HIS FOR A PRICE

by Caitlin Crews

  Or maybe she was afraid she already did.

  “Leave it, Mattie,” Chase told her, his voice hard again. He sounded like a different man entirely today, raw and grim, and it changed everything. It changed her. Or maybe it was Nicodemus who had done that. “There are some stones it isn’t worth turning over.”

  And she wasn’t surprised when he claimed he had another call and disconnected moments later. She sat where she was for a long time.

  Mattie had been protecting something she didn’t fully understand since she was eight years old. She’d been held hostage to those memories. And the only way she’d figured out how to do that and carry on living was to hold herself at a distance from anyone and everything that ventured near. Let nothing and no one close, she’d reasoned, and they couldn’t know her. Or hurt her, the way she’d been hurt the day they’d lost her mother.

  Or learn things they shouldn’t. Things so terrible that her relationship with her father and with Chase had never recovered after that awful day.

  But Nicodemus had never been one for distance, until now. She shook her head slightly, as if trying to clear it, and understood that was part of what was happening to her. Why she felt like an empty echo chamber. Why she was so miserable.

  He wasn’t there.

  For ten years, Nicodemus had always been there. If not right in front of her, then nearby. She’d known it. She’d expected it—perhaps even come to depend on it. He’d made certain she did. He’d been a fact of her life, like the weather, like the inevitability of fall into winter. He’d been relentless. He’d been Nicodemus.

  He’d pushed and pushed, and he’d made it so very easy to push back—

  Mattie didn’t know what to do with herself now. Not when she’d given him everything, more than she’d ever given anyone, and it still wasn’t enough. Not when she’d pushed back the way she’d always done and he’d walked away instead, leaving her with no choice but fall forward on her face. Leaving her where she landed on the ground.

  Leaving her, at last, the way she’d always claimed she’d wanted him to do.

  After everything, it shouldn’t have surprised her so much that he was right. She really was a liar.

  Glass, she told herself frantically as she felt all of this surge inside her, so close to bursting out. She was smooth and she was hard all the way through and she was glass—

  But what she felt was broken.

  * * *

  Mattie waited for him in the decidedly sleek and modern waiting room of his Manhattan office, high in one of those Midtown buildings that housed everything from doctors to lawyers to international multimillionaires like Nicodemus in varying shades of lush, dark wood and understated gilt edges.

  “Mr. Stathis may be some time,” the gatekeeping receptionist said pleasantly enough from behind her fortress of a high, curved desk, if not for the first time. “He doesn’t encourage walk-ins.”

  “Mr. Stathis will see me,” Mattie assured her with a grand sort of bravado that she did not feel at all. Also not for the first time.

  “I really do need your name, ma’am,” the woman replied, her professional smile showing signs of strain.

  “I’ll say it once more.” Mattie raised her voice so that all the people around her pretending not to listen to this interchange—business associates of Nicodemus’s, she could only hope, waiting for their meetings with his various staff members and capable of all kinds of gossip should he ignore her for too long—could hear her. And recognize her, she had no doubt. And wonder. “Just tell him there are consequences to his behavior, and they are sitting in his lobby.”

  The woman’s lips all but disappeared, she pressed them together so hard, but she didn’t say another word.

  And Mattie waited. She used her smartphone to page through tabloid articles heralding the quick end to her hasty marriage and did her best to look as relaxed and confident as she wanted to look—as she’d dressed.

  Once again, for him. Killer heels not suited for New York City sidewalks in the wet, slippery fall, a pencil skirt that made poetry of her long frame and a silk blouse that wrapped around her torso lovingly yet failed to show anything a possessive Greek husband might find objectionable.

  At least, Mattie fervently hoped he was still both of those things. Possessive and her husband. Or this meeting she’d engineered was going to be significantly more devastating than she was prepared to handle.

  But it was still a very long time before a sharp, expectant sort of silence descended over the waiting room, like the fall of an ax. Mattie sat a little straighter in her chair, but she didn’t look up. Not while she heard a low, quick conversation in a voice she knew all too well, one that made her whole body shiver into immediate goose bumps. Not when she felt a very familiar dark glare sear into her flesh from across the room, making it difficult to sit still.

  Not until he was looming over her and she had no choice whatsoever but to crane her head back and look up that mouthwatering length of him, packaged to extremely gorgeous effect in one of the dark suits he favored that made him look like he really was king of the goddamned world.

  He wasn’t smiling. His eyes were cold—colder than she’d ever seen them before.

  And both of those things hurt in ways Mattie hardly knew what to do with.

  “Are you pregnant?” he asked. Not at all gently, or even politely.

  She didn’t blush. She didn’t look around to see if anyone had heard. She knew Nicodemus well enough by now to know he never would have said that if anyone was listening.

  Or she hoped she did.

  “No,” she said, very calmly, which wasn’t at all how she felt.

  “Then I fail to understand what consequences there could be that require not only my presence upon demand, but your theatrical appearance here at all.”

  If he was having trouble with all of that subzero wind chill that dripped from his low voice and oozed from every taut, unwelcoming line in his body, he certainly didn’t show it.

