by Tara Pammi
“Hello, Gaspard.”
Pure steel clanged in his voice.
Gaspard turned, blanched and then schooled his expression back to politeness. All in the space of a breath. “Dmitri.”
The gazebo, which she had thought lovely seconds ago, suddenly felt like a battleground. Why did Dmitri look like he had seen a ghost?
He took another step, his gaze lingering on Gaspard’s hand over hers. “I see that you’re already hovering around Jas like a vulture.”
“Jas?” the man said, flicking his gaze between her and Dmitri. His nose flared as if he was a hyena scenting something. “But Ms. Douglas has been regaling me with tales of where she grew up...” He looked at Jasmine again, lingering on her diamond pendant and her dress. His brow cleared. The conclusion he so obviously came to was like a slap to her senses. “Is she one of yours, then?”
“I’m not anyone’s, Mr. Devue.” Jasmine wanted to slap the man and then thump Dmitri. “Really, Dmitri, don’t—”
Cutting her off, he clasped her wrist and pulled her roughly to his side.
She resisted, or tried to. As a result, she ended up being slammed against his side.
Her breath left her in a soft gasp, a hundred different sensations swarming at her.
His hip pressed into her belly, the hard ridge of his muscled thigh straddled her legs and his forearm knocked into her breasts. His body was like a hot, hard cage around her shuddering muscles and shivering skin.
Sharp, instantaneous, all-consuming need filled every nook and crevice.
All the while the infuriating man stared at Gaspard, his expression disturbingly menacing. His arm stayed around her waist. “Jas is a childhood friend of mine and is in Athens as my guest.” At least he hadn’t said she was his possession. “She’s not without protection, Gaspard. Do not come anywhere near her.”
“Why don’t you let the lady decide?”
“Unlike the women you terrify, I have nothing to lose.” There was not even a facade of civility in Dmitri now.
Something crawled to the surface in the man’s face, Jasmine was sure, before he spoke again. Something that made her uneasy. “Leah has my information, Ms. Douglas, if you would like to see me.”
With another dark glance at Dmitri, the man left.
Jasmine felt her face flame as she saw that a few people had noticed the exchange. Saw the tasteless conclusion that they immediately came to.
They thought she was Dmitri’s mistress and Gaspard had been poaching.
Bile coated her throat. The entire evening fell apart, instantly became dirty to her in a way that was reminiscent of her old life.
She turned to Dmitri, clutching the fury that threatened to split her from the inside. “What is it with you? Are you so sadistic that not only will you humiliate me but you won’t let another man talk to me?”
Instead of the infuriatingly calm expression she usually got, a tic played in his jaw. “You don’t know that man. It’s got nothing to do with what’s going on between you and—”
“Stop, just stop.”
She looked around, trying to recall the simple joy she had felt this evening when she had put the dress on, when she had looked at herself...when she had, despite her effort not to, imagined the look in his eyes.
“All I wanted was to spend one evening like a normal person. Just dance, meet a few people who don’t know what or where I have come from and have fun. Without you and this whole spectacle between us hanging over my head. Without worrying about the past or tomorrow. Now you have made me into an object of speculation. You made me feel as dirty as I have always believed myself to be.”
His silence only lent weight to her accusation.
“I’m going to go over there and apologize to Gaspard. Stay away from me, please. The last thing I want is to create a scene at Leah and Stavros’s wedding after intruding on it so shamelessly in the first place.”
His fingers clamped over her wrist like a vise. “No, you’ll not. You don’t need to apologize to—”
“No, what I don’t need is you in my life, even for another second. What I don’t need is you dragging me around and dumping me without a word, leaving me to wonder what I’m going to do the next day. What I don’t need is for you to make me feel as though every decision I have ever made is wrong, as if my entire life is one giant mistake.
“God, I’m so stupid I kept making excuses for you. I kept thinking...
“No wonder Andrew didn’t want anything to do with you. No wonder he told me again and again that we were better off without you.”
His skin pulled taut over his bones, his mouth blanching at her reckless words. “You’re wrong, about everything.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE HAD JUST reached her room when Dmitri barged into the room. The thud of the door as he closed it with his shoulder sank into Jas’s bones.
He flung the dinner jacket away, untied the buttons of his shirt. Was he preparing for a fight instead of walking away as usual? she wondered. Even that little bit of attention gathered momentum inside her.
God, she had it bad.
She leaned her forehead against the dark wood paneling of the wardrobe and closed her eyes. “I don’t want to look at you...”
“No. I won’t let you sneak away. Not until you hear me out.”
“That’s the problem with you, Dmitri,” she said, still stunned at his mutinous tone.
Now he cared what she thought of him, that he had made her angry? That he had hurt her? Why?
“I have made it by myself all these years. Until you...stop treating me as if I’m rubbish you have been forced to rescue by a thin thread of conscience that you can’t rid yourself of, I have nothing to say to you. Nor do I wish to listen to anything you might have to say.”
