And all of that dark wonder had simply burst within her. Hunger and heat. That damned harsh mouth of his like a kind of miracle against hers. Claiming her. Branding her.
Shaking her to her core.
But she’d kissed him back, despite everything. She’d tasted him until she’d thought she really was as drunk as she sometimes acted. She’d fallen apart in his arms as if she’d been waiting her whole life for him to taste her. As if she’d always known it would be like that.
On some level, she had.
Fire. Panic. An instant and impossible addiction that had already gnawed at her, even while he’d still been taking his lazy, devastating fill of her mouth, as lethal and sure in the way he’d kissed her as in everything else.
“I told you,” he’d growled into her mouth when she’d been limp and useless against him. “You’re mine. You always have been. You always will be. How long do you plan to draw this out?”
Mattie had stared at him, unable to speak with all of those dark and wondrous things moving in her, and he’d smiled then, as close to tender as she’d ever seen him. It had transformed his dark face. It had made him something far more dangerous than simply gorgeous.
So she’d run in the opposite direction.
“Play your games, princess,” he’d said, harsh and amused as she’d fled from him. Certain, the way he always was. “When you come to me, I will make you crawl.”
She’d believed him.
“No,” he said, yanking her back into the dangerous here and now. His hand was on her arm, and that heat was stampeding through her and this time, there was no hope of escape. “We can’t all be me. But you can certainly learn how to please me, Mattie. And if I were you, I’d learn it fast.”
It was another threat. Or more of a promise, she supposed. Because despite everything, despite how long and how far she’d run from this man, he’d won. The way he’d always told her he would.
“I’ve never really been a quick learner,” she told him with a kind of manic cheerfulness, because she couldn’t let herself think about what pleasing him might entail. God help her, but she didn’t dare. “Oops. One more disappointment for you to swallow, I’m afraid.”
CHAPTER TWO
HE’D WON.
That was what mattered, Nicodemus told himself as he looked down into the lovely, rebellious face of this woman who had defied him and haunted him across the years, and somehow willed himself not to put her over his knee. Or under him right here on the library floor.
He took a breath, the way he would if this was as simple as the business deal he was pretending it was. Then another, and still she watched him like he was an animal, and she was half-afraid she might pick up a few fleas if she stood too close.
Nicodemus couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel jubilant. Wildly triumphant. Instead of this same dark fury that always beat in him when she looked at him like this, so recklessly defiant when the fact he would win could never have been in any doubt.
He made himself let go of her, though it was hard. Too hard, when everything inside him beat like a tight, taut drum and he wanted nothing more than to bury himself in her, at last. To ride out his victory until she screamed his name the way he’d always known she would, to taste her and learn her and take her, over and over, until this vicious hunger was sated.
Because he was certain it would be sated once he had her. It had to be.
But that would come later.
“Sit,” he ordered her, jerking his chin in the direction of two deep, dark brown leather armchairs before the nearest fireplace. “I’ll tell you how this will work.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very promising start to the marriage you’ve been threatening me with for years,” she said in her usual flippant, disrespectful way that he really shouldn’t find as amusing as he did. Like it was foreplay. “In fact, if you ask me, it sounds like the kind of marriage that will lead to a very big, very public divorce in approximately eighteen months, or as soon as I can escape and file.”
“You won’t escape,” he said, nodding toward the chairs again, and less politely. “Though you’re welcome to try. I’d be happy to chase you down and haul you back.”
He was rewarded with that dark blue glare of hers that had been making him ache with a driving need for almost as long as he’d known her. He smiled and was rewarded with the faintest hint of a shiver that she tried to hide.
She settled herself in the far chair with that wholly unearned grace of hers that he’d found nothing short of marvelous since the day they’d met. Mattie Whitaker had never suffered through any awkward phase as far as Nicodemus could tell. She’d been a gleaming bright beacon at sixteen, with her half-American, half-posh-British accent she’d wielded like a sword, even then. At eighteen, she’d been magnificent, pure and simple. From her glossy blue-black hair to her rich, dark blue eyes, to that wide mouth that should have been outlawed. She’d had poise and elegance far beyond her years, a consequence, he’d decided long ago, of having had to play hostess for her father after her mother had died when she was only eight.
He’d walked into that silly ball, that leftover nod to some gilded-age American fantasy he couldn’t begin to understand, and had been struck dumb. Like she’d been a lightning bolt instead of what she was, what he knew she was: one more pretty little rich girl in a sparkling dress.
But God help him, it was how she’d sparkled.
She’d been so careless—thoughtless and spoiled as only wealthy heiresses could be. He’d suffered through that once already back in Greece, with self-centered, deceitful Arista, who’d nearly taken him to his knees and to the cleaners when he’d been twenty-two and a trusting, stupid fool. He’d vowed he’d never trust so easily nor be so deeply foolish again.
But there was something about Mattie that had drawn him in despite that. He’d watched her careen through all her blessings as if she hardly noticed them. He’d studied the way she’d shrugged off her expensive schools and the featherweight jobs she’d taken afterward, in publishing companies or art galleries or the like that paid so little only heiresses could afford to work at them. Or only occasionally work at them, in her case.
