“Suit yourself,” Nic had replied. He’d shrugged, but Mattie had been far too aware that every inch of him was hewn of steel, that he was himself a deadly weapon.

She’d felt the power he wore so easily like a thick, hot hand at her throat. Worse, she’d been aware of that part of her that craved it. Him. More.

“I have a very long memory, Mattie, and a very creative approach to retribution. Consider yourself forewarned.”

“Be still my beating heart,” she’d snipped at him, and then had tried her best to ignore him.

It hadn’t worked then. It didn’t work now.

“Will we reminisce all day?” she asked, injecting a note of boredom into her voice that she dearly wished she felt, while he continued to hold her immobile. “Or do you have a plan? I’m unfamiliar with the ins and outs of blackmail, you see. You’ll have to show me how it’s done.”

“You’re free to refuse me yet again.”

“And lose my father’s company in the process?”

“All choices have consequences.” He shrugged, much the same way he had at that benefit dinner. “Your father would have been the first to tell you that.”

That he was right only infuriated her more.

VOWS OF CONVENIENCE

Bound by duty!

The Whitaker name was once synonymous with power, wealth and control. But with the family business facing certain ruin, and its reputation turning into dust, the Whitaker siblings need to make the ultimate sacrifice to safeguard their futures …

HIS FOR A PRICE

Following the death of Mattie Whitaker’s father, a merger with Greek tycoon Nicodemus Stathis’s company will go a long way towards fixing her problem—but Nicodemus’s help comes at a price …

October 2014

HIS FOR REVENGE

Chase Whitaker is playing his own dark game of revenge against Zara Elliot’s father, the chairman of his board. He plans to replace him— but he has no defences against Zara’s unstudied charm and natural beauty …

December 2014

His for a Price

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouth-watering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/ or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

To Megan Haslam, my wonderful editor, for twenty great books together!

Here’s to twenty more!

Contents

Cover

Excerpt

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

IF SHE STOOD very still—if she held her breath and kept herself from so much as blinking—Mattie Whitaker was sure she could make the words that her older brother Chase had just said to her disappear. Rewind them then erase them entirely.

Outside the rambling old mansion high above the Hudson River some two hours north of Manhattan, the cold rain came down in sheets. Stark, weather-stripped trees slapped back against the October wind all the way down the battered brown lawn toward the sullen river, and the estate had shrunk to blurred gray clouds, solemn green pines and the solid shape of the old brick house called Greenleigh, despite the lack of much remaining green. Behind her, at the desk that she would always think of as her father’s no matter how many months he’d been gone now, Chase was silent.

There would be no rewinding. No erasing. No escaping what she knew was coming. But then, if she was honest, she’d always known this day would arrive. Sooner or later.

“I didn’t hear you correctly,” Mattie said. Eventually.

“We both know you did.”

It should have made her feel better that he sounded as torn as she felt, which was better than that polite distance with which he usually treated her. It didn’t.

“Say it again, then.” She pressed her fingers against the frigid windowpane before her and let the cold soak into her skin. No use crying over the inevitable, her father would have said in that bleakly matter-of-fact way he’d said everything after they’d lost their mother.

Save your tears for things you can change, Mattie.

Chase sighed, and Mattie knew that if she turned to look at him, he’d be a pale shell of the grinning, always-in-on-the-joke British tabloid staple he’d been throughout his widely celebrated bachelorhood in London, where he’d lived as some kind of tribute to their long-dead British mother. It had been a long, hard four months since their father had dropped dead unexpectedly. Harder on Chase, she expected, who had all their father’s corporate genius to live up to, but she didn’t feel like being generous just now. About anything.

Mattie still didn’t turn around. That might make this real.

Not that hiding from things has ever worked, either, whispered a wry voice inside her that remembered all the things she wanted to forget—the smell of the leather seats in that doomed car, the screech of the tires, her own voice singing them straight into hell—

Mattie shut that down. Fast and hard. But her hands were shaking.

“You promised me we’d do this together,” Chase said quietly instead of repeating himself. Which was true. She’d said exactly that at their father’s funeral, sick with loss and grief, and not really considering the implications. “It’s you and me now, Mats.”

