Desert Jewels & Rising Stars

by Sharon Kendrick

  He turned to look at her, stretched out across the rumpled bed inside the master suite, her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open as she slept. Her hair was a satisfying tangle around her shoulders, and her curves seemed to gleam in the moonlight—beckoning him with a siren’s call he could not seem to escape. He felt himself stir, always ready for her, always desperate to lose himself inside her once again. He felt something squeeze tight inside of his chest, and turned his back on her again, ruthlessly.

  The night was cool, with a brisk breeze coming in off the sea, smelling of salt and pine. Nikos stared out at the dark swell of the water and the twinkling lights of the village below, and could not understand why he did not feel that kick of adrenaline, that hum in his veins of victory firmly within his grasp. He had felt it when he’d weakened the various Barbery assets enough that, following the old man’s death, it had taken the merest whisper to send them tumbling. He had celebrated that victory—remembering too well what it had been like when the situations were reversed and it had been the Katrakis fortune on the line. He remembered Peter’s gloating laughter when he’d called to announce the deal was off, the Katrakis money lost, Althea discarded, and all of it according to the Barberys’ plan. Nikos imagined the Barberys had celebrated that, too, all those years ago. He had made himself coldly furious over the years, imagining that very celebration in minute detail, reliving Peter’s vile words.

  So why did he not now feel as he should? He had reeled her in, completely. He had been astonished when she’d made her confession to him, though he could not allow himself to speculate too much on what might have led her to unburden herself. He could only think of a handful of motivations, none of them coming from places he wished to think about. What was important, he told himself, was that she’d told him everything there was to tell about her brother’s plans. About her own part in those plans. And then she had made love to him like a wild thing, untamed and ravenous, moving over him in the dark of the bedroom as if she were made of fire and need, bringing them both to writhing ecstasy.

  But Nikos did not feel that cool beat of triumph—he felt something else, something elemental and dark. Something wholly unfamiliar. Some deep-seated streak of possessiveness rose in him, roaring through him, making him question the scheme he had committed himself to so long ago.

  You never meant to involve the girl, he reminded himself now, as if he still had a conscience. As if he had not rid himself of that encumbrance long since, as his actions with Tristanne made perfectly clear. You never meant to do what Peter did.

  He thought of Althea then. Beautiful, impetuous, foolish Althea. His half sister by blood, though she claimed no particular family relationship to him unless it suited her purposes. He had been something like her bodyguard and her convenient escort, when she did not wish to be seen on the arm of their grizzled old father. And he, damn him, had been so desperate for her favor, for her approval. He had wanted to protect her, to make her smile, to prove to her that he deserved to call himself her brother even while their father treated him like the unwelcome hired help.

  But she had not been interested in her feral half brother. She had not cared if he stayed to ingratiate himself with their father or if he disappeared back into the ghetto from whence he came. If anything, she had resented the fact that she was no longer the sole focus of their father’s attention—and even if what attention Demetrios Katrakis gave to his bastard son was negative, it was attention. She had not minded that Nikos was there, necessarily, but nor would she have cared particularly if he was not. Her indifference had only made him that much more determined to win her over.

  But then she had fallen madly in love with Peter Barbery, and had sealed all of their fates.

  Nikos let his hands rest on the rail in front of him, and forced himself to breathe. What was done was done, and there could be no undoing it. Peter had tossed Althea aside the moment Gustave Barbery had succeeded in cheating Demetrios out of a major deal. The entire Katrakis legacy had faltered. Althea had killed herself, and when it was found that she had been pregnant, Demetrios had blamed Nikos even more. For failing to protect her and the child? For surviving? Nikos had never known. A year later, Demetrios, too, had died, leaving Nikos to pick up the pieces of the Katrakis shipping empire.

  It had all happened so fast. He had only just found his family, and the Barberys had ripped them away from him, one by one.

  What was done was done, he repeated to himself. And what would be, would be. He had vowed it over his father’s grave, and he was a man who kept his promises. Always.

  But still, he did not feel that surge of cold certainty that had led him here. That focus and intensity that had allowed him to plot and plan from afar, across years. Was it because, as a little voice in the back of his head insisted, doing what he planned to do to Tristanne made him exactly like Peter Barbery? Worse, even—for Barbery had promised Althea nothing, while Nikos had every intention of abandoning Tristanne at the altar.

  He could see it play out in his mind’s eye, shot for shot, like he watched it in the cinema. Tristanne would walk down the aisle, dressed in something white and gauzy and ineffably lovely, and he would not be there. He would never be there. She would not cry, not in front of so many. He knew that the fact she’d cried in front of him tonight meant things he was unwilling to look at closely. But she would not cry in her moment of greatest humiliation. He could see, as if she stood before him, that strong chin rise into the air, and the tremor across her lips that she suppressed in an instant. He saw the smooth, calm expression she turned toward the crowd, toward the cameras, toward the gossip and the speculation.

  And he saw the great bleakness in her chocolate eyes, that he feared she would never be rid of again.

  He hissed out a harsh curse and let the night wind toss it toward the rocks far below, battering it into a million pieces.

