Desert Jewels & Rising Stars

by Sharon Kendrick

  “You do not get my point.” He interrupted her, his gaze hard on her face. “I am only stating a fact, which should in no way surprise you. Do you think I did not know perfectly well that you had no interest at all in becoming my mistress?”

  She seemed to freeze then.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said after a moment. He suspected that if she were another kind of woman, she might have stammered.

  “You do.” He arched a brow. “But you need not concern yourself, Tristanne. I know what you wanted.”

  She swallowed. “You do?” Her chin rose. “You must enlighten me. I thought I was perfectly clear about what I wanted. And perfectly satisfied with the result.”

  He let the moment drag out, enjoying himself far too much. He loved the panic that flashed in her gaze before she shuttered it, the nervousness she betrayed by the smallest of gestures—almost shifting her weight from foot to foot, almost biting her lower lip.

  “I cannot have you as my mistress any longer, Tristanne,” he said quietly. “You are terrible at it.”

  “Very well,” she said, her voice even, her eyes carefully blank. He wondered what that cost her. “I am devastated, of course.”

  He almost laughed at the insulting blandness she managed to inject into that last line—a fighter until the end, this woman. She would go down swinging, or die trying. He could not help but admire the sheer force of her bravado. It reminded him of his own bullheadedness, back in his angry youth.

  “You are an idiot,” he said then. He shook his head at her. “I am not casting you aside.”

  “Are you certain of that?” she asked dryly. Something flashed in her eyes. Relief? Irritation? “The recitation of my many flaws and the myriad ways I have disappointed you seems to suggest otherwise. Or perhaps this is the Nikos Katrakis brand of affection? How delightful.”

  “You cannot help yourself, can you?” he asked, his voice almost mild. He moved closer to her, then reached over to trace the mouth that spat such foolishness at him, the mouth that poked at him and exasperated him—the mouth that he found himself fantasizing about when she was not in the room. “You will keep going until you drop, no matter the cost to you.”

  She did not jerk her head back from his touch, nor shiver beneath his hand, but he had the sense that she fought off both. Her gaze searched his.

  “I don’t understand this conversation,” she said quietly.

  And then, he could put it off no longer. He felt something powerful move through him. Revenge, he told himself. Finally he would have his revenge. But it felt much more like a necessity than a tactic or a strategy—though he refused to consider why that might be.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  “Oh,” she managed to say somehow, her mind reeling, while her heart galloped wildly in her chest. Did she fall back a few steps? Had she fainted? But no, she was still standing there on the patio, too warm from her hike back up the side of the cliff—and from Nikos’s unexpected, scowling appearance.

  Or perhaps the heat that washed over her had more to do with what he had just said.

  “I will not get on my knees, Tristanne,” he told her in his infuriatingly arrogant way. He looked almost amused at the thought. “Nor will I spontaneously burst into poetry.”

  She could not think. She could not think, and that was the danger, because if she could not think, she could only feel…and she did not want to feel the things she felt. She could not allow herself to feel the emotions that coursed through her, buffeting her, as if she were no more substantial than a leaf in high winds.

  A fierce, overwhelming joy suffused her, pulsing through her veins, blocking out the world for a moment—blocking out reality. The tantalizing idea, as painful as it was inviting, that she could have this man—really have him, when she knew she could not—called to a deep well of hope she had not known she held inside. But oh, the joy of imagining, even for a second, that she was not deceiving him! That he was proposing to a woman who actually existed—instead of this fake mistress person she had tried so hard to put on, like a second skin. He thought she was a failure at it, but then, he had no idea how far from herself she’d had to go to get here.

  He had no idea.

  “If I were someone else,” he drawled then, his dark eyes a harder version of amused, “I might be rendered insecure by your continued silence.”

  But her mind was still racing, her heart still pounding—and she was frozen solid. Peter, she knew, would exult in this opportunity. Marrying Tristanne off to a rich man he could then lean on for financial support was an abiding fantasy of his; their father had shared it. It would solve all of her problems. Nikos would help her help her mother, of course, and Vivienne would finally be debt-free and on the way to recovery. Tristanne would be free of Peter, finally, for she could not imagine that her brother would bother with her any longer if he could approach Nikos directly. If he dared.

  If only she did not love him.

  “I can see your brain working overtime,” Nikos said, tilting his head slightly as he gazed down at her. “What can there be to think about, Tristanne? We both know there can be only one answer.”

  If only she did not love him.

  But she did love him, every arrogant, demanding, exasperating inch of him. She loved the way he moved through the world, using that powerful body and his far more impressive mind to cut a swathe before him. She loved the way he held her so tenderly sometimes, though she knew he would deny any and all softer emotions—or any emotions at all—were she to say such a thing aloud. She loved the defiant way he spoke of his past, as if it did not hurt him, as if it had not shaped him. She loved. She loved with every breath, with every caress of pencil against paper, with every touch of skin to skin. She loved him more than she had ever loved another person in her life, more than she could ever say, and she knew that she could not marry him. Not when almost everything she’d said to him, more or less, was a lie.

