HIS FOR A PRICE

by Caitlin Crews

  He liked her wry humor. He liked how profoundly unafraid of him she was. He liked how willing she was to mock them both, as if all of this was simply a game they were playing instead of so terribly real and important it made him ache inside. He liked a thousand things about her that had nothing to do with how pretty she was, or how terribly he craved her, or his merger with her father’s company and the work he’d do with her brother in the coming months.

  Yet none of that mattered, because she couldn’t stop lying and he couldn’t live with it. He’d had more lies in his life than he could bear. And he couldn’t help noticing she hadn’t denied it.

  “That wasn’t meant to be anything but a simple truth,” he said then, shifting around so he could look at her. “It’s the central core of who you are, Mattie. You lie. Always. About everything. Even this.”

  She frowned at him, though her mouth looked vulnerable, and he had to steel himself against reaching for her.

  “You can’t demand that someone let you into their private thoughts. That takes time and—”

  “Why did you save yourself for me?” he asked her, swift and brutal.

  Her frown deepened. “It was an accident.”

  “That’s a lie, even as we sit here discussing lying.” She flushed, confirming it as surely as if she’d openly admitted it. “Let’s try again. What are your nightmares about?”

  She looked miserable then, and he wanted that to be enough. He wanted that to matter. But she swallowed, looking down and moving her hands beneath the sheet she’d pulled over her so he couldn’t see them. He didn’t need to see; he knew she’d made them into fists.

  He knew too much about her now. That was the trouble.

  “I had one nightmare,” she said in a low voice, and she couldn’t even look at him. “And you woke me.”

  He felt like he was cracking open, breaking apart. Like that final lie was the last nail into a sheet of glass and it shattered everything.

  “I thought I could reach you,” he said quietly. “I thought it was all a game and you’d stop playing it when we were here, alone. All this time, I thought that beneath everything, this mattered.”

  She lifted her dark eyes to his, and they were bright with tears he had no expectation she’d ever shed. He couldn’t even be certain they were real, no matter how much he wanted them to be.

  “This does,” she whispered. “This matters.”

  “Then tell me one true thing, Mattie,” he said, more urgently than before. “One that isn’t a trap. One that doesn’t take us down your little rabbit hole of lies within lies until we are nothing but twisted into knots. One thing.”

  “You know everything that matters,” she said instead. “I’m here, aren’t I? This all happened. I saved myself for you, and what does it matter why? What more do you think you need to know?”

  He shook his head , and the battle to keep himself from touching her became pitched and nearly violent. He stood, moving away from the bed to slap on the lights that lit the room with a golden glow—but it was better than all those shadows. All that too-intimate darkness, where he was too likely to imagine he saw what he wanted to see instead of what was.

  Mattie sat in the center of the bed, wrapped in his sheets, blinking in the sudden onslaught of light. And he still longed for her, despite everything. He was still as hungry for her as if he hadn’t spent an entire day indulging that appetite.

  He understood, then, that this would never change. That she’d had this hold on him since the first and always would. That he loved her as he’d loved no other, and it still didn’t matter.

  He never did learn his lessons.

  “My father was a strict, grim man,” he told her, though he didn’t know why. But then, he didn’t want to leave her in any doubt as to his motives. “He came in and out of our flat in a dark cloud, and my mother rushed to appease him, no matter what he did or said. For a long time, I didn’t understand why his moods were the only important ones in our home.”

  He studied her as she sat there, her eyes wide and fixed on him. “No smart little interjections, Mattie? I’m surprised.”

  “You never talk about your past,” she said simply. “Only what you own.”

  He accepted that as a hit, though he wasn’t certain it was meant as one. It stung, nonetheless.

  “As I grew, my father took an interest in my character.” He folded his arms over his chest and stared at her, though what he saw was that crowded little flat and the angry man who dominated it with his temper and his cruelties. His ability to find fault in everything. “He could smell lies on me, he told me. And when he did, he took it upon himself to beat them out of me.”

  “So we are both liars, then,” Mattie said, and he thought her voice was warmer than it should have been. Warmer than made any sense.

  “He was given to great lectures he punctuated with his fists,” Nicodemus continued. “He had very distinct ideas about what was wrong and what was right.” He smiled, not nicely. “Needless to say, I was a grave disappointment to him in all ways.”

  She let out a small sound that was something like a sigh. “It’s hard to imagine you subject to someone else’s whims. Much less a disappointment to anyone.”

  Nicodemus didn’t want to continue with this. He wanted to explore that soft note in her voice, instead. He wanted to pretend none of this mattered to him. He wanted to bury himself in her and let that be enough. It almost was, after all.

  Almost.

  He wanted more than almost. He’d accepted almost for the whole of his life. From his parents, from Arista. From Mattie. He couldn’t do it any longer. He wouldn’t.

  “Luckily, my father did not stay with us all the time,” he said, instead. “Often he was gone for weeks. My mother would tell me he was away on business, and that he loved us very much, as if she thought I needed soothing, but the truth was, I preferred it when he was away. The only time my mother ever hit me was when I said so out loud.”

