by Tara Pammi
Jasmine decided she would rather die before she betrayed how much that had hurt. Yet again. “Yes, but then that’s to be expected. It’s not as if he’s my keeper despite the fact that he... He insists on dragging me along but hates me for it... I don’t understand why he won’t just leave me to my fate.”
The most painfully thick silence followed her outburst.
Jasmine turned away toward the window, mortification burning her face up as if it was a furnace. She had said way too much again.
Sighing, she pressed her forehead against the cool window. “Forget I said that, please. I...I’m usually not so whiny and self-pitying. The past few days, my life’s taken the strangest turn after years of...” And Dmitri was at the center of all the confusion... “I feel a bit lost and directionless.”
Leah joined her at the window and squeezed her hand.
Fighting a gush of warmth at the back of her eyes, Jasmine held on.
Her mom’s lifestyle, Andrew’s problems and then her own chosen path meant she had never had the chance to have a normal life. Now she realized how many small, simple things, like friendship, she had given up willingly along the way.
She hated him for it, but maybe there was credit to Dmitri’s ruthless walking away from the whole lot of them. Cutting away those ties that only added burdens to her very soul. Starting afresh without the past hanging around her neck like a boulder.
He was flourishing, wasn’t he? she thought with uncharacteristic envy.
“When Stavros told me what kind of a...situation Dmitri found you in, and how you got yourself out of it, I was amazed.” Jasmine raised her gaze and met Leah’s, the calm acceptance in her tone going a long way to soothe her. “What stuns me even more is how different and strangely intense Dmitri was around you in just those few minutes. Whatever is going on between you two—”
“Nothing is going on between us, Leah. I’m like that festering sore he wants to close, a dirty stain from his old life he wants to incinerate. In fact, I’m as stunned as you are with each passing hour why he won’t just wash his hands of me. He’s made it clear enough that this whole thing with me...has disrupted his life.”
“But nothing ever disrupts Dmitri. Nothing even touches Dmitri. He has his work and toys. The only lasting relationship he has in his life is with Stavros, and he has that insane...lifestyle.
“Whereas with you, it’s as if... He doesn’t know what to do with himself with you around is what I’m thinking,” Leah added, with a twinkle in her eyes that made Jasmine squirm uncomfortably.
Of course, she couldn’t tell Leah it was all one-sided.
“You’re so much in love,” Jasmine said without rancor. “You’re seeing rainbows and butterflies and possibility of romance where there is only guilt, Leah. Please don’t matchmake.”
“Am I that transparent?” Leah said. “All I wanted to say, Jas—I can call you Jas, right?” When Jasmine nodded, she went on, “Is that I know how it feels to not have a friend. And to deal with a man who, at least, seems to not like...”
“Hate is the word you’re looking for,” Jasmine pointed out sourly.
“Hates the very air you breathe,” she said pointedly, and something in her gaze told Jasmine how far Stavros and Leah had to have come. “And turns you inside out. And makes you wish you were anyone but yourself.”
Jasmine smiled, something in the other woman’s openness catching up to her. “I don’t believe Stavros could ever hate you. Even I can see that he worships you.”
A blush dusted her cheeks and Leah laughed self-consciously. “But we almost lost each other. The thing is, you have a friend in me. And it has nothing to do with Dmitri.”
Jasmine had never known such open acceptance, such genuine warmth. “Thank you.”
Walking into the center of the room, Leah looked at her wardrobe. “Now let’s talk about something fun. What are you wearing to the party tonight?”
Could one die of an excess of embarrassment? Jasmine wondered for the nth time in the past week.
“I...I don’t have anything to wear. And I’ve had a lifetime’s quota of being embarrassed and humiliated and whatnot by Dmitri.”
Such an effervescent smile dawned on Leah’s mouth that Jasmine forgot what she was going to say. “I’m a designer with an entire workroom full of dresses, and I would love to dress you in something that will knock the—”
Jasmine shook her head. “No, not for him,” she amended.
What was the harm in borrowing a dress for one night? In opening herself to a friendship? In letting, for once, something good enter her life?
Whether willingly or not, Dmitri had given her her life back. And she was going to live it, for herself, starting tonight. Not her mother, not the pain of the past, not a debt, which somehow she would find a way out of, and definitely not about a man who kept her around because it relieved the little guilt he had about the past.
She faced Leah and smiled.
“I want to look good for myself. I want to have an evening where I forget the past week and don’t worry about the future. I would love to borrow your expertise and your dress so that I can enjoy the party and be a part of my new friend’s happiness. That sounds good, right?”
Leah beamed, hooked her arm through Jasmine’s and said, “That sounds perfect.”
* * *
Take what you paid for.
Jasmine’s outrageous dare kept ringing around in Dmitri’s head as he stepped out of his chopper and waved the pilot away.
And her kiss... Theos, it had lasted a few seconds too long, because he could still feel her taste on his lips, could still feel the liquid longing flowing through him.
As if she had left something of herself in his very blood.