  This was different, he told himself fiercely. He had never intended to use Tristanne; she had approached him. How was he to refuse to use the perfect tool when it fell into his lap? After all this time? He thought of that odd, tender moment in the rain in Florence. He had been trying to forget it ever since it had happened. He was not like Peter Barbery, he told himself, even though he had the strangest feeling that when he did this thing to Tristanne, when he wounded her so deeply, so irrevocably—it might even wound him, too.

  He, who had shut off that part of himself so long ago now that it was almost shocking to recall how much he had loved his spoiled, careless half sister, and how much it had hurt when she’d thrown that in his face. He had never thought anything could hurt him again.

  “You are nothing to me!” she’d screamed at him when he’d attempted to console her after Peter’s vicious termination of their relationship. He had not known, then, that she was pregnant. That Peter Barbery had scoffed at her and called her a whore—then claimed his own child could have been anyone’s. All Nikos had known was that Althea had been in a lump on the floor of her room in their father’s elegant mansion in Kifissia, her face streaked with tears. Still, her eyes, as they focused on him, were narrow and mean. Like their father’s.

  “Althea,” he had said, his hands in the air, trying to soothe her. He had thought he had shown her that he was trustworthy—the older brother she had never had. Someone she could love and lean on. That was what he’d wanted.

  “I wish you had never been born!” she had thrown at him, cutting him as surely as if she’d thrown a knife. “This is your fault! You were the one who was too cocky, too sure—”

  “I will make this right,” he had promised her. “I will. I swear it on my honor.”

  “Your honor? What is that to me?” She had been scornful then, her pretty face twisted, spiteful. “You may have climbed out of the sewer, Nikos, but you still walk around with the stench of it clinging to you, don’t you? And you always will!”

  Nikos shook the unpleasant memory away, gritting his teeth. Only a week later, she had been gone, her pregnancy uncovered. So m
uch lost. So much wasted.

  The Barberys deserved whatever they got, even Tristanne, the innocent one. He would not feel guilty for it.

  He would not.

  She was still half-asleep when he pulled her into his arms. Tristanne came awake as his body moved over hers, her own already responding to him, already softening for him, before she was fully aware of what was happening.

  “You have yet to answer me,” he said softly, moving his mouth along the column of her neck. “I presume this is merely an oversight.”

  “What if my answer remains no?” she said, her voice husky from sleep, and, she thought, the fact that no secrets remained between them. Not any longer. She felt…naked unto her soul. New.

  Vulnerable.

  A faint memory stirred then, of Peter in Florence, asking snidely after Nikos’s angle in all of this. She shook it away, concentrating instead on the feel of Nikos’s hard muscles beneath her hands, his hot mouth against her skin, her breast. What could she do? She had told him everything. She could only hope that he would do her the same courtesy—but even if he did not, it was not as if she could simply decide to stop loving him in the meantime.

  Her body would not allow her to stop wanting him, not even for the barest moment.

  “Yes,” she said, as he twisted his hips slightly and thrust deep into her, making her sigh with wonder at the perfect, slick fit.

  “Yes, what?” he taunted her as, slowly, he began to move, stroking in and out of her, sending shivers of delight all through her limbs.

  “You are a bully,” she said, gasping.

  “I am merely emphatic,” he growled against her throat, nipping at her. “And very, very focused.”

  And because she could do nothing else, because ripples of pleasure fogged her brain and coursed through her veins, she wrapped her legs around him and held on tight.

  His eyes were dark, threaded through with gold, and yet seemed almost conflicted as they met hers. He dropped his gaze, and kissed her, taking her mouth with an intensity she might have called desperate in another man. He began to thrust faster, harder, holding her bottom in his strong hands to please them both with the deeper angle.

  “Yes,” she said, because she could not remember, now, why she had denied him. She wanted to soothe him, to ease the darkness in his gaze. She wanted. “I will marry you.”

  He did not speak again. He merely lowered his head, and then he took them both over the edge.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “WE MUST marry quickly,” Nikos said the following evening as they sat in the fading light, startling Tristanne as she feasted on tangy kalamata olives and sharp feta drenched in locally grown olive oil and spices. The sun had only just ducked below the horizon, and Nikos had only just returned from another day in Athens.

  Part of her, she realized now, had wondered if the events of the previous night were real—of if she’d dreamed them. His words sent a thrill of anticipation through her.

  “Why must we do anything of the kind?” she asked. “Surely we can have the usual engagement period. We would not want to suggest that there is any reason to rush, would we?”

  “Will this turn into another battle, Tristanne?” he asked, his mouth curving into that familiar half smile, though there was a hardness to it tonight. “Will you explain to me what will and will not happen, at great length, only to acquiesce to my wishes in the end? Is that not the pattern?”

  She wished there was not that edge to his voice, as if he meant his words on several levels she could not quite understand. She wished she did not feel slapped down, somehow. But she reminded herself that everything between them was different now. She had come clean and even so, he wanted to marry her.

  Or so she kept telling herself, as if it were a mantra.

  “Why do you wish to marry quickly?” she asked calmly, as if she had not noticed any edge, or even his usual sardonic inflection.