He hadn’t called her that in a very long time, since they’d been trapped in that car together, in fact, and she hated that he was doing it now, for this ugly purpose. She steeled herself against it. Against him.

“You and me and the brand-new husband you’re selling me off to like some kind of fatted cow, you mean,” Mattie corrected him, her voice cool, which was much better than bitter. Or panicked. Or terrified. “I didn’t realize we were living in the Dark Ages.”

“Dad was nothing if not clear that smart, carefully chosen marriages lead to better business practices.” Chase’s voice was sardonic then, or maybe that was bitterness, and Mattie turned, at last, to find him watching her with that hollow look in his dark blue eyes and his arms crossed over his chest. “I’m in the same boat. Amos Elliott has been gunning for me since the day of the funeral but he’s made it known that if I take one of his daughters off his hands, I’ll find my dealings with the Board of Directors that much more pleasant. Welcome to the Dark Ages, Mattie.”

She laughed, but it was an empty sound. “Should that make me feel better? Because it doesn’t. It’s nothing but a little more misery to spread around.”

“We need money and support—serious money and very concrete support—or we lose the company,” Chase said, his voice flat and low. So unlike him, really, if Mattie wanted to consider that. She didn’t. “There’s no prettying that up. The shareholders are mutinous. Amos Elliott and the Board of Directors are plotting my downfall as we speak. This is our legacy and we’re on the brink of losing it.”

And what’s left of them—of us. He didn’t say that last part, but he might as well have. It echoed inside of Mattie as if he’d shouted it through a bullhorn, and she heard the rest of it, too. The part where he reminded her who was to blame for losing their mother—but then, he didn’t have to remind her. He’d never had to remind her and he never had. There was no point. There was scarcely a moment in her entire life when she didn’t remind herself.

Still. “This is a major sacrifice, to put it mildly,” she pointed out, because the thoughtless, careless, giddily reckless creature she played in the tabloids would. “I could view this as an opportunity to walk away, instead. Start my life over without having to worry about parental disapproval or the stuffy, disapproving Whitaker Industries shareholders.” She studied her brother’s hard, closed-off expression as if she was a stranger to him, and she blamed herself for that, too. “You could do the same.”

“Yes,” Chase agreed, his voice cool. “But then we’d be the useless creatures Dad already thought we were. I can’t live with that. I don’t think you can, either. And I imagine you knew we had no other options but this before you came here today.”

“You mean before I answered your summons?” Mattie clenched her shaking hands into fists. It was better than tears. Anything was better than tears. Particularly because Chase was right. She couldn’t live with what she’d done twenty years ago; she certainly wouldn’t be able to live with the fallout if she walked away from the ruins of her family now. This was all her fault, in the end. The least she could do was her part to help fix it. “You’ve been back from London for how long?”

Her brother looked wary then. “A week.”

“But you only called when you needed me to sell myself. I’m touched, really.”

“Fine,” Chase said roughly, shoving a hand through his dark hair. “Make me the enemy. It doesn’t change anything.”

“Yes,” she agreed then, feeling ashamed of herself for kicking at him, yet unable to stop. “I knew it before I came here. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy to go gentle into the deep, dark night that is Nicodemus Stathis.”

Chase’s mouth moved in what might have been a smile, had these been happier times. Had either one of them had any choice in this. Had he done much smiling in her direction in the past twenty years. “Make sure you tell him that yourself. I’m sure he’ll find that entertaining.”

“Nicodemus has always found me wildly entertaining,” Mattie said, and it felt better to square her shoulders, to lengthen her spine, as she told that whopper of a lie. It felt better to make her voice brisk and to smooth her palms down the front of the deliberately very black dress she’d worn, to send the message she wished she could, too. “I’m sure if you asked him he’d list that in the top five reasons he’s always insisted he wanted to marry me. That and his fantasy of merging our two corporate kingdoms like some feudal wet dream in which he gets to play lord of the castle with the biggest, longest, thickest—”

She remembered, belatedly, that she was talking to her older brother, who might not be as close to her as she’d like but was nonetheless her older brother, and smiled faintly.

