by Olivia Gates
Her gaze wavered. She hadn’t thought he’d admit to either charge, let alone both, and that willingly?
Before he could be sure of his analysis, steely challenge flooded back into her expression. “So, I’ll spell out the question you’re asking yourself. What the hell do you think you’re doing, Sarantos?”
His lips twitched at the baiting in her gaze, even as something there compressed his chest over what felt like thorns. A white-hot kernel of affront? Of fury? Of…hurt?
No. He’d just admitted his perception was on the fritz. It might have always been where she was concerned. He should no longer try to fathom her or himself. He should let this play out, take him where it would. He’d help it along with the one thing that he had to contribute now. Straightforwardness.
He emptied his gaze of all but seriousness. “I’m doing what I have to do. I’m asking you to marry me.”
Flames of that elusive expression flared, raged higher. His chest began to burn. Then she seemed to douse them with an act of pure will, smirked. “There he goes again. Okay, let me get this straight, Sarantos. You’re going for your most unpredictable by being predictable for once? You’re offering to ‘marry me’ because I ‘had your son,’ just like any dutiful male would? How quaint.”
This was serious. This confrontation was not going according to any unformed fears he might have come here harboring. But he couldn’t help it.
Her belittling barbs penetrated right to his humor centers, tripped their wires.
His lips spread. “You make it sound as if I’m a different species.”
Something heavy and hot entered her gaze, made the tightness travel lower in his body. It was uncanny, unprecedented, how she took control of his body with a look. That particular look now grew antagonistic.
“You know you are a different species, Sarantos,” she muttered. “Trying on the conformities of a member of the common herd doesn’t suit you.”
He exhaled. “Not conforming was a luxury I availed myself of for the past twenty-five years. Under the circumstances, I can no longer afford it.”
Her gaze hardened with each word out of his mouth. “Do you even hear yourself? Just yesterday you were offering the ultimate form of disconnection in human liaisons. Then you discover Alex and switch to proposing the ultimate form of entanglement, the stuck-till-death kind of situation, or the type of mistake with escalating consequences.”
His gaze stilled. Did that mean she had as dismal a view of marriage as he’d always held?
Neither his beliefs nor hers were the issue here. They both had another—Alex—to consider now.
He nodded. “I am aware of the discrepancy. But the givens of the situation have changed diametrically since.”
She exhaled her impatience. “It seems I have to repeat what I said last night, in a clearer way. You have nothing to do with Alex or me. There’s no duty or right thing to do involved here.”
“If I didn’t believe there’s all of that and more involved, I wouldn’t be here today.”
She seemed at a loss for words. Then she rasped, “I’ll make it clearer still. An offer of marriage for a baby’s sake means you’re applying for the positions of husband and father. In which parallel universe are you husband and father material, Sarantos?”
Silence seemed to explode in the wake of her bluntness. An evaluation, an exposure he wasn’t about to contest.
Not that she was giving him the chance to waste her time with protests when she’d long made up her mind about him. “You’re not any known human relationship material, either. Even with your siblings, you have the most perfect example of nonrelationships.”
He wasn’t about to contest that truth, either.
He let his no-contest count as an admission, went on to make his point, the only one to be made here. “I may well be the last man on earth to qualify for either role, but that doesn’t change the facts. You had my child. A child I owe my name and support. I owe you that, too.”
She hooted in pure denigration. “Whoa. At least no one can accuse you of spouting sentimental embellishments. Tell you what. The ‘child’ and I will take a rain check on whatever you believe you owe us. In this life. Let’s take this up again in another. We’re both fine for this one, thank you.”
“Being ‘fine’ isn’t a reason not to accept my support and protection, to benefit from my status and wealth.”
“I say it’s the perfect reason not to. I don’t need support and protection, and I have status and wealth, and so will Alex. What else do you have to offer us?”
Everything stilled inside him at the lethal conciseness of her question. She always managed to take truth to its most abrading foundations.
And he had to offer her the same level of brutal frankness.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Probably nothing.”
Another silence crackled in the wake of his admission.
Then her lips made a luscious twist of cynical certainty. “There you go. And thank you for not pulling punches. It saves us from wading through false sentiments and promises, which have no place between us.”
The oppressive tightness in his center, what always signaled things spiraling out of control, heightened.
He shook it off, countered, “I do think so, too, if for an opposite reason. It’s exaggerated expectations that destroy any endeavor, personal or professional. I am offering you the absolute truth, so you’ll know for certain what I’m offering.”
“But you are not sure what you’re offering,” she shot back.
“Besides everything you claim not to need, no, I’m not sure,” he said. “But honesty trumps false security every time.”
“And, like your offer, it’s still deficient and unnecessary. And the reason behind both your honesty and your offer is even worse.”
He’d thought she’d hit him with all she had, that he could now begin to negotiate. Seemed she was far from done.
He cocked one eyebrow at her, genuinely interested, even impatient, to find out what else she would hit him with. “So what terrible motive have you come up with for me?”
