by Tara Pammi
Until Jas had come into his life.
Her eyelids were drooping, and she still had that silly smile over her face. Then he was smiling because she looked infinitely breathtaking in the utter enthusiasm with which she’d embraced tonight.
And that smile knocked over into his life, kicking everything he had ever believed about himself wide-open, as though she was the domino who started it all. Digging his hands into her hair, he pulled her closer. “Why are you still smiling?”
Finally, she deigned to open her eyes and he found himself falling deeper and deeper into her spell. The openness of her expression made it impossible to be anything but. She looked at him as if he was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen.
It filled him with a strangely exhilarating weight that he had not known in his adult life. It magnified inside him, spreading to his chest, filling every nook and cranny. As if he was now responsible for keeping that smile on her face.
Her fingers found his mouth and traced the seam with such a possessive touch. Expelling a harsh breath, he forced himself to relax. He never invited the woman he slept with to touch him, never lingered in the moment after seeing to their pleasure and his own. “Because it was that good.” Her long lashes cast shadows over her cheeks as she struggled to keep her eyes open. “Tomorrow, I swear, Dmitri, you can have whatever you want,” she offered magnanimously, as if she was a goddess granting boons.
He wanted to tell her she had already given him something precious—her trust. But he kept the words to himself. “You can, instead, answer my question now,” he said, wondering anew at how at ease she had been with her body.
Theos, the woman was like a sensual missile, and thinking that about her made him think of her with other men and right now, he didn’t want to go there.
It seemed being in bed with Jas meant every thought he had left him feeling either raw or uncertain or both.
“What?” she said, suddenly tense.
“What did you do all these years at Noah’s nightclub, Jas?”
His heart hammered at her continued silence. Propping himself up, he looked at her.
Her shoulders became a rigid line, her gaze not meeting his as she pulled up the duvet to cover herself up.
“Jas, whatever it is—”
“I was a pole dancer in his underground nightclub.”
While Dmitri grappled with that, she met his eyes. Full of fake defiance and shadows of shame, her gaze did nothing to abate the rage building inside him. “A pole dancer?” he repeated, disbelief and fury and guilt all rolling into his tone.
“I jumped in only because one of the girls was sick one day and was terrified of losing the spot. I told myself it was just for one night. Apparently, awful as I was that first night, I was still a huge hit. Guess I owe it to my father for his contribution toward making me look exotic.” Loathing spewed out when she said that word. As if she hated that about her and what it had enabled her to do.
“But the tips, Dmitri, they were ten times what I got waitressing. Suddenly, I could at least dream of leaving that life. I could imagine a different one.” Her voice became small; her entire body scrunched into herself.
Shame, Dmitri realized slowly—that emotion in her voice was shame. Was that why she had hidden the truth from him until now? Why she thought she was beneath him?
If only she knew his roots...
“So I practiced until my legs felt as if they would fall off, until the heretofore unused muscles in my thighs and calves burned as though there were knives lodged inside them, put on mere scraps of lace and took to the stage. I tuned out every man who looked at me as if I was a morsel of meat instead of a woman with wants and fears, I loathed myself a thousand times for every night I went up there, but I did it.
“I was an instant super hit.”
He blinked to clear the haze of red that covered his vision. “So what did Noah threaten you with that you came to me finally?”
She flinched, her gaze shying away from him again. “In the past year, I went from the side to center stage, and the show went from a huge floor show to an outrageously expensive, custom show.
“Suddenly, the men I’d tuned out all along were too close, their hands pawing me, their comments and their looks getting worse and worse. Noah, unwilling to lose their business, relaxed the security. So in the guise of congratulating me, they kept cornering me everywhere I turned after the show. Even then, I somehow managed.
“Until...he said customers were asking for personal performances. That they were willing to pay upward of thousands for one dance, that they wanted me to get more familiar with them... Some of the girls told me it wasn’t that bad, that they made more money... But all I could see was turning into my mother, hating myself for the rest of my life, falling for one of those men who didn’t even know the real me, deluding myself that one of them would actually want me for something more than a quick...
“I couldn’t bear to do it. I didn’t have the guts to see it through anymore. It just felt as if I would never ever get out of that life if I stayed any longer. There was only so much I was willing to do to repay Andrew’s debt.”
Men, driven by lust and hunger, leering and pawing at her, because the kind of club that Noah owned wouldn’t be anything like the one he had just acquired... The picture her words painted nauseated him. He shot out of the bed, his blood boiling, his emotions raw.
She sat up in the bed, her hair mussed up, her expression so vulnerable that it caught at his chest.
“Dmitri, what is it? Don’t, please, look at me like that. As if I...” She didn’t finish the words, her throat working conspicuously, her hands fisting the duvet.
But he didn’t care what she was feeling. Theos, he was drowning in what could have been. “You could have come to me so much sooner. You could have avoided all that. If any of them had gotten his hands on you, if they had forced you into something that you didn’t want... Christos.” He turned and slammed his fist into the wall.
