Too much. Everything.
She couldn’t open herself up like that. She didn’t dare.
But she could give him this.
Mattie showed him what lurked in her heart, what she’d never dare say aloud. She lavished him with all the beauty and terror and sweet, hot need he’d introduced her to so expertly. She led him to the bed and crawled over him, leaving no part of him untouched. As if she could press all the things she felt directly into his skin. As if she could tattoo him with her own mouth.
As if this was better than the truth he wanted.
And then, finally, when everything had tightened beyond bearing and both of them were desperate, she climbed on top of him, wincing slightly when she took him deep inside her.
“This is too much,” he gritted out, even now, when she knew he was pushed to his limits. “You are new to this.”
Mattie only held his gaze. And then she began to move.
She built her rhythm slowly, carefully, and then, when she was more comfortable, she picked up her pace. His hands gripped her hips as he met her, thrusting hard and deep and beautiful.
And this, she thought and had to bite her lip from saying, was better than simply true. This was truth itself and this was right and surely, he must feel it. Surely, he must know all the things she felt, yet couldn’t say.
Surely, he must understand how desperately she loved him.
This time, when the fire built and built until it finally burned them both alive, they flew off that glorious edge together.
But when Mattie woke from a shockingly uninterrupted sleep, it was another perfect gold and blue morning outside the windows, there was a servant bustling around in the kitchen downstairs with unwelcome efficiency and cheer, and Nicodemus was gone.
CHAPTER NINE
NICODEMUS’S ENTIRE LIFE mocked him.
There were the papers he’d signed in a grim fury the day he’d returned from Greece to merge the Stathis Corporation with Whitaker Industries, despite that burning thing in him that had wanted nothing more than to fly to London and punch Chase Whitaker in the face, because Chase was the closest thing on the planet to Big Bart. He still didn’t know how he’d managed to keep himself in check. How he’d returned to Manhattan and his office there without causing any international incidents, such was the temper he’d been in when he’d left his island.
There was the brownstone in New York’s West Village he stood in now, that he’d bought and painstakingly renovated years ago and had been calling home when his real home should have been in Athens near his own headquarters. There was even this damned mood he was in, black and dangerous like the autumn storm outside the windows, pelting the city with the same bitter cold he felt inside himself.
It was all about her, and he felt it like one of her mocking little laughs, lighting him up and ripping into him at the same time.
You have to put this behind you, he ordered himself.
Over and over again. But it didn’t seem to work.
The sad truth was, everything he did and everything he’d done for years revolved around Mattie Whitaker, and the fact he hadn’t noticed it even as he’d done it galled him. The fact he’d never seen her for what she was ate at him. At first, perhaps, it had been unconscious. He’d wanted a woman like her, he’d told himself. And he’d admired her father, the first man who’d ever treated Nicodemus as something other than a trashy upstart. The man who’d encouraged him to educate himself and had given him the tools to do it.
But at some point along the way he’d stopped pretending. And now he was married to a woman he couldn’t trust, tied up in a thousand legal knots with her family business, and completely screwed.
Literally as well as figuratively, he admitted darkly, and let out some rendition of a laugh.
And she’d been a virgin.
He still couldn’t believe it. He still couldn’t handle all the implications of that—the one thing she couldn’t fake or lie about. He didn’t know what was worse—his absolute disbelief, because her virginity meant he didn’t know her as well as he’d thought he did, or that primitive part of him that simply wanted to claim her as his, now and forever.
It stood to reason that now he finally had her, now that he’d made her his in every possible way, he didn’t see how he could let himself keep her.
Another blustery autumn night had fallen over Manhattan, blanketing the city with a thick darkness that looked almost soft from inside the office he’d built on the second floor of the brownstone, despite the rain that still pounded down, making the trees along the city street bend and sway.
And Nicodemus ignored the insistent beeping from his laptop that indicated one incoming email after the next. He ignored the buzzing of his mobile phone. He stared out at the cold, wet dark and tortured himself.
One scalding-hot image after the next, as relentless as the freezing rain outside, and as brutal.
Mattie kissing him, using her mouth all over him, beguiling him and enslaving him. Mattie sitting astride him, the most beautiful creature he’d ever beheld, riding them both into all of that white-hot wonder.
Mattie, Mattie, Mattie, the way it had been since the moment he’d seen her in her long-ago ball gown, sparkling so brightly she’d eclipsed the whole of the world.
And that was when the truth of things hit him, making him feel something like sick.
After all this time, after all the effort he’d put into never, ever becoming a man like his father, he’d neglected to recognize that it was his other parent’s influence he should have guarded himself against.
Because he was no different from his sad, discarded mother, was he? She’d taught him how to pine. How to spend years longing for someone who would never return the feeling. Arista had been a mere practice run. He’d built a whole life around his hopes and dreams about Mattie.
“How can you consider taking him back, after all of this?” Nicodemus had railed at his mother in those terrible days after that last scene with his father, when his mother had still maintained her vigil and her beauty regimen as if those things were sacred rituals that would bring him back. “How can you weep for him?”
