“He sounds deeply unpleasant,” Tristanne had said quietly.
“He was Demetrios Katrakis,” Nikos had said coldly. “What softer feelings he had, and he did not have many, he reserved for his late wife and their daughter. Not his gutter trash bastard son.” His expression had been so fierce then, almost savage. Tristanne had known, somehow, that were she to show even a hint of sympathy, he would never find it in himself to forgive her.
So, instead, she had settled back in her seat, sipped at her wine and gazed out at the picturesque little village, quite as if her heart were not breaking into pieces inside her chest, for the discarded little boy she knew he would never acknowledge had existed.
He never spoke of these conversations. He only made love to her with an intensity that she worried, sometimes, in the dark of night, might destroy them both. How could anyone live with so much stark, impossible pleasure? How could they handle so much fire so often, and not turn themselves into cinders?
So rather than voice the thoughts and feelings that she was afraid to entertain even in the sanctity of her own head, Tristanne drew. She drew Nikos in a hundred poses, in a hundred ways. She told herself he was no more and no less than an example of a particular kind of hard male beauty, and she owed it to her artistic growth to master his form with pencils and a pad of paper.
That was why she traced the line of his nose a thousand times, the high thrust of his cheekbones, the proud set of his chin. That was why she agonized over the fullness of his lips, so wicked and seductive even at his most mocking, his most cutting. She spent whole afternoons learning the sweep of his magnificent torso; spent endless hours studying the strength and cleverness of his hands. It was to improve her craft, she told herself—to become a better artist.
“Surely you have drawn me more than enough,” Nikos said now, coming to stand behind her. His fingers moved through her hair, pulling at the dark blonde waves almost absently. “Why not sketch the rocks? The cliffs? The cypress trees?”
Tristanne had not heard him end his call, but she had known the moment he moved across the wide patio to join her. She sat on one of the comfortable chairs that was placed to take advantage of the sweeping views of the Assos peninsula and the Ionian Sea beyond. But on the pad propped up on her knees in front of her was another drawing of Nikos. This time, she had drawn him in profile, his brow furrowed in thought, his mouth curled down at the corners. This was the Nikos she knew all too well, she thought now, looking at the drawing with a practiced eye. Resolute. Commanding. In control.
“I prefer to draw people—it’s far more challenging. And you are the only person I see regularly,” she said airily. “I could ask one of the tourists in the village to pose for me, but I do not believe you would care for it if I did.”
“Indeed, I would not.” There was an undercurrent of amusement in his rich voice, and she knew if she looked that he would be biting back that almost-smile.
“So, you see, I must use you,” she said. “It is an artistic imperative.”
She put down her pencil, and twisted to look up at him. As ever, her breath caught in her throat as she gazed at him. As ever, he seemed larger-than-life, blocking out the enormous azure sky. She could not see the gold in his eyes with his face in shadow, but she felt it anyway, as if another kind of gold hummed within her, and turned into an electric current when he touched her.
“I must go into Athens this afternoon,” he said in a low voice. His hand moved from her hair to her cheek. His thumb traced a firm line along her jaw.
“Do I accompany you?” she asked softly. She could not pretend that she was not his mistress now, in word and in deed. Not when she knew what to ask and how to ask it, with no expectation or recrimination. Only availability. She was endlessly, terrifyingly available. She told herself that she was only ensuring Peter’s continued compliance, and thus her mother’s future, as they came ever closer to the month her brother had demanded at the party in Florence. Peter had even sent the papers that indicated she would have access to her trust, should she continue as she was. She was not doing this on a whim, she reminded herself firmly. Her plan was working just as she’d hoped. She had not meant to sleep with Nikos, it was true, nor had she anticipated spending more than a few days with him, but the fact that those things had changed did not alter the rest of her plans in any respect. She was not like her mother in her earlier, healthier days, kept for a man’s pleasure like an inanimate object; a toy. She was not. She told herself so every day.
“I will only be gone a few hours,” he said. He meant he would take the helicopter, which made the trip to his office in Athens merely a long, if rather flamboyant commute. “I will return tonight.”