“Share,” she amended. “Of the company. The biggest share.”

“Of course that’s precisely what you meant,” Chase replied drily, but Mattie heard something like an apology in his voice, a kind of sorrow, right underneath what nearly passed for laughter.

Because his hands were tied. Big Bart Whitaker had been an institution unto himself. No one had expected him to simply drop dead four months ago—least of all Bart. There had been no time to prepare. No time to ease Chase from his flashy London VP position into his new role as President and CEO of Whitaker Industries, as had always been Bart’s ultimate intention. No time to allay the fears of the board and the major shareholders, who only knew Chase from what they read about him in all those smirking British tabloids. No time to grieve when there were too many challenges, too many risks, too many enemies.

Their father had loved the company his own grandfather had built from little more than innate Whitaker stubbornness and a desire to best the likes of Andrew Carnegie. And Mattie thought both she and Chase had always loved their father in their own complicated ways, especially after they’d lost their mother and Big Bart was all they’d had left.

Which meant they would each do what they had to do. There was no escaping this, and if she was honest, Mattie had known that long before her father died. It was as inevitable as the preview of the upstate New York winter coming down hard outside, and there was no use pretending otherwise.

Mattie would make the best of it. She would ignore that deep, dark, aching place inside her that simply hurt. That was scared, so very scared, of how Nicodemus Stathis made her feel. And how easy it would be to lose herself in him, until there was nothing left of her at all.

But you owe this to them, she reminded herself sternly. All of them.

“He’s here already, isn’t he?” she asked after a moment, when there was no putting it off any longer. She could stand here all day and it wouldn’t change anything. It would only make the dread in her belly feel more like a brick.

Chase’s gaze met hers, which she supposed was a point in his favor, though she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the moment. “He said he’d wait for you in the library.”

She didn’t look at her brother again. She looked at the polished cherry desk, instead, and missed their father with a rush that nearly left her lightheaded. She would have done anything, in that moment, to see his craggy face again. To hear that rumbling voice of his, even if he’d only ordered her to do this exact thing, as he’d threatened to do many times over the past ten years.

Now everything was precarious and dangerous, Bart was gone, and they were the only Whitakers left. Chase and Mattie against the world. Even if Chase and Mattie’s togetherness had been defined as more of a polite distance in the long years since their aristocratic mother’s death—separate boarding schools in the English countryside, universities in different countries and adult lives on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. But Mattie knew that all of that, too, was her fault.

She was the guilty party. She would accept her sentence, though perhaps not as gracefully as she should.

“Well,” she said brightly as she turned toward the door. “I hope we’ll see you at the wedding, Chase. I’ll be the one dragged up the aisle in chains, possibly literally. It will be like sacrificing the local virgin to appease the ravenous dragon. I’ll try not to scream too loudly while being burned alive, etcetera.”

Chase sighed. “If I could change any of this, I would. You know that’s true.”

But he could have been talking about so many things, and Mattie knew that the truth was that she’d save her tears because they were useless. And maybe she’d save the family business, too, while she was at it. It was, truly, the least she could do.

Nicodemus Stathis might have been the bane of her existence for as long as she could remember, but she could handle him. She’d been handling him for years.

She could do this.

So she held her head up high—almost as if she believed that—and she marched off to assuage her guilt and do her duty, at last, however much it felt like she was walking straight toward her own doom.

* * *

The worst thing about Nicodemus Stathis was that he was gorgeous, Mattie thought moments later in that mix of unwanted desire and sheer, unreasonable panic that he always brought out in her. So gorgeous it was tempting to overlook all the rest of the things he was, like profoundly dangerous to her. So gorgeous it had a way of confusing the issue, tangling her up into knots and making her despair of herself.

So absurdly gorgeous, in fact, that it was nothing but unfair.

