HIS FOR A PRICE

by Caitlin Crews

  And it would take a far better man than he was to do anything about it now.

  He sunk his fingers deep in her thick hair, loosely holding on to her as she tormented him, as she worshipped him. Letting her build the fire in him higher and higher, letting her take him, letting her have him any way she pleased.

  Mine, he thought with every stroke of her wicked tongue. Finally mine.

  And when he fell off the side of the earth and shattered into a thousand pieces, he shouted out the glory of it in words he knew she couldn’t understand.

  When he opened his eyes she was still on her knees before him, those marvelous eyes big and wide and focused only on him. Another trillion dreams shattered by a far better reality, he thought. Her lush mouth was swollen slightly, and there was that flush across her cheeks that told him she was as affected by this as he was. For a moment he only stared at her, this woman who had haunted him for so long.

  This woman he still didn’t understand at all.

  Then Nicodemus tucked himself away and zipped up his trousers, the fire still roaring inside him. He wanted to haul her to her feet and bend her over the counter. He wanted to lick his way into her heat again, then lose himself in it, until they were both as shattered as that glass she’d thrown.

  He wanted all of her. Here, now.

  But he’d waited so long—and he couldn’t trust her sudden capitulation. He reached down and slid his hand along her jaw, holding the side of her face, the soft satin of her cheek warm against his palm. Something like tenderness, but with so many lies between them.

  Always the lies. Always so many damned lies.

  “I think I like you kneeling, princess,” he said, not wanting to face that yet. “I may make it a daily requirement.”

  She didn’t like that. He could feel it in the way she quivered, could see it in the way her pretty dark eyes narrowed. But she didn’t throw something back at him the way he could see she wanted to do. She stayed there, passive and accommodating and not at all the Mattie he knew.

  Not that he was complaining. Not at the moment. Not when he was still breathing hard.

  “Wasn’t that...okay?” she asked, with breathy concern. But he could see the calculation in her eyes, and it helped bring him back to reality.

  “You don’t listen,” he told her coolly. “I’ve told you before—I don’t care how I have you. I’m not that proud. If you want to kneel down before me and pretend it’s an apology instead of a manipulation, I won’t stop you.” He shrugged. “I didn’t.”

  He was impressed with how she held herself so still. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “This kind of about-face would be suspicious in anyone, but is especially so in you.” She started to move, and he shook his head, made his voice harsh. “Stay where you are.”

  “So you can indulge your domination fantasies?” She rolled her eyes. “No, thank you.”

  “This is not a fantasy.” He smiled, enjoying the fury in her gaze because that was the real Mattie behind whatever sugar-coated, undeniably hot game she was playing out. “This is a fact.”

  He was fascinated by the way her face changed, one emotion after the next and none readable. Eventually, her shoulders dropped. She let go of the ripe tension drawing her body so tight, blowing it out in a long sigh that drew his attention back to her mouth, which he knew, now, could make him her slave. Easily. And then she smiled at him in that way she had before, so that the exquisite little dent beside her mouth revealed itself anew.

  As if she was made entirely of sunshine and sweetness.

  He didn’t believe it, of course. But it made that heat flare again inside him, pooling in his groin with as much force and need and hunger as if he’d never let her use her mouth on him in the first place. As if he’d never found such sweet release.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “You make me feel—” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t bring herself to name it. “I don’t know how to react to it.”

  “That may be the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me.” Her hair had tumbled down from the little twist she’d put it in, thanks to his hands and the madness of the way she’d brought him over the edge like that, and he brushed the silken mass of it back from her face. “But I doubt very much that’s why you’re saying it.”

  “Fine.” She settled, relaxing her bottom on her feet, looking less like she was kneeling and more like she happened to be doing some kind of yoga near him. “You’re the expert on me, or so you keep telling me. So what terrible, underhanded reasons do I have for doing what I just did? Maybe you can explain why you did the exact same thing to me on the plane. Will our reasons be the same?” Her mouth curved, challenging him. “Or will you decide, the way you always seem to do, that I’m devious and motivated only by plots and schemes and deceit while you—and only you—are nobly called to action by nothing more than the purity of your intentions?”

  “I might be less sarcastic, were I on my knees,” Nicodemus observed.

  That curve in her mouth deepened, her eyes were bittersweet chocolate with that blue besides and still seemed like sunlight next to the glossy midnight fall of her hair, and he knew that this could go on forever. That it would.

  It made him inexpressibly sad.

  They’d been sniping at each other for a decade, and there was no end in sight. Playing power games, raising the stakes. He’d forced this marriage and she’d only today touched him for the first time entirely of her own volition—and not, he understood and hated that he did, because she’d been overcome with the longing to do so.

  He’d told her he didn’t care how she came to him, and on some level, that was true. But it was also true that there was a restlessness in him, like an uneasy winter wind, and a howling expanse inside that he didn’t want to admit was there.

  Finally, everything was exactly how he wanted it. Everything was in its rightful place. He had every single thing he’d ever desired—and yet this was still nothing more than an echoing, cavernous house filled with things. The world in his pocket, the woman of his dreams at his feet with his rings on her finger, and he was still as entirely and utterly alone as when he’d realized what Arista really was all those years ago. What she’d really wanted from a low class man with high class aspirations and too much money too fast.