“I will miss you, then,” she said, in that casual tone that she knew would not set off his alarms. She was so calm, so blasé. She worked so hard to appear that way. “Luckily I have my drawings of you. In case I begin to forget what you look like.”
He pulled her to her feet, sliding a hand around to the small of her back and holding her against his wide chest. He looked down into her face. She felt the heat of his hand seep into her skin, warming her, even as she felt the usual quickening within. She did not know what his expression meant—only that he searched her own, and that his eyes burned into hers.
Did he know? she wondered in a sudden panic. Had she somehow given herself away?
“Perhaps you can help me pack,” he murmured suggestively.
Because that was the only fire they acknowledged, the only way they could.
She hid the rest of it. Sometimes even from herself.
“Of course,” she said, like the perfect mistress she was more and more these days. Just as she’d always feared. Just as Peter had predicted. She smiled at him. “I can think of nothing I would rather do.”
Because she knew beyond the slightest doubt that she could not tell him that she loved him. She could not. She could never tell him that she loved him—she could not even think the words, for fear they would bleed onto her tongue without her knowledge.
She could only love him with her body, and the soft strokes and broad lines of her pencils, and pray with all she had that he never, ever knew.
Nikos strode through the villa, his temper igniting with every step.
She was nowhere to be found. She was not lounging suggestively in his bed, wearing something appropriately saucy. She was not taking a coincidentally perfectly timed shower, the better to lure him in. She was not in any number of places she could have been in—should have been in—and the fact that he had rushed home from Athens to see her made him more furious about her deficiencies as a mistress than he might have been otherwise.
A man should not have to hunt down his mistress. A man should simply cross the threshold and find her waiting there, beautiful and sweet-smelling, with a soft smile on her lips and a cold drink in her hand.
Nikos stopped on the patio, and scowled at the sun as it sank toward the horizon, spilling red and pink fingers over the gleaming sea. It infuriated him how often he seemed to forget the fact that Tristanne was not, in point of fact, his mistress. He was no better than a boy, letting his head get turned by scaldingly hot sex. It had taken today’s meeting with his team in his office to reacquaint himself with his goals. Peter Barbery, as expected, was trading on Nikos’s good name with all manner of investors, Nikos’s people had confirmed. Apparently the man’s personal loathing of Nikos would not prevent Peter from acting as if the two of them were thick as thieves. Which meant that everything was in place. All that Nikos needed to do now was up the stakes. Raise the bar just that little bit higher, so when he sent it all crashing down, it would really, truly hurt. Leave scars, even.
And he knew just how to do it.
He had rushed back to the island, telling himself that he was not excited to do this thing so much as finally recommitted to his original vision of how this entire operation would proceed. He had lost his focus slightly, he had admitted to himself on the helicopter ride from Athens.
Tristanne was a beautiful woman, and he was a man who greatly appreciated beauty, especially when he found it wrapped around him every morning like a vine. More than that, she grew more mysterious by the day, and he found he was more and more intrigued by his sense that she was hiding more than she shared. But this, he had concluded today, was simply because he wondered what the Barberys’ end game was; what they thought they could gain from him.
He would accept no other reason for his uncharacteristic obsession with this woman. There was no room for anything but his revenge, surely.
He heard a scuffing sound then, and turned to see Tristanne emerge from the bushes that marked the edge of the cliff. She held her drawing pad in one hand, and looked at the ground as she walked. Her hair was twisted back into one of those smooth, efficient knots he hated, and she wore rolled up denim trousers, thronged-sandals, and an oversize shirt. She looked like a local painter, not a beguiling mistress—and she did not seem to notice that he was standing there, watching her approach.
Of course. Why had he expected anything different?
He told himself that what he felt was annoyance. Irritation that she should be so desperately inept. He told himself that he was simply shocked that she was so ill equipped to play her own game of deception.
