by Tara Pammi
It was as if she had found the Dmitri that she had been waiting for all these years, here of all places.
In his kiss.
* * *
Her soft, tentative mouth was like pouring kerosene onto a thin flicker of fire, working him into such a state of arousal that Dmitri felt it burn his throat.
Then her tongue licked his lower lip and his erection became thick against his jeans, as if it could imagine those licks against itself...
It was unlike anything he had ever known in the past decade or with another woman. But it was the vulnerability that she strove so hard to hide in her eyes that captured him.
Her eyes held that perpetual longing for something, that same hungry look that he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror. Something inside her had always calmed him, and now it was as though the effect had grown up along with them, morphed into pure sexual hunger.
It stirred into fire that unquenchable hunger inside him, filled the void that resonated inside him whatever he did, however far he went to fill it...
She would be different, he knew. She would be an experience he would never forget in his life. She would be the drop that would finally quench his thirst.
Because Jasmine knew him, the real him. Not this charming, pleasure-seeking playboy that he had become to hide the reality.
And she would give him everything she had. He could see it in her eyes, in the way her eyes turned molten, in the way her mouth trembled when he came near.
What will happen after that, Dmitri? a voice very much like Stavros needled. Christos, that bastard had really become his conscience over the years, hadn’t he?
And the voice that was full of honor and integrity poured ice-cold water over his lust. Black, guileless eyes wide, she stared at him with a sort of wonder. That very same look that had pulled him back from so many moments of rage.
Except now it was tinged with sexual need.
Hating himself, because her taste was already implanted in his very cells, he wrenched himself away from her. Christos, it wasn’t working. Nothing he did to keep her at a distance was working.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Every word was gritted out through a tight jaw.
Jas tried not to flinch and failed, hurt and shame diluting the haze of desire in her blood. With shaking fingers, she touched her tingling mouth, wondering if she would ever forget the taste of him.
“I’m offering myself to you. I’m saying—” a balloon could be crushing her lungs “—take what you paid for.”
She saw his flinch in the tightening of that concrete jawline, in the slow, almost imperceptible blink of his eyes, as if he was chasing away the shock before it could unsettle him completely. As if nothing he didn’t allow himself to feel was to be borne.
He pushed away from her then, and it was that exaggerated, you-are-plague kind of movement that pricked her. “And what would that be, agapita? See, to this minute, I’m not sure what made Noah think you were worth that atrocious amount of money. What drove another man to bid for you against me?”
Crackling energy arced into life around them, but she was damned if she backed down now. “Have sex with—”
A flare of warning in his eyes arrested the word on her mouth. Coiled energy seeped from his very pores, as if his usual facade was surface-thin now. “Be careful what you say to me, Jas.”
But she couldn’t let him intimidate her now or he would do it forever, she realized. It seemed they were engaged in some kind of power play. God knew how, for she had nothing to take him on with, but no way was she going to back down. “Take my virginity. Call my debt done. God, let us walk away from this impossible situation.”
“So you’re selling yourself to pay off your—”
She slapped her hand over his mouth, a surge of fury washing through her. “Don’t say it, or this time I’ll drive the knife deeper willingly.”
His mouth was a furnace against her palm. Slowly, as if it took him a tremendous amount of willpower, he pushed it back. “Then, what is it you’re proposing, thee mou?”
She looked away, struggling to marshal her thoughts. His taste still lingered on her lips; her scalp tingled with how hard he had held her.
Had it been a knee-jerk response, then, that kiss? Did men inevitably kiss back with such heat when a woman threw herself at them? Was Dmitri no different from all the other men whose lust was so easily inspired by naked flesh grinding a pole?
The thought made her more than a little sick. But the kiss had felt so personal, as though she was getting a part of Dmitri...
It was tragic how little she knew. Although she had a feeling it wouldn’t have come in handy with someone like Dmitri. It had been a week now since he had rescued her and yet she had no measure of him. At all.
“I’ll sleep with you once. Just once to get even.” Somehow, she held his gaze without betraying herself. “I won’t be your mistress, Dmitri.”
“You’re automatically assuming that you fit the role of my mistress, thee mou. You don’t. So don’t lose sleep over it.”
She barely resisted the urge to catch a glimpse of herself in the huge flat-screen monitor as his words ballooned inside her. She knew she was unfit for a lot of things, but this... “I’m not...fit to be one?”
“You’re not my type.”
“I thought anything with a set of boobs was your type.”
His gaze dipped to her chest and stayed there, the most unholy light in it. As if he was asking her to give him a peek.
Heat claimed her face, and she folded her arms repressively. She knew what would wipe that look off his face, and for a self-indulgent second, she was so tempted to do it, but...her mouth went dry just at the thought of it.
“How would you know what I prefer, Jasmine?” Nice and pleasant and warm, as if they were discussing the weather.
