HIS FOR A PRICE

by Caitlin Crews

  “Yes, and my housekeeper obeys me. She is a gem without price.”

  “So am I to perch on your arm and be decorative?” Mattie asked. “That sounds delightful. Very intellectually stimulating, I’m sure. What will we tell the tabloids? What new stories will they create? That you took me to Greece to lobotomize me?”

  He ran his hand over his face and for a moment—just a moment—looked tired. Sad, even. It reminded her of that unguarded moment she’d stumbled upon that day in the kitchen, and, like then, she didn’t know what to make of it. Or of her own response, which was outsized and strange. Unwieldy.

  If she could, she thought—if she was someone else—she would reach over and try to soothe him with her hands. She scowled down at her fingers, clenched around the tablet with too many tabloids and still sporting those too-bright rings he’d put there, as if they’d betrayed her.

  “You can do whatever you want, Mattie,” Nicodemus said, and she hated everything about this. That she felt caught up in whatever this new thing between them was, tighter and harsher and so much narrower. That she hurt—and more for him and that light she missed seeing in his eyes than anything else.

  She didn’t dare ask herself what that meant.

  “And if I want to leave you?” she heard herself say, because she couldn’t stop.

  “Anything but that,” he said, his voice harsh, and when his phone rang again he swiped it up from the table, though his dark eyes stayed on her. “We’ll suffer in this together. I know I already made that clear.”

  And then he directed all of his attention back to his work, and Mattie knew she had no one to blame for that dark and heavy thing squatting on her chest but herself.

  That night they worked together in the kitchen, putting together one of the simple meals they’d been living on here. A fresh salad. Homemade pita bread warmed in the oven and placed in a basket. A plate with a hunk of feta and tangy local olives, drenched in a gold-green olive oil. Lamb that Nicodemus had prepared matter-of-factly and quickly on the grill, then placed on the plates Mattie carried out to the table on the terrace.

  It occurred to her as they settled across from each other that they’d developed their own rhythm in these past days. That this was what married couples did, this quiet dance of shared food and a laden table. Candles against the cool October air and no need for conversation.

  It occurred to her that despite everything, despite what she’d done to avoid it, this was the most intimate she’d ever been with a person she wasn’t related to.

  The insight was like a slap to the head and she sat there for a moment, staring at Nicodemus in dismay. Because this was precisely why he was doing all of this, she understood. Even if he was angry with her, he was still creating bonds between them that had nothing to do with their decade of games or that sexual tension that burned between them even now. He was making this—him—a habit.

  This was exactly what she didn’t want. What she couldn’t allow.

  “What now?” he asked, reaching out to drag a soft square of the pita bread through the olive oil, then popping it in his mouth. He sat back in his chair as he chewed, but the way he looked at her was anything but indulgent.

  “I think it’s time you explained to me what happened the other day in the kitchen,” she blurted out. “Most men would be transported with delight if they received an unsolicited blow job.”

  Was that a muscle that twitched in his jaw? Or did she only want it to be because it indicated she still affected him? How could she know her own motivations so little?

  “I am not most men.”

  “Obviously.” She sat much too rigidly in her seat, and found that her appetite had deserted her. She shoved the perfectly grilled lamb around on her plate. “You’ve been punishing me ever since.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.” He seemed unperturbed, and continued to eat with every appearance of contentment. “Punishment can take many forms, but none, I think, involve whiling away your days on a beautiful island with nothing to do but relax.”

  “That depends on the company.”

  “Here’s the thing, Mattie.” His gaze flared into something else. Something so blisteringly hot it robbed her of breath. “I’ve done all this before. The pretty girl. The endless, circular lies. I already know how it ends.”

  She didn’t like that flare of prickly heat that washed over her, because she knew exactly what it was, and she’d never been jealous of anything before in her life. Damn him.

  “Are you trying to tell me that I don’t measure up to your ex?” she asked tautly. “They say comparison is the thief of joy, Nicodemus. Maybe that’s why you’re so grumpy all the time.”

  He looked like he wanted to bite at her, and she shouldn’t have thrilled to that.

  “I don’t find all the insults and digs and snide remarks amusing anymore,” he grated at her.

  “Why not?” she asked, and she didn’t know how she dared. Or why her voice was so tiny when she did. “I thought you knew how it ends.”

  “What I thought was a game we were both playing was something else entirely to you,” he said with a quiet menace that rolled through Mattie like a seismic event, and paled in comparison to that look in his dark eyes. “I wasn’t lying. You were.”

  “But what if I’m not?”

  She hadn’t meant to say that. She didn’t even know where it came from—and yet it was there between them, stretched out prone on the small table, surrounded by the flickering flames of the candles and the rich Greek night all around them.

  “There are always consequences,” he said after a moment. “In this case, I don’t believe a single thing you say. You wanted to manipulate me and you were willing to go as far as possible to do it.”

  “You’re one to talk,” she managed to reply, though her eyes felt glazed and she was half-afraid the rest of her had turned to stone. “Where do you think I learned how to use sex as a weapon in the first place?”

