Not that Nicodemus had asked what she’d wanted. And the rings he’d given her still fit perfectly, she noticed, no matter how she scowled at them.
The October afternoon was cool, or maybe that was her. Mattie had never been one of those wedding-maddened girls, forever imagining her perfect day and flipping through bridal magazines in the absence of a groom, but she’d always imagined that at least one of her parents would be there when it happened. That neither of them was alive to know she was married, much less to have witnessed it, ached—and ached deep.
And while she’d known that this situation with Nicodemus was part of a much wider bid to retain control of the family company and all the high stakes that implied, Mattie really had imagined that Chase might have made it from London to watch her sacrifice herself for his benefit, rather than sending her an underwhelming text with his apologies.
Then again, she and Chase hadn’t been close in a long time. And she’d always known whose fault that was.
It was a good thing she’d frozen solid, she thought then, because if she hadn’t, she might have been tempted to indulge that great, heavy sob building up somewhere inside her. And that might wreck whatever little of herself she had left.
“Reflecting on your good fortune?” Nicodemus asked from behind her, and Mattie congratulated herself on managing, somehow, not to jump at the sound.
“Something like that,” she said, as coolly and unemotionally as she could.
Down below, she heard the roar of a motor before she saw the small boat take off in the direction of the island of Kimolos a few miles away. She frowned when she saw three figures on the deck. The priest and both witnesses, clearly, which meant she was alone here with Nicodemus.
Alone. And married to him. Married.
Mattie turned, very slowly, to face the man who stood behind her, his hands deep in the pockets of the loose-fitting tan trousers he wore. His crisp white shirt highlighted his olive skin, the contrasting beauty of his dark eyes and almost wild hair, and though it didn’t cling to him at all, it still somehow emphasized his powerful chest. He should have looked anything but elegant. But somehow, on him it all worked, and brought out his power and his ruthlessness instead of undermining it.
There was something different about him then, she realized. Something even more dangerous than before. It made the tiny hairs on the back of her neck and down her arms prickle in uncomfortable awareness. It was almost as if—
But then she understood. He’d won. Just as he’d always promised her he would.
Her throat was dry. Too dry.
And Nicodemus Stathis was her husband.
“Come inside,” he said, his gaze as dark as it was patient, and that made something very deep inside her shudder.
“I’m fine right here.”
It was a profoundly stupid thing to say. It made her sound like an infant and she knew it the moment the words passed her lips. Nicodemus’s hard face softened, and that only made everything worse.
“You’re afraid that if you come inside with me, that means we’ll immediately consummate this marriage,” he said after a moment. His head canted slightly to one side, as if he was imagining it, sending a fist of need punching into her belly, then clenching tight. “Does it happen on the marble floor, in your half-terrified, half-longing fantasies? Up against the wall beneath the paintings? Sprawled out across the couches, to really settle in and take our time?”
“I don’t think anything of the kind.” But she did. She really did, and his scalding-hot images didn’t help matters, not when she knew how he’d hold her, how he’d tease her and torment her. How he’d take her places she’d never dreamed she could go. “We’ve shared a bedroom the past two nights and you haven’t attacked me. I’m not afraid of you.”
His mouth moved into that mocking little crook. “Of course you’re not. That’s why I’ve found you sleeping in the guest suite one night and on that sofa in the solarium the next. Because you are so unafraid.”
Mattie had no intention of telling him about the nightmares—the screech of tires, that endless singing, that empty stretch of road—that had ripped through every night for as long as she could recall, torn it and her apart. It was why she’d never shared a bed with anyone.
And while she might have realized pretty quickly that first day that fighting with Nicodemus on the topic of separate bedrooms was futile, that didn’t mean there weren’t ways around it. She’d done what she’d always done before when faced with unacceptable sleeping arrangements, whether here or in boarding school or wherever she found herself along the way: she pretended to sleep where she’d been put, then snuck away to somewhere her inevitably violent awakening wouldn’t attract any notice.
“You ‘worked’—” and she crooked her fingers in the air to hang quotation marks around that word “—both nights until dawn. What do you care where I slept?”
He studied her the way he did much too often—the way that made her wonder yet again how she’d failed to realize that he’d spent these long years figuring her out while she’d only been focused on avoiding him. And worse, made her remember what it had been like to wake both nights to find herself lifted into his strong arms then carried through the house against the sweet torture of his magnificent chest. Safe, a rebellious part of her whispered. Like when he’d placed her back in that huge bed in the master bedroom that he made feel so tiny and so crowded when he slept beside her for an hour or two, his arms around her like he could fight off whatever came their way.
These are not helpful thoughts, she told herself sternly.
“I care that you continue to be disobedient when I’ve made it fairly clear that there will be consequences for disobedience,” he said, so silkily she nearly missed what he’d actually said. “But you should ask yourself why—if I knew I had to work all this time, and I did—I insisted you sleep in the master bedroom at all.”
“If I cared as much about sleeping arrangements as you seem to do,” she said icily, “I would have asked you.”