“Look at you,” he said coolly, his low voice rolling through the falling dark and wrenching her head up. “Have you been climbing up and down the cliffs? You look bedraggled enough to have attempted it.”
“Not at all,” she said as she closed the distance between them. Her chin, as ever, firmed and rose. The frown that had dented the space between her brows disappeared as her eyebrows arched. “Did you not indicate earlier that you preferred me to draw inanimate objects? I was merely obeying you. Rocks. Trees. As ordered.”
The sarcastic inflection to her voice infuriated him. The defiant gleam in her brown eyes, reflecting the last red streaks of the sunset, provoked him. She should have been begging, pleading, insinuating herself. Wasn’t that why she was here in the first place? Instead she had challenged him from the start. She did it even now. He was not even sure she did it deliberately.
She was naturally provoking.
“You,” he said coldly, “are very possibly the worst mistress in the history of the world.”
Chapter Twelve
HIS words seemed to hang there in the dusk, swirling around them both like the sea air and the sound of the waves against the base of the cliffs far below. He did not know why he felt his heart pound so hard against his chest, much less why he felt himself harden.
“I beg your pardon,” Tristanne said, her eyes throwing daggers at him. He watched her shoulders tense and then square. “I had no idea I was so deficient.”
“Now you do.” He swept his gaze over her. “What do you call this ensemble, Tristanne?”
She stiffened, and her free hand curled over into a fist before she shoved it into her pocket. “I believe the word I would choose is comfortable,” she said, very precisely.
“Comfortable is not a word in a mistress’s vocabulary.” He shook his head at her. “Unless you are referring to my comfort. I expected to enter this villa and find you arrayed in front of me, like a banquet for my eyes.”
“Are you sure you are discussing a mistress?” Tristanne asked in the same irritatingly cool, calm tone. “Because it sounds to me as if you are referring to a pack mule. Or the family hound.”
“You are argumentative,” Nikos said, as if he were checking off a list. “Independent.” She blinked, and then averted her gaze, and he hated it. “Unacceptably mysterious,” he gritted out.
“You will find, I think, that those are characteristics of most adults,” Tristanne said. She moved to the nearby table and set her pad down upon it. “Perhaps you do not encounter such creatures in your daily attempts to rule the world, but I assure you, they are out there.”
“And you are too clever by half,” he replied in a silky tone. “And do not mistake me, Tristanne. That is not a compliment.”
She turned toward him then, something he could not understand moving quickly across her face, gone in an instant. Was it…a kind of grief? But that made no sense.
“You will have to excuse my ignorance,” she said, a storm brewing in her gaze, though no hint of it touched her voice. “I thought that your initial objections to my concept of my role as your mistress centered entirely on whether or not we would fall into bed. Having answered that question, in a way that I am quite certain is to your satisfaction, I fail to see how anything else matters.”
“You fight with me at the slightest provocation,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. As if he did not want to explore the satisfaction to which she had just referred, despite his body’s instant and enthusiastic reaction. He crossed his arms over his chest as he looked down at her, enjoying himself. “How is this proper behavior? How is this enticing?”
At that, she actually laughed. “You are claiming that you do not find it enticing?” she asked. “My mistake. I thought your preferred method for conflict resolution proved otherwise.”
Just yesterday she had argued with him about something absurd—some take on an article in the local paper—and he had had her there in the infinity pool while the sun beat down on them and birds called to each other from above, rendering them both happily wordless. Conflict resolution, indeed.
He could not help but smile.
“My point is that you do not suit as a mistress,” he said. “How could you? I should have known when you asked for the position that it could never work.”
“And why is that?” she asked, a hint of pink high on her cheeks.
“Because women do not ask to become my mistress,” he said softly. “Why should they? They either are, or are not. It is always quite clear.” He was fascinated by the ruthless way she kept her expression under control. Only a twitch near her eyes, and the faintest tremble of her lips betrayed her. “And I am the one to do the asking.”
“I believe I get your point,” she said crisply. “There is no need to belabor it. What is next, Nikos? A play-by-play breakdown of every time we—”
“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.
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