  “You’re such a liar.” It came out somewhere between wonder and despair, and she’d never heard him use that tone of voice before. It tore at her. “You lie to my face about things I know are not true. I was there. I’ve never used sex. I’ve simply admitted the attraction I feel and occasionally acted upon it. There’s a difference.”

  “Because you say there is!” she threw at him. “That doesn’t make it so!”

  “I’ve been dreaming of getting my mouth on you for years,” he growled at her, looking much too dangerous for a man who still appeared to do no more than lounge there across from her. “I didn’t ask you to strip for me, Mattie. You did that.”

  “But you were happy to take advantage, of course.”

  “I’m not going to have this argument,” he told her then, that colder note of impatience back in his voice. Shifting, she thought, from potentially emotional husband to unamused CEO in an instant, and she loathed it. “Because we both know you know better—and that I wasn’t the one playing games.”

  “Nicodemus—”

  “Eat your dinner,” he told her. He picked up his own fork and speared a piece of lamb with barely repressed violence.

  “This is fake,” she gritted out, and was surprised to discover that her hands were in fists in her lap, and her throat was so tight it hurt to speak. “This is nothing but a game of make-believe. We might as well be the tabloid stories they make up about us. How is this any better?”

  “This is a marriage,” he retorted, all of that ferocity in his voice , and darkening his gaze, and she was sick enough to exult in that, because at least she’d reached something in him. “Our marriage. You should count yourself lucky I’ve decided it should be so goddamned civil.”

  * * *

  Nicodemus woke in a rush.

  He didn’t need to reach out to the empty mattress beside him to realize that Mattie wasn’t in the bed. He knew immediately. But his hand moved over the spot she normally occupied—as far away from him as she could get and still technically be in the same bed—and he found
it cold. Utterly devoid of her heat, telling him that she’d slipped away again. She always did.

  He swung his way out of the bed and onto his feet, not bothering to turn on the lights. Outside, the moon was flirting toward fullness, creating a rippling path across the dark water, and Nicodemus was furious.

  He would have asked himself what the hell was wrong with him, but he knew. It was always Mattie, always this same woman lodged in him like a pebble in his shoe. Or a knife in his side, if he was more accurate, and he had no idea how he was maintaining his control. If it didn’t bother her so much when he went cold and distant, he acknowledged to himself in the predawn quiet of his empty bedroom, he would have broken already.

  So maybe he played as many games as she did, after all.

  But it was this particular game of hers—this nightly ritual—that he thought might drive him to the brink of madness.

  Every night she deserted their bed. Every night he would either wake to find her missing or come to bed after another round of irritating international conference calls to find she wasn’t there. Every night he would hunt her down, find her sleeping somewhere else in this sprawling place and sometimes muttering and thrashing in a way that suggested anything but sweet dreams, and carry her back with him.

  Every single night, and they never discussed it.

  Nicodemus assumed it was her last gasp of rebellion, and on some level he couldn’t help but admire her hardheadedness and persistence. But it wasn’t admiration he felt tonight as he failed to locate her in any of her usual spots. She wasn’t in any of the guest suites. She wasn’t in the great room, the solarium or on the leather couch in his office. He went through every room of the villa without finding her, and it was only when he stood near the wall of windows outside his private gym and indoor lap pool that he realized she’d escalated things and left the building.

  He thought she might be the death of him one of these days, he really did.

  Nicodemus let himself out into the cold night, the October wind and the watching moon piercing him as he walked across the flagstone patio that made a ring around the outdoor pool that he’d need to close for the season soon. He felt the coming winter in the stones beneath his bare feet, and he felt like a caveman when he wrenched open the door to the pool house and saw her there, where she shouldn’t have been.

  She was in a ball on the summer chaise in the corner, and for a moment, he thought she was awake and speaking to him—

  But then he saw the tears. And the look of abject terror on her face.

  She wasn’t speaking, he realized. She was crying the same word over and over and over.

  Nicodemus didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t civil. He simply closed the distance between the door and the chaise in two strides. He picked her up, blanket and tears and all, and cradled her in his lap.

  She was ice cold and distraught and she wasn’t, it finally dawned on him, awake.

  So he simply held her. He rocked her gently, murmuring old words he half remembered from a childhood he would have said had held no softness of any kind. He smoothed her hair back from her face and let her sob into his neck.

  And he pretended he would do the same for any woman he encountered, any person at all. That he would feel this same sense of immensity and something very nearly like awe that she was letting him hold her, this same ache that she was in pain. This same pounding understanding—like his own heart in his chest—that he would fight off anything that threatened her, even if it was inside her own head.

  Slowly, the sobbing subsided. Her breaths came smoother, slower. And Nicodemus knew the moment she came fully awake and aware of her surroundings, because her whole body went tense.

  “You’re all right,” he told her quietly, glad it was so dark in the pool house. Glad there was no chance she could see the expression he was afraid he wore much too plainly on his face. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  He chose not to investigate how deeply and wholly he meant that.

  “What—what happened?”