Nicodemus watched her now as she leveled that frank gaze of hers at him, her dark eyes serious, though they were the precise color of after-dinner chocolates with that intriguing shimmer of darker blue. She could be flighty and reckless and sometimes attention-seeking, but she was also intelligent. He’d long suspected she liked to pretend otherwise, for her own murky reasons. Another mystery he looked forward to solving.
“I think it’s time you told me what this is really about,” she said, and she reminded him of her father then, with that matter-of-fact tone and her direct gaze. Nicodemus pulled in a breath. “I mean it,” she said as if that had been an argument. “I don’t believe for one second that there aren’t parades of more suitable heiresses if an heiress is what you want. Prettier ones, if that’s your thing. Richer ones, certainly. Far more notorious ones and one or two who might as well have spent their lives in a convent. You’ve always struck me as being particularly annoying—” and there was the faintest hint of that dent beside her mouth that he knew was a dimple, that he’d spent many a lazy hour longing to taste “—but there’s no denying the fact that you’d be a nice catch. You’re disgustingly wealthy. You’re very powerful. You’re not exactly Quasimodo.”
“What a resounding recommendation,” he said, torn between laughter and incredulity that she dared speak to him the way she did. She always had. Only Mattie, in all the world. Maybe that was why she haunted him. “Who wouldn’t marry me?”
She eyed him for a moment that bordered on the uncomfortable. “Why me?”
And what could he tell her? That he’d been hit by something he still didn’t understand? He didn’t believe that himself. Nicodemus got what he wanted, no matter what it took. It was how he’d clawed his way to where he was today. It was how he’d first claimed Arista, then rid himself of her and her sharp claw
s. It was how he’d survived learning the truth about his stern, rigidly moralistic father and what his exposing that truth had done to his mother. It was what he did. Why should this woman be any different? He told himself that was all there was to it.
He’d been telling himself that for years.
He forced a smile. “I like you. That’s why.”
“If you do,” she said drily, “then I suspect you might be mentally ill.”
“Perhaps I am.” He shrugged. “Does that make me less of a catch? A little more Quasimodo than you thought?”
He’d meant to simply outline what would happen from here now that she’d finally come to him. Lay down the law with the supreme pleasure of knowing that this time, she’d do as she was told. Because this time, she had to do it.
And he hadn’t lied to her. He never lied. He didn’t care how she came to him. Angry or on her knees, whatever worked. Nicodemus didn’t waste much time worrying about the cost of Pyrrhic victories. It was the victory itself that mattered.
It was the only thing that mattered.
“It makes you much more likely to find yourself committed to a mental institution by your devoted wife one day,” Mattie was saying. She smiled that fake smile of hers. “Depending on the fine print of our prenuptial agreement, of course.”
She was eyeing him with a certain mild arrogance, as if she was the one with all the power here. When he could tell—from the way she sat with her legs crossed tight and her arms over her middle, from the telltale fluttering of her pulse at her neck and that faint flush high on her cheeks—that she knew she was on precarious ground.
But then, so many things about this woman were an act. Smoke and mirrors. And he vowed he would find the truth beneath it all no matter how long it took him. He would take her apart and put her back together the way he wanted her.
He’d been waiting for this—for her—for years.
“We marry in two weeks,” he said, watching her face as he said it. Something flashed through her dark eyes, but then he saw nothing but that polite mask of hers that he’d always known better than to believe. “It will be a very small ceremony in Greece. You, me, a priest and a photographer. We will honeymoon for two weeks at my villa there. Then we will return to Manhattan, where your brother and I will finally merge our companies, as was the wish of both your father and me.” He smiled and let her see the edge in it. “See? Simple. Hardly worth all this commotion for so many years.”
“And what is my part of this?” she asked as if she couldn’t care less either way.
“During the wedding I expect you to obediently recite your vows,” he said silkily. “Perhaps even with a touch of enthusiasm. During the honeymoon? I have a few ideas. And ten years of a very vivid imagination to bring to life, at last.”
There was no denying the flush that moved over her face then, or that look of something like panic that she blinked away in an instant. Not touching her then very nearly hurt—though wanting Mattie was second nature to him now. What was waiting a little bit longer after a decade?
Besides, he suspected that his feigned laziness drove her crazy, and he wanted any weapon he could find with this woman he still couldn’t read. Not the way he wanted to read her.
“I meant when we return in all our marital splendor to New York City,” she said, and it occurred to him to wonder if it was difficult for her to render her voice so loftily indifferent. If it was a skill she’d acquired once and could put on whenever she liked or if she had to work at it every time. “I have my own apartment there. A life, a job. Of course, I’m happy to live separately—”
“I’m not.”
She blinked. Then smiled. “I doubt very much you’d enjoy moving into my tiny little two-bedroom. It’s very girlie and I don’t think you’d look good in all that pink.”