  He had not spoken of love, she knew, nor would he. But did that matter? She knew the truths between them that only their bodies could speak. He did not have to feel as she did. She was not certain that he could, even if he’d wanted to do something so anathema to him.

  Which only made it more clear what she must do, though every part of her rebelled. Every cell rose up in revolt, almost choking her to keep her from saying what she resolved she must say. She felt a sharp heat behind her eyes, but she would not cry. She would not.

  “I cannot marry you,” she said at last, the words ripped from her, seeming to tear at her throat, her tongue, her lips. She was not sure how she managed to do it. But she could not lie to the man she loved, not any longer. She simply could not. She would find some other way to save her mother, somehow, but she could not do this anymore. The fact that she had done it at all was something she would regret for the rest of her days.

  “No?” He did not seem particularly taken aback by her declaration. “Are you certain? I feel sure that you can.”

  “I mean that I will not marry you,” she amended, with every last drop of bravado she possessed. As if it did not kill her to say it. As if it were not a supreme act of sacrifice to say such a thing to him when she knew, she just knew, that she could love enough for both of them. She could feel the force of it, thudding heavy and hard against the walls of her chest.

  “Ah.” He studied her. “Have you gone over all romantic, Tristanne? Has talk of marriage led you to fantasize about notions of forever and matching rings?” He laughed, shortly. “I assure you, I will have my lawyers bury us both in prenuptial contracts. I imagine that will prove a cure for any lingering romantic fantasies.”

  “That would be a relief, I am sure,” Tristanne somehow brought herself to say, even managing a certain level of dryness. As if she could be as cynically detached as he was—as he expected her to be.

  “Then what is your objection to my proposal?” He shrugged with the supreme confidence of a man who knew himself to be one of the world’s greatest catches, wa
nted by untold numbers of women on innumerable continents. “You cannot say we do not suit.”

  “You just spent some time detailing the ways in which we do not suit,” Tristanne said, almost testily. She did not know why she continued to spar with him. She should simply leave him, she knew. She should do it now, while she still felt virtuous for refusing him. Before the pain caught up with her and laid her out, flat, as she suspected it would. As she feared it would.

  She had always known he would haunt her—and that was before she’d been foolish enough to fall head over heels in love with her.

  “A man does not expect to argue with his mistress,” Nikos said, his mocking half smile appearing again. “But that is the province of a wife, is it not?”

  “I do not think you believe half of the things that come out of your mouth,” Tristanne threw at him, fighting the swell of her own emotions. She wanted, too badly, to be the woman she’d pretended to be. The woman he’d actually proposed to, instead of the woman she was. “I think you simply say these things for effect!”

  “Marry me, and see for yourself,” he suggested, completely unperturbed. Daring her, in fact, to marry him!

  Tristanne felt something break inside of her, and had to bite back a gasp that she feared would come out more of a sob. She could not cry. She would not cry, not now, not in front of him. But she felt all of her fight, all of the bravado she’d clung to as her only defense against this man, go out of her in a great rush.

  What was she fighting for? Why was she being so noble? The truth was that she was selfish, not sacrificing, because she wanted to say yes more than she could remember wanting anything else, ever. She wanted to disappear completely into the life that Nikos offered her, and bury herself in the sizzling heat of his embrace. The truth was that she loved Nikos, and while it was something Peter could never possibly understand, she knew in her heart that her mother would. And how could she walk away from him without even trying to tell him the truth about herself? How would she ever manage to live with herself if she did such a thing?

  She loved him, for all she knew that such a thing was neither wise nor rational, and she had to believe that somewhere inside of him, buried beneath all those layers of masculine pride and years of neglect and solitude, he felt something for her. Surely she had to trust him enough to tell him the truth, if she had any hope at all of trusting him with her heart—or, at the very least, of surviving this relationship with him with any part of herself intact.

  She let her fists clench at her sides. She stood straight. She raised her head high, and she looked him straight in the eye. She let his old gold gaze warm her, and she refused to let herself give in to the heat that prickled behind her eyes.

  “I cannot marry you,” she said quietly, with as much dignity as she could muster, “because I am lying to you. I have been lying to you from the start.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “HAVE you?” Nikos sounded almost offhand, very nearly bored, as if people confessed to deceiving him several times a day. Perhaps they did, Tristanne thought ruefully. Or, much more likely, this show of nonchalance was carefully calibrated to disarm the unwary so he might strike when they least expected it.

  “I have,” she said. She studied his dark face. The haughty cheekbones, the full mouth pulled into its characteristic smirk. She wanted to press herself against the heat of him; lose herself in the heady passion that only he had ever aroused in her. But she had already lost too much of herself in this terrible game, so she merely waited.

  “Come,” Nikos drawled after a long moment. “We will have some wine and sit, like civilized people, and you will tell me how you have lied to me for all of this time.”

  Bemused, Tristanne could do nothing but follow Nikos inside. He poured himself a glass of wine from the bar in the corner of the living room, and merely shrugged when Tristanne refused one for herself. The tasteful room was all done in whites and neutral colors that inexorably led the eye to the spectacular view, visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides. He settled himself into one of the low-slung armchairs and raised a brow, inviting her to continue.