“It seems that even you haven’t escaped the social conditioning that stipulates that men must take responsibility for their progeny or forfeit their right to manhood and its pride and privileges.” She swung her chair back to her desk, swept him a sidelong glance that had the heat percolating beneath his ribs spreading to his head before flooding the rest of his body. “So I’m judging your motives are a cocktail of pride, honor and responsibility.”
He stared at her. That was what she’d thought so bad?
He barked a guffaw of incredulity. “You say it as if those are the most reprehensible of motives.”
She inclined her head, making his hands itch when the movement sent a swath of midnight silk swishing over one turquoise-clad shoulder. “They’re up there with the worst kind of motives in my opinion. You don’t marry someone, or become someone’s father, because your unreasoning male pride is prodding you, a reluctant sense of honor is harassing you or a hated responsibility is breathing down your neck.”
Just yesterday, if they’d had that same conversation, he would have said the same things, in as harsh or harsher terms. He’d always believed if something was wrong, it was wrong no matter the circumstances. But maybe he’d been wrong.
He exhaled his deepening uncertainties. “Maybe a lot of men don’t start out in a marriage having those motives, but most stay because of that glue of pride and honor and responsibility.”
She took her gaze away completely now, busied herself with arranging some papers on her desk. “Maybe. And maybe other women have to accept that, because alternatives are far worse. That is not true in my case. Appeasing your sense of duty and male pride isn’t good enough for me, or for Alex. Your name, money and status are all you’re offering because they are all you have to offer. And since they don’t feature as reasons for me to marry, they don’t count for me. As for you, in case you’re trying to contain a situation you fea
r will one day take a far bigger bite out of you than the price you’re willing to forfeit to deal with said situation in its…infancy, so to speak, I again assure you…” She suddenly looked up, slammed him with a solemn stare. “Neither I nor Alex will ever need a thing from you. I can guarantee you that in a binding contract.”
She was making this hurdle course harder with every look, every word. He hadn’t come prepared to engage her in a grueling character dissection. Grappling with his own doubts and deficiencies had commandeered most of his resources. He’d expended the rest in making the offer at all. Now he was down to his reserves, and she was depleting those fast.
Her cell phone rang. She lunged for it as if for a raft in a stormy sea.
He watched the metamorphosis of her expression as she took what was evidently an unwelcome business call. So that was how she looked when she was dispassionate, formal, as he’d thought she’d been as she’d confronted him. But seeing the real thing now made him realize she’d actually been seething with emotions. Mostly negative, granted, but they were fierce and specific to him, and he was their instigator and their target.
How had he been fool enough not to include that intensely personal factor in his negotiation?
He waited for her to end her call then closed the two steps he’d kept between them, bent and clamped both her wrists in his hands. Her gaze jerked up to his, her face an unguarded display of surprise and vulnerability as he tugged her out of her seat and against the body that clamored to feel her against it.
He held eyes that had emptied of all but instant response, savored her instinctive surrender before she snapped back into antagonist mode. “There is one more thing I can offer,” he groaned. “One thing you know only I can offer. This…”
He swooped down and stilled the tremor invading the fullness of her lower lip in a bite that made her cry out, arch into him, all lushness and urgency. The taste and feel and scent of her flooded his senses, eddied in his arteries, pounded through his system. She spilled gasps into his mouth, her tongue sliding against his, tangling, her teeth matching him nip for nip, until he felt himself expanding, as if he’d unfold around her, devour her whole. And he’d only intended to kiss her, make his point. He should have known he’d lose his mind at her reciprocation.
He gathered her pants-clad thighs, opened her around his hips, pinned her to the wall behind her desk with the force of his hunger. She clung to him, arms and legs, opening for his tongue, for the thrust of his arousal against her heat through their barriers.
He felt his brain overheating, his body hurtling beyond his volition. Only one thing would stop him from taking her against that wall. Her. He wouldn’t stop otherwise. Which he should, before the point he’d intended to make in his favor became more proof against him.
Suddenly, as if she’d heard his feverish thoughts, she was writhing against him in a different kind of desperation, to get away.
He stilled, snatched his lips from hers, raised his head to roam unseeing eyes through the black-and-blue blankness of frustration, only to drop his forehead against hers, sharing the upheaval of aborted passion.
When he could finally make a move that didn’t drive his body against hers, he unclamped her from his spastic grasp and let her down on her feet.
He still couldn’t move away. It was she who did, stumbled around him on unsteady legs without meeting his eyes. His body roared anew as she brushed past him, as he realized he’d undone her blouse, had her breasts almost spilling from her bra. Before he could send everything to hell and pounce on her, drag her to the ground, give them both what they were in agony for, she put the width of her desk between them, began to speak.
For a moment he saw nothing but those lips that had just been suckling coherence right out of him, glistening and swollen from his possession. He could imagine nothing but them moving like that, all over him.
It was only when he heard her say “…I want you…” that his mind screeched its stalled wheels to process her words.
Then he realized the context of her words, and that was a far more efficient libido douser than a plunge in freezing waters.
“If you wanted to prove that I want you,” she said, her breath still ragged, her face flushed, “and that you’d offer great sex in the new bargain, as I told you last night, you shouldn’t have bothered. We both already know that.” She picked up the dossier she’d gathered earlier, started to walk to her office door. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting.”