“The heart is more forgiving than you imagine,” his mother had told him, humming to herself as she’d combed out her hair. “And far more resilient.”
And he’d hated her for it.
He could admit that now, after all these years had passed. After he’d exacted his revenge when he’d gutted his father’s company and stripped him of the better part of his wealth. After he’d gone on to far outshine the man who had ruined them both. God, how he’d hated her. He’d hated her almost as much as he’d loved her, in that same helpless way, so unable was he to fix what was broken in her or save her once his father had abandoned them.
“He is never coming back,” he’d told her when she’d ended up in the hospital and had insisted that he dress her in something nicer than a hospital gown, in case his father deigned to stop by when Nicodemus had known full well he wouldn’t. “He doesn’t care if we live or die.”
“Love is not always a straight line, Nicodemus,” she’d replied in that reedy voice of hers, so thin even he’d known, at sixteen and before the doctors had taken him aside to confirm it, that she hadn’t had much time left.
And the guilt he’d felt over how much he’d hated her obliviousness, her dogged optimism, her reckless belief in one so deeply unworthy of her notice, had led him to approach his father that last time.
His reward for that had been a month in jail, and his mother had died alone.
Nicodemus couldn’t shake aside these old ghosts. He felt as if he was that twelve-year-old boy again, miserable and astonished, with his face pressed to the gates of a fancy house high in the hills above Piraeus. He’d done exactly what he’d set out to do then. The houses. The expensive toys. Whatever he desired was his—precisely as he’d dreamed when he’d first seen the true life his father led. When he’d understood that he and his mother were the dirty secrets.
But
he’d forgotten—or chosen to ignore—that the heart that beat inside his chest was softer.
As foolish and as suicidal as his mother’s had been.
“You must stop this,” he ordered himself, only aware that he spoke out loud when he heard the resounding silence that followed his words.
He cursed beneath his breath, pushing back from the desk, ignoring his ringing phone. Ignoring the hours of work he had left to do today. Ignoring everything but that darkness inside him that he wished he could excise with his own two hands.
He wished. He still wished and that, Nicodemus understood, was his problem. Perhaps it always had been.
He had to decide what to do with Mattie now. It occurred to him, standing in yet another home he’d made with every expectation that she would live in it with him one day, that this was the first time in a decade that he’d had any doubts. He’d always known exactly what to do with Mattie Whitaker. He’d always had a plan. That plan had changed in its particulars over the years, but essentially, it was always the same: isolate the two of them from the rest of the world and let their insane chemistry do the rest.
He’d always imagined that would be enough.
But now—he’d tasted her innocence. He’d seen truths in her beautiful eyes that she’d refused to speak out loud. He’d soothed her in her restless, broken sleep and he’d held her in his arms as she’d cried. He’d watched her rebel, and he’d watched her surrender, and he couldn’t have said which part of her he liked most.
He’d loved her from afar for ten years. He loved her even more now.
And it still didn’t matter.
He couldn’t trust her. He didn’t believe her. She was made entirely of secrets and lies, and he couldn’t do it. He knew where it led. Exactly where it led. He’d already done this, more than once.
Which meant that somehow, after all these years and all the things he’d done to get them here, the lives he’d built for them to live in and the dreams he’d been fool enough to think he could indulge, he had to find a way to let her go.
* * *
“You must have done something,” Chase said over the phone, with what sounded like sheer irritation in his voice. It made his British accent that much more pronounced.
It made Mattie want to reach through the phone and slap him, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean in his London office.
This is your beloved big brother, the only family you have left in all the world, she cautioned herself. None of this is his fault,
None of this is your fault, either, she replied to herself staunchly—though she imagined that depended on which of her faults was under discussion. And with whom.
Mattie took a deep breath as she stood in her same old living room on the Upper West Side, now its usual size without Nicodemus looming in it to shrink the dimensions around him. His absence lanced into her, a sharp and searing pain, no less bearable for the fact it wasn’t anything new, and she deeply regretted returning her brother’s call.
“Would you like a point-by-point analysis of how I executed my duties as Nicodemus’s arranged bride?” she asked, her voice almost as clipped as his, and her accent had gone American years ago. “I should warn you in advance. Some parts get a little bit naked. That’s what happens in marriages whether they’re arranged or not, or didn’t you know?”
It was easy to keep her voice cool and even. Or arch and brittle, more accurately. Because ever since Nicodemus had left her to make her own way home from his island, Mattie had felt...nothing. Not when Chase called. Not when the papers speculated about her and her marriage. Not at all.
She was a polished piece of glass, she told herself now. Hard and smooth. Impervious to harm.
“I don’t need this bloody headache,” Chase muttered.
It was almost under his breath. And Mattie therefore almost pretended that she hadn’t heard it. But there was that raw thing inside her that felt like a poisonous snake, coiled tight and ready to strike, and Chase was setting himself up as the perfect target.
“I apologize that the marriage you pushed me into for business purposes has turned out to be less than blissful,” she said in that same bright and hard tone. “You’ll remember how thrilled I was about it in the first place. Who could possibly have predicted that this might happen?” She pretended to wait a beat, as if considering the question. “Oh, right. I did.”