But even the pain that shafted up his knuckles and arm was not enough to release the fear that crawled through his veins.
“Dmitri, you have to understand—”
“Understand what, Jas? You had a choice. My father was an alcoholic bastard but did you know that my mother was a prostitute?” he said bitterly, giving voice to something he had never shared with another soul. “He drank with her money but hated her for it. It ate through him and he took it out on her and me. Half the time, I couldn’t stop him because I was such a runt...until I learned to use my speed and my fists...
“She was saving to leave London, just enough so that she could bring me to Giannis in Athens, who was her uncle. She had to hide the money because he took all of it from her. And then just two days before we were set to leave, he found out. He was in one of his drunken rages and he pushed her.
“She hit her head on the wall and died instantly, before I could even catch her. Then he locked the door outside and he ran.” He dropped to the bed, his head in his hands, trembling, shivering, still feeling her cold body in his arms. “I sat there for hours, imagining all the different ways I could have saved her. The silence... I have never been able to bear it since. If Andrew hadn’t come to look for me as he always did when he heard from the neighbors that my father was in a drunken rage again, I don’t know how long I would have been there.
“You know what I thought when Gaspard touched you today, Jas? Fear that I wouldn’t be able to save you. And now to hear you so blithely say that’s where you have put yourself willingly for so many years...”
He felt as if he was in that moment today. The pain and the fear that ripped through him... He couldn’t breathe.
Turning away from her, he put on his discarded trousers, his chest cold as ice. He couldn’t bear to look at her, not all that loveliness, that flush to her skin.
Because if he did, he knew either he would be tempted to wring her neck for her recklessness or he would take her against the wall like an animal, her comfort and soreness be damned, just to rid the shiver in his muscles. Just to feel all of her with his rough hands, just to reassure himself that she was here, safe in his arms, beyond that world’s reach now...
And then he would never be able to forgive himself.
He needed to leave until he had a better handle on his emotions, until he understood what was happening to him. He found his hands were shaking.
“Dmitri.” Her soft entreaty seared through him and he turned.
The sheet wrapped around her nakedness, she rose from the bed like a goddess, and even drowning in fury, he was drawn to her. “Don’t, Jas... I can’t bear to look at you.”
Her arm fell back against her body. The wariness disappeared from her eyes and something else set in. He was almost at the door.
“I hated you for never looking back,” she said then, sounding small and broken.
Her words were like a rope that bound him to the room, to her.
“For years, I imagined that you would come back and somehow rescue Andrew and me from that life. I built you up into...this hope in my head when Andrew got worse, when it felt as if I couldn’t take another day.” He opened his mouth but she raised her hand. “I know the truth now, I do. But when Andrew told me those lies about you giving up on us, all that hope instantly turned to hate. Because, you see, that hatred was easier to bear than the pain.
“I thought you had abandoned me. Just like the rest of them. Like my father, my mum and even Andrew. At his funeral, you were so distant, so out of my sphere, full of pity for me. You stood there so coldly, offering me money, as if that was all I deserved from you. As if I was a problem you wanted to fix and then forget about.”
Pity? He had never pitied her. He had looked at her, eighteen and innocent and full of such blazing hatred for him, and he’d thought she was better off without him...
He hadn’t been able to stomach that he had failed at saving another life... That even with all the wealth he had acquired, he had been of no use... The idea of letting Jasmine back in his life, even if he had been able to persuade her in the first place, the fear of failing had been too much...
It was still too much.
“Andrew always said,” she continued in that same, small voice, “pride was my biggest shortcoming. The thought of begging you for help, it made me so angry. I wanted you to look at me and not feel pity... I wanted to prove to you that I could somehow make it without your help... Pathetic, right, that even then, I was so fixated on you.”
“Theos, Jas...”
“Tonight I told myself I had nothing to be ashamed of. That I wasn’t going to hold myself responsible for their mistakes, that I... But I’m in your bed and you are looking at me as if you wish you had never laid a finger on me. Exactly what I had always wanted to avoid.”
She didn’t give him a chance to negate her; she didn’t give him a chance to even process everything she had blurted out in that usual blatantly raw way of hers.
Dragging the red sheet behind her, her shoulders a stiff line, she walked away.
* * *
Jasmine didn’t know how long she stood under the hot spray of the shower after Dmitri had walked out. But there was such cold in her chest that she felt as though she would never warm up ever again.
Dmitri was disgusted by her illustrious career. She had asked him straight and he hadn’t denied her. But even worse than his disgust was the turmoil that churned through her gut.
Because even if he had been able to stomach his disgust, she had betrayed herself, hadn’t she? She hadn’t known what she had been about to say, had only wanted to make him understand why she hadn’t come to him for help. Only wanted to make him see that it had been so hard. Only wanted to take away that anguish in his eyes.
