She had known it would be this way from the start. She had dreamed this when she was still just a girl, and had only imagined him from afar. She had known.
And so she moved against him, losing what was left of her in the glory of the fire that raged between them, not caring, in the dark of the night, that it left her little more than ash. Just as she had expected. Just as she had worried.
Exactly as she had feared.
Chapter Eleven
HIGH on the green and gray cliffs of Kefalonia, Tristanne sat out on the wide stone patio that encircled the sumptuous villa and let the wild, rugged coastline of the Greek island sink into her bones, as if the shining Ionian Sea could soothe her, somehow, as it crashed against the dark rocks far below. Olive groves, bursts of pine and columns of cypress trees lined the narrow isthmus that stretched out before her in the late morning light. The tiny fishing village of Assos straddled the small spit of land, cheerful orange roofs turned toward the sun, while the ruins of a sixteenth century Venetian palace stood sentry above. This was not the smooth, white and blue beauty of the better-known Greek islands that Tristanne had explored in her youth. This was tenacious, resilient Greece, beautiful for its craggy cliffs as well as its unexpected and often hidden golden-sand beaches.
It did not surprise her that this remote and isolated stretch of land, torn between the cliffs and the sea, was the place Nikos Katrakis called home.
Tristanne shifted in her seat, and deliberately did not look over her shoulder to where Nikos sat closer to the wide-open patio doors that led inside, taking one of his innumerable business calls on his mobile phone in clipped, impatient Greek. She did not have to look at him to know where he was and what he was doing. It was as if she had been tuned to him, on some kind of radio frequency that only she could hear. She knew when he was near. Her breasts tightened and her sex warmed, readying her body for him, no matter what.
It was only one among many reasons to despair, she knew. Only one among many reasons to accept that she had lost any measure of control she might have had over this odd interlude in her life. If there was any way she could have been further complicit in her own destruction, Tristanne could not imagine what that might be.
He had taken her over, body and soul. He made love to her so fiercely, so comprehensively, so well and so often, that she wondered how she would ever be the same again. She worried that she had completely lost touch with whoever she might have been before that night in Florence. And the most frightening part was that she was not at all certain she cared as she should, as she knew she had back in Florence, standing in that flat with the Duomo looming behind her, trying to stop the inevitable. The days turned to weeks, and she could do nothing but burn for him. Again and again and again.
They had sailed from Italy to Greece, stopping wherever the mood took them. Sorrento. Palermo. The sights blurred in her memory, narrowing to a singular focus. Nikos. She remembered his slow, hot smile on a sun-baked street in Sorrento. She remembered the possessive weight of his hand in the small of her back as they explored the old seawall in the ancient city of Valletta in Malta. Then they had sailed on to the famed island of Ithaka, before mooring in Assos, the small village on neighboring Kefalonia that Nikos called his home.
“The villa was originally my grandfather’s,” he’d said that first afternoon, when they’d left the yacht in the tiny harbor and were in the back of an exquisitely maintained Mercedes as it navigated the twisting, turning road toward the hills. “It came to me following my father’s death.”
“So you never came here as a child?” she had asked. She had been staring out the window of the car at the pebbled beach in the village center, where children played beneath white umbrellas, and the pastel facades of the houses seemed to beg to be photographed, all of it beneath the impossible blue of the Greek sky.
His look had been dark, and far too cynical to be amused.
“I did not holiday on the island, if that is what you mean. I grew up in Athens, and stayed there,” he’d said, matter-of-factly, and she’d remembered, then, his talk of slums and poverty, and had flushed. It had already started then, she knew, the need she felt to protect him—even from his own past. She had not yet allowed herself to think about what that must mean—what it could not mean. What she refused to permit it to mean.
“Since you call it home, I assumed that meant you had some childhood connection to it,” she had said stiffly. She was terrified that he could sense that she had softened considerably, that she cared in ways she knew perfectly well would appall him. It appalled her. His dark gaze had been cool, assessing, and she’d frozen next to him in the backseat of the old Mercedes that his servant drove carefully up the snaking, hilly road, hoping her expression would remain calm, removed.
“It is the only one of my father’s properties that he never visited as long as I knew him,” he’d said in that detached, cold way that did not encourage further discussion. “I suppose I find his absence soothing.”
She had not asked any further questions about his father. Not then. He had swept her into the villa, and then into the wide bed in his stark white room that took its only color from the sea beyond, the stretch of water and the gleaming bowl of the endless sky. And she had been so hungry for him, so desperate to feel that heady rush and that exquisite fall into ecstasy, that she had not minded such diversions.
If only we could stay in bed forever, she thought now, her eyes on the horizon.
But once they were in Greece, where Nikos seemed to be as much a part of the island landscape as the olive trees and the rugged hills, it seemed almost inevitable that the old tycoon should come up in conversation. His father, she’d learned, had been raised on this island by Nikos’s grandfather, then sent out into the world to help run the old man’s business concerns. It was difficult to say which of those two men had been the harder, the more driven. She told herself she wanted to know about his family because it made sense to learn all she could about the man who had so entranced her, however brief this liaison must be, but she was afraid she knew perfectly well that was not the reason she asked.