  Tristanne laced her fingers together before her, and frowned down at her clasped hands. She could not bring herself to sit down, as if they were having cocktails and everything was perfectly normal. She did not feel civilized in any respect. Her heart beat too fast, and she felt too hot, too restless. Dizzy. She wished she could go back in time and keep herself from speaking at all. She should have either accepted his proposal, or simply said no and left it at that. Why was she exposing herself like this? What was there to gain? He was so remote, so cold now—sitting there as if they hardly knew each other. And she was making it worse by dithering over it, dragging the uncomfortable silence out…

  “I remembered you,” she said, not knowing what she planned to say until it was out there, hanging in the air of the elegant room while the Greek night pressed against the windows, dark and rich. “I saw you at a ball in my father’s home when I was still a girl. I mention this because it was the first lie, that I saw you for the first time on your yacht that day.”

  He took a sip of his wine, then lounged back against his chair. His eyes were so dark, yet still shone of gold. She took that as a good sign—or, at least, not a negative one. Not yet.

  And so she told him. She stood like a penitent before a king, and she confessed every part of it. Peter’s mismanagement of the family finances and her mother’s frailty and ill health. Her need for her trust fund in order to settle her mother’s debts and take her somewhere safer and better, which Tristanne felt she owed her. Peter’s revolting ultimatums, and his obsessive hatred of Nikos, which had been one of the reasons she’d picked him. The things Peter had said about Nikos, and about Tristanne, and what she knew Peter hoped to gain from her liaison with Nikos. What she had expected to gain from her association with Nikos, and how surprised she had been by the passion that had flared between them.

  She talked and she talked, a ball of dread growing larger and heavier in her gut with each word. As she spoke, Nikos hardly moved. He drank from his wineglass from time to time, but otherwise merely listened, stretched out in his chair with his hard face completely unreadable, propped up against one hand.

  She realized that she had no idea what he would do. He was a ruthless, dangerous man—she had known that from the start, hadn’t she? It was why she’d chosen him. She had no doubt that he dealt with betrayal harshly. Like the dragon he was. What would he do to her?

  When she was finished, she found herself staring down at her hands once more. She willed herself not to shake. Not to weep. Not to beg or plead with him. And not, under any circumstances, to let it slip that she was in love with him. She nearly shuddered then, at the very thought. She did not have to know what would happen next to know that would be like throwing gasoline on an open flame.

  “And this is why you say you will not marry me?”

  Her head shot up at the sound of his low, firm voice. She searched his face, but could see nothing save that same fire in his gaze. She could only nod, no longer trusting herself to speak.

  Nikos leaned forward, and set his wine down on the wide glass coffee table. As Tristanne watched, panic and hope and fear surged through her in equal measure, making her feel light-headed. He stood up with that masculine grace that, even now, made her throat go dry.

  “I do not care,” he said quietly, fiercely, closing the distance between them. He reached over and cupped her cheek in his hand, his eyes dark and intense. “I do not care about any of it.”

  “What?” She could barely speak. Her voice was a thread of sound, and she knew she was trembling, shaking—finally breaking down in front of him, as she had vowed she would never do. Must never do! “How can you say such a thing? Of course you must care!”

  “I care that you have been put in a position to do such things by your pig of a brother,” he growled at her, his voice low and rough, as if he, too, did not entirely trust himself
to speak. “I care that had I refused your proposition, you might have made it to someone else.” His hand, hot against her skin, tightened a fraction. “I care that you are standing before me trying your hardest not to weep.”

  “I am not!” she snapped at him, but it was too late. She felt all of her fear, all of her anger and pain and isolation and love, so much desperate, impossible love, coalesce into that searing heat in her eyes and then spill over, tracking wet, hot tears down her face.

  She disgraced herself, and yet she could not seem to stop.

  He murmured something in Greek, something tender, and it made it all the worse. Tristanne jabbed at her eyes with the back of one hand, furious at herself. What was next? Would she start to cling to the hem of his trousers as he made for the door? How soon would she become her mother, in every aspect?

  It was a chilling thought. Her very worst nightmare made real—but then Nikos took her face in both of his hands, and she could think only of him.

  “Listen to me,” he said, in that supremely arrogant way of his—that tone that demanded instant obedience. “You will marry me. I will handle your brother, and your mother will be protected. You will not worry about any of this again. Do you understand me?”

  “You cannot order me to marry you,” she said, pricked into remembering her own spine by the sheer conceit of him, by his overwhelming confidence that her very tears would dry up on the spot at his command.

  His hands tightened slightly, and his mouth curved into a very male smile.

  “I just did,” he said. “And you will.”

  And then he kissed her, as if it was all a foregone conclusion; as if she had already agreed.

  She could have been putting on an elaborate act, but he did not think so, Nikos thought much later as he stood out on the balcony that hung high over the cliffs, far above the crashing waves. He did not believe that her body could deceive him on that level, even if she wished it to do so.