“The tabloids are full of your manly exploits, as they like to call them. Orgies and parties aboard your yacht, motorbike races, boxing matches with other men who have to thump and pummel each other to prove their stick is bigger than everyone else’s—”
His sudden laughter filled the cabin and she stared hard. The man was so unfairly gorgeous...
“Your very lifestyle is providing an economy for some of these magazines.”
“And you were spending your hard-earned cash on them?”
She was trapped and they both knew it. “I want to hear about these standards of yours. I want to hear what screening process the most self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking playboy in the world has for the women he—”
“I like my women wanton, willing and experienced. I like them stylish and sophisticated and full of confidence in and out of bed.” So basically, everything she was not, she realized. “I like them to want me in bed as if I was air.”
Oxygen seemed to be fading fast as he enunciated each word, his gaze full of molten hunger. Her skin tingled; her body ached.
“I like to not wonder if I would find a knife in my back while I’m kissing her or to be wished to hell while I’m moving inside her.”
“I would never knife you from the back,” she mumbled, her mouth drying at the erotic picture he painted.
His mouth curved into one of those rarely genuine smiles. “That is true. Should I continue?”
“No.”
“You’re prickly, infuriatingly naive,” he said it as if it was the most boring list in the world. “You have a lust/hate thing going on with me and...your virginity means you’ll be high maintenance in bed.”
“I do not have a lust/hate thing going on for you... What the hell do you mean, high maintenance?”
Damn it, she needed to find a way to stop his words from finding purchase inside her. Or a way to stop her body from wanting him so much...
Because no amount of twisting the
truth was going to help her.
She wanted Dmitri with a hunger that knew no reason or rhyme. She wanted him to look at her as if she was the only woman on earth; she wanted him to worship her, look at her as if he couldn’t breathe if he didn’t have her.
For years, she had lived, cloaking herself in shame, unable to look at any man and not hate herself. It was the only way, clutching that self-disgust, that she had been able to go on.
The only way she had been able to slip into the skin of Jazmin, the pole dancer, and still face herself in the mirror come morning.
Now it was as though that shame was beginning to slide off her skin. Now it was as if she could breathe and face herself in the mirror again. For the first time, she could be a woman.
It was as if her sexuality, denied and deprived for so long, was on wings.
“Yes. I’ll have to teach you what to do, be gentle so that you’re not hurt, and then after the whole thing,” he drawled, as if it was the hardest thing to sleep with her, “I’ll have to hold you and mop your tears and lie that it was the most beautiful thing ever. Deflowering virgins is highly overrated, Jasmine.
“I like my sex fast, rough and without any accompanying drama, whereas you’re an emotional cannon waiting to go off. And as you seem to know very well, I’m incapable of anything but the most insubstantial of emotions.”
“I’m not an emotional cannon.”
He undid his cuffs and rolled back the sleeves. Plump veins ran over the muscular arm, the sight of coarse hair on that olive skin giving her a warm flush. “In the past week, you have knifed me, sobbed all over me, tried to kiss me and wanted to cuddle as though I was your favorite—”
“Only an utterly ruthless bastard would count those against me in such a way.”
“If you think I’m anything else, then you’re more foolish than I thought, Jas. Find another way to pay me back.”
“So that until then you will tug me along with you as if I was a pet you decided to keep while passing judgment on the choices I have had to make to survive.”
“Yes, that’s the one upside to this whole thing. I can tell you, repeatedly, what a naive, stubbornly annoying...” He looked away as if his fury couldn’t be contained by words.
“You almost sound as if you care.”
“And you sound far too desperate to hear that I care. I don’t care, Jas. My only interest is in keeping you alive. I don’t like even a pinprick of guilt, marring my lifestyle. So me looking after you is for purely selfish reasons.”
Could he not leave her even a fragment of her pride? But for once, Jasmine had a feeling it wasn’t about her, her shame, her nonexistent self-esteem.
Why was he always making sure she didn’t form an attachment to him? Why did he insist on reiterating what he didn’t feel for her?
What if it wasn’t about her?
She looked around the plane, thought of the bike, the hotel he had taken her to. His yacht, his expensive toys, his women... If Dmitri was the playboy he played so well, he wouldn’t have come for her like that.
If he hadn’t cared, he wouldn’t have been so angry with her, then or tonight when she had suggested a way to pay off her debt.
“Is it so hard to admit that you feel something for me, Dmitri? Even if it was just an echo of our horrible past life together? Everything has to be this sanitized, sterilized version of you?”
His head recoiled back, tension swathing his entire frame. As though she was a danger to him. When he looked at her, his head cocked and eyes narrowed, Jas didn’t buy it.
It was as if a storm was brewing in his eyes as he stood up. “That Dmitri was violent and deranged, Jas.”
She had shocked him. Into what, she had no idea, but she had. Satisfaction swelled inside her. “At least that Dmitri was real.”
“You’re like that mutt Andrew saved once, remember? Even after it got better, he wouldn’t go away. Kept coming back to him, desperate for another nuzzle.”
