by Dani Collins
But some said emulation was the sincerest form of flattery and Demitri wanted to emulate Theo. He would never be perfect the way Theo was, but somehow his withdrawn, reclusive brother had earned the devotion of a sweet, loving woman. Demitri needed to know how that was done.
“I’ve never liked you, either, if you want the truth,” Theo remarked as the women disappeared.
“Is that the best you can do?” Demitri scoffed with a fake husk of a laugh, pretending the lazy blow hadn’t landed hard enough to leave a mark.
“No,” Theo said flatly.
Demitri rocked back on his heels, nodding as the silence stretched. “No, you can refuse to talk to me at all. It’s a brutally effective punishment, Theo. I don’t have a spare in Nic the way you do. Gideon can’t stand me. You’re all I’ve got for a brother.”
Theo didn’t look at him. He’d gone very still. Slowly he took a sip of the soda he held. “Gideon runs a tight ship. He doesn’t put up with jackassery of any kind. I never make mistakes, so he doesn’t have anything to call me up for. You’ve made yourself a pet project for him, though. That’s the only reason he rides you.”
Theo was letting a few emotions creep into the conversation—annoying ones like superiority and weary exasperation. It was his version of warming up. Demitri took heart.
“And Nic—” Theo began, but Demitri stopped him.
“I know. You would have talked about him if you could have. Frankly, I’m glad that you have at least one good memory from our childhood,” he said sincerely, unable to suppress the deep anguish anymore, aware it flashed into his expression before he was able to control his emotions outwardly even if they threatened to overwhelm him internally.
Theo acknowledged the statement with a lowering of his brows and tightening of his lips.
“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Demitri added, guts clawing with shame. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I am sorry.”
Nothing for a long moment, then, “Those things weren’t your fault. I shouldn’t have made out as if they were. We were kids. None of that was our fault. And you’re not like him. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Their gazes met for a fraction of a heartbeat, just long enough to see the shattered emotion in the other and look away to hide their own.
A weird relief weakened Demitri’s limbs. He’d needed to hear it. It allowed him to believe he might be good enough for Natalie after all.
“For what it’s worth,” Theo continued drily, “Nic has himself so together he makes me feel like the idiotic younger brother. So you’ll always have a place in my life.”
“Good to know,” Demitri said with a catch of laughter, pleased to be back on trashing terms with Theo. “By the way, you don’t pay Natalie enough. I’ll be stealing her for the firm I’m starting.”
“Is that what you’re doing with her?” Theo asked, giving him a sharp look.
“No,” Demitri said in a rare moment of complete sincerity. “I’m going to ask her to marry me.” It made him proud to say it, and he liked the way Theo absorbed the news with a thoughtful, approving nod.
“Good luck.” He even sounded like he meant it.
* * *
Natalie dropped her lipstick into her pocketbook and met Jaya’s gaze in the mirror. “That’s ten minutes. Have we given them enough time?”
Jaya’s painted smile twitched. “Was I that obvious? I really have been wanting your impressions on how the new software was received.”
Natalie shrugged, not feeling she’d told Jaya anything she wouldn’t have heard through other channels, but the topic had been a nice path around the scandal that had arisen from Natalie’s assignment in France.
“I think we were right to let them duke it out in private,” Natalie said, referring to Demitri and Theo. “I just hope they have. Family isn’t something you can have so much of that you can afford to throw any of it away.”
“That’s what I kept telling Theo after he ignored Demitri’s call!” As they walked back, Jaya told her about a disagreement in her own family involving her cousin. It had gone on for years, breaking many hearts. She was so engaging, Natalie started when someone touched her arm.
It was Rowan. She waved them into conversation with her and Gideon, leaning gleefully toward Jaya as she gave a little nod to something across the room. “Don’t look now, but the planets have aligned.”
Natalie followed their gazes to all four siblings standing in a group, talking animatedly.
“Oh,” Jaya sighed, setting a hand over her heart. “I was starting to worry it would never happen.”
“This will mean the world to Nic,” Rowan murmured with a poignant creak in her tone.
“And Adara,” Gideon said.
Demitri had needed this, too. Natalie felt a wistful pride in being part of making it happen. For a moment, she even felt equal to these other partners in this mystic circle, gazing with happiness for the group of laughing adults who hadn’t known joy as children.
Not long after, they toasted Adara with champagne and sang along when Adara’s favorite chart-topping crooner led the crowd in “Happy Birthday.” Then the dancing started.
“Evie wants Zoey to spend the night,” Rowan found Natalie to say. “Would you mind? She’ll be heartbroken if Zoey leaves. One of us will have to go up to her.”
Rowan had booked several rooms for the musicians she’d hired to entertain the crowd, but one of those suites had been set aside for Natalie and Demitri. If Zoey needed her mother in the night, they’d only be a few doors away. Natalie made the call to Zoey and had to pull the phone away from her ear when her daughter squealed, “She said yes!”
The enchantment of the evening deepened as Natalie absorbed that she would be making love with Demitri tonight. Resting her head on his shoulder, she surrendered to the sexual pull he always exerted over her. Her jacket was off and his lips touched her bare shoulder. Male fingertips caressed up her arm. She lightly traced the hollow at the back of his neck.