  “I don’t mean to overstep,” she said quietly. “But I can’t say I’m forming a positive impression of your parents.”

  He saw his mother’s stunningly beautiful face, those flashing black eyes and that lustrous fall of hair she’d spent so many hours brushing and curling and tending. He saw the creams she’d only used when his father wasn’t there, the drinks she’d favored while alone that were liberally laced with the alcohol she otherwise only served his father. He could picture her, pretty and breakable, staring out the windows as if looking for ships at sea—though they hadn’t had a view of the sea from their flat. And the only one who ever came to visit them was his father.

  “One day when I was twelve, I decided to follow my father when he left us,” Nicodemus said then, because he couldn’t seem to stop. “I don’t remember what brought this on. I’d like to think he’d given himself away somehow but I suspect the truth is, I was twelve. I was bored. He had come less and less that year, and the less he came, the more it upset my mother. She coped by drinking and spending her days further and further away inside her dream world.”

  “Who took care of you?” Mattie asked.

  He smiled. “Did your father take care of you himself while running Whitaker Industries?” he asked. “I imagine not.”

  “We had a series of excellent nannies,” she shot back, tilting her chin up as she did, reminding him of all the ways he couldn’t have her. “And a fantastic housekeeper that Chase and I consider a member of the family.”

  “My mother did not work, though she told stories of when she’d cleaned houses before I was born. There were no nannies or housekeepers. I took care of myself.” That look on her face made him feel something like claws inside his chest, so he pushed on. “But that day, I followed my father. I followed him up into the hills where the houses were bigger. Prettier.”

  Nicodemus found himself moving without meaning to do it, ranging toward the windows and pausing there, his back to the bed, because he wasn’t sure what he’d do if she kept looking at him with
all that softness in her gaze. He didn’t know what would become of his conviction, his purpose. Of him.

  “And when I peeked in the windows of the big house he’d gone inside,” he said quietly, as much to the sea as to the woman behind him, as much to his memory as anything, “I found he had a whole other family.” There was no sound from behind him, not even a breath against the air in the room. “I didn’t understand at first. I couldn’t make sense of it. There was a woman, three children. One was a boy who looked about my age. And they all called my father Babá.”

  He had never said that out loud. And even now, he refused to admit that it tore at him, like knives into flesh. That he could still feel such an old betrayal so keenly, even after all these years.

  “That is the word for Dad,” he clarified. And he heard her then. She breathed out, long and hard, like she hurt for him, and his curse was, he wished she did.

  “I don’t know how long I watched them through their big windows.” He remembered it being a long time—months, even—though he supposed that could have been the vagaries of memory, playing tricks on him. “I went back day after day. And watching them, I learned to want. I wanted all of it. The parties that seemed to bore them. The fancy toys they never seemed grateful for. The great big house with whole rooms they didn’t enter for days at a time, if at all.”

  He turned back to face her then, leaning one shoulder against the wall to the side of the window. She hadn’t moved. She still sat where he’d left her, more beautiful now than any woman had the right to be. Her hair was a tousled mess, tumbling down her back in its midnight glory. Her mouth looked ravaged and her eyes gleamed with emotion. And he wanted her. God, how he wanted her. The way he’d always wanted her. The same way he’d wanted that other life he’d glimpsed through his father’s windows.

  He should have known better then. He did know better now, and still, here he was. It was as if he’d learned nothing, after all.

  “The next time my father beat me for my supposed lies, I asked him about his.” Mattie frowned, as if she could see what was coming in that small, sharp-edged curve of his mouth he allowed himself. “I knew it was a secret, but you see, I had no secrets of my own. He’d seen to that. So it never crossed my mind to consider the reasons secrets like his might be better kept hidden.”

  “Nicodemus,” she said softly, like she could see straight through him to his guilt. His lingering fury. “Whatever happened, you were a child.”

  “I was twelve,” he corrected her. “Not quite a child, not where I grew up. And certainly man enough to receive the vicious beating my father gave me for questioning him, following him, calling him out. I was his sin, you see. The living, breathing emblem of his betrayal of his wife with the low class servant girl who had cleaned his house. He was very self-righteous when he told me that he had come to us all these years purely in an effort to wash the stain from my soul. To help me become a better man, because left to my own devices, I’d no doubt become a whore like my mother.” Nicodemus didn’t look away from Mattie as he said this, laying out the history he never spoke of so matter-of-factly. And he didn’t crack when she winced at that ugly word. “He made me thank him as I lay there, bloody on the floor. And then he walked out the door and he never returned.”

  “Never?” Mattie asked, shock coloring her voice, her gaze. “But he was your father!”

  “Worse, he stopped supporting us,” Nicodemus said. “That meant I had to leave school to work wherever I could, and it meant my dreamy, useless, fragile mother had to work in the factories. Thread, mostly. And it killed her.”

  Mattie didn’t say his name again, but she made a small noise that sounded almost too rough, too raw. It made him want to touch her, hold her, almost more than he could bear.

  “When I went back to my father’s great big house on its sparkling hill, to ask him to help once my mother had collapsed, he had me arrested.”