Instead of the smooth, uncaring tone that he delivered all his insults in, he sounded ragged, on the edge, furious.
And just like that, his insults didn’t hurt anymore.
Instead, she felt victorious, as if she had drawn him out finally.
Feeling more out of control of her own fate than her worst working nights had been, she sighed. “You said Stavros was Leah’s husband. Are they really getting married again?”
“Stavros married Leah under the worst of circumstances.” His voice took on a softer tone when he spoke of Leah. “To make up for it, he is giving her a wedding now.”
“He looked so stern and forbidding...but he’s doing it for her? That is so romantic. No wonder Leah looks as if she’s glowing from the...”
His pointed look told Jasmine clearly what he thought of her gushing. A burn began to climb up from her chest to her throat.
“Is that what you want, Jas?” he said without scorn or mockery.
“What I want... I’ve never even had the indulgence to think of what I want from life. It doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate someone else’s happiness. Despite what I’ve had to do to survive, there’s some innocence left inside me, Dmitri.”
“Some innocence, Jas?” A light came on in his eyes, rendering Jas still. As if she had gained a little traction with him. Just a little but enough. “Have I been duped in the quality of my purchase? Is there a return tag, then?”
It was an outrageous situation they seemed to be caught in. And it was of their own making, too, Jas realized with a hollowness in her gut. But neither of them, it seemed, would walk away.
And if she didn’t laugh, she was afraid she would cry. Or do something equally disastrous, like wanting to prove that she was woman enough for the arrogant rogue in front of her.
Prickly and high maintenance? Oh, how she wanted to do something that broke that smugly satisfied smile. How she wished she could shatter that facade of careless debauchery...
How she wanted him to kiss her, not because she thrust herself at him, not because he thought he should teach her a lesson, but because he wanted to, more than anything in the world.
Nothing more self-destructive in wanting to prove that she had a place in a man’s life when he couldn’t give a flying fig about it... She had seen her mother do it and had the worn-out child and adult T-shirts to wear for it.
“One of these days, you’re going to wish you had sent me on my way, Dmitri,” she said, because empty challenges didn’t cost anything.
She was far too invested in this strange relationship they had, she realized, fresh panic blooming in her gut.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JASMINE HAD NEVER imagined that she could feel lonely surrounded by at least a hundred guests at the estate where Stavros and Leah were getting married. It seemed as if the entirety of Athens’ high fashion society was attending the party that night and would stay for the wedding.
Dmitri had dumped her once again at the estate in the middle of the night and disappeared after he had blurted out, “We’ll talk about your future after the wedding.”
He had quite literally handed her over to a maid and stormed back into the night.
Clamping her teeth so tight that it hurt, she had forced her mind away from where, and whose bed, he would be going to in the middle of the night.
Having fallen asleep at some strange hour of predawn, she had woken up this morning to the sounds of guests having a lazy, laughing breakfast in the courtyard outside her balcony. Disoriented by the amount of jet-setting she seemed to be doing, she had pulled on a sweater and ventured out to see Stavros and Leah and an assortment of strangers staring up at her.
It was obviously too early and too domestic a setting for Dmitri to be anywhere near.
She had never felt so out of place as that morning.
Yet what wa
s he supposed to do with her, she had asked herself on her walk that afternoon. She was neither a friend for him to voluntarily want to spend time with her, nor was she a girlfriend, which would have been altogether another matter. Nor was she a family member.
She only wished he hadn’t brought her to such an intimate occasion. The last thing she wanted to do was to intrude on Leah and Stavros.
She couldn’t bear to think about what the couple thought of her. Because, despite everything, she liked them, and in a different life, she would have wanted them to like her.
Granted, she had spent barely any time with them and under such strange circumstances that night, but there had been such a familial bond between Dmitri and the two of them. A bond she had only seen once before, between her brother, Andrew, and Dmitri.
Had she somehow expected the same bond to exist between her and Dmitri, despite his new life and her supposed hatred for him? Was that why it felt as though she was being knocked down by every small thing he did or didn’t do?
So she mostly kept herself to her room and walked around the lush acreage whenever she couldn’t bear to stare at the elegant furnishings anymore. She had just finished walking through the vineyard and returned to her room when someone knocked on her door.
Leah Sporades stood outside the room. “May I come in?”
“Of course.” Jasmine stood back, remembering her manners.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to spend time with you after you arrived last night. I had so many last-minute details to look over and then of course, Stavros is being his usual arrogant, domineering—”
“Please, Leah, stop.” Jasmine was equal parts embarrassed and amazed by Leah’s openness. “Don’t say another word. I should be the one apologizing for intruding on such a private and important occasion. You’re not responsible for unexpected guests who crash in the middle of the night.”
“What?” Now the woman looked genuinely baffled. “Jasmine, I insisted that Dmitri bring you. What did he say to you to make you feel as if you were not welcome...” Leah sighed. “He just dropped you here and left, didn’t he? In the middle of the night?”