Instead, she had blurted out things even she hadn’t fully realized, didn’t know what to make of.
She rubbed her head, where an ache was beginning. In reality, she was sore all over, between her thighs especially. Her skin felt extrasensitive to the spray of the complicated jets of the shower. On her hips, where his fingers had dug in so hard and held her down when he had been thrusting into her, her scalp where he had held her for his kiss... He was all over her, inside and out.
Fixated on him, really, had she no self-respect left? Was she going to beg him next to keep her in his bed?
He had made love to her—no, sex. It had been explosive sex, yes, but only that, and here she was, pushing her fears, her fixation for him onto his plate. A long jump for a man who had admitted to just wanting her, under extreme conditions, too, to her dumping her sob story over him.
No wonder he had said he couldn’t bear to look at her. No wonder he hadn’t been able to even stay in the room another minute.
It felt as if there was a lead weight in her chest that she couldn’t push down or breathe out, blocking her very breath.
And knowing what she had learned from him today, she wondered if even his attraction to her was a product of his protective nature, couldn’t help but wonder if he would ever really see the real her.
Not his friend’s sister, that friend whom he thought he hadn’t been able to save, not as a way to satisfy the guilt that obviously had settled inside him as a teenager who had seen his mother’s horrific death...
But just her, Jasmine Douglas, ex-virgin pole dancer, penniless and with no prospects of a career, weak when it came to helping abusive family members and desperately falling for the teenage boy she had known once.
But hurting all over, she couldn’t summon the energy to be angry with herself. She had decided today to carve her own life, to make her own mistakes if that was what it took, to stop living in the shadow of the past.
Maybe her first mistake was to fall for a man who would never see her, much less want her in his life.
She had a career that reminded him of a past he clearly wanted to forget, she had thrown herself at him, first for help and now for sex, and she had blurted out her obsession over him. Why would a man who had everything in the world want a woman like her?
* * *
Dmitri stepped out from the house into the open grounds, the desolation and shame he had heard in Jas’s voice running through him in an endless loop.
Theos, he had only realized after he had lost it so thoroughly how she had lived with that shame for so long, how low her self-esteem must have been.
He had thought her merely attracted to him, whereas it went so much deeper. And tonight, by telling her about Andrew’s deceit, he had torn down the last barrier.
Her words and the weight of them... He was not ready for them. He was never going to be worthy of them.
He saw another shadow join his in the silence and turned.
His suit jacket gone, Stavros stood with his hand on the stone bench. They had spent many nights sitting on the bench, looking at the stars, each increasingly awed by the generosity of the man who had saved them both from certain hell. And determined to their last breath that they would make him proud of them.
Full of integrity and honor, Stavros had taught him so much. But right now, he was the last man Dmitri wanted to see because he wouldn’t lie to spare Dmitri’s feelings. He wouldn’t spare anyone, especially when it came to doing the right thing.
“You seduced her, didn’t you?” Stavros finally said, sounding utterly disgusted.
Gritting his jaw tight, Dmitri strove to calm himself. He would not lose it tonight, not again.
“Before you lose it, your little temper tantrum was witnessed by everyone at the party. Then you followed her and neither of you emerged for the rest of the night. Leah was worried about her.” The bastard went on, unperturbed. “The interesting thing is that you’re pacing he
re in the middle of the night. Which means at least you feel some regret.”
“She was a pole dancer at that club.”
The statement fell into the dark silence like a grenade waiting to be detonated. His gaze stunned, Stavros looked as though he was out of words.
“That’s not the worst,” Dmitri added. He needed to fix the situation, but for the life of him, he still couldn’t hate himself for what had happened.
“What is, then?”
“She...she’s full of shame over it, still just as stubborn, however, she’s very vulnerable to me, some kind of leftover from our past together—” God only knew why “—and now I seduced her, yes. So it’s a lot worse. If I had known how much she—”
“Theos, Dmitri, don’t start lying to yourself now.”
Dmitri felt it like a lash, loathing Stavros for being right.
He would have taken Jas come what may. That he had even resisted that long was a miracle in itself.
But he could not simply walk away from her. To do so would mean to torture himself eternally about whether she was safe. About who she was with, if there was another man who had taken over his place in her life, whether that man was worthy of her, if he would treat her well...
Christos!
And the thought of Jasmine with any other man but him, the thought of any man taking that smile, that double-edged innocence, of any man kissing her or learning that sensuous body of hers... It drove him crazy.
He had never ever felt this possessive about a woman, only a cold detachment. At most, sympathy when it had come to Anya.
He knew that Jasmine hadn’t given herself to him lightly, and telling her that it was a night of madness for him would only hurt her.
And he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t hurt Jasmine, not when there had been a hundred people in her life who had only ever done that.
The solution, the only solution to the tangle of mess he had created, came to him slowly, quite simple in its brilliance.
His heart seemed to freeze for a moment, and then stuttered into life, pounding even harder after that pause.