and her purpose fell away as if they had never been. It was as if the whole world—the glittering expanse of the French Riviera, the endless blue-green Mediterranean Sea—faded into his hot, gold gaze. Was consumed by him, enveloped into him—changed by him, that fanciful voice whispered in the back of her mind.
“Miss Barbery,” he said in greeting, his native Greek coloring his words just slightly, adding a rough caress to his voice. It sounded like a command, though he did not alter his careless position, lounging so indolently against the bar, one hand toying with his glass of amber-colored liquor. He watched her with old, intent eyes. The hairs on the back of Tristanne’s neck stood at attention, letting her know that he was not at all what he seemed.
Something wild and unexpected uncoiled inside of her, making her breath stutter. Shocking her with its sudden intensity.
He was not careless. He was in no way relaxed. He was only pretending to be either of those things.
But then, she was banking on that. Surely her brother, who cared only about money and power, would not be as obsessed as he was about this man unless he was a worthy opponent.
“You know my name?” she asked. She managed to keep her composure despite the humming reaction that shimmered through her, surprising and unsettling her. It was the Barbery family trait, she thought with no little despair: she could appear to be perfectly unruffled while inside, she was a quivering mess. She had learned it at her father’s emotionless knee—or suffered the consequences. And she wanted only to use this man for her own ends, not succumb to his legendary charisma. She had to be strong!
“Of course.” One dark brow rose higher, while his full, firm lips twisted slightly. “I pride myself on knowing the names of all my guests. I am a Greek. Hospitality is not simply a word to me.”
There was a rebuke in there somewhere. Tristanne’s stomach twisted in response, while he looked at her with eyes that saw too much. Like he was a cat and she a rather dim and doomed mouse.
“I have a favor to ask you,” she blurted out, unable to play the game as she ought to—as she’d planned so feverishly once she’d realized where Peter was taking her this afternoon. There was something in the way Nikos regarded her—so calm, so direct, so powerfully amused—that made her feel as if the glass of wine she’d barely tasted earlier had gone straight to her head.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, surprised to feel a flush heating her cheeks. She, who up until this moment had considered herself unable to blush! “I wanted to work up to that. You must think I am the rudest person alive.”
His dark brows rose, and his wicked mouth curved slightly, though his enigmatic eyes did not waver, nor warm. “You have not yet asked this favor. Perhaps I will reserve judgment until you do.”
Tristanne had the sudden sense that she was more at risk, somehow, standing in front of Nikos Katrakis in full view of so many strangers than she was from Peter and his schemes. It was an absurd thought. You must be strong! she reminded herself, but she couldn’t seem to shake that feeling of danger.
Or stop what came next. What had to come next—even though she knew, suddenly, with a deep, feminine wisdom that seemed like a weight in her bones, that this was a mistake of unfathomable proportions. That she was going to regret stirring up this particular hornet’s nest. That she, who prided herself on being so capable, so independent, did not have what it took to handle a man like this. One should never rush heedlessly into a dragon’s lair. Anyone who had ever read a fairy tale knew better! She bit her lower lip, frowning slightly as she looked at him, feeling as if she fell more and more beneath his dark gold spell by the moment. It was if he was a trap, and she had walked right into it.
The trouble was, that didn’t seem to frighten her the way it should. And in any case, she had no choice.
“The favor?” he prompted her, something sardonic moving across his face. Almost as if he knew what she planned to ask him—but that was silly. Of course he could not know. Of all the things that Tristanne knew about Nikos Katrakis—that he was ruthless and magnetic in equal measure, that he had clawed his way from illegitimacy and poverty into near-un-imaginable wealth and influence with the sheer force of his will, that he suffered no fools and tolerated no disloyalty, that he alone drove her cold brother into fits of rage with his every success—she had never heard it mentioned that he was psychic. He could have no idea what she wanted from him.
“Yes,” Tristanne said, her tone even. Confident. In direct contrast to the mess of unsettled churning within. “A favor. But just a small favor, and not, I hope, an entirely unpleasant one.”
She almost called it off then. She almost heeded the panicked messages her body and her intuition were sending her—she almost convinced herself that someone else would do, that she need not pick this man, that someone less intimidating would work just as well, could accomplish what she needed.
But she glanced to the side then, to ease the intensity of Nikos Katrakis’s gaze and to catch her breath, and saw her brother shoulder his way into the bar area. Half brother, she reminded herself, as if that should make some difference. Peter’s familiar scowl was firmly in place when he looked at her—and who she was with. Behind him, she saw the clammy-palmed
financier Peter had handpicked for her—the man he had decreed would be his ticket out of financial ruin for the modest price of Tristanne’s favors.
“You must bolster the family fortune,” he had told her matter-of-factly six weeks earlier, as if he was not discussing her future. Her life.
“I don’t understand,” she had said stiffly, still wearing her black dress from their father’s memorial service earlier that day. She had not been in mourning, not even so soon after his death. Not for Gustave Barbery, at any rate—though she would perhaps always grieve for the father Gustave had never been to her. “All I want is access to my trust fund a few years early.”
That bloody trust fund. She’d hated that it existed, hated that her father thought it gave him the right to attempt to control her as he saw fit. Hated more that Peter was its executor now that her father was dead—and that, for her mother’s sake, she had to play along with him in order to access it. She’d wanted nothing to do with the cursed Barbery fortune nor its attendant obligations and expectations. She’d spent years living proudly off of her own money, the money she’d earned with her own hands—but such pride was no longer a luxury she could afford. Her mother’s health had deteriorated rapidly once Gustave fell ill; her debts had mounted at a dizzying rate, especially once Peter had taken control of the Barbery finances eight months ago and had stopped paying Vivienne’s bills. It fell to Tristanne to sort it out, which was impossible on the money she made scraping out the life of an artist in Vancouver. She had no choice but to placate Peter in the hope she could use her trust to save her mother from ruin. It made her want to cry but she did not—could not—show that kind of weakness in front of Peter.
“You don’t have to understand,” Peter had hissed at her, triumph and malice alive in his cold gaze. “You need only do as I say. Find an appropriately wealthy man, and bend him to your will. How hard can that be, even for you?”
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