This was so perfect. So loving.
Holding eye contact with him was always a stumble into sexual heat. Tonight it was a blind gallop into a conflagration. He was so handsome, carefree in an authentic way that hurt to look at. Every point where she came in contact with him stung with need, tightening her airway and wetting her eyes at the magnitude of the moment.
She loved him so much.
“We have a room,” she reminded in a voice husked with growing passion.
“Do you want to leave?” He searched her gaze, the delving deep enough to make her insides shake.
She nodded, ducking her head to hide her reaction, tracing a hand beneath his open coat across the tensed muscles of his waist.
The crowd had thinned. Nic and Rowan had already left, since they had to be up with the children in the morning. Adara hugged them and Gideon bussed Natalie’s cheek with a kiss, sounding sincere when he said, “Thank you for coming.”
She and Demitri walked out hand in hand, sexual tension climbing between them with each step. When they entered the suite, he threw the entry card on the table and said, “Come here, beautiful.”
She spun into his arms, crashing herself against him so he grunted at the hit and wrapped her arms around his neck in abandoned joy. His mouth was everything she’d been waiting for, his hair spiky between her fingers, his body already aroused and thick against her—
“Easy, Natalie,” he soothed in a masterful voice, arms hardening to still her from wriggling through his skin to adhere to his bones. His nose grazed her cheekbone; his brow touched hers. “We have time. Lots of time.”
A lifetime? It wasn’t like her to believe in permanence, but for once she let herself trust he would always be here for her.
And he wouldn’t be rushed when it came to getting what he wanted from her. He would seduce her, holding her pinned to his steely body while he drew out his long, lazy kisses that thoroughly plundered her mouth.
She couldn’t move in his hold, could only tell
him with her lips and tongue and a ragged, lusty moan that he was torturing her. Her blood pounded her arteries in painful hammer blows of need. His heart slammed behind his chest wall, reverberating against her resting palm, the only evidence he matched her excitement.
That and their breaths mingling in shaken hisses.
“I want you so much,” she whispered when he nipped at the straining cord along the side of her neck, then closed her eyes, abandoning herself to his caresses.
“This is all I’ve been thinking about since I first saw you tonight. Your skin. Your laugh. The way you catch your breath.”
She did it now as he tilted her hips into his, sex to sex, need to need.
Stropping her face against his spicy-smelling neck, she said, “I want to be naked. I want to feel you.”
“Yes.” The word hissed out of him and he stepped back to turn her, lowering her zipper down her spine with sensual care, forehead tilted against her crown. His soft laughter pooled hotly against the back of her bare neck. “These dimples are my fatal weakness, Natalie,” he said as her gown slid to the floor. He set two thumbs against the upper swells of her bottom, where the high cut of her French lingerie framed them. “After Lyon, I agonized that I would never see them again.”
She smiled, made joyous by the confession.
His fingers moved into her hair, gently pulling pins and dropping them. The quiet attentiveness, the tenderness of his touch, the graze of his clothing against her bare skin made it the most romantic moment of her life. She felt like a bride. Cherished. Loved.
Tonight she would let herself believe that she was. Somehow she was more than all the other women he’d been with combined.
Her own movements slowed as she grew determined to savor. Remember each touch. Each breath.
When he turned her, he grazed the backs of his fingers along the side of her breast. Leaned in to kiss her sweetly. “You’re so beautiful, Natalie.”
She believed him and undressed him between kisses, pushing his jacket off his shoulders, pulling away his bow tie, opening the buttons hidden in the ruffles of his shirt. When she got to his fly, he reached into his pocket to remove a strip of three condoms.
“Always prepared,” she teased, pushing his pants down his hips.
“Wishful thinking that came true,” he said, caressing her jaw and rueful smile. “I thought you’d be sleeping with Zoey tonight.”
Kicking free of the last of his clothes, he set his feet apart and drew her into his nude body, making them both release shattered breaths at the contact of skin on skin. His fingers tangled in her panties and slid them down, urging her to leave them on the floor as he drew her to the bedroom.
The unhurried purity of the moment encased her in a glow, walking like the only two humans on earth to the bed. Her heart was wide-open to him, taking in his reverent study of her form as though it was a vow. She would never love anyone the way she loved him, she realized. Tears stung the backs of her eyes. Her feelings went beyond his primitive sexuality and masculine beauty. The fighter in her rested when he was near. Surrendered and trusted.
As he pressed her to her back on the soft mattress, parted her legs and entered her with his strength, she clenched her eyes against brimming wetness.
“Look at me, Natalie.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “It’s too much.”
“I’ve got you. I’m going to take care of you.”
He would, she saw, when she dared to open her eyes. His dark eyes were deeply colored with sincerity. His muscles quivered as he held back. Always so generous, especially in bed.
She twisted, agonized by the acute intimacy and pleasure-pain of holding him within her, with the difficulty of stifling the words in her throat.
“You’re holding back,” he accused, thrusting with care to draw out each sensation. “Why? Give me all of you. Everything,” he commanded.