  How was this any different?

  He realized, then, the depths of the fantasy he’d built up around Mattie Whitaker. The things he’d imagined she could do, the magic she could work, and why? Because she’d been the prettiest thing he’d ever seen when he was twenty-six and so far away from the ugly little place he’d come from. Because, as she’d accused him, he’d wanted that access to her father and to Whitaker Industries. Because he’d wanted her and had convinced himself that he’d already learned his lesson with Arista. That he’d never repeat those mistakes.

  Nicodemus was, as he had always been, the king of the damned. A lie his father had told and nothing more. And the worst part was that he knew he wouldn’t change a thing he’d done to get here. Not one thing. Not even this.

  Especially not this.

  “Are we going to stare at each other forever?” Mattie asked, her voice easy but those dark eyes of hers intense. “Or is it that you don’t have an answer?”

  “I have an answer.” He thought he sounded far smokier, darker, all the way through, but she didn’t seem to notice any difference, and why would she? She didn’t know him. No one ever had, and he understood then that no one ever would. Especially not this woman he’d made his wife, a word she’d claimed was meaningless, anyway. He believed her. Finally, he believed her. “I doubt you’d like it.”

  Nicodemus dropped his hand from her face and when she rose to her feet in a lithe sort of ripple that made all sense desert him for a beat of his heart, then another, he didn’t object. She reached over and helped herself to his coffee, swirling the traditionally thick mixture around in the cup before taking a dainty sip.

  “This is about control, isn’t it?�
�� she asked. But it wasn’t really a question, and he found he was preoccupied with the fact that the soft, airy sweater she wore matched the darker parts of her eyes. “You’re obsessed with making sure I don’t have any.”

  “No,” he said. He wanted to be the coffee cup she pressed to her lips. He wanted to lick the little bit of moisture away when she lowered it. He wanted her to want him, and not because she thought she could leverage it. Maybe that was all he’d ever wanted. More fool, him. It was Arista all over again, and he wasn’t twenty any longer. He had no excuse this time. “This is about lies. It always is. And I’m afraid you’ve miscalculated.”

  She raised her eyebrows at him, but didn’t speak, not even when he reached over and traced a path along her delicate jaw, over that little dent that made him foolish with longing, then on down the elegant line of the aristocratic neck she’d inherited from her titled English mother. Then he found his way along the collarbone that led to her exposed shoulder. Her skin was so soft, so warm. She was still so pretty, as gleaming and lovely in his house as in her father’s.

  And she was no more than what he’d made her inside his own head. A stranger with a perfect face. One more critical mistake in a long line of them.

  Another damned lie and this one all the worse because he’d told it to himself. For years.

  “I’ve known for a long time that everything you said to me was untrue,” he said after a moment, and he wasn’t playing up that dark note in his voice then, like grief. That was what this was. What he’d lost. “But your body, I believed. I told myself it whispered the truth no matter what you said.”

  The more dramatic papers claimed she’d lured him into this marriage, that she was a siren who’d enslaved him with her infamous charms, that she was her brother’s instrument sent to bring him to heel. He watched her now and wished that any of that were true. That he could fool himself for a little bit longer.

  “My body and I are not separate entities,” she said, grittier than whatever too-sweet voice she’d been using, but at least that was real. At least that was her.

  “And now I know it,” he said quietly. He dropped his hand and stepped back, away from her, the way he should have done when she’d come to him in the first place. The way he should have done ten years ago when he’d found himself drawn to yet another pointless, pretty little heiress who would never do anything but look down her nose at him. “Which means there’s not a single thing about you I can believe, Mattie. And from this moment forward, I promise you, I won’t.”

  That shouldn’t have hurt her, given how deliberately she’d played out this scene, and it certainly shouldn’t have sat on him the way it did, so heavy and dark he thought it might crush him, but there was no mistaking the ravaged look on her face then.

  “I wouldn’t have—” She stopped, and he got the impression she’d surprised herself by speaking. “Nicodemus, if I didn’t want—”

  But she didn’t finish. Her expression was equal parts misery and resignation. What he would have called longing, before, when he was still clinging to all his fantasies. When he’d still imagined that this was a game he could win.

  That she was.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he said. “I finally see this for what it is.”

  “A mess?” she supplied bitterly, and he smiled.

  “Just another lie,” he told her. And he’d had his fill of them so long ago, hadn’t he? How had he done this to himself? “But it’s our lie, Mattie, and there’s no escaping it now.”

  He knew he had to leave her there in the kitchen before he made himself a liar, too. Before he forgot what he was doing and lost himself in her, instead, that gorgeous deception she’d offered on her knees with a smile. That marvelous deceit he wanted to believe more than he wanted his next breath.

  More than he wanted anything.

  Nicodemus didn’t know how he made himself walk away. Only that he did.

  * * *

  “If I had known that you planned to work through our honeymoon, such as it is,” Mattie said in a very bored tone, lifting her gaze from the tablet computer, where their wedding pictures were splashed across all the tabloids, and glared at Nicodemus’s profile as if it was his fault she looked besotted and in love in every one of them, “I might have brought my own along.”