  His dark eyes touched on hers, then dropped to caress her lips, then her breasts beneath the light cotton shift she wore. She ordered herself not to squirm in her seat; not to respond. Her body, as ever, reacted only to Nikos and ignored her entirely.

  “Must you ask?” His voice was low. “Can you not tell?”

  “I do not believe in divorce,” she said quietly, holding his gaze when he looked at her again. She did not know why she felt compelled to say such a thing, even while her heart fluttered wildly in her chest. “I realize it is unfashionable to say so, but I have never understood the point of getting married at all if one does so with an escape clause.”

  “I assure you, divorce exists.” He shook his head, and reached for one of the spicy olives. He popped it into his mouth. “My grandfather divorced three wives in his time.”

  “Especially not if there are children,” she continued, ignoring him. She shrugged. “I have seen too many children destroyed in their parents’ petty little wars. I could not do that to my own.”

  Something in his gaze went electric then, making her breath catch.

  “If there are children,” he said quietly, fiercely, “they will be born with my name and live under my protection. Always.”

  He did not speak for a long while then, looking out to sea instead. Something about the remoteness of his expression made her heart ache for him, for the abandoned child he had been, though she dared not express her sympathy. She was too worried he would read into it what should not be there—her unreasonable empathy, her compassion, the love she felt for him that scared her, on some level, with its absoluteness. Its certainty. It was a hard rock of conviction inside of her, for all that so much about him remained a mystery—as out of reach as the stars that shone ever brighter above her in the darkening sky.

  Was it love? she wondered. Or was she deluding herself in a different way now? First she had thought she could maneuver around this man, use him for her own ends. That had proved laughable. Now she thought she could love him and make a marriage between them work based on only her love, and their breathtaking, consuming chemistry? Was she as foolish as the waves in the sea far below her, thinking they would remain intact as they threw themselves upon the rocks?

  Did she really want to know?

  “We will marry in two weeks,” he said at last. His head turned toward her, his expression almost grim. “Here. If that suits you.”

  “Are you asking my opinion?” she asked dryly, as if things were as they’d used to be between them. As if he was not so stern, suddenly—so unapproachable. “How novel.”

  “If you have another preference, you need only make it known.” His brows rose a fraction. “I have already notified the local paper. The announcement will be made in tomorrow’s edition. Everything else can be expedited.”

  “Two weeks,” she repeated, wishing she could see behind the distant expression he wore like a mask tonight. Her intuition hummed, whispering that something was not as it ought to be, but she dismissed it. Nerves, she thought. His as well as hers, perhaps. And well she should be nervous, marrying such a man. He would bulldoze right over her, if she showed the slightest weakness. He might do it anyway. He was doing it now.

  And yet some primitive part of her thrilled to the challenge of it. To the challenge of him. Even this somber version of him. What did that say about her?

  “Two weeks,” he said, as if confirming a deal. He settled back against his chair, and picked up his ever-present mobile. “Perhaps you should take the helicopter into Athens and find yourself something to wear.”

  “Perhaps I will,” she agreed, and picked up another crumbled-off piece of the feta, letting the sharp bite of it explode on her tongue. No matter how spicy, or sharp, she always went back for more. She could not fail to make the obvious connection. Perhaps, she thought with some mixture of despair and humor, that was simply who she was.

  She did not notice, until much later, that he had not told her why he wanted to marry so quickly. That he had talked around it entirely.

  Everything seemed to speed up then, making
Tristanne feel almost dizzy. Soon they would be married, she told herself, and they would have the rest of their lives to sort through whatever lay beneath his sudden remoteness. She told herself that this was simply the male version of jitters—and at least her focus on what Nikos was or was not feeling, or how he was behaving, allowed her to avoid focusing on the things she did not want to think about.

  He was busy all the time, he claimed. He was always on his mobile, talking fiercely in Greek. When he found time to speak to her, it was to confirm that she was tending to the wedding details he had given over to her. She found a simple dress in a boutique in Athens, as directed. She met with a woman in the capitol city of Argostoli on the island who bubbled over with joy at finding the perfect flowers for Nikos’s bride.

  She contacted her family. Vivienne, predictably, was overjoyed—her enthusiasm not quite hiding the tremor in her voice, though she tried.

  “That is how it was for your father and me,” she said with a happy sigh. “We took one look at each other and everything else was inevitable.”

  Tristanne could not reconcile the cold parent Gustave had been with the stories her mother told of him, but she did not argue. Once her mother arrived, she would be safe. And soon, Tristanne had no doubt, well. It was all as she’d planned, back when she’d believed she could manipulate Nikos to her will.

  “You must come to Greece,” she said softly. “We cannot marry without you.”

  Peter, of course, was more difficult, even after she had the pleasure of telling him she no longer required his help in any respect—that he could keep her trust fund for the next three years, with her compliments.

  “You’ve upped the ante, haven’t you?” He sneered into the phone. “How proud you must be of yourself. I had no idea you could make a man like Katrakis turn his thoughts to matrimony. What a perfect little actress you are!”

  “You are, in point of fact, my only sibling,” Tristanne said coldly. “That is the only reason I am extending an invitation.”