She couldn’t keep it in. She let go, moaning, “I love you. I love you.” She shuddered as she released all her defenses, poured her love over him and prayed she’d get a piece of him in return.
CHAPTER TEN
DEMITRI HAD KNOWN tonight would be good. Sex with Natalie was easily the best he’d ever had. In those first days after their split in France, he’d told himself their lovemaking had merely benefited from the build of knowledge between them, as it typically could when affairs were drawn out. They’d learned how to tantalize the other to the limits of their sanity and enjoyed every second of it.
But here he was, missionary, barely having kissed her before he’d been inside her, and rather than emptying him, she had filled him. He was better than satisfied. He was moved—by words that she’d told him didn’t mean anything.
He had little trust in the phrase himself. He’d heard it dozens of times from women in the throes of passion. He would have dismissed her saying it, but he couldn’t. He wanted it to be true. He wanted to believe they really had been making love every time he’d touched her, building toward this moment, this emotion.
Because he was in it. In love.
It was the only explanation for his utter transformation. She wasn’t changing him. He was changing himself for her, because she deserved better than he’d been.
He loved her.
Gently drawing away, he adjusted them, then gathered her against where his heart was only now easing to a resting pace. He’d never felt so fragile in his life. It was terrifying. Completely unfamiliar.
He wasn’t an emotionally dependent man. He was connected to his siblings, their opinion mattered to him, and when he’d finally pushed them away to the point that they’d ostracized him, he’d quietly agonized.
But this, with Natalie, was so much more. From the moment he’d decided to find her—before that, even—he had been looking for ways not just to maintain their connection, but intertwine them. Knot her to him indelibly.
He wanted to tell her how much she meant to him, but he remembered so clearly her disparagement of her ex. It would gut him right now if she brushed off his saying something he’d never felt, let alone expressed aloud. If he wound up pushing her away with those words, he’d be devastated. But he still needed her to realize how far she’d brought him from what he’d been.
“Thank you for coming with me tonight, Natalie. I couldn’t have made peace with my family without you.”
She drew her arm off him and reached for the sheet. He pulled it around her and snugged her into his front more firmly, running a hand up and down her back, absently encouraging her to melt into him again, thoughts still drifting in a thousand directions as he tried to take in all the ways she’d enriched his life.
He tried to work up how to propose without risking his soul.
“All those times Adara nagged me about these little reunions, I couldn’t see myself being a part of it. Now the pieces are falling into place.” He should have stopped there, he would think later, but the next words came out of his mouth. “Should we get married? So it’s not so confusing for Zoey? I’d like to be in your bed every night, you know.”
* * *
Natalie shimmied away from the heavy weight of his arms, heart pared like an apple. For a moment all her brain could conjure was panicked expletives. He wasn’t acknowledging her expression of love. He was saying thank-you, as though she’d brought him a fresh cup of coffee.
And starting to enlighten her as to why he’d brought her here: so he fit in with the siblings who had spouses and children. While she’d been falling in love, he’d been repackaging himself as a family man to find acceptance with his siblings. She didn’t blame him. She was totally sincere in wanting him to strengthen his relationship with them on every level.
She just didn’t understand why, why she had to be an instrument. A means to a prize rather than the prize itself. He’d told her last night that he was fixing his relationship with his family, but that had been a lie. Maybe just a fabrication. Maybe he didn’t even see it, but she did. She always saw where her responsibility began and ended
.
She wouldn’t have been so hurt right now if he’d been honest with her about it up front. She probably wouldn’t even have said no, because as he’d rightly pointed out, she was a soft touch, especially about things like family. If he’d told her this was why he’d needed her here, she would have found a way without letting her daughter attach to him and without giving up her heart to him.
But she couldn’t do this for the rest of her life. She couldn’t love him with all her heart and know he’d only married her for what she represented, not who she really was. She took on a lot for other people, but that was more responsibility than she was willing to carry. It wasn’t fair to her and it would never be fair to Zoey.
“Demitri...” She swung legs that wouldn’t hold her to the edge of the bed, then sat there, face covered. Stupid, stupid Natalie. Had she actually started to believe all the sparkle and glitter, laughter and lovemaking, added up to more than a nice chemical match with a very rich man?
“I know you don’t want to get married,” he said, coming up on an elbow behind her. “But for Zoey’s sake—”
“For Zoey’s sake I have to say no,” she said, voice coarse. She stood, forcing her weak knees to lock, then searched out a hotel robe from the closet.
“Why?” The question was cold and hard.
“Because we’ll end up divorced.” She flung an exasperated hand into the air. “Listen, this is my fault. I started believing in the fantasy again. I know better than to imagine I’m ever going to get something real—”
“The fantasy,” he interrupted, fairly spitting the word. “The one where you pretend you’re one of those barfly tarts I used to pick up because acting like that is so much better than living your real life.”
“Hey!” she cried, not liking how nasty this was getting.
“You don’t like the way it sounds? Neither do I. You might have warned me that you were just enjoying the ride, Nat. Was saying you loved me part of the fantasy, too?”
So he had heard. And he was throwing it in her face. She jerked back as though it was a physical object striking her in the nose.