HIS FOR A PRICE

by Caitlin Crews

  “You’re splitting hairs,” she said. “And you know it.”

  “No.” And his voice was no less stern for that gentle look he aimed at her. “I am a very simple man. I keep the promises I make. I don’t have to force you to do anything. I don’t want to force you. I told you before—you’re free to do as you like. You always have been.”

  “Free to have you hunt me down all these years? Free to have you make nasty little bargains with my brother that you know I’d have to be a selfish monster to refuse?”

  Nicodemus didn’t quite shrug. “Freedom is never without cost.”

  “And what was—this?”

  She jerked her chin in a hard little gesture that she hoped encompassed what had happened right here on this plane. She certainly didn’t want to think about it, much less let those images chase through her head, or move like wine in her veins. She didn’t want to feel the aftereffects, all those leftover flames still dancing just beneath her skin.

  She didn’t want to admit that he’d knocked down a lifetime of her defenses that swiftly, that easily. With her participation and help, no less.

  “I thought you wanted me to take you for a test drive, Mattie,” he said, horribly, and even laughed when she scowled at him. “Was that not enough of a test? Should we try a higher gear?”

  “I,” she said very distinctly, very deliberately, “would rather throw myself out of this plane right now.”

  “That would be unfortunate,” he said, without sounding in the least concerned she’d try. “And undoubtedly painful, before your inevitable death.”

  “I don’t want to have sex with you.” Her voice was much too strident.

  As usual, Nicodemus didn’t do what she’d expected he might. He only shook his head at her as if she was a child.

  “That is a lie,” he said quietly. “As I think you must know I am well aware, having tasted what you want right here.”

  “Are you going to manipulate me into that, too?” she demanded, uneven and too loud. “Are there more hideous consequences if I don’t lie down and take it the first time you order me to do it?”

  Nicodemus blinked. “I can promise you that there will never come a day when I will order you to lie down and take it, as intriguing as that image might be.”

  “Don’t avoid the question.”

  Nicodemus studied her, and, not for the first time, Mattie had the prickly sense that he saw all the things she’d spent her life working so hard to conceal. All the things she’d shoved aside, hidden, buried deep.

  “No,” he said, and he didn’t break that uncompromising gaze. “I’m not going to force you. I’m not going to manipulate you.”

  “I wish I could trust you,” she said.

  “I’ve never lied to you,” he said, in that same inexorable, impossible way, as relentless as an incoming tide. “You can’t say the same. I suspect it’s you that you can’t trust.”

  She rubbed her hands up and down her arms and moved to sit in one of the comfortable chairs across the aisle, pulling her feet up beneath her in as close to the fetal position as she could get while still upright.

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Mattie.” He might have been laughing again. She could see it in his eyes , could hear it, rich and thick and entirely too beguiling in his low voice. “I don’t have to force you or manipulate you or strip off my clothes in a clumsy little challenge, do I?” His smile then was beautiful, truly. Stunning and shattering at once, and it poured into her, through her, like light. Like a nuclear blast. Like a death knell, and she knew it. “I only have to touch you, and you’re mine. You’ve always been mine. Perhaps it’s time you admitted it.”

  * * *

  They arrived on his island a little before noon the following day after a helicopter ride from a private airfield outside Athens, and it took every shred of control Nicodemus had left inside him to keep from simply tossing Mattie over his shoulder and ravaging her the moment they stepped inside his villa. Exactly the way he’d told her he wouldn’t.

  This has been a very long game, but the end is in sight, he reminded himself fiercely. Don’t lose your advantage now.

  She had to come to him, one way or another. She had to surrender. She had to be complicit in his triumph over her, or he wouldn’t truly win her at all. He knew this as well as he knew his own name. On some level, he supposed he’d always known it.

  Nicodemus had bought this island not long after seeing Mattie for the first time at that damned ball of hers, flush with his own burgeoning success and sense of purpose. He’d planned to remake the world in his image and to a large extent, he’d succeeded. He’d built the vast, sprawling villa in the intervening years, making it as much a monument to his own growing power and influence as to the stunning views it commanded from the top of the rocky hill that made up the bulk of the small island, tucked away in a sleepy part of the tourist-heavy Cyclades islands.

  It was the kind of house he’d dreamed of while growing up in a crowded flat in the port city of Piraeus outside Athens, mired in his father’s strict rules and then, afterward, the mess of his father’s lies. It was a house filled with light and art and the sea, not the clamor and struggle of the busy, working-class neighborhood of his childhood. Quiet elegance and wealth were evident in every last detail, from the dizzyingly high ceilings to the recognizably famous canvases he’d installed on his walls. All it needed was the perfect gilded lily of a woman to live in it with him, as glossy and as bright and as expensive as the view he’d worked so hard to claim as his own.