They watched each other for an eternity of seconds. How was it that all her self-worth seemed to hinge on what Dmitri thought of her or how he talked to her? Or how he kissed her?
Was it a genetic trait that her mom had passed on to her, this eternal fixation on one man?
And slowly, sinuously, as if it was a snake waiting to strike, that awareness pulsed into life. Jasmine looked away to beat it back. The luxuriously soft red duvet covering the huge antique four-poster bed stared back at her, and the fever in her blood multiplied.
His arm stretched toward his nape, he finally spoke. “I have never thought of you as rubbish.”
His deceptively flat statement lay in the space between them. Molten gray eyes challenging her to take it up, and hers surely reflecting her panic...
Her struggle lasted all of two seconds, that same something inside her being pulled toward him. As it had always been. “All your actions say otherwise.”
“I was so angry that I could have wrung your neck for not coming to me sooner, yes. But I didn’t think that of you, not once.”
She could see him measuring his words now. What had changed?
Before she could argue, he held up a hand. “I didn’t realize that leaving you in the middle of the night could be construed as—”
“Hurtful? Insensitive? It wasn’t the point you were exactly trying to make?”
“No. I just couldn’t wait to...”
“To go back to whoever was waiting for you, I know.” She thought she might be a little sick. “I shouldn’t have kissed you like that, not when—”
“No, you shouldn’t have. And I don’t have a girlfriend.”
Something tight relented in her chest and she blew out a breath. Just because she lost the little sense she had when she was near didn’t mean Dmitri had to reciprocate. “I only realized this morning how much of your plans I wrecked. I didn’t know that Leah insisted that you make me your plus one. I’m absolutely okay with sitting with the guests. Dmitri, are you listening?”
She commanded herself to not flush. The traitor that her body was, it continued, as it wanted. “This isn’t even your house and you dump me here in the middle of the night, not to mention two nights before the wedding. If Leah hadn’t—”
“I knew Leah would look after you. And this is my house,” he drawled. “Not that it was still okay,” he added when she glared.
Her mouth fell open in an O. “I thought it was Leah’s grandfather’s estate.”
“Giannis was fair to his last breath. According to him, Stavros got Leah and consequently a bigger share in the company, so I got the estate.”
“So you got the bad end of the deal, then?” she couldn’t help pointing out.
Leaning against the traditional, four-poster bed, he laughed. All Jas could think was that they were in a small room with a huge bed and... “Only you and Stavros think Leah is worth more than a thousand-acre estate.”
“You’re like a greedy dragon that hoards treasure. How much is enough, Dmitri? Have you really become that shallow?”
“It enabled me to buy you, Jas, didn’t it?” he said, and then looked away, as if he had said too much.
And Jas scrambled for something to say, something to fight her body’s feverish reaction to him. “I get that you have your own life and that I pushed my way into it. I just... Just don’t dump me on someone else. Once we figure out some kind of plan for my future, I won’t bother you again.”
“I’ve decided that you’re not bothering me anymore,” he said, in an arrogant tone that said he had decided a lot more things than that.
What the hell did that even mean?
That was a complete one-eighty, if she’d ever heard one. She didn’t dare ask him what had caused this. Because she was terrified he would tell her that he’d moved from mild annoyance to pity, that it was something from his past that had fractured through that facade tonight and not her...that she would realize that when it came to him, she would take anything.
God, she couldn’t catch her breath with this man.
“But what you did just now, that was not okay on any level. You humiliated me. It’s as though you really think I’m one of your possessions.”
“Possession, Jas?” A winter storm blazed in his eyes. “You froze like a deer caught in headlights when he touched you.”
“Dmitri, I’m not completely clueless when it comes to men. I know how—”
“Gaspard Devue is the worst kind of man, Jas.” He reached her and Jasmine forgot how to breathe. He took her hand in his and looked down at them. Hers, slender and soft, his dark and rough—it was so...simply sexy. “That he gets to roam free like that after everything he keeps doing... I don’t think Leah knows what kind of a man he is or she would have never let him step foot here. When I saw his hands on you, bile crawled up my throat.
“He has these toxic relationships with women. He abuses them in ways that I can’t even bear to think of. I have seen his handiwork on Anya and—”
“Anya Ivanova, the supermodel? The one you were going to marry?” she piped up. Then wanted to sink through the floor when his mouth tensed.
He stared at her for a long time before he nodded. “He isolated her, beat her and, when she threatened to tell the authorities, he pulled the rug out from under her life by spreading vicious rumors about her work. Terrified to within an inch of her life, she came to me. I offered to stay with her at an Alps resort while she recovered. But however much I reassured her, she refused to press charges.”
And the gossip magazines had thought a woman had finally conquered Dmitri Karegas. Dark and light, they had complemented each other perfectly. Jasmine had bought the tabloid, read it through and then ripped it into shreds, and had stood shaken by the depth of her envy for a woman she knew nothing about.
While he had been helping an abused woman recover her life.
Jasmine had a feeling she was seeing a side of Dmitri no one did. Except the unfortunate woman.