“Because I know you far better than you think I do,” he answered for her, those dark honey eyes gleaming hard, his voice even darker, even smoother, confirming a whole handful of her worst fears. “And everything with you is easier if it is introduced slowly, and in stages.”
She really, really didn’t want to think about that, and everything it implied. About their history. About him. About what was going to happen here, between them, if he had his way.
“I’m not a headstrong mustang you can break with a few muttered words and a carrot,” she snapped at him. “You’re definitely not a cowboy, and this isn’t the Wild West.”
“I think you should consider the fact that if I was happy to allow you to get naked on a plane, I’m unlikely to stand much on ceremony on my own island, where no pilot or air steward lurks a few feet away,” he replied, that voice of his lethal. “If I want you, the fact you’re standing outside is hardly going to put me off.”
“Thank you,” she gritted out. “That’s very comforting.”
“If you want me to comfort you, you need only ask, Mattie.” He paused, his dark eyes searching hers, and that soft thing in them again that would be the undoing of her. “Just ask.”
And that was worse. That hint of emotion in his voice, of something like understanding. Sympathy. It choked her, black and thick and terrible.
“What if what I need comfort from is you?” she asked, her voice a jagged little bit of sound, hardly there at all with the sea crashing into the rocks below and a few hardy seagulls cartwheeling in the air around them as if it was still summer. It matched that almost-smile he aimed her way, that sent a bolt of something a great deal like sorrow arrowing through her. As if she’d already lost something here.
“Come inside,” Nicodemus said again. It wasn’t a request.
If you can’t be in control, Mattie’s father had always said, you can at least be practical. So she gathered herself together as best she could. She kept her spine straight
and her head high, and she marched through the open glass doors like she was proceeding straight off a plank into shark-infested waters.
He slid the doors closed behind her. Mattie heard the click when they shut like a gun to her ear. She walked to the seating area nearest the great windows and sat down in an armchair with great deliberation, so Nicodemus couldn’t sit next to her. He watched her, his mouth twitching again as if he could read her mind as easily as breathe, and then went to the bar tucked into a cabinet to the side and poured two flutes of champagne.
“Take this, please,” he said when she only glared at the glass he brought over and held out to her.
She felt numb, but she took it, staring at it as if it was poison.
“Eis igían sas,” he said. When she frowned up at him, he lifted his champagne in a toast she was certain was mocking. “To your good health.”
“I’m not sure good health is anything I should be aspiring to, in my situation,” she said crisply. She set the flute down on the vast, glass-topped table before her with a decisive clink without so much as tasting it. “It seems to me that a tidy little virus that will carry me off with a minimum of fuss is what I ought to be hoping for. It might be my only escape.”
“I’m sorry to tell you that with great wealth comes immediate access to the best physicians across the globe,” Nicodemus said, seeming perfectly content to stand there, tall and dark and her husband. “I’d make certain you were cured.”
“Exactly how long am I to be trapped in this marriage?”
“You should have paid better attention earlier. Until death,” he said quietly, and there was something in the way he looked at her that made that heavy knot low in her belly flare to life again, hot and needy. Longing and betrayal at once. “Forever.”
“Until death is not the same as forever.”
“Then yes, Mattie,” he said in a mild tone that made her feel like a tantruming toddler. She supposed it was meant to do exactly that. “You may have all the freedom you could possibly desire. In the grave.”
“Wonderful.” She treated him to a tight, fake smile. “Well. This has been delightful. Every girl dreams of being hurriedly married across the planet from all the people she cares about. And half in a language she doesn’t understand. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll take a nap to recover from the thrill of so much fairy-tale glamour at once.”
“You’ve taken quite a few naps since we arrived here.” He moved then, draping that absurd body of his on the nearby couch, at an angle to her, and her heart kicked into a higher gear. “I wonder why?”
“Jet lag?” Mattie supplied tartly. It wasn’t as if she’d slept during those naps she’d claimed she’d needed, of course. She’d been keeping as far away from him as possible.
“Perhaps.” His long fingers toyed with the delicate crystal he held, and she remembered, with startling accuracy, the feel of those fingers dancing across the skin at her side, tracing the sweeping lines of her tattoo. “Or perhaps you are merely trying to avoid the consequences of the past ten years, to say nothing of what happened on the flight over.”
“You talk a lot about these consequences,” Mattie said in as unbothered a tone as she could manage. “But I already feel humiliated. That happens when one is forced into a marriage she doesn’t want. What’s a little in-flight entertainment on top of that? I hope you filmed the whole thing and are planning to upload it to YouTube. Sixty million page views and a host of vile and insulting comments are about the only thing that could make this any worse.”
“That’s more your province than mine, I think,” he said, his dry tone reminding her of that unfortunate video a “friend” of hers had uploaded when Mattie was twenty-three and very drunk. “I’ve never graced the internet without my knowledge, as far as I’m aware.”
“Do you own the internet, too? Or just every person who might post on it?”
“I’m so pleased,” he said after a moment, “that none of this has dulled your sense of drama.”