  Nicodemus had his laptop open before him on the glass-topped table between them, his smartphone in his hand, and he didn’t bother to look over at her. As if they’d been unhappily married for years, Mattie thought darkly.

  “Your work?” he asked, perfectly politely. “I was unaware that you had more than a passing acquaintance with the term.”

  And that right there was the problem. He’d been nothing but polite since that scene in his kitchen almost a week ago now. Nicodemus was scrupulously courteous. Unerringly distant. And that gleaming thing she’d taken entirely for granted, she only realized now that she couldn’t see it, was gone from those dark eyes of his.

  He insisted she sit with him. Sleep in that bed with him whenever he was in it. Eat all her meals with him. He was still attempting to gentle her, like she was an obstreperous cow. But the Nicodemus she hadn’t realized she’d come to know—and, on some level, depend upon—was gone.

  Mattie hated it.

  “You know perfectly well that I work in PR,” she said now. “I can think of at least three occasions in the past five years you’ve referenced it directly.”

  She was curled up in a corner of the sofa in the great room while Nicodemus sat in one of the armchairs, leaning forward now to tap at his keyboard. He still didn’t look at her. Not even to point out that none of the references he’d made to her career were positive.

  “You do not work in PR,” he said when he finally deigned to answer. That harsh mouth of his didn’t curve the way it would have, once. There was no hint of that rich laughter in his low voice. “You get paid to attend parties with the paparazzi in tow. You get paid more to call up your equally rich, bored and pointlessly famous friends to come along with you. You raise the profile of already sensationalized events by your exalted presence. Is that PR? Or a slightly more sanitized version of prostitution?”

  Ouch.

  “The tabloids claim you’ve stolen me away and married me without Chase’s permission, because you’re business rivals fighting over the company like a couple of wild dogs.” She eyed him. “Making me the bone in this scenario.”

  The old Nicodemus would have smirked at that. This one didn’t bother, and Mattie hated that she felt it like an acid inside her, eating away at her. Leaving nothing but gaping holes and a kind of hollowness behind.

  “They also claim you’ve been secretly in love with me for years.” He kept typing whatever it was he was typing, ruling his world from a distance and not sparing her a single glance as he spoke. “That your father opposed our relationship and only now can we be together, the Romeo and Juliet of the business world. Or that you’re actually the conniving power behind Chase, and this union was all your idea to throw off your father’s creditors. I’m not sure which version I find more laughable.”

  HAS MATTIE BEEN FAKING IT ALL ALONG? screeched one article, which had hypothesized that Mattie was actually some kind of corporate Mata Hari, slithering from one rich man to the next while hiding herself in plain sight as a vapid tabloid train wreck. She thought that one might actually be the most insulting of them all.

  “I thought the witnesses to our wedding were household staff with the odd smartphone camera,” she continued, changing the subject slightly from the obnoxious headlines that showed no signs of abating as the days passed. “Imagine my surprise to discover that one was a photographer so talented he made that sad little exercise look like a romantic moment.”

  “You’re a far better actress than I ever gave you credit for,” Nicodemus said, and he did glance over at her then, but she saw nothing on that fiercely beautiful face of his but impatience. “But then, why shouldn’t you be? It’s not like you know anything about reality.”


  “Like you do, you mean,” she retorted, and waved a hand around them to indicate the sprawling villa and the stunning views in all directions. “Because this is reality.”

  “The difference is that I earned this.” His cell phone buzzed and he frowned at it but didn’t answer, and Mattie hated how she clung to that. Like it meant something. “I built this. I came from nothing and believe me, I remember what it was like to have no reason to live but dreams that someday, it might be better. I don’t imagine you can say the same.”

  “Everybody’s had to fight, Nicodemus,” she said, and she was horrified at what she heard in her voice. That rawness. That telling darkness. The memories that came with it, and then the guilt. Always the guilt. “Everyone. Even someone you find as useless as me.”

  He looked at her then, but it was different—so damned different—from the way he’d studied her all these years. She didn’t understand why it made a clawing panic rise inside her, making her chest tight and her throat hurt. She didn’t understand any of this. She only knew that she’d played her best weapon and won—but lost something, too. Something she hadn’t realized she could lose. Something she certainly hadn’t realized she’d miss.

  And suddenly, she was afraid to hear what he might say next.

  “Is it in your grand plans that I continue to work?” she asked languidly, as if she wasn’t affected by any of this at all. “When we get back to New York, I mean. Does your great and glorious male dignity demand that I become some kind of housewife, instead? I read an article that claimed you’ve abducted me against my will and hypnotized me to force me to act against my brother. Just FYI. There could be questions if I don’t turn up at the office.”

  “I don’t believe you possess any of the skills I might require in a housewife,” Nicodemus said, and there was the faintest hint of his dry humor there. It made Mattie’s heart kick at her. “Can you cook? Clean? Do a single thing you’re told?”

  She settled back against the couch. “A man of your wealth has a housekeeper for all that, surely.”