Chase sighed at her sarcastic tone. Mattie’s fingers clenched so hard around her phone receiver that it hurt, her rings biting into her flesh, and it wasn’t her brother who she was angry at, she knew. He had nothing to do with all the things that had happened between her and Nicodemus on that island—all the things she couldn’t tell him. Or anyone.
All the things she wasn’t entirely ready to admit to herself, even now.
“I spoke to Nicodemus not three days ago and he gave me no indication that there was anything wrong with your marriage,” Chase said, sounding impatient, which made that thing inside her pull tight. Coil harder. “In fact, you didn’t even come up.”
“Oh, I see,” she gritted out. “That must mean that I hallucinated the past month of my life, then.”
She heard the sound of papers rustling, and then a keyboard tapping, and it filled her with a completely unwarranted fury that Chase could simply...go about his business while she was nothing but stuck.
Not that she’d entirely admitted that to herself in the week or so since she’d returned home from Greece. She hadn’t allowed herself to think such a thing while tossing herself back into the life she’d left behind here and wanted so desperately to believe still fit like a glove.
But that didn’t make it any less true.
“Although, now that I think about it, he did seem particularly focused on business,” Chase said, almost grudgingly. “He’s usually a little more friendly. Only a little.”
Mattie waited, but Chase didn’t offer up any other details. She realized she was clenching her teeth, and forced herself to stop.
“Thanks,” she said mildly, though inside, she was so terribly raw and too hot and shattering into jagged little pieces. “I’ll write you a note, shall I? And the next time you see him or talk to him, you can give it to him, and we can all pretend we’re in grade school together.”
“Mattie—” Chase began.
“I don’t want to hear whatever you’re about to say,” she told him, and there was nothing smooth or glass-like about her voice then. She only wondered how she’d held it together so long. “I did what you wanted me to do, and you couldn’t even do me the courtesy of showing up to witness it. And I only called you back today because I thought you should know the state of things between Nicodemus and me. Foolishly, I was worried that it might affect the business. I’m delighted to hear that while Nicodemus may have broken a promise or two to me, all is well where the company is concerned.” She laughed, and it was not a nice sound. “As ever, that’s all that matters.”
“It’s not all that matters.” Chase sounded tougher than the brother she knew. Harder. Colder. “But it’s the only thing we have left. And if that doesn’t mean something, Mattie, then I don’t know what does.”
It’s not the only thing, a tiny voice whispered inside her. It’s a company. It’s not us.
And Mattie realized then that she was miserable. Pure and simple.
She let that unfortunate truth trickle through her, filling her up until she hardly recognized herself, as if it had changed her from the inside out. Altered her. It made her want to throw her phone across the room and watch it break into pieces. It made her want to curl into a ball and cry for days, as she’d only done one other time in her life.
She’d been a liar for most of her life because there was one truth she couldn’t tell. And she wondered why she’d never noticed that keeping that secret had changed her. Turned her inside out. Made her the kind of woman who could look at a man she loved and be too afraid to admit it, even to herself.
That thudded into her. Like a sledgehammer. Like
Nicodemus’s heartbeat beneath her palm. Like one more true thing she couldn’t tell him, couldn’t say out loud, couldn’t let herself believe.
“Do you think about that day?” she asked Chase, because they were what was left. The company was incidental. Or it should have been.
His silence told her he knew exactly what day she meant. And more, that he did think about it. But they hadn’t spoken of it. Not in twenty years. Not since it had happened.
And she didn’t want that guilt anymore, the guilt that had always convinced her that it was her fault they had this distant, strained relationship. That it was her fault they were like this.
“I get that you’re upset, Mats,” Chase said after an uneven moment, when there’d been nothing but that heavy silence between them that she wasn’t sure he’d break. “But I don’t see any point in revisiting old ghosts. Particularly those ghosts.”
“I’m guessing that means you don’t wake up every night of your life screaming, then,” she heard herself say, as if from a far-off height. “Calling out for her again and again.”
“What is the point of this?” And she’d never heard him sound like this, not in years. Like there was something raging beneath his skin, too. “What is there to be gained? I’m sorry that you still have the nightmares, I am. But dragging ourselves back through this swamp is only going to—”
“I don’t understand why we lied about being there,” she whispered, because she couldn’t seem to stop now that she’d started. “What was the point of that?”
“You were eight years old,” Chase said succinctly. “I was thirteen. I don’t think we remember the same things. We did her a kindness. As well as us.”
“I’m not eight anymore, Chase. Tell me what you remember.”
“Our mother died in front of us,” he said, and she couldn’t identify what she heard in his voice then. Pain, yes. That same horror she still felt herself. Grief and fury and then something so much darker beneath it. “On the side of a road. But you and I are safe. I don’t know what else you want.”
“I want the truth,” she said, and maybe it shouldn’t have surprised her that her legs were too shaky, that she had to sit down. That the world felt as if it was breaking apart all around her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know why.
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