  It was amazing how remote he could sound, he thought. As if these things had happened to someone else. But he could still feel his father’s security guards’ hands on him, his father’s foot against his neck, as he was held facedown in the dirt. He still remembered the stink and the din of that grotty cell.

  “While I sat in jail, my mother died. And when I got out, Mattie, I dedicated my life to making certain that no one would ever use their wealth or power to get the better of me. And that no one would ever lie to my face again. I was sixteen, and I maintained this position for at least a couple of years. And then, when I was twenty and full of myself and all the new money I’d made running construction sites, I lost my head over the boss’s daughter.”

  “Nicodemus,” she said in that thick, ragged way that he feared would be his undoing.

  “Her name was Arista and she was much too pretty,” he said. “It blinded me. She took my money and my adulation and she liked what I could do for her in bed, but when it came time for her to marry she chose a rich boy from her social circle and laughed at me that I’d expected anything else. I was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe, nothing more. I thought I’d learned my lesson, at last.”

  She looked at him for a long time, and Nicodemus wished things could be different. Wished all of this was different. And wishing had never led to anything but trouble.

  His smile felt bitter. “And then I came to the States and I saw you. And you were everything I ever wanted, Mattie. More than I dared dream. Your father treated me better than my own ever had, and I could see all that heat in your eyes when you looked at me, and I knew you were the one I wanted. You and no one else.”

  She jerked slightly. And when her gaze met his again, it was something more than troubled.

  “You wanted a pretty girl you saw dancing at a party,” she said, very carefully. Very distinctly. “I could have been anyone. I could have been that girl in Greece. You didn’t know anything about me. You still don’t.”

  “I love you,” he told her, because there was no point pretending any longer, and it didn’t matter, anyway. “And everything you’ve ever told me is a lie.”

  Her breath caught, then came fast, like that flush across her cheeks and the upper slopes of her breasts. Her mouth opened, but she snapped it closed, and he saw a whole world of misery in those bittersweet eyes of hers.

  Still, she said nothing. But then, had he expected anything else?

  “And when I tell you I cannot abide liars, Mattie, I mean it. I mean this. I mean you.”

  Everything had gone too dark, despite the golden light that made the room seem so cheerful, so bright. Too raw. Too stark. And she looked at him like he’d broken her heart. Like he’d torn her in two.

  It said terrible things about him, he knew, that he wished he had. That he wished he could. That he wished she felt something for him when he knew—he knew—that would only make this that much worse.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said then, his voice final, and he could see she heard it. “I won’t ask again.”

  * * *

  It was as if a thousand words fought inside her, pushing at her throat and making it feel tight, turning into the tears that pricked at the back of her eyes, running over her skin and into her veins like some kind of poison—but Mattie knew she didn’t dare open her mouth. She didn’t dare try to speak.

  She knew, somehow, that she wouldn’t stop.

  And the idea of that—of spilling her guts the way Nicodemus had done, of letting out all the brutal things that had lived inside her all this time—swelled in her like a terrible wave.

  She couldn’t do it. She would rather he hate her forever for the things he thought he knew about her than tell him the truth and see it right there on his face. Unmistakable and real.

  Mattie fought back a wave of panic and crawled to the edge of the bed, then onto her feet. Only then did she let the sheet drop, and was rewarded for that with the sharp sound of Nicodemus’s indrawn breath.

  “Don’t play these games with me,” he warned her. “You didn’t like how it ended the las
t time you tried to manipulate me with sex.”

  But he didn’t move from where he stood near the window, and that was what she focused on.

  I love you, he’d said, and the words tumbled around and around inside her, picking up mass and speed with every second until she thought they were all she was. That and all the things she couldn’t say in return.

  She moved closer to him, feeling that pull, that electricity that called to her whenever he was near. And now she knew what it meant. What it was promising.

  “Mattie.” He took her hands in his when she would have put them on his bare skin, and his face was grim again. Dark and forbidding, and that thing inside her that she’d always thought was broken because it only ever responded to him pulled taut. As attracted to his darkness as his light. Attracted, no matter what. “Just tell me the truth. Any truth, damn you.”

  But she couldn’t do that. She didn’t know how.

  All she’d ever done with Nicodemus was fight. Fight and lie, just as he accused her. It hadn’t been a strategy—it had only ever been survival.

  And so, she told herself, was this.

  She melted against him. She turned her head to kiss her way along his strong forearm, amazed when she felt him shudder. She tipped forward until her breasts pressed into his chest—and she smiled when he let out a stream of dark, evidently filthy Greek.

  He let go of her hands.

  And Mattie told him all the truths she knew in the only way she could.

  She loved him with her mouth, her fingers, her cheeks against the expanse of his abdomen. She loved him the way she understood, now, she always had. He’d cast his shadow across the last ten years of her life, and she finally understood why.

  Why she’d waited. Why she’d had boyfriends but had never felt right about taking that last step with them. Why she’d run so hard in the opposite direction every time she’d seen Nicodemus.

  It was this. The things he wanted were uncompromising, exhilarating. The things she felt were the same.