“I am afraid it is much too late for that.”
She jumped against the iron bench and swiveled to see Nicodemus standing there in the French doors that led to the guest room. Tall, dark. Grim.
And furious.
Mattie looked at the cigarette as if she’d never seen it before, then looked at him. That will be your last cigarette, she remembered him saying so long ago in her father’s library. Her heart was wild against her ribs. But she couldn’t back down. She’d already given too much away.
So she held his dark gaze while she put the cigarette to her mouth again, took a long drag and then blew the smoke out. At him.
For a moment, everything stopped. The world on its axis. The air around them. Everything.
Then Nicodemus threw back his head and laughed.
It was the last thing Mattie expected; it filled the morning with its golden, infectious sound, and maybe that was why she didn’t think to move when he closed the distance between them, rounding the bench to stand in front of her.
And then it was too late. He leaned over her, trapping her against the high back. He plucked the cigarette out of her fingers the way he had once before, and this time he stubbed it out beneath his foot. Then he caught her where she sat with an arm on either side of her, bringing his face dangerously close to hers.
There was a fire in his dark gaze. And it lit her up with what she chose to call fear, though that molten thing down deep in her core knew better.
“Was I unclear?” he asked in a mild tone at complete odds with the fierce look in his face. “Because I remember telling you that smoking was unacceptable. Did I dream this conversation?”
“I never agreed to obey you, Nicodemus,” she said, amazed she had the power of speech when he was so close and so obviously furious with her. “You simply decided I should, the way you’ve decided any number of things since the day we met.” She didn’t know where she got the courage—or foolishness—to shrug like that, like he bored her. “And you’re welcome to decide whatever you like, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with your decisions. Much less follow them like gospel.”
He looked at her for what felt like a very long time. And then he smiled.
“Thank you,” he said, almost formally.
She was almost afraid to ask. “For what?”
“For making this easy.”
She didn’t see him move. He only shifted, and then she was in the air, unable to make sense of what was happening to her until the soft curve of her belly hit the rock hardness of his shoulder. He was already inside the villa and moving swiftly through the guest wing by the time she registered that he’d simply picked her up and thrown her over his shoulder.
Mattie fought. She kicked at him and beat at his back with her fists, and he only laughed and smacked his hand down on her bottom. Hard.
Then he tipped her upright again and dropped her. She cried out in the instant before she bounced in the center of their bed. His bed, she corrected herself furiously, desperately scrabbling to catch herself and sit up—
To see Nicodemus standing there at the foot of the bed, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes like stone as he glared down at her.
“We’ve had a week of lies and strained civility,” he said, and there was nothing cool about his voice. Nothing measured or polite. “Now we do this my way.”
“This has all been your way already!”
“Mattie,” he said, harsh and certain and more like steel than she’d ever heard him. “Be quiet.”
She told herself she wasn’t obeying him. That she was simply trying to calm her racing heart, stop her ragged-edged gasping for breath. She told herself that if she’d wanted to, she would have screamed at him. But whatever the reason, she fell silent.
Nicodemus could have been carved from marble.
“What do you suggest I do with a woman who acts like a disobedient child?” he asked, his voice a low rasp.
“I take it that’s a rhetorical question?”
He ignored her. “It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out that you have Daddy issues, Mattie. The question is, do I play that role? Is that what it will take?”
Her jaw ached. That was how she realized she was clenching her teeth.
“I,” she bit out, so angry it was like a living thing clawing its way out from within her, “do not have Daddy issues. The only issue I have is you.”
“This is what you need to understand,” Nicodemus said in that ruthless way that made something shiver through her, settling low in her belly and becoming a pulse of heat, mixing with that anger and changing it into something she couldn’t recognize. Or she didn’t want to recognize. “I will win. No matter how long it takes, no matter what I have to do, no matter what games you play. I will win because winning is what I do.”
“You don’t get to order me—”
“It is time for you to stop running at windmills,” he told her in that same ruthless way. “We are not living in your world, where you can order everyone around and have them dance to your tune. We are in mine. And I find my interest in indulging these tantrums is over.”
She couldn’t speak for a long moment. There was that terrible yearning deep inside her, too deep and too dark. It would eat her whole, she knew, and what would be left of her on the other side? What would happen when he got what he thought he wanted and really, truly knew her?
Why did she want to find out when she knew she’d regret it?
“The fact that you think you have the right to expect obedience is a problem, Nicodemus,” she said, scowling at him, hoping she could bluster her way through this the way she always had before. “The fact that you think you can manhandle me? Also a problem.”
He was dressed all in black today, she couldn’t help but notice. A black T-shirt that strained over his muscled arms and black trousers that clung to his narrow hips and showed the faintest hint of his olive-toned skin at the waistband. He looked like he could singlehandedly take down a terrorist cell if he felt like it—which meant cowing her should be the work of a few moments. The idea made her limbs feel like liquid. Hot and slippery when she wanted to be strong.