“Gaspard was the one who found her in St. Petersburg when she was barely seventeen, gave her her first big break. And through the years, he isolated her, abused her. Until she thought there was nowhere else to go, caught in that relationship.”
And Dmitri had got her out of it. “She quit modeling, didn’t she?”
“Yes, I helped her get out of some of the contracts.” He shrugged.
When there had been no announcement of an engagement coming, the tabloids had gone berserk. Nothing had come out of it except Anya Ivanova, she suddenly remembered breathlessly, had started a retail clothes store in London.
With Dmitri’s backing, Jasmine realized, the pieces falling into place. He had helped the woman get on her feet, but she knew he wouldn’t mention that.
Just like he wouldn’t mention anything that betrayed the man he was beneath the facade. She understood now why he had reacted so violently, saw the shadows of the past fill his eyes.
“I saw that flicker of interest in his eyes when he looked at you. If he so much as comes anywhere near you again, I will...” The barely restrained violence in him would have scared her if she hadn’t known him once.
If he could do so much for an ex, Jas wasn’t surprised at what he had done for her. After all, he had admitted that he owed Andrew. For all his playboy persona, Dmitri seemed to have a white-knight complex.
And she had been nothing but a literal damsel.
“Promise me that you will stay away from such men in the future.”
“Isn’t seeing him a long way from falling into an abusive relationship, Dmitri?”
“It is, but I...”
She gasped as realization sunk in.
He thought she was ripe for picking for a man like Gaspard, that she had no sense of self-preservation at all. Or maybe he thought she was like her mother.
But then, ever since she had come into his life, all she had done was act like a pushover. It didn’t help to know that it was only he who made her act so out of character. “You think I’m more prone to it?”
“Theos, Jas, I don’t want to argue with you. Just give me your word.”
“I won’t see him,” Jasmine said first, wanting more than anything to reassure him. As to what the man’s actual offer had been, she had no idea, but she didn’t mention that to Dmitri. She sighed. “Believe it or not, I wouldn’t have blithely gone off with Gaspard tonight or any other night. You give me far less credit. I made hard, gut-wrenching choices, but I did survive on my own, Dmitri.”
“You have no idea how sorry I am about that.”
“Why?” She shook her head. “It is not your fault.”
And just like that she accepted it wasn’t. When she had asked for help, he had come, guns blazing. What more could she ask for?
That they had grown apart was nothing but a circumstance of their lives. That she had held on to the memory of him all these years... It was an affliction she needed to grow out of.
“Partly it is. I...should have taken on your responsibility at Andrew’s funeral, should have made some kind of arrangement for your future.”
“Stop saying that. I never wanted you to fix my life, Dmitri. I just...needed a friend. Andrew needed a friend.”
A growl fell from his mouth, a jagged sound of frustration and regret. “I should have known what Andrew would do. I should have...never trusted him. I should have...”
What did he mean? Fear fisted tight in her gut.
“Tell me to walk away, Jas,” he said in that controlled voice that she was beginning to hate. “Tell me to leave the past where it should be. Tell me to hang on to the little honor I have.”
He looked so painfully handsome, so achingly real. And she was terrified of asking but equally of not knowing... She felt as though she was standing at a precipice th
at she had been trying to reach all her life, as though the real Dmitri was finally within her reach.
“What did you mean by that?”
He knelt in front of her and a flutter began in Jasmine’s belly. Tilted upward toward her, he reached for her and Jasmine started shivering. Warm, rough hands clasped her bare shoulders. “You’re cold?”
“No. It’s you,” she whispered, knowing that there was nothing to hide from his gaze.
Fragile, she felt so fragile when he touched her like that...
His fingers lifted her pendant off her skin, the tips brushing against the curve of her breast. She closed her eyes, sharp tingles taking over her body. “I should have got the matching earrings, too.”
A storm unleashed in her gut as the words fell over her.
Snatching away the pendant from his fingers, she looked up. “Wait...you were the one who had it delivered for my eighteenth birthday? But that’s impossible. Why would Andrew say he had ordered it?”
The truth slammed into her from every which way, shaking the very axis of her life.
“Because he lied to you and to me. He told me you were better off without me in your life and I believed him. And I didn’t care who you thought it was from as long as you had it.”
It was all there in his eyes—the guilt, the pain, the lies he had allowed her to believe. He didn’t have to say a word. And in that minute, she saw what she had been too blind to see.
“You came back to see us... Oh, God... When, how?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “That first year, I ran away three times and almost reached London. But Stavros just kept getting better and better at stopping me. Finally, Giannis made a deal with me. If I met every challenge he had for me, he would bring me himself to see Andrew. And I did. I worked round the clock. I begged Stavros to teach me everything he knew. I began to control my temper... And the little money I made in those first couple of years, which was truly nothing, I gave to Andrew.”
She didn’t care if it might have been nothing. He had been given a new lease on life, a life none of them had ever dreamed of, and he still had come back for them.