“Did you know your grandfather?” she had asked one afternoon, as they sat in a bustling taverna in the village square lunching on goat stifada and fresh-grilled sea bass in a delectable lemon sauce. Tristanne sipped at a dry white wine while Nikos drank from a large glass of Mythos beer.
“You are obsessed with a man who has been dead for decades,” Nikos had said in quelling tones. His brows had arched high, mocking her. “Are you looking for ghosts, Tristanne? The island is full of them, I am sure. There are plenty of saints and martyrs here to occupy your thoughts. There is no need to go digging in my history.”
“I am hardly obsessed,” she had replied in the calm voice that she wielded as her only remaining weapon. Her only armor, however weak. She’d taken a sip of her wine and had pretended to be unmoved. “I am interested, however. He built an amazingly artistic home for a man you refer to in such harsh terms.” The villa was an artist’s dream—every room carefully designed to captivate the senses, and to gracefully frame the stunning views.
“My grandfather was not a particularly nice man, Tristanne,” Nikos had said, a gleam in his dark eyes that had made the fine hairs on the back of her neck prickle in warning. “And the only artistic impulse he possessed involved buying things that others told him were sought-after.” He’d shrugged, though his gaze had been hard. “But what man who builds an empire is nice? He raised his son to be even worse. His own image, magnified.” His mouth had twisted. “This is my heritage, of which I am deeply proud.”
She’d let his sardonic tone wash over her, and schooled herself not to react. He would not respond well to any show of emotion, she knew—any hint of compassion, or identification. She’d sometimes thought he deliberately tested her to see if there was any hint of softness in her demeanor. It was her duty to behave as if all that was between them was sex and the promise of money. Perhaps, for him, that was even true.
>
“Whether you are proud of it or not,” she had said then, “it is still where you come from. It is worth knowing.”
“I know exactly where I come from,” he had retorted in that quiet, dangerous tone that Tristanne remembered only too well from Portofino. Did it mean she had struck a nerve? Or only that he wished to slap her down, put her in her place? She’d felt her chin rise in automatic defense. His mocking half smile had seemed extra bitter then, as if he’d been able to read her as well as she was learning to read him.
“Then there is no need to get so upset about it, is there?” she had asked lightly.
His eyes had seemed to catch fire and his smile had deepened to a razor’s point.
“Why should I be upset?” he had asked, in that cutting tone, though whether he’d wished to slice into her or himself, she’d been unable to tell. “In retrospect, I should thank my father for casting my mother aside when her charms as a mistress grew stale. After all, she was merely a dancer in a club. What did he owe her? That he chose to favor her at all was more than she could have dreamed. No doubt that is why she succumbed to the usual narcotics, and abandoned me. But then, as he told me himself many years later, long after I proved myself to him through DNA and hard work—the streets hardened me. Made me a more formidable opponent.” His shrug then had struck her as almost painful to watch. “Truly, I should have thanked him while I had the chance.”
“He sounds deeply unpleasant,” Tristanne had said quietly.
“He was Demetrios Katrakis,” Nikos had said coldly. “What softer feelings he had, and he did not have many, he reserved for his late wife and their daughter. Not his gutter trash bastard son.” His expression had been so fierce then, almost savage. Tristanne had known, somehow, that were she to show even a hint of sympathy, he would never find it in himself to forgive her.
So, instead, she had settled back in her seat, sipped at her wine and gazed out at the picturesque little village, quite as if her heart were not breaking into pieces inside her chest, for the discarded little boy she knew he would never acknowledge had existed.
He never spoke of these conversations. He only made love to her with an intensity that she worried, sometimes, in the dark of night, might destroy them both. How could anyone live with so much stark, impossible pleasure? How could they handle so much fire so often, and not turn themselves into cinders?
So rather than voice the thoughts and feelings that she was afraid to entertain even in the sanctity of her own head, Tristanne drew. She drew Nikos in a hundred poses, in a hundred ways. She told herself he was no more and no less than an example of a particular kind of hard male beauty, and she owed it to her artistic growth to master his form with pencils and a pad of paper.
That was why she traced the line of his nose a thousand times, the high thrust of his cheekbones, the proud set of his chin. That was why she agonized over the fullness of his lips, so wicked and seductive even at his most mocking, his most cutting. She spent whole afternoons learning the sweep of his magnificent torso; spent endless hours studying the strength and cleverness of his hands. It was to improve her craft, she told herself—to become a better artist.
“Surely you have drawn me more than enough,” Nikos said now, coming to stand behind her. His fingers moved through her hair, pulling at the dark blonde waves almost absently. “Why not sketch the rocks? The cliffs? The cypress trees?”
Tristanne had not heard him end his call, but she had known the moment he moved across the wide patio to join her. She sat on one of the comfortable chairs that was placed to take advantage of the sweeping views of the Assos peninsula and the Ionian Sea beyond. But on the pad propped up on her knees in front of her was another drawing of Nikos. This time, she had drawn him in profile, his brow furrowed in thought, his mouth curled down at the corners. This was the Nikos she knew all too well, she thought now, looking at the drawing with a practiced eye. Resolute. Commanding. In control.