He turned and stilled, taking in the tableau of the evening spread out from his vantage point atop the roof.
Giannis’s estate, the very place that had shielded him and healed him, at least enough to move forward in life, was lit up like a bride. He was glad Leah had decided to have the wedding here. It would have made Giannis ecstatic to see Stavros and Leah begin their new life here.
A huge white marquee had been erected in the vast grounds behind the mansion. Soft, strategically placed ground lights lit up a path from the house to the marquee and all around the gazebo and the pool.
A profusion of stylishly dressed guests flitted in and out of the marquee, and he searched the festivities, only then realizing that he was looking for her. That all day, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind.
Cursing himself, he walked off to shower and dress.
He had dropped off Jasmine past midnight and gone back to the Katrakis offices in Athens, the very force of his need to keep her by his side pushing him to do the opposite.
It had taken every ounce of his willpower, which was not much to begin with when it came to her, to keep rejecting her in the face of her increasingly reckless questions. In the face of her soft mouth flush against his, her breath coating his skin.
Take my virginity. Have sex with me, just once. Call the debt paid.
Something about the casually abhorrent way she had made that offer wouldn’t leave him alone even now.
As if she was offering herself up like some sacrifice to circumstances beyond her help and he...he was unscrupulous and monstrous enough to want to take it.
It hurt him, he realized, stunned at the new development. It stung that she would think him low enough to take her under those conditions.
Did she think him so completely without morals? Hadn’t he done all he could to make her think that?
But the farce he had begun sat like a knife under his ribs now, constantly pinching him. That she thought he was without morals or loyalty or even basic decency grated on him.
Theos mou, the more he tried to insult her and
humiliate her and chain her with his words, the more she seemed to sink under his skin, the more she seemed to carve into him.
And the thing that boomed loud inside his head, refusing to be ignored, that had rattled him through the office hours today until he had walked out of a shareholder meeting that he had insisted on, was how tempted he had been to take her up on the disgusting offer.
Tempted to continue kissing her, to swallow her gasps and moans, to tear away the loose shirt and bare her to his gaze, to strip her until all that she worked so hard to hide was revealed to him...
Something desperate and needy inside him was mesmerized by her.
By her daring smile, by her disarming innocence, by her disquieting loyalty to her brother and mother, by her disturbingly sensual mouth that seemed to say the most outrageous things to him...
Having showered and dressed, he made his way back to the grounds, eagerly eating up the space. He spied Leah and Stavros at a distance chatting with a cousin of Giannis’s who was an absolute bore, and grinned at the scowl that was beginning to make an appearance on his friend’s brow when the younger man kept touching Leah.
Stavros, when it came to Leah, was like a dog with his favorite bone... No one would touch her if it was up to him, no one would even look at her...although for the first time since Dmitri had met Stavros, he began to understand Stavros’s possessiveness.
Theos, he wished he didn’t but he did.
He took a champagne flute from a passing waiter and downed it in one go, feeling decidedly on edge. Deciding he needed something stronger, he was about to walk toward the bar set up near the house when he heard husky laughter and turned toward the gazebo.
The vividly red curve of a woman’s lush mouth met his gaze. Arrested, he stared, realizing slowly that it was none other than Jas.
Jas, as he had never seen or imagined her—exotic, stunning, brimming with a sensuality that had every drop of blood in him pounding south. Possessive desire knocked at him.
You’re not my type.
You’re prickly, you’ll be high maintenance in bed.
Each and every one of his words came back to him as if fate had very neatly and viciously aligned them for him to swallow back.
She stood in the gazebo, a circle of light bathing her from head to toe. He noticed her shoulders first. A strange thing to be noticing about a woman, he instantly thought, the excellent champagne warming his throat.
Bare and delicately rounded, while her long arms had a muscle tone to them. His fingers itched to trace the graceful line of her neck to her collarbone.
Her hair, her glorious hair, finally free of that knot, framed her face in thick, wavy curls, softening that feral look.
A shimmering gold dress, with a neckline that crisscrossed over her breasts, pushed her breasts up and then, right below, flared out into billowing folds. It ended several inches above her knees, baring long, toned legs that literally went on forever.
For days, she had been covered up in the baggiest of clothes.
He had been right, she was far too much on the thin side, all jutting bones and sharp angles. But the shimmering fabric made everything of what there was of her.
She looked like an exotic bird; nothing so pedestrian as the word beautiful would suit her. A barely there chain hung over her throat with a glittering diamond pendant nestling in that cleavage.
Desire and possessiveness rolled through him in waves.
It felt like his stamp of possession that she wore a thing he had bought. Even though the simple fact that she was wearing the necklace proved that she clearly didn’t know it. She would probably throw it in his face, he thought, grinning.
It had been mere months before Andrew had died, for her eighteenth birthday. Dmitri had overseen his first million-dollar project and Giannis had made him a stockholder in the company. Two years after Stavros had made it. And had asked him how he wanted to celebrate. Looked at him with such a twinkling light in his eyes when Dmitri had said that he needed to buy a diamond pendant first.
