She was a Barbery. How could anything else matter? She was a Barbery—and that was all Nikos needed to know. That was all there was to know.
She might entertain him in a way he had not imagined a woman could, but that was of no matter. He might want her in a way he had not expected, but then, he had never been one to deny his appetites, no matter how inconvenient. He could use all of that for his own ends.
It would in no way prevent him from taking his revenge.
“Tell me,” Nikos said that evening, his low voice making the fine hairs all over Tristanne’s body stand at attention. “Does your brother often leave his mark upon your skin?”
It was the first time he had spoken since they’d left the yacht, and his voice seemed to echo off of the cobblestone street around them, ricocheting off of the famous yellow and pink pastel buildings of Portofino that clustered in a sparkling curve around the pretty, tiny harbor, and stood out against the green hills of pine, cypress and olive that rose steeply behind them. Or perhaps she only thought so, as she flexed her bruised arm slightly in response and felt that twist of shame roll through her again. That deep, black despair.
Tristanne took a quick breath to dispel it, and snuck a glance at the striking man who walked so quietly, so deliberately, at her side. His mood had changed considerably over the course of the day. Gone was the mockery and the sly insinuations; the man who met her for dinner after the sun had set in a red and orange inferno above the turquoise sea was quiet and watchful now. Brooding. He walked beside her with his hands thrust into the pockets of his dark trousers, a crisp white shirt beneath his expertly tailored jacket, which hugged the contours of his broad, muscled shoulders intimately.
“Of course not,” Tristanne said. She was surprised to hear her own voice sounded so hushed, as if she expected to hear it tossed back from the hills, her lie repeated into every passing ear. She frowned at her feet, telling herself that she was concentrating on walking in her high, wedged sandals over such tricky, ancient ground. That was all. That was the only reason she felt so unsettled, so unbalanced.
She wished she had not dressed for him. She wished even more that she did not know perfectly well that she had done so. At first she did not understand how she had found herself in this particular dress, an enticing column of gold that reminded her of his eyes. It poured over her curves from two delicate wisps of spaghetti straps at her shoulders and swished enticingly around her calves as she moved. She did not know why she had left her hair down, so that it swirled around her upper arms and her naked back, nor why she had dabbed scent behind her ears and between her breasts, so that it breathed with her as she moved. Why she had so carefully outlined her eyes with a soft pencil, or why she had darkened her lashes with a sooty mascara. It was as if someone else, some other Tristanne, had done those things, made those choices.
Until she had walked out onto the deck, and seen him, and then she’d known exactly what she’d been doing, and why. That knowledge poured into her, filling her and washing through her, nearly making her stumble as she walked. Her motivations were suddenly as clear to her as if she’d written them out in a bullet-point list. As if they were glass. It had been all for that quicksilver gleam in his eyes when he looked around from his position at the railing and saw her. That sudden flare of heat in his old coin eyes, quickly shuttered.
And what did that make her, already far too susceptible to the one man to whom she could never, ever surrender herself? What in the world did she think she was doing with him—when she should have thought of nothing but her necessary goal? Her poor mother? She should have dressed in sackcloth and ashes—anything to repel him.
But she did not wish to repel him, a traitorous voice whispered. Not really. Perhaps not at all. She pulled her wrap closer around her shoulders, and frowned intently at the cobblestones beneath her feet as they made their way along the harborside quay toward the bustling center of the small village.
“That is all you have to say?” Nikos asked, a certain tenseness in his voice. Tristanne looked at him then, no less imposing in the soft, Italian night than he was in the stark light of morning.
“Must I defend my family?” she asked, with a casual sort of shrug that she did not feel. She had perfected it over the years, to deflect exactly this kind of attention. “All families have their little skirmishes, do they not? Their bad behavior and regrettable scenes?”
“I am no expert on families,” he said, with a derisive snort. “But I am fairly certain most restrain themselves from physical displays of violence. Or should.”
“I bruise very easily,” Tristanne murmured dismissively. Better Peter should take out his rage on her than on Vivienne, Tristanne thought, as she always had. She did not want to think about the way Peter’s fingers had dug into her flesh, nor the words he had thrown at her, his face contorted in fury. And she did not want to talk about this. Not with Nikos. Not ever. She felt the punch of something edgy and heavy in her gut, but she struggled to repress it.
Not now, she ordered herself fiercely, blinking back the heat behind her eyes. Not with him. It does not matter what I dreamed of when I was seventeen—he can be nothing to me!
Nikos stopped walking, and she did, too, turning toward him warily. He stood with his back to the famous Piazzetta, the faint breeze from the water playing through his thick, black hair. His gaze was dark, troubled.
“What kind of man is your brother, that he would put his hands on you in this way?” he asked, condemnation ringing in his voice. “Surely your father would not have countenanced such behavior, were he still alive.”
It was the certainty in his voice that did it, somehow. It was all…too much. Tristanne flushed hot with that toxic mixture of shame and fury, and it was all directed at the man who stood there before her, beautiful and disapproving in the lights that spilled from the restaurants that lined the Piazzetta.