He stood by the French doors on the far side of the library, his strong back to the warmth and the light of the book-laden room, his attention somewhere out in all that gray and rattling wet. He stood quietly, but that did nothing to disguise the fact that he was the most ruthless, wholly relentless man she’d ever known. It was obvious at a glance. The thick, jet-black hair, the graceful way he held his obviously dangerous form so still, the harsh beguilement of the mouth she could only see in the reflection of the glass. The menace in him that his smooth, sleek clothes couldn’t begin to conceal. He didn’t turn to look at her as she made her way toward him, but she knew perfectly well he knew she was there.

He’d have known the moment she descended the stairs in the great hall outside the library. He always knew. She’d often thought he was half cat. She didn’t like to speculate about the other half, but she was fairly certain it, too, had fangs.

“I hope you’re not gloating, Nicodemus,” she said briskly, because she thought simply waiting for him to turn around and fix those unholy dark eyes of his on her might make her dizzy—and she felt vulnerable enough as it was. She thought she could smell the smug male satisfaction heavy in the air, choking the oxygen from the room as surely as if one of the fireplaces had backed up. It put her teeth on edge. “It’s so unattractive.”

“At this point the hole you have dug for yourself rivals a swimming pool or two,” Nicodemus replied, in that voice of his that reverberated in her the way it always had, low and dangerous with that hint of his Greek childhood still clinging to his words and wrapping tight around the center of her. “But by all means, Mattie. Keep digging.”

“Here I am,” she said brightly. “Sacrificial lamb to the slaughter, as ordered. What a happy day this must be for you.”

Nicodemus turned then. Slowly, so slowly, like that might take the edge off the swift, hard punch of seeing him full on. It didn’t, of course. Nothing ever did. Mattie ordered herself to breathe—and not to keel over. He was as absurdly gorgeous as ever, damn him. No disfiguring accidents had turned him into a troll since she’d seen him at her father’s funeral.

He was as smoothly muscled as he’d been when he was in his twenties and honed to steel-like perfection by the construction work he’d somehow catapulted into a multi-million-dollar corporation by the time he was twenty-six. The fine, hard lines of his face were nearly elegant while his corded strength was as apparent in the line of his pugilistic jaw as in that impossibly chiseled chest of his that he’d concealed very poorly today behind a tight, black, obviously wildly expensive T-shirt that made no concession whatsoever to the weather. He was too elemental. He’d always made the hair at the back of her neck stand on end, her nipples pull painfully taut and her stomach draw tight, and today was no different.

Today was worse. And on top of that, Nicodemus was smiling.

I am lost already, she thought.

Nicodemus was a sheer, high, dizzying cliff and she’d spent ten years fighting hard to keep from toppling off. Because she still had no idea what might become of her if she fell.

“You really are gloating,” she said, folding her arms over her chest and frowning at him. It was more of a smirk than a smile, she thought as she eyed him warily, and that too-bright gleam of a warmth like honey in his dark coffee gaze. “I don’t know why that surprises me, coming from you.”

“I’m not sure that gloating is the word I’d choose.”

He was lethal, pure and simple, and his dark gaze was too intent. It took everything she had to keep from turning and bolting for the door. This day was always coming, she told herself harshly. Accept it, because you can’t escape it.

Though she’d tried. God, but she’d tried.

“The first time I asked you to marry me you were how old?” he asked, his voice almost warm, as if he was sharing a fond reminiscence instead of their long, tortured history. “Twenty?”

“I was eighteen,” Mattie said crisply. She didn’t move as he roamed toward her. But she wanted to. She wanted to bolt for her childhood bedroom on the second floor and lock herself inside. She made herself lock her gaze to his, instead. “It was my debutante ball and you were ruining it.”

Nicodemus’s mocking little smile deepened, and Mattie fought not to flush with the helpless reaction he’d always caused in her. But she could still remember that single waltz her father had insisted she dance with him that night. Pressed up against his big body, much too close to his fierce, demanding gaze, and that mouth of his that had made her nothing but...nervous. And needy.

It still did. Damn him.

“Marry me,” he’d said instead of a greeting, almost as if he’d meant to let out some kind of curse, instead.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said, holding Nicodemus’s dark, dark eyes as if they hadn’t bitten deep into her, making her chest feel tight. She’d been a brash girl when she’d wanted to be, back then, forever attempting to get her father’s attention, but her voice had been small. He had terrified her. Or maybe that wasn’t terror, that overwhelming thing that had swamped her, fierce and instantaneous, but she hadn’t known what else to call it. “I don’t want to marry you. Or anyone.”