He prowled toward her, trying to keep his approach, his stance, unthreatening as he blocked her way. “I was only bringing up benefits both of us were overlooking while we analyzed what I have to bring to the table.”
She swept away the bangs his passion had spilled into her eyes, looked up at him with something that chilled him. An emptiness he’d never seen.
“So you’re combining yesterday’s offer and today’s—no-strings sex merged with a legal union for damage control?”
He didn’t know what to say when she put it that way. It was what he was offering, but stripped of any humanity and stated in the stark terms only a lawyer could reduce it to.
But she was waiting for him to say something. So he did. “This is far more than what most so-called couples have.”
Her gaze lengthened for seconds before she nodded.
His heart lurched in his rib cage. Did she agree?
Before he could think of anything more to say, she circumvented him wordlessly, resumed her path to the door.
Once she opened it, she turned to him. “As a businesswoman, I enter only into ventures where the pros outweigh the cons. In your case, Sarantos, all the pros in the world don’t counter your cons. So my answer to your proposition is no. And I demand you take this no as final and nonnegotiable.”
Aris watched as the door closed behind her with muted finality, and wondered.
What the hell had he done?
“You did what?”
Selene winced at the sharpness of her best friend’s cry of disbelief.
Worse than disbelief. Kassandra Stavros’s sea-green eyes were explicit with the conviction that Selene had gone mad.
Kassandra was the only one she’d told her secret. But that wasn’t why she’d told her what had happened with Aristedes. Kassandra had just happened to walk in on her at her most distraught after he’d left a couple hours ago.
Not that she’d told her everything. Just the bare bones of the two climactic confrontations they’d had since yesterday. She certainly hadn’t mentioned the temporary insanity that assailed her every time Aristedes touched her….
Now she wished she had a rewind-and-erase function. She would have wiped Kassandra’s memory. She would have wiped hers, of the meetings with Aristedes. Of Aristedes himself.
“You’d be nuts if you turned him down down.” Kassandra spelled out her view of Selene’s mental stability. “And since you’re the most un-nuts person I know, you didn’t, right?”
“Down down?” Selene huffed. “As opposed to down up?”
Not picking up on Selene’s dejection, but only the derision, Kassandra made a face at her. “You know what I mean. Down for real. You’re making him sweat it, right? I won’t say he doesn’t deserve it, ’cause he does, big-time, for walking away without a look back and staying gone that long.”
“Don’t forget coming back for business then tossing me an incidental proposition to be his sporadic sex stop in the States.”
Now that Selene was being sarcastic, Kassandra took her words seriously, nodded in all earnestness, her dainty nose crinkling in disgust. “Sure, for that, too. That actually deserves some creative grovel-inducing punishment. The nerve of that man.” Suddenly Kassandra’s lips twisted as she sighed. “But what a man. You have to admit, if anyone can get away with arrogant bullshit like that, it’s him.”
A spark of sick electricity quivered behind Selene’s breastbone.
She’d always seen that glazed look come into women’s eyes at the mention
of Aristedes. And even if Kassandra was just indulging in the indiscriminate drooling most women did over hunky strangers, that it bothered her, and so much, made her mad. And sure that she’d done the right thing by turning Aristedes down down.
She didn’t do jealousy, would have hated herself and her life if she’d ended up with a man every woman lusted after. A man whom she knew could never be hers, with whom she’d suffer that soul-destroying sickness, never sure if he was lusting back, or worse.
She now found herself imagining how Aristedes would react to her childhood friend. Kassandra, the rebel who’d gone against her strict Greek family’s will and become a top model and rising fashion designer, was a golden goddess. Aristedes, like all other men, would no doubt pant after the willowy grace and screaming femininity of her friend’s body, the masses of incredible sun-streaked hair and those Mediterranean green eyes. But contrary to her reaction to most other men, once she knew Aristedes wasn’t Selene’s territory, Kassandra would pant back, and more.
Unaware of the disturbing thoughts spreading their hated tentacles through Selene’s mind, and bent on concluding her train of thought, Kassandra went on excitedly, “So, how long will you make him suffer? I say at least a day for each month. And maybe another week for that last transgression.”
“Kass, I’m not going to make him sweat or salivate or anything else. I turned him down down.”
After gaping at her for a long moment, Kassandra shook her head. “A knee-jerk reaction. Understandable. But definitely not the right one.” Her focus sharpened on Selene. “So marriage was never on your agenda after that so-called engagement fiasco with Steve, no matter how much your family pushed you. I think they contributed to your eternal self-sufficiency with that constant stream of eligible and terminally boring bachelors. But you’re almost thirty years old, you aren’t saving yourself for a man you fancy more, since you fancy the hide off that one—so much so you broke your vow of celibacy for him and had a son with him, for chrissake! And since he offered marriage, who better to marry?”
“Who worse,” Selene muttered. “This man is my family’s enemy. My enemy. Until proven otherwise. And even that proof is something he can—and did in the past—negate in a heartbeat if he thought he’d make a million dollars more by turning against us.”