“And the fact that you call anything I do that you don’t like a tantrum,” she continued, her chin rising up as she refused to let herself look away from him, “is certainly a big problem, as well. It’s wildly condescending, for a start.”
“Here is what will happen,” he said in a perfectly calm, conversational tone, as if there was no tension in the air, no beating, throbbing, white-hot thing wrapping tighter and tighter around them both. “I told you I was going to spank you. You had the option to dance for me, instead, but you chose to run away, as usual. Leaving me to clean up yet another one of your messes. Also as usual.” He smiled faintly. “Did you think I had forgotten these infractions?”
“Is this boarding school all over again?” she demanded, still going for the bluster even as that hot, slippery, yearning thing made her worry she might turn into a puddle on the bed. “Will I get detention for smoking that cigarette? Will I have to write lines? Scrub the floors?”
“I have something significantly more corporeal in mind.”
“You say you want obedience but you didn’t like it much when I actually got on my knees, did you?” she snapped at him, telling herself that fire in her was fear, not desire. Because she didn’t want to be fascinated by this. She wanted to be afraid. “And I’m not calling you sir, by the way, no matter how many shades of crazy you show me.”
A careless shrug. “You made your body fair game in this little struggle of ours. Why shouldn’t I do the same? I think we’ll do this my way and see what you call me when I’m done. You might be surprised.”
“If you spank me,” she told him, low and fervent, “I really will let that current sweep me off to Libya. I mean it, Nicodemus.”
“Note to self,” Nicodemus said mildly, sounding completely unimpressed with her threat. “Tie wife to the bed.”
He moved t
hen, putting his knee on the mattress as if he meant to crawl toward her. And everything seemed to slide sideways in a dizzy sort of shift. The world went red. Mattie thought something blew up inside her—knocking out reason. Knocking out everything save that grinding, expanding, whole-bodied desire for anything and everything he might give her.
She panicked.
Mattie dove for the side of the bed, already envisioning her escape. Into the bathroom, where she could lock the door and, if all else failed, crawl out on the roof and try—
But he simply reached out and caught her with one large hand around her hip, yanking her back into the center of the bed.
“Be still,” he told her.
So instead, Mattie fought.
She flailed and she kicked, she bucked and she twisted, and she was lost for what seemed like a very long time in the haze of it. But then the fever seemed to lift, and Mattie had to face the unpleasant realization that, as ever with this man, she’d only made it all that much worse.
Because he hadn’t fought back. He’d simply pinned her to the bed with his superior strength. And waited.
She was out of breath. Nicodemus was impassive.
He was stretched out above her in absolutely the worst position she could imagine. His chest pressed against hers, flattening her breasts in a way that made her simultaneously hot and very, very worried. His hips were flush against hers, his legs on the inside of hers, and he made no attempt at all to hide the fact that he was hard. Ready. Aroused.
He was so strong. So perfectly formed. Beautiful even when he held her down, his fingers threaded with hers, her arms up and over her head and flat against the mattress.
“You’re only making this worse for yourself,” he told her.
And she was sick, she decided, because she didn’t want to fight him any longer. She wanted to melt into him. She wanted to shift so that his hardness pressed more directly against the core of her. She wanted to lift her mouth and press it against his. She wanted—and she knew that it was more destructive by far than anything he could do to her.
“Nicodemus.” But she was whispering, and even she could hear the longing in her voice. And the fact she didn’t demand that he release her.
“You claim you won’t surrender to me by choice,” he said, in that firm, relentless way that made a rush of heat wash over her, turning her restless and liquid and yearning beneath him. “And yet it has been obvious to me for some time that surrender is what you need above all things. Think about it. You, completely out of control. No manipulations. No schemes. No plotting. Just your bare bottom and my hand. Imagine what we can learn from an interaction so elemental?”
It took her long moments to realize that she was shaking, over and over, as if something had gone loose inside her and could no longer be contained. As if he was already doing the things he’d painted so vividly. As if she was already that far gone. That lost. As if she could truly surrender the way he wanted her to do. The way she wished she could do. She shook, hard and deep.
But she didn’t say no.
“Or,” he said, in that dark, low way, “you can tell me one true thing.” His gaze locked with hers. “Just one. The truth, Mattie, or my hand. Your choice. But I’ll have some kind of surrender from you, either way.”
And that was when Mattie realized what she had to do.
Because it was the only thing she had left. And she didn’t know why she’d been avoiding it for so long. As Nicodemus had taught her too well in this last fraught week, there were intimacies much more shattering than sex. The world was filled with one-night stands, bedpost-notchers and all kinds of people who used sex to hide from intimacy, not to enhance it.
She could do it. She should have done it long before now. She should have realized it was the only possible way she could get the upper hand with him.
Mattie swallowed, hard. She searched his face for any give, any softness, any sign that he was something other than this: hard, demanding, implacable. But it was the Nicodemus she knew staring back at her, and the sheer, startling rightness of that—of him and of this decision she’d made so effortlessly after all these years of agonizing—washed over her. It made her remarkably calm for someone who was pinned to a bed and literally trapped between a rock and a hard place.