He’d laughed as if she’d delighted him. “You will.”

“I will never want to marry you,” she’d told him stoutly, some kick of temper—or self-preservation—in her gut making her bold. She’d been eighteen. And it hadn’t been lost on her that Nicodemus was not one of the silly boys she’d known then. He’d been very much a man.

He’d smiled at her as if he knew her and it had connected hard to her throat, her chest, her belly. Below. It had made her toes cramp up inside her ferociously high shoes.

“You’ll marry me, princess.” He’d seemed certain. Amused, even. “You can count on it.”

He seemed even more amused now.

Nicodemus closed the distance between them almost lazily, but Mattie knew better. There was nothing lazy about him, ever. It was all misdirection and only the very foolish believed it.

“Have we ever determined what was wrong with you that you wanted to marry a teenager in the first place?” she asked him now, trying to divert whatever was coming. But he only stopped a scant few inches in front of her. “Couldn’t find a woman your own age?”

Nicodemus didn’t reply. He reached over and raked his fingers through the long, dark hair she decided instantly she needed to cut off, then wrapped it all around his hand, like he was putting her on a leash.

Then he gave it a tug. Not a gentle one. And she felt it deep between her legs, like a flare of dark pleasure.

Mattie wanted to smack his hand away, but that glinting thing in his dark gaze dared her to try, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction when she was already tilting her head back at an angle that made a dangerous heat kindle to bright life inside her. Then build.

“That hurts,” she told him, horrified that there was a hint of thickness in her throat when she spoke. That gave him ammunition. It couldn’t be allowed.

“No, it doesn’t.” He sounded as certain as he had when she’d been eighteen, and it was infuriating. No matter if it made everything inside her tilt again and then tighten.

“I realize I’ve been bartered off like chattel,” she bit out. “But it’s still my hair. I know how it feels when someone pulls it.”

His smile deepened. “You lie about everything, Mattie,” he murmured, the slap of the words at jarring odds with the way he crooned them, leaning in close. “You break your word the way other women break their nails.”

“I break those, too.” It was like she couldn’t stop herself. “If this has all been a bid for the perfect, polished trophy wife, Nicodemus, you’re going to find me a grave disappointment.”

He laughed softly, which wasn’t remotely soothing, and tugged again, and it wasn’t the first time Mattie regretted the fact that she was both tall and entirely too vain. Five feet ten inches in her bare feet, and the gorgeous black boots she was wearing today put her at a good six feet and then some. Which meant that when Nicodemus loomed over her and got too close to her, that mouth of his was right there. Not miles above her, which was safer. Within easy reach—and she imagined he was deliberately standing this close to her because he wanted to remind her of that.

Like she—or her shuddering, jolting pulse she could feel in a variety of worrying places—would be likely to forget.

“I told you a long time ago that this day would come,” Nicodemus said now.

“And I told you that I wasn’t going to change my mind,” she replied, though it cost her a little more than it should have to keep her chin up and her gaze steady on his. “I haven’t. You can’t really believe that this grotesque, medieval form of blackmail is the same as me surrendering to you, can you?”

“What do I care how you come to me?” he replied in that low, amused voice of his that kicked up brushfires inside her as it worked its way through her and made her feel a delicious sort of weak. “You mistake me for a good man, Mattie. I’m merely a determined one.”

And despite herself, Mattie remembered a long, formal dinner in Manhattan’s Museum of Natural History for some charity or another and her father’s insistence that she sit with Nicodemus, who, he’d informed her when she’d balked, was like another son to him. A far-better-behaved one, he’d added. Mattie had been all of twenty-two—and infuriated.