  Trust only went so far, Mattie decided, and snuck a glance around him to see that—as she should have expected, because he might be furious with her but he was still Nicodemus—he’d dismissed the receptionist and cleared the room.

  “I’m not happy with you,” she informed him.

  Something in his hard jaw twitched. “I will cry myself to sleep over that, Mattie, I promise you. But in the meantime, I have a company to run and a merger with an unpleasant family company I regret already to oversee. I left your histrionics and your lies in Greece for a reason.”

  “And I slept with you,” she retorted.

  He hadn’t expected that—she could see it in the way his dark eyes widened slightly, then narrowed. He frowned at her, and there was something wrong with her that she saw that as a kind of progress. Better than all that ice, anyway.

  “Thank you,” he said, in such frozen tones she almost missed the fact that his accent was heavier—also a good sign. “But my memory works perfectly.”

  “I’m twenty-eight years old and I’ve never slept with anyone but you,” she said, and she pushed up out of the chair then, so she could face him. So he wasn’t towering over her, especially not with the shoes she had on. So she could look him in the eye, the way that had always made her feel so strong and so weak at once. Today was no different. “You gave me one night and then you disappeared.”

  His stunned pause was so brief that she almost missed it.

  “I’m reliably informed that is the plight of many a young woman in this dark, dirty city,” he told her, with all that menace and ruthlessness in his voice, in the way he looked at her, and her curse was that it moved through like a long, low lick of heat. “You should count yourself lucky I didn’t make you walk home from Greece.”

  “I waited a long time to have sex,” she said, keeping her chin high and her eyes on him. “I want more of it.” She felt more than saw the way he caught his breath at that, but she had no trouble identifying that flash of murder in his dark gaze. “An
d I’m married to you, which means that if I head out for the bars like so many young women in this big, bad city, I’d be committing adultery.”

  “That,” he said, his voice a mere rasp of darkness despite the bright lights all around them, “and I’d kill you.”

  Mattie smiled. “So you see my predicament.”

  He stared at her for a long time. Too long. Then he reached over and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, sending a bolt of that wildfire straight through her. There had to be something wrong with her that even a touch like that made her melt—but she didn’t care. She was too busy reveling in it.

  “Once again,” Nicodemus said in that same dangerous tone that was wreaking havoc with her nervous system, “you play with things you cannot possibly understand.”

  “Play with me or I’ll play with whoever I want,” she countered, fairly bursting with all of that fake bravado, because it was the only thing she’d been able to think of that would push him enough, and quickly. “Those are your choices, Nicodemus, though you claim I never give you any.”

  His hand tightened around her arm, and he hauled her, gently yet inexorably, around the side of that fortress of a desk that was currently missing its gatekeeper. He towed her down the long hallway, while his employees leaped from his path and did a terrible job of pretending not to stare, until he reached the great, big office in the far corner.

  It had a long, deep view of the city along the outside walls, and when he closed the door behind them, they were trapped there together. A wall on one side to block them from prying eyes and the canyons of Manhattan right there on the other.

  He let go of her, but she could still feel his fingers and the heat of his skin, like brands into her flesh.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” he told her, his accent under control again, but this time she sensed how hard it was for him to maintain it. “But it will not involve bargaining for sex like an animal.”

  “Not like an animal,” she protested mildly. “Unless, of course, you think that’s fun. I’m willing to try anything once. Even spanking. I think.”

  He shook his head and leaned against the massive granite desk that should have fallen through the floor beneath it, so gargantuan did it look, and yet somehow it suited him. He ran his hand down his front as if to straighten the tie he wore that didn’t require any straightening, and it would have been easier if he’d glowered at her.

  But he didn’t. If anything, he looked sad and tired, the way he had before, and like then, it made her heart clutch inside her chest.

  “I don’t want to play games with you anymore,” Nicodemus said quietly. Too quietly. “For too long, I thought this was all a game, and that I knew how to win it in the end, but I was wrong. I’m not accustomed to that. It might take some adjustment.”

  She’d expected temper. Accusation and heat. Not this.

  But she didn’t know how to do anything with this man but push back.

  “Does that mean divorce?” she asked in her same nearly flippant tone, so at odds with the one he’d used. “Or no divorce? I can’t keep track. Though the fact you ran away from Greece rather suggests the latter, if I had to guess. You’re usually far more direct.”

  “I did not run away,” he corrected her, his dark gaze narrowing with a temper he didn’t let color his voice. “I had work to do, and let’s be honest, Mattie, though I know that’s a stretch for you. You can’t give me what I want.”

  If he’d shoved a red-hot fire poker into her chest, he couldn’t have hurt her more, and she couldn’t control how stricken she felt. He saw it and shook his head as if it hurt him, too.

  “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings,” he said after a moment, his voice a fraction less cold. Less painfully precise. “Perhaps it was never fair of me to want the things I demanded of you. I don’t know. Maybe you were right when you said any pretty girl would have done. I can’t take any of that back. But I can stop chasing a person who doesn’t exist.”