  Nicodemus had never heard her stutter, he thought then, nor sound so terrified. Not his Mattie, who careened through the world like Don Quixote but with a far sharper tongue. He rubbed a hand over that aching thing in his chest, then smoothed it over her hair again—but she was awake now, and she pulled away.

  And he had no choice but to let her.

  “Do you have these nightmares often?” he asked as she scrambled up and out of his lap like she was on fire, then wrapped herself in that blanket as if it could protect her. From him or from whatever dire thing stalked her dreams? He couldn’t tell. “Is that why you creep out of our bed every night? You’ve been upset before, but not like this. You usually quiet down when I hold you.”

  “What?” Her voice was sharper then, but no less panicked. More so, he’d have said. “What do you mean?”

  “You were having a terrible nightmare,” he said slowly, aware from the taut way she stood and the sudden spike of tension in the room that he’d stumbled into something here. Something important. “You were sobbing. Screaming, I think. The same word again and again.”

  “How strange,” she said, and though her voice was cooler then, he could hear all the panic and the leftover nightmare beneath it. “I must have eaten something that disagreed with me.”

  Another lie, Nicodemus thought, but he couldn’t summon up the usual fury at that sad little truth. She was so brittle; she was acting so tough—but she hadn’t faked those desperate sobs. She hadn’t faked those tears that he could still feel against his collarbone, the night air turning his dampened skin cold. Like proof.

  He stood and saw the way she jerked her chin back, as if she had to fight herself to stay still. He wished, then, they were different people. Or that they could start this whole thing over the way she’d pretended she wanted to do that day in the kitchen. He wished that he could trust her—or that she could trust him, even a little, with who she really was.

  He wished this hadn’t all been set in stone so many years ago now.

  He didn’t touch her, though he wanted nothing more. But he didn’t think he’d stop at a mere touch, and that was the last thing she’d allow. He could almost see the defensiveness prickle around her, like she’d grown spikes where she stood.

  “I don’t think it was food poisoning,” he said after a moment. His voice was matter-of-fact in the dark room. “You were crying out for your mother.”

  She made a sound like she’d been socked in the gut. “My mother?” she asked, much too softly. “That doesn’t make any sense. You must be mistaken.”

  “No, agapi mou,” he said, and he was only distantly aware that he’d called her my love. It hardly seemed important, though some part of him registered it would be. Eventually. He reached over despite himself and wrapped a strand of her black hair around his finger, pleased that it retained a small bit of her warmth. Wishing he could, too. “All you said was mama. Over and over again.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHEN SHE WOKE UP it was morning, and Nicodemus was gone.

  For a moment, Mattie blinked at the side of the bed where he normally sprawled, all of his masculine perfection on mouthwatering display. But then her memory caught up with her in a sickening rush, and so did her headache.

  She felt hungover, though she knew she wasn’t. Dreadfully, hideously hungover, from the pounding at her temples to the desert where her mouth should have been. And there was panic like a stomach cramp, deep in her belly, growing more acute by the second.

  A shower—long and hot and almost punishing—didn’t help. Neither did sneaking down to the kitchen and fixing herself a huge mug of coffee to stave off the fog in her head. Mattie crept down the long hall that led to Nicodemus’s office and stopped when she heard his voice from within. Powerful, commanding. Certain.

  “I’ve already signed the papers,” he was saying, and Mattie imagined boardrooms all over the world filled with corporate disciples in three-piece suits, leaping over each other to do his bidding.
“I will be forced to view any further delays or dragging of feet as hostile, am I clear? Endaxi.”

  His voice lulled her into a false sense of security, like he could handle anything—even her, and she knew she couldn’t risk that.

  She slipped back down the hall and climbed back up to the master bedroom. It took her only a moment to locate her things in the vast walk-in closet, and she pulled the cigarette packet out of the bottom of her purse with a small sigh of relief. The packet had crumpled on the side and the three cigarettes that remained within were bent almost to breaking, but that hardly mattered. She pulled one out, then rummaged around for her lighter.

  She didn’t go out on the balcony that wrapped around the master bedroom on three sides. Instead, she retraced her steps through the villa and then continued on into the long wing where all the guest suites were. It was there, at the farthest point of the house, she snuck out onto a little patio, found a small iron bench not directly visible from inside and indulged in her filthiest habit.

  Mattie pulled her legs up beneath her and tipped her head back, letting the chilly air and the warm sunlight battle it out. Slowly, surely, she felt better. The cigarette tasted stale, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t about the taste. It wasn’t even about smoking.

  It was, if she was honest with herself, purely about reminding herself that Nicodemus couldn’t control this. Her. That he didn’t know her, no matter what he’d thought he’d heard last night. That she still had whole parts of herself she was keeping at bay, keeping hidden, that he couldn’t reach no matter how many meals they shared or nightmares he soothed away. That he cast the illusion of safety, but it was only that: an illusion.

  Because that had to be true, or she was well and truly lost.

  And if there was a growing part of her that wanted to simply surrender to him, to lose herself in him, to see if someone as strong and formidable as he was could help her carry the weight of all her secrets—

  “Don’t be an idiot, Mattie,” she said out loud.