It was all his fault! He was beguiling when he should have disgusted her, and she hated that he knew what Peter had done. That he knew exactly how little her own brother thought of her. What did that say about her? About how worthless her own brother found her?
And what did it say about her that she cared what this man thought about it? About her? When his thoughts should not matter to her at all?
“What kind of man is Peter?” she asked, her temper kicking in again, harder, and scalding her from within. At least it was better than tears. Anything was better than tears. “I don’t know how to answer that. A typical man? A normal man? They are all more or less the same, are they not?” She felt wild, as if she careened down a narrow mountain pass, out of control and reckless.
The elegant arch of his dark brows did nothing to stop her. “Careful, Tristanne,” he said softly, but she did not wish to be careful.
“They control. They demand. They issue orders and care not at all for the feelings or wishes of anyone around them.” She threw her words at him like blows, for all the good it did her. He did not move. He did not flinch. He only stared at her with eyes that grew darker by the second. And still she continued. “They crush and flatten and maim as they see fit. What is a little bruise next to everything else a man is capable of? Next to what you are capable of, for that matter?”
It seemed as if the world stopped turning. As if nothing existed save her labored breathing and the sounds of la dolce vita all around, spilling out of the cafés and trattorias and somehow failing to penetrate the tense, tight bubble that surrounded them.
She did not want to feel this way. She wanted to play her part the way she’d planned—bright and easy and seductive—and instead she kept tripping herself up on her own jagged emotions. Was it him? Was he the reason she could not control herself the way she wanted to—the way she had prided herself on doing the whole of her adult life? Her control had saved her in tense interactions with her family—why couldn’t she summon it now?
Nikos did not move, and yet he seemed to loom over her, around her, filling her senses and her vision. Filling the
whole universe with his smooth muscles, his dangerous mouth, his molten gold eyes with that hard edge within. Just as she feared he would do. Just as she knew he would.
He reached over and brushed her hair back from her face with a gentleness that belied the tension she could feel shimmering between them, then followed a long strand down toward her neck, pulling it between his fingers as if he could not quite bear to let it drop. His mouth moved as his hand returned to his side, but then he shook his head slightly, as if thinking better of whatever he had been about to say.
A couple strolled too close to them on the narrow quay, almost jostling into Tristanne. But Nikos shot out a hand again and moved her out of the way, his touch shocking against her skin for all that it was protective, even kind. He did not speak, but he did not drop his hand from her forearm, either. Tristanne imagined she could see the force of his touch, the feel of it, dancing over her like light, illuminating all of her hidden places, her shadows.
She could not do this. Any of this. She could not feel. Neither temper nor despair nor…this softer, scarier thing she dared not name. Emotion had no place here, between them. She could not allow it.
She cleared her throat. “I am speaking rhetorically, of course,” she said, her voice husky with the things she could not show, not even to herself.
“Of course.”
His mouth flirted with that half smile of his that she was appalled to realize she wanted to see, even yearned to see, while his eyes gleamed almost silver in the dark. She shivered, though she was not cold.
“Come,” he said quietly. “It is time for food, not fighting.”
Chapter Six
NIKOS did not understand how he could possibly have rowed in a public street. With a woman he had yet to take to his bed, no less. It defied all reason. It went against nearly forty years of habit and precedent, for that matter, and disturbed him deeply.
He was not in the habit of suffering through emotional scenes, his own or anyone else’s. He did not soothe hurt feelings or tactfully contain angry explosions. He had never before entertained the faintest urge to do either. He did not allow emotion into his life, in any form. Not anymore. It had been long years since he’d backed down from a challenge or left accusations unanswered—in fact, he preferred to respond as forcefully as possible, decimating his accusers, grinding them into dust beneath his feet, ensuring neither they nor anyone in their vicinity would dare to test him again.
Until tonight.
He sat across from Tristanne in his favorite waterfront trattoria, the light from a hundred flickering candles playing over her lovely features, wondering what spell she had cast upon him to make him behave so unlike himself. He paid no attention to the fine, fresh food before them—airy foccacia with a tangy olive tapenade, hand-crafted pasta flavored with pesto corto, grilled peppers and anchovies, and the freshest fish imaginable tossed with garlic and olive oil. How could he concentrate on food? He was galled by his own uncharacteristic display of something very close to weakness. The worst kind of weakness—and to a Barbery, no less!
Was that her game? To make him betray his own vows to himself? If so, he was appalled to see how well it was working. What was next? Would he break into sobs in the center of the village piazza? Weep for his wounded inner child? He would more readily saw off his own head with the butter knife that rested on the crisp white linen tablecloth before him.
“You are by far the most mysterious member of your family,” he said, because that was the point, after all, of this charade, was it not? To destroy the Barberys by whatever means necessary, to gather the information he needed to do so? More than this, he needed to break the silence. Quiet between them seemed too dangerous now; too fraught with undercurrents and meanings he refused to explore. Sexual tension he understood, even encouraged. Anything beyond that was anathema to him. He was here to seduce her, to wreak his revenge on her very skin—not to comfort her.