Mattie found that her hands were in fists again, stuck in the voluminous dark gray skirt of the dress that had seemed like such a good idea when she’d packed it in New York, and now felt nothing but childish. Just as he’d accused her of being, directly and indirectly, a thousand times. It made her heart ache and her head pound today.
Being near him made her feel as out of control and panicky as it ever had. As perilously close to losing herself and all those tightly held spiked things she carried in the deepest, darkest part of her. Worse, now, that he’d kept so many of his promises. That he’d won.
That he kept winning.
“Did you send your staff away with that priest?” she asked. Her voice was quieter. More raw. Too telling by far. And she thought he heard that, because he studied her for a long moment without speaking.
“I did.” She didn’t understand that particular light in those honeyed dark eyes of his. She didn’t want to. “We are very much alone, though there will be deliveries to the dock each morning should you require something. Do you?”
“A ride to Athens?”
His lips crooked. “Other than that.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“You do.” He smiled, and she told herself the chill that snaked down her back was fear, not anticipation. Never that. “Everything, Mattie. I want everything, as I’ve told you from the start.”
She shook her head. “That was all a game. A dare stretched out across the years. Stupidity.” She broke off and tried to find the right words, or, when that failed, any words. “This is different. It’s not a game anymore. I don’t want this, Nicodemus.”
He leaned forward to put his empty glass on the table and then sat back again, and she still couldn’t get that raggedness inside her under any kind of control. She still couldn’t do a thing about that wild red tide that rose inside her, as relentless and unstoppable as he was.
And he simply sat there, unmoved and unbothered, as if everything between them was unfolding according to his plan. She supposed it was, and that made her feel even more trapped, even more hunted, than before.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, with that remarkable, maddening calm. “But even if I did, it’s done.”
“I did what you wanted,” she gritted out. “I married you. Why can’t that be enough?”
Again, that smile, much too knowing. Much too dangerous. “You know why.”
Mattie didn’t mean to move. She had no intention of doing anything but continuing on as she was and hoping that somehow poked holes in his smooth, impenetrable armor....
But instead, she simply burst—reaching out and slapping her full glass of champagne with all of her might and an open hand. It flew through the air, spraying the amber liquid all around and then smashed into pieces on the white marble floor some six feet away.
And for a moment, the only sound was her own harsh breathing and the drumming of her pulse in her ears.
Nicodemus’s too-calm gaze tracked the arc of the champagne glass, stayed on the shattered glass rather longer than it should have then finally cut back to her.
“Ah, Mattie,” he said. Soft. Lethal. And something like kind, which made it that much worse. It told her exactly how much trouble she was in, on the off chance she couldn’t guess. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”
* * *
Nicodemus decided he was enjoying himself, after all.
“You’re going to clean that up,” he told Mattie, who had her chin set at that mulish angle that he found far more amusing than was wise, and all that murder in her eyes. “But first, of course, there must be punishment.”
“Punishment,” she repeated, as if she’d never heard the word before.
“It’s what happens when one throws temper tantrums,” he said. “As you would have realized had your father not shipped you off to stuffy British boarding schools for half your life and treated you with benevolent neglect the rest of the time.”
She stiffened, and her love
ly, dark eyes flashed with outrage. “You’re insane.”
Nicodemus smiled and settled back against the couch, lazily at his ease.
“I’m feeling benevolent myself, as this is our wedding day,” he told her, injecting a note of magnanimity into his voice, purely to watch the fireworks in her gaze. “So I’ll give you a choice. Either you subject yourself to the task of my choosing, or I spank you.”
For a moment, she didn’t react. Then his words clearly penetrated. She flushed hot. He saw the pulse in her neck leap as she jerked back against her chair.
“You can’t spank me!” But there was that note in her voice, and that heat in her eyes, and he wondered what images she was playing with in that complicated head of hers. If they matched the ones in his.
“Can’t I?”
“You can’t simply...do whatever you want!”
“By all means, Mattie, complain to the local authorities.” He nodded toward the windows and the sea beyond. “It’s a bit of a swim, as I’ve said, but I’m sure you’ll receive a perfectly warm welcome in Libya when you come in with the tide.”
“Don’t be absurd!” she snapped.
But he could see that she wasn’t as sure of herself as she’d been in all their previous encounters, and that amused him more than anything else could have. Perhaps it had dawned on her that for all the years they’d played their game of cat and mouse, she’d relied as much on the fact they were in public while they danced around each other as she had on his restraint. And now they were stranded here, together.
This was his home. His rules. His game.
“Act like a child and I will treat you like one,” he told her after a moment, when he thought he could have heard her heart thumping if he’d only stopped to listen. “I’m not your father, Mattie. I’m far more proactive. I’m not going to spoil you on the one hand, ignore you on the other and hope for the best.”
A best that had included Mattie’s well-photographed “wild phase,” which still irritated Nicodemus more than was warranted or, he was aware, fair. A best that had also included making no provision for his own children in the event of his own death. What had Bart been thinking?
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