  Not any woman, he knew. He’d tried simply glossy and pedigreed once, and it had brought him Arista, who had wanted his money and his power and his prowess in bed, but not his ring or his name. It had taken him much too long to see her true face, to understand what it had meant that her family sneered at him and his lower-class roots. Mattie was different—because he’d always seen her true face. He’d known from the start that she was lying about her aversion to him. He’d held her in his arms in that ballroom and felt her tremble even as she’d denied him. More than that, claiming her meant claiming a place deep in the bosom of her family. He knew exactly how highly her father had thought of him, because Bart Whitaker was a self-made man who’d married above his station, too.

  It was as if Mattie had been crafted specifically for him.

  And now she was here. Right where he’d wanted her for a decade. Standing in his house, contained by the walls he’d designed and built himself, the last component of his dream come true sliding into place with a click he thought was nearly audible.

  Few things in life were as good in fact as they seemed in theory, Nicodemus knew from painful experience, but this—she was one of them. He didn’t know what surged in him then, some wild concoction made of equal parts lust and satisfaction and at last, and he simply stood there in the foyer and let it beat through him. As simple and as poignant as joy.

  He watched her as she turned around in a circle in the great room that opened up in front of him, that too-pretty face of hers unreadable in the bright fall sunlight. She tipped her head back, as if to bask in all that sunshine, but then she caught him looking and stopped. Hid. Again.

  Because there was always another game where Mattie Whitaker was concerned. Always another lie.

  It was good he remembered that now, he told himself sternly, before he forgot himself entirely and did something foolish. Like pick her up in his arms and swing her around, as if she’d come happily and willingly to this marriage. As if this was some kind of love story.

  His own sentimentality should not have surprised him. It was nothing new. This was the culmination of his last remaining dream. He’d already achieved all the rest, one after the next. Mattie was the last thing he’d wanted that he hadn’t yet had. The very last. It was his own burden that he also wanted her to be real.

  “I would ask you if you like this place,” he said, aware of the chill in his voice and doing nothing to modify it, because better she s
hould hear that than what lurked beneath, betraying him completely, “but it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Apparently not.” Her dark eyes met his, then moved away again—too quickly, as if she feared what he’d see if he looked too closely. Or perhaps he only hoped that was why. “If you say so.” Her mouth shifted into something far more recognizably bitter. “Is this how you prefer I address you, Nicodemus? As submissively as possible? Should I curtsey?”

  “There is very little submissive about you, Mattie,” Nicodemus said with a great patience only slightly marred by his clenched teeth and the rigid way he held himself too still. “Especially when I can hear you choking back your temper as you speak.”

  “A natural reaction to my circumstances, I’d imagine,” she retorted, her arms crossed tight over those beautiful breasts of hers, and it didn’t help that he now knew what they looked like when they were taut with need. He knew how she tasted, and it might very well be the ruin of him. “I’d see about forming a support group, but I suspect the taking of war brides went out with the last century. If not well before.”

  “This is the history of the world,” he said, with what he thought was admirable patience. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets so he’d keep them off her, and roamed across the marble floor in her direction, the room in blues and whites with hints of darker woods as accents, and Mattie’s glossy black hair a startling midnight in the middle of it. Perfect. “We aren’t doing anything particularly new, you and I. People have always done things like this, for the same reasons, all throughout the ages.”

  “You mean women have always been forced to do things like this,” she corrected him, but he was closer now, and her voice wasn’t as strident as before. He saw the remains of all that exuberant heat still there in her lovely eyes, and he wanted to taste her again more than he wanted his next breath. But he only waited, and watched her pull in a long, ragged breath. “Women are forced to bend, or kingdoms break. Women are made to surrender, or nations and corporations and men fall apart.”

  “Consider this a history lesson, if you must. If that makes it easier for you. More palatable.”

  She glared at him. “And what about what I want, Nicodemus?”

  “What about it?” He shook his head when her glare deepened into a scowl. “We both know that you aren’t as opposed to this as you pretend. Did we not prove that in scorching detail at thirty-thousand feet?”

  “You’re wrong. Again. Why am I not surprised?”

  “Have I beaten you?” he asked, his voice a lash in the vast room, and she jolted slightly, as if she felt its edge in long, red stripes against her skin. “Abused you in some way?” She looked as if she was about to speak but he kept going. “There are a lot of men who might have taken that impromptu strip show on the plane as an invitation to indulge whatever appetites they liked.”

  “Didn’t you?” she accused him, and he laughed.

  “Remind me, in future, never to restrain myself where you are concerned.” He shook his head. “Particularly when you take it upon yourself to get naked in inappropriate places.”

  “I didn’t want that!” she hissed at him, with as much force as if she’d have preferred to scream it. Her hands were clenched tight. She was rigid and obviously angry and Nicodemus’s curse was that he found her beautiful. Distractingly so. Even—especially—when she was attempting to defy him. “I didn’t want any part of what you did.”

  “This I could tell by the way you screamed my name as you climaxed in my mouth,” he said with arid impatience, and she flinched as if he’d slapped her.

  “I thought you would stop.” It was a harsh whisper.

  “Because I always have before?” The laugh he let out then was devoid of humor. “Then you’ve learned a valuable lesson. Don’t test me again.” The look on her face was mutinous and miserable at once, and so unnecessary when they’d come this far already—but he bit back the more earthy reaction he had to it. “Your body doesn’t tell the lies you do, Mattie. It’s significantly more honest.”