But it also made it easy. Or maybe that was because it was him.
Maybe, a small voice whispered inside her, it’s always and only been him, and you should have admitted it a long time ago.
Mattie didn’t want to think about that, or all the things it could mean.
“One truth,” he said, as if he thought she wasn’t going to answer him. “That’s all it will take to clean the slate. Can you do it?”
She pulled her fingers out of his, faintly surprised when he let her. Then she reached up and slid her palms along his hard jaw, letting the sensation crash into her. She liked the fact he hadn’t bothered to shave in days, that his skin was rough to the touch. She liked that gleam in his dark eyes. She liked that she was closer to him now, almost too close to bear.
“I want you,” she whispered.
And Nicodemus froze.
* * *
For a shimmering moment, everything was taut. Stretched thin on the edge of a knife—or maybe that was him, holding himself above her, her words like a shout ricocheting within him.
Nicodemus didn’t ask her to repeat herself. Not because her words were burned into him, though they were. Not even because he knew he couldn’t possibly hear her over the racket inside him, the clamor of his heart and the shout of his blood in his veins.
But because he had never seen that look on her face before, in her pretty eyes. Wide open. Clear. Determined, perhaps, and more than a little anxious. Bright.
True.
It moved over him like a wave. Like an ocean’s worth of tides, dragging at him, blessing him or condemning him, and Nicodemus wasn’t sure he cared which. He reminded himself that Mattie was a liar. That like the only other people who had ever meant anything to him, she would lie to him as easily as she breathed. That there was no point in believing her now, when she was only telling him what she thought he most wanted to hear.
When she was right.
She moved then. She slid her hands from his face and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and then she shifted her hips against his, dancing for him again. Making him wish that this once, he could believe her.
“Nicodemus,” she whispered. “I always have.”
And he was still only a man, despite everything. He was as weak as any other. Perhaps even as weak, in his own way, as the man he’d always hated the most—his father. And Mattie Whitaker had been crawling in him like an itch for all these years, whispering his name in his darkest hours whether she knew it or not, and promising him exactly this in every last one of his favorite fantasies.
How could he resist her?
He stopped trying. He simply dropped his head and crushed his mouth to hers, and who cared what came after? If she proved—the way he assumed she would, because she always did—that even this was a lie?
For the first time in his life, Nicodemus didn’t care.
She tasted like fire and longing and all of the wildness that had swirled between them all this time. He kissed her again and again, glutting himself and losing himself at once, feeling that lush, lithe body of hers pressed against him, soft where he was hard, tall and long and perfect.
Mine, he thought, reveling in the word, in her exquisite warmth in his arms and that pounding, beating, hungry demand inside him, spurring him on, making him half crazed with need.
Her hands traced shapes down his back, tested the heft of his biceps, then found their way to his hips. Everything was the heat of her mouth, the glory of her taste, the maddening slide of her body against his. He pulled back to peel off his shirt and she made a soft sound of distress.
Nicodemus thought he might very well eat her alive.
He threw his shirt away, then tugged hers off. He peeled the skin
tight black denim from her endless legs, feeling as delirious at the sight of all that lovely flesh as he had been when she’d done this for him in midair. He reached out and traced her phoenix tattoo again, attuned to the soft sounds she made, the way she caught her breath and then let it out hard as he leaned in close and licked his way over the riot of color.
He took his time. He settled in and followed every line, tasting every part of that magical, mystical creature she’d inked into her skin. When he was done, she was shifting and rolling beneath him as if she couldn’t help herself. As if she was as needy and insane with it as he was.
But it wasn’t enough.
Nicodemus pulled her bra down, one cup at a time, so he could worship each of her breasts in turn. He remembered the thrust of her nipples, the sweet rose of them, but this time he savored each one. He used his tongue and his lips and even the scrape of his teeth, until she was thrashing against the mattress and muttering what sounded like his name. Or perhaps it was an endless stream of something very much like a plea.
Either way, it moved in him like the finest music.
He shifted then, following a meandering path down her abdomen until he reached her pierced navel and could admit, at last, that he liked it. He more than liked it. It made her even sexier, something that he’d have thought impossible. He wanted her—all of her, all of these bright colors and sexy rings—entirely to himself.
The possessiveness wasn’t new. But the simple beauty of her surrender, her body wide open beneath him, quivering for his touch—made him feel like a god. He would do anything for this, he understood then in a way that might have worried him had he allowed himself to consider it, and yet at the same time he doubted he’d ever drink his fill of this woman. He couldn’t see how he’d ever come close.
Mine, he thought again, the way he always did, though this time it felt darker. Hotter. Much more intense.
Because it felt like truth, at last.
When he reached the dainty lace thong that stretched to contain her femininity, her fingers dug into his hair. Hard.
“No.” He only watched her, though he went still, however difficult it might have been. “I want you,” she said again, even more beautiful this time because her voice was so ragged, and he knew he’d done that to her. “Inside me, Nicodemus. Please.”
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