  This was worse. This made the misery she’d felt without him pale and wither away, and she had no idea what that was that swamped her then in its place. Only that it felt too much like despair.

  “And what am I supposed to do?” she asked, and she didn’t understand why she sounded so muffled and squeaky at the same time until she felt that heat trickling down her cheeks. She was crying. After all this time, she was crying in front of him without a nightmare to blame it on, and she didn’t even care.

  Nicodemus looked hewn from stone, propped up there against that granite desk with the city laid out at his feet. His gaze was dark and troubled, but he didn’t move.

  “I don’t understand,” he said after a moment, and there were too many undercurrents in that voice of his, too much Mattie knew she couldn’t comprehend. “I thought you would rejoice at this. You’ve wanted me to leave you alone for years.”

  “But you never did,” she said, or sobbed, and she didn’t care which. How could she not care? After all these years so desperate to keep him from seeing any hint of vulnerability? But all she cared about was him. “You were always there. You were always pushing at me, and I got used to it. To you. What am I supposed to do when I push back and there’s nothing there?”

  He stared at her then, for so long that she thought she’d almost reached him—but then he shook his head. Once. Hard. Like he was waking himself up.

  “I don’t want to spend any more time than I already have, loving someone I made up inside my head.” He looked tormented as he said it, torn apart, and it made Mattie feel like she was falling to pieces herself. “I know where that ends. I know what it looks like. I can’t do it. Not again.”

  He’d gotten louder as he said that, more the Nicodemus she knew and less that creature made of stone and blame and judgment, and it was absurd how very nearly giddy that made her then, a dizzying hope like a great, bright beam of light inside her.

  “That’s a lie,” she said, wiping at her cheeks and then holding his incredulous, thunderstruck gaze with hers, brave suddenly, because she recognized this. “And I would know. You’re afraid.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I BEG YOUR PARDON?” His voice was a harsh warning, but Mattie ignored it.

  “You heard me,” she said, forging on. “What happened to the Nicodemus who told me that our marriage would last forever? Babies and no divorces?”

  “I also told you there would be no secrets,” he bit out. “But you can’t do it. You prefer to play your games, trying to manipulate your way out of anything honest with sex.”

  “So do you.”

  In the silence that fell between them then, Mattie could hear her own heart, catapulting itself so hard against her ribs she worried it might break right through. Slowly, very slowly, his dark gaze fixed to hers, Nicodemus straightened from his desk, and she was reminded how very dangerous he was. How lethal when he chose.

  “You know you do,” she said. “Any game I might have played with sex, you’ve played yourself. The fact that you think you had different motives doesn’t change anything. It’s the same game.”

  “It most assuredly is not.”

  “This has been the same pattern from the start. You push, I push back. Around and around we go, and we’ve been doing it for years. You had no reason to think anything would change when we went to your island—but then it turned out that I wasn’t who you thought I was. And if I was a virgin, you couldn’t stay up there, all warm and comfortable on your moral high ground.”

  “You can twist this any way you like, Mattie,” he said in that same harsh tone. “That doesn’t make it true.”

  “There are a thousand ways we could have handled this marriage,” she said, searching his face for the man she’d glimpsed in Greece, the man who’d been discarded by his father and had still made so much of himself. The little boy he must have been once, who’d made himself into a king of sorts, by the force of his own will. “It could have been a team effort. But instead, you threatened me and crowded
me. Gloated about your victory over me.”

  “You’re unbelievable.” He took a step toward her, then appeared to think better of it and stopped. “Are you truly standing here today, claiming that had I approached you differently you would have—what?” He shook his head in amazement. “Come to this marriage dancing and singing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I do know that you couldn’t risk it. How could you possibly pretend to open up to me and then retreat like this if I was interested in a real partnership? That might make you something less than the upright and honest one here, and then what would happen?”

  She couldn’t help the bit of sarcasm that snuck in there at the end, and she saw him register it with a scowl.

  “Let me guess,” he said, witheringly. “Somehow, this is all my fault, yes? Isn’t that where you’re headed?”

  “Not at all.” It was hard to keep her head up high, her gaze on his, but she did it. “You wanted me to respond the way I did. Because that way, you get to be the martyr, and I’m still the spoiled brat who even managed to remain a virgin to spite you.”

  “Then why?” And there was nothing controlled about his voice then. Nothing concealed in his expression. She could feel the kick of it. “If not for spite—for another point in this endless game?”

  “Why do you think, you idiot?” she hurled back at him, and she threw her hands up as if she wanted to hit him or encompass all of Manhattan or maybe because she couldn’t stand still. “Because of you!”

  * * *

  Nicodemus stared at her, his beautiful wife and this warrior creature who’d taken her over, making her lovely cheeks flush and her bittersweet eyes glitter wildly. She looked perfect in her stunningly feminine clothes, from head to toe his living, breathing, fantasy—and she’d just called him an idiot.

  “What do you mean, because of me?” he asked, because he couldn’t process any of this. It was like he was learning English all over again, and missing half the meaning.