What had he been thinking then? Had he always been waiting for her like this?
No, he told himself, discarding his champagne flute with a flick of his wrist. No, it had been about proving himself. He had wanted to go back to the one innocent in his old life and show her that he had made it. That he was nothing like the man who had raised him.
So he’d had it delivered, uncaring as to how Andrew would explain it. Something inside him roared in delight and he just couldn’t silence it anymore.
Nothing ever touched him beyond an ephemeral satisfaction. Nothing ever held his attention for more than a few days.
Except now, with this woman. If her brother had kept him alive, it was as if she breathed new life into his very veins... As if she held the key to making him whole again.
When the man next to her bent too close to her, she tucked away a curl behind her ear in a nervous gesture.
And that hint of vulnerability tugged at Dmitri.
His hair slicked back, his narrow nose seeming all too familiar, the man stood far too close to her. When he turned, the light illuminated his profile, and Dmitri recognized him.
It was the French photographer, Gaspard Devue.
Devue’s fingers moved over Jasmine’s bare arm, trailed over her shoulder while she froze, her neck holding at an awkward angle, those large eyes of hers too big and trusting.
The bruises, the fear in Anya’s eyes when she had come to his hotel in Paris... Gaspard Devue was one of those who preyed on the innocent, defenseless, who needed to use his fists to make himself feel bigger and stronger...
Just as his father had been...
Something detonated inside Dmitri at the thought of Jasmine even breathing the same air. All the sophistication he had acquired slid off him, and he was that fourteen-year-old boy who had finally had enough. Who had finally found enough strength in his lanky arms to defend himself, who had been terrified that one day he wouldn’t get up after another blow.
That had been the last day his father had ever been able to touch him. But still, he had been too late to save his mother. Always too late.
Adrenaline punched through his blood, his muscles curling for a fight. It was all he could do to stop himself from marching over there and throwing her over his shoulder, from dragging her back to her room and locking her in...
He couldn’t create a scene at Leah’s party even if the bastard deserved it...
All he needed was to get Jas away from the man. And then he would lock her up for the next twenty years...
Christos, where was his head?
He didn’t understand what was happening to him. He did, however, know what it was he wanted, craved. Sex and passion, he understood. That, for some reason, she trusted him and wanted him.
From the moment Giannis had pulled him away from that life, he had thought of her. He had been with countless women and hadn’t felt an iota of what he felt when he just looked at Jas.
He wanted all of her.
* * *
She had known that he was watching her. Not from where or for how long. But the awareness had seeped into her as slowly as the breeze that caressed her bare shoulders, as sinuously as Leah’s soft silk dress brushed against her skin, making her feel as if she, too, could be elegant and sophisticated instead of dirty and vulgar.
It was as though there was a chip under her skin that sent out a signal anytime Dmitri was close.
She had been so attuned to those sensations that she had missed half of what the suave Frenchman had said to her.
From the moment she had come down to the party, he had been so polite and attentive that Jasmine had felt flattered despite knowing that he was nothing but a seasoned flirt. Still, he had been telling her about all the photo shoots he had done with models she had only seen in mag
azines until she realized Dmitri was back and lost focus.
Belatedly, she caught him staring at her mouth and her face with a detached yet somehow intrusive intensity. Caught between embarrassment and hyperawareness, she froze when Gaspard trailed his fingers first over her jaw and then her neck. His strange gaze creeped her out more than the fact that he was touching her.
“So, mademoiselle, does my offer interest you?” he croaked out in a husky voice that felt just a little too practiced.
Schooling her face into a vacuous smile, she searched her mind for a way to ask the man what exactly his offer was. Because they had been talking about his studio, the project he took on, and if it was some kind of job or remotely like that, she didn’t want to give offense.
And then she heard footsteps behind her—a soft tread like a predator that concealed its very ferociousness from an unsuspecting prey. Refusing to give in to the shiver that began at the base of her spine, she slowly turned, her hand still encased in Gaspard’s.
The light from outside the gazebo enveloped him in a halo as he stood at the lower steps. Jasmine couldn’t seem to breathe; her lips tingled, remembering, yearning.
A black tuxedo lovingly draped his broad shoulders, the snowy white collar contrasting against his olive skin. His freshly shaved jaw glinted and Jasmine once again felt the shocking awareness of every inch of space that Dmitri occupied.
He fairly breathed sex and masculinity and power, irrevocably out of her reach.
Until their eyes met. And then it was as though the world melted away around them. Every inch of skin that the silk touched felt hot; every muscle curled tight.
She reached out behind her, the wood grain smooth to her touch, hoping it would cool down this...heat inside of her.
He took the steps and a little chill pulsed down her back as his face was finally bathed in light.
Tight lines bracketed his mouth, that cool facade completely gone. His looks. His mood. His cloak of debonair charm. Everything had fallen away. Suddenly, he seemed like the Dmitri she had known once, and it tripped all her alarms.