  “Just because my body has some insane chemical reaction to you doesn’t mean I want to indulge it,” she threw at him. “The world doesn’t work that way.”

  “Yours does,” he said flatly. “The sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be.” She made a sound that was as close to a growl as he’d ever heard her make, and he really did laugh then. “This is like your very own, personal fairy tale,” he told her. He swept an arm through the air, inviting her to truly take in her surroundings. “Blue sky, perfect Greek sea, a little castle on a hilltop, and all of it yours. All you have to do is marry a man with whom you have all of this inconvenient chemistry. No glass slipper required. You should look a bit happier.”

  She turned slightly to look out at the view, through all the sweeping glass that let in the glory of the Greek islands on three sides and all that sunshine from above, but her mouth pressed into a flat line.

  “You’re thinking of Disney fairy tales, I think,” she said, those dark eyes fixed on Kimolos, the nearest island, as if she was calculating how far it would be to swim to it. “This feels a bit more Grimm Brothers, where everything ends in pecked-out eyes and a river of tears.”

  He waited until she turned toward him, which took a few tense moments, and when she did, he only shook his head, slowly. A dark scowl like a thundercloud rolled across her lovely face, ferocious and fierce. It only made him want her more.

  “I’m pleased to see that you’ve accepted the reality of the situation with such grace,” he said smoothly. “And while we’re on that topic, I’ll show you to our room so you can get settled.”

  She blinked. Went entirely too still, the way he’d known she would. “Our room?” she asked.

  And Nicodemus smiled.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THREE DAYS LATER, Mattie dutifully mouthed a set of vows that might as well have been gibberish for all they resonated in her, high on a rocky cliff with a view of nothing but the deep blue Aegean Sea and the next island over, which Nicodemus had informed her boasted a population of less than a thousand souls and the only nearby ferry to Athens.

  “Should you wish to swim for it,” he’d drawled that first night when he’d installed her in the bedroom he’d claimed they were to share, with its stunning view of the shifting sea and the green hills of the other island, “you should know that it’s several miles and there’s a vicious current. You could wind up in Tripoli by morning.”

  “And wouldn’t that be a shame,” she’d sniped back at him, because she was incapable of biting her tongue at the best of times—and especially when facing him over the wide, vast expanse of the giant bed his amused expression had told her he had every intention of sharing with her. “This close to the wedding of the century.”

  Nicodemus had only laughed and left her there, to seethe and plot and try her best not to fall apart.

  Mattie still didn’t believe this was real. That this was really happening.

  Not when Nicodemus had looked her up and down in that dizzying, glassed-in great room of his obnoxiously perfect villa earlier today, his mouth crooking slightly as he took stock of the dour gray dress she’d opted to wear for the occasion.

  “Are you in mourning already?” he’d asked, that rich amusement making his voice deeper, darker. It had washed through her like another devastating lick of his talented tongue, and with the same explosive effect. She’d tried valiantly to fight it off, though his expression indicated she hadn’t been particularly successful.

  “It seemed appropriate,” she’d replied coolly. “It was the only one I could find on such short notice that screamed forced to the altar. Don’t you agree?”

  Nicodemus had only laughed. At her, she’d been well aware, the way he’d done a great many times since that day in her father’s library. Since her eighteenth birthday, for that matter. Then he’d taken her by the arm and led her over the smooth stones toward the priest and the two members of his household staff who were standing in
as witnesses to this quiet little tragedy out on his covered marble terrace.

  Mattie had told herself that none of this was happening. That none of this was real. That none of it mattered.

  Not when Nicodemus took her hands in his. Certainly not when he recited his own vows in that powerful voice of his that seemed to echo deep in her bones, however unreal the words seemed to her. Not when the priest spoke in English and then in Greek, as if to make certain it took. Not when one of his staff took a series of photographs that Mattie was sure she didn’t want to see. Not when Nicodemus pulled her close to him to press a coolly possessive kiss to her mouth, more matter-of-fact than anything else.

  Not that her treacherous body had cared how he kissed her, so long as he did—and she hated that she couldn’t lie to herself about that. That the proof was right there in the rowdy, insistent pounding of her heart and the blistering heat at her core, telling her truths she didn’t want to accept. Especially when he left her there on that achingly lovely terrace to escort the priest and the two witnesses back into the villa, as if it had never crossed his mind that she might consider jumping from that cliff, to swim or to drown or to be swept off to Tripoli with the next tide, to escape him by any means necessary.

  It was no more than another nightmare, she thought, and she was well-acquainted with those. That didn’t really happen. But even as she thought it, she looked down at her hand at the heavy set of rings that he’d put there, sliding one on right after the next. A square-cut diamond raised high above two sapphires next to a ring of flatter diamonds around a platinum band. The kind of rings reality show “housewives” wore, she thought uncharitably, though she knew that wasn’t fair. They simply weren’t the sort of hushed, restrained rings her mother had worn all those years ago, the sort Mattie had always imagined she’d wear herself one day.