She reached into one of the pockets he hadn’t realized she had in that dress of hers to pull out a cigarette and a lighter, then lit the cigarette, watching him blandly as she blew out a stream of smoke.
“Enjoy that cigarette, Mattie,” he told her mildly. “It will be your last.”
She let out another stream of smoke. “Will it?”
“I have very specific ideas about how my wife will behave,” he said, and smiled when that coolly unbothered front of hers slipped slightly. “That she will live in my house and that she will not work, if that’s what you call it, at that laughable excuse for a public relations firm in all those see-through clothes.”
“I see. This will be a medieval marriage, to go along with the Stone Age courtship rituals we’ve been enjoying thus far. What a thrill.”
He ignored her. “I have certain expectations regarding her behavior. Her style of dress, her comportment. The lack of cigarettes sticking from her mouth, making her smell and taste like an ashtray.” He shrugged. “The usual.”
She held the cigarette in one hand, not looking the least bit worried, though that faint tremor in the hand that held that cigarette told a different story, and stared at him. “I understand that this is all a big chess game to you, Nicodemus, with me playing the role of the most convenient pawn—”
“More the queen than a pawn. Unpredictable and hard to pin down, but once that’s sorted, the game is over.” He smiled when she frowned.
“I hate chess.”
“Then perhaps you should choose a better metaphor.”
“I’m a person,” she told him, and he thought that was temper that made each word like a blade. Her dark eyes blazed with heat. And fear. And yet her voice was cool, and he wanted her with that desperate edge that made him loathe himself. The wanting was fine. The desperation was not. He’d thought he’d outgrown that kind of thing when he’d shaken Arista off. “And this is not, despite all appearances to the contrary, the twelfth century—”
“Then why are you marrying me?” he asked, making no attempt to keep that lash from his voice. “You don’t have to do it, as you’ve pointed out. There’s no gun to your head.”
“A merger between our two companies will strengthen both, and bolster Chase’s position as CEO,” she replied after a moment, something shrewd and sad in her gaze. “It changes the conversation he’s been having with the board and the shareholders, anyway. And of course, you’d become the COO, and you’ve proved you’re very good at operating companies and making piles of money. But you don’t have to marry me to make that happen.”
“I don’t.” He shrugged. “I’m not the one crafting objections to this marriage and looking for explanations. You are.”
“But you won’t hold up your end of your business arrangement with Chase if I don’t agree to do this.” Her eyes darkened. “I want to be a hundred percent certain we’re both clear about who’s pressuring who in this.”
“I’m perfectly clear about it.” And practically cheerful, as he smiled at her obvious flash of temper. “But this is all more of these games you like to play, Mattie. We both know you’re going to marry me. You’ve known it since we met.”
She didn’t like that. He could see it on her face, stamped across those lovely cheeks of hers. But it didn’t change that simple truth. Nothing ever had.
“I haven’t done it yet,” she pointed out quietly. “I’m not sure I’d get carried away counting my chickens if I were you.”
He laughed then. “I’m going to enjoy teaching you the appropriate way to respond to your husband, Mattie. I really am.” He leaned forward, took that nasty cigarette from her and tossed it into the fire without looking away from her. “I’m marrying you because I want you. I always have. More than that, I want to merge my company with your father’s, and I want the link between us to be strong. I want to be part of the family, so there can never be any question about who deserves a seat at the table. That means marriage. Babies. A very long life together, because I don’t believe in separations or divorce. Or secrets.”
Especially the secrets, he thought, shoving those terrible old memories aside. The lies and the devastation they’d wrought.
“What you mean is, I’m a pawn,” she said evenly. “You can say it, Nicodemus. It’s not as if I don’t know it already.”
“And you’re marrying me because...?” His lips curved when she only glared at him. “You enjoy playing the martyr? You’ve always wanted to barter yourself? You have a deep desire to prostrate yourself before the ambitions of others?”
“Family duty,” she said primly. Piously. “I don’t expect you to understand that.”
“Of course not,” he said, and he wasn’t laughing then. “Because everything I have I tore from the world with my own two hands. My father never believed I would amount to anything.” And he did his best to see that I wouldn’t, Nicodemus thought grimly, those same old lies like painful scars deep inside him. “My mother cleaned houses and worked in the factories. The only thing they gave me was life. The rest I worked for.”
And held on to, despite the best effort of grasping materialistic little parasites like Arista.
“No one ever said you weren’t an impressive man, Nicodemus,” Mattie said to him. “But what does it have to do with anything? You’ve been chasing me for so long, I think you don’t even know why you started.”
“No, Mattie,” he said gently. Too gently, maybe. He thought that might have been the trouble from the start. He’d treated her like she was made of glass, and she’d done nothing but cut him with her own sharp edges. It was time he remembered that.
It was time he took control of this.
Her cheeks were flushed and her mouth was so close, and he’d waited so long. He could see the panic in her eyes as she looked back at him, the rise and fall of her perfect breasts against that unfathomably soft dress she wore. He couldn’t stop himself from reaching over and taking her hot cheek in his hand, holding her there and tracing her lips with a single restless movement of his thumb.
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