“I prefer to draw people—it’s far more challenging. And you are the only person I see regularly,” she said airily. “I could ask one of the tourists in the village to pose for me, but I do not believe you would care for it if I did.”
“Indeed, I would not.” There was an undercurrent of amusement in his rich voice, and she knew if she looked that he would be biting back that almost-smile.
“So, you see, I must use you,” she said. “It is an artistic imperative.”
She put down her pencil, and twisted to look up at him. As ever, her breath caught in her throat as she gazed at him. As ever, he seemed larger-than-life, blocking out the enormous azure sky. She could not see the gold in his eyes with his face in shadow, but she felt it anyway, as if another kind of gold hummed within her, and turned into an electric current when he touched her.
“I must go into Athens this afternoon,” he said in a low voice. His hand moved from her hair to her cheek. His thumb traced a firm line along her jaw.
“Do I accompany you?” she asked softly. She could not pretend that she was not his mistress now, in word and in deed. Not when she knew what to ask and how to ask it, with no expectation or recrimination. Only availability. She was endlessly, terrifyingly available. She told herself that she was only ensuring Peter’s continued compliance, and thus her mother’s future, as they came ever closer to the month her brother had demanded at the party in Florence. Peter had even sent the papers that indicated she would have access to her trust, should she continue as she was. She was not doing this on a whim, she reminded herself firmly. Her plan was working just as she’d hoped. She had not meant to sleep with Nikos, it was true, nor had she anticipated spending more than a few days with him, but the fact that those things had changed did not alter the rest of her plans in any respect. She was not like her mother in her earlier, healthier days, kept for a man’s pleasure like an inanimate object; a toy. She was not. She told herself so every day.
“I will only be gone a few hours,” he said. He meant he would take the helicopter, which made the trip to his office in Athens merely a long, if rather flamboyant commute. “I will return tonight.”
“I will miss you, then,” she said, in that casual tone that she knew would not set off his alarms. She was so calm, so blasé. She worked so hard to appear that way. “Luckily I have my drawings of you. In case I begin to forget what you look like.”
He pulled her to her feet, sliding a hand around to the small of her back and holding her against his wide chest. He looked down into her face. She felt the heat of his hand seep into her skin, warming her, even as she felt the usual quickening within. She did not know what his expression meant—only that he searched her own, and that his eyes burned into hers.
Did he know? she wondered in a sudden panic. Had she somehow given herself away?
“Perhaps you can help me pack,” he murmured suggestively.
Because that was the only fire they acknowledged, the only way they could.
She hid the rest of it. Sometimes even from herself.
“Of course,” she said, like the perfect mistress she was more and more these days. Just as she’d always feared. Just as Peter had predicted. She smiled at him. “I can think of nothing I would rather do.”
Because she knew beyond the slightest doubt that she could not tell him that she loved him. She could not. She could never tell him that she loved him—she could not even think the words, for fear they would bleed onto her tongue without her knowledge.
She could only love him with her body, and the soft strokes and broad lines of her pencils, and pray with all she had that he never, ever knew.
Nikos strode through the villa, his temper igniting with every step.
She was nowhere to be found. She was not lounging suggestively in his bed, wearing something appropriately saucy. She was not taking a coincidentally perfectly timed shower, the better to lure him in. She was not in any number of places she could have been in—should have been in—and the fact that he had rushed home from Athens to see her made him more fu
rious about her deficiencies as a mistress than he might have been otherwise.
A man should not have to hunt down his mistress. A man should simply cross the threshold and find her waiting there, beautiful and sweet-smelling, with a soft smile on her lips and a cold drink in her hand.
Nikos stopped on the patio, and scowled at the sun as it sank toward the horizon, spilling red and pink fingers over the gleaming sea. It infuriated him how often he seemed to forget the fact that Tristanne was not, in point of fact, his mistress. He was no better than a boy, letting his head get turned by scaldingly hot sex. It had taken today’s meeting with his team in his office to reacquaint himself with his goals. Peter Barbery, as expected, was trading on Nikos’s good name with all manner of investors, Nikos’s people had confirmed. Apparently the man’s personal loathing of Nikos would not prevent Peter from acting as if the two of them were thick as thieves. Which meant that everything was in place. All that Nikos needed to do now was up the stakes. Raise the bar just that little bit higher, so when he sent it all crashing down, it would really, truly hurt. Leave scars, even.
And he knew just how to do it.
He had rushed back to the island, telling himself that he was not excited to do this thing so much as finally recommitted to his original vision of how this entire operation would proceed. He had lost his focus slightly, he had admitted to himself on the helicopter ride from Athens. Tristanne was a beautiful woman, and he was a man who greatly appreciated beauty, especially when he found it wrapped around him every morning like a vine. More than that, she grew more mysterious by the day, and he found he was more and more intrigued by his sense that she was hiding more than she shared. But this, he had concluded today, was simply because he wondered what the Barberys’ end game was; what they thought they could gain from him.
He would accept no other reason for his uncharacteristic obsession with this woman. There was no room for anything but his revenge, surely.
One Reckless Decision (Mills & Boon M&B): Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past (Special Releases) Page 27