“Mysterious?” He noticed the way she tensed in her chair. Did she expect an attack? Perhaps she should. Her eyes met his briefly. “Hardly.”
It made it worse, somehow, that she looked so beautiful. Still not the obvious, provocative beauty of a proper mistress, but rather her own potent brand of bewitching femininity that seemed to go straight to his head—and his groin. She looked too good for a sewer rat like him, far too pedigreed and finished and perfected. She was all gold and class and melted chocolate eyes—the kind of woman he would have yearned for heedlessly in his desperate youth, knowing his hands would only dirty her, ruin her, destroy her in the very act of worshipping her. He almost hated her for reminding him of those terrible days, when he’d still operated blindly from his rage, his agonized determination to escape, rather than the cool analytical mind and sharp business acumen he relied on as an adult.
But he was no longer that child. He had exorcised that particular demon, and any outward expression of his darkest rage, many years ago.
“Your father and brother and even your mother have been seen in all the halls of Europe over the past decade,” he said simply, ignoring the unacceptable mix of chaos and desire that surged within him, focusing on his purpose. “You have not. One began to imagine you were merely a legend. A fairy story of the lost Barbery heiress.”
She gazed at him for a moment, then returned her attention to her plate. “I was not lost.” She smiled then, that excessively polite curve of her mouth that put him instantly on alert. “My father and I had a difference of opinion regarding my course of study at university. I chose to follow my own path.”
“What does that mean?” he asked. He was caught by the way the candlelight made her skin glow like rich, sweet cream above the warm golden caress of her gown. He blinked. She did not appear to notice his fascination.
“It means that I chose to pursue a Fine Arts degree, even though my father felt that was a waste of time. He thought Art History would be more appropriate—better suited to cocktail party conversation with potential husbands.” Tristanne toyed with her fork—nervously, he thought, and then finally set it down against her plate. “I wanted to draw, you see. To paint.”
That simply, she reminded him of who they were, and why they were here. Nikos had never had the luxury of indulging the creative impulse—he had been far too busy fighting for survival. And then, when survival was assured, making certain that he would never again even approach destitution, or anything like it. Drawing? Painting? That was someone else’s life. Not his.
“That is not very practical,” Nikos said, unable to keep the bite from his tone. “Is that not the point of university? Practicality? An education in service of your future?”
“You would have gotten on well with my father,” Tristanne said dryly. She shifted in her seat, the candlelight caressing her cheeks, her neck, the hint of velvety shadows between her breasts. “When I opted to ignore his advice, he retracted my funding. I decided to move to Vancouver, which, apparently, sent him into apoplexy, as my father did not care to be defied.” She smiled slightly. “None of this made for pleasant family reunions, so you will understand why the halls of Europe were without me for so long.”
There was a subtle mockery in her tone. He ignored it.
“I trust you do not cast yourself as the victim in this scenario,” he said, his voice like a blade. “Those who accept financial support cannot whine about their loss of independence. About feeling crushed or flattened. Everything comes at a price.”
He expected a storm of emotion—tears, perhaps; a repeat of what had occurred in the piazza. But Tristanne only held his gaze, her own surprisingly clear, if narrowed.
“I do not disagree,” she said after a moment. “I am not, I think, the hypocrite you would prefer me to be. I chose not to accept any financial support whatsoever from my father once I moved to Canada.”
Something he could not identify moved through him. He called it anger. Distaste. And yet he knew it was not that simple—or, perhaps, it was not directed across the table.
“You
chose?” he echoed. “Or were you disowned?”
“Who can say who disowned who?” Tristanne replied in a light tone he did not quite believe. “Either way, I never took another cent from him.” Her chin tilted up; with pride, he thought. He felt a stab of recognition, and ruthlessly suppressed it. “I may have to wait tables or tend a bar, but it’s honest work. I don’t have much in Vancouver, but everything I do have is mine.”
He could not have said what he felt then, staring at her, but he told himself it was a simmering rage. They were not at all similar, despite her words. Her pride. For what was she really but one more spoiled heiress who made the usual noises about her independence, but only so far as it suited her? She had come running back to Europe quickly enough after Gustave had died, hadn’t she? Did she hope to get into her brother’s good graces now that he controlled the purse strings? What did she know about real struggle, about truly fighting for something, anything, to call one’s own because the alternative was unthinkable?
Not a damn thing.
“How noble of you to abandon your considerable fortune and fight for your preferred existence by choice rather than necessity,” Nikos drawled, and had the satisfaction of watching her pale. His smile could have drawn blood. He wished it did. “The desperate residents of the slums where I grew up salute you, I am sure. Or would, if they could afford to have your exalted standards.”
He had the pleasure of watching her flush red, though she did not otherwise change expression. She met his gaze steadily, as if she was not afraid of him, when he knew better. He had seen to it that she was. Or should be. And he knew that she should be.
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