“I’m not trying to change your mind, princess,” Nicodemus had told her in a voice pitched for her ears alone, at odds with the way he’d spoken to others that night—mighty and sure, bold and harsh. He’d shifted in his seat and pinned her to hers with that knowing dark glare of his she’d come to know far too well. “We both know how this will end. Your father will indulge you to a certain point, but then reality will assert itself. And the longer you make me wait, the more I’ll have to take it out of your rebellious little hide when you’re where you belong. In my bed. Under my...” He’d paused, his dark eyes had glittered, and she’d felt it as if he’d licked the soft skin of her belly. Like a kind of glorious, transformative pain. His lips had crooked. “Roof.”

“What an inviting fantasy,” Mattie had retorted, aware he hadn’t meant to say roof at all. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping me from leaping at the opportunity to experience that great joy.”

“Suit yourself,” he’d replied. He’d shrugged, but she’d been far too aware that every inch of him was hewn of steel, that he was himself a deadly weapon. She’d felt the power he wore so easily like a thick, hot hand at her throat. Worse, she’d been aware of that part of her that craved it. Him. More. “I have a very long memory, Mattie, and a very creative approach to retribution. Consider yourself forewarned.”

“Be still my beating heart,” she’d snipped at him, and then had tried her best to ignore him.

It hadn’t worked then. It didn’t work now.

“Will we reminisce all day?” she asked, injecting a note of boredom into her voice that she dearly wished she felt while he continued to hold her immobile. “Or do you have a plan? I’m unfamiliar with the ins and outs of blackmail, you see. You’ll have to show me how it’s done.”

“You’re free to refuse me yet again.”

“And lose my father’s company in the process.”

“All choices have consequences, princess.” He shrugged, much the same way he had at that benefit dinner. “Your father would have been the first to tell you that.”

That he was right only infuriated her more.

“My father was misguided enough to consider you like a son to him,” Mattie said, and there was no keeping the emotion at bay then. It clogged her throat, made her eyes heat. But she didn’t care if he saw this, she told herself. This wasn’t the emotion that would destroy her. “He adored you. He thought more highly of you than he did of Chase, at times.” She paused, as much to catch her breath and keep from crying as for effect. “And look how you’ve chosen to repay him.”

She’d expected that to be a blow to him, but Nicodemus only laughed again then dropped his hand from her hair, and it took everything Mattie had not to rub the spot where he’d touched her. The worst part was, she didn’t know if she wanted to wipe away his touch or hold it in. She never had. He canted his head to one side as he studied her face and then laughed some more.

“Your father thought I should have dragged you off by your hair years ago,” he said with such lazy certainty that Mattie flushed with the unpleasant understanding that he was telling the truth. That Nicodemus and her father had discussed her like that. “Especially during what he liked to call your ‘unfortunate’ period.”

She flushed even darker, and hated that it hurt. And she suddenly had no trouble at all imagining her father discussing her regrettable, motherless and rudderless early twenties with Nicodemus, no matter how much it scraped at her and felt like a betrayal.

“I did the best I could,” she bit out, and she broke then, because that was scraping a bit too close to truths she didn’t dare voice, and that terrible guilt that lay beneath everything. She stepped back and would have put even more distance between them, but Nicodemus’s hand shot out and wrapped around her upper arm, stopping her that easily.

She refused to think about the impossible strength in that hand, much less its dark heat, no matter that it blasted into her through the soft, black cashmere knit of her dress. She wouldn’t think about it and she wouldn’t react to it. She wouldn’t.

“You know very well that you did not do anything remotely like your best,” he said evenly, with only the faintest hint of old tempers and half-remembered harsh words in his voice. “You made it your business to shame your father. I would say you shamed your family name, but we both know your brother had that well in hand. How a great man like your father managed to raise two such useless, ungrateful, overly entitled children remains one of life’s greatest mysteries.”

Chase was right. Her father might have agreed with Nicodemus while he’d lived, but Mattie couldn’t let herself live down to those low expectations any longer. She could smell the leather again, feel the heat of the South African sun. Then the screech—

“Almost everyone is useless, ungrateful and overly entitled in their early twenties,” she told him, forcing herself to face him, to hold that judgmental gaze of his, and not try to jerk out of his hold. She suspected he wouldn’t let go, and then what? “The trick is not remaining any of those things.”

“Some of us had far more serious things to do in our early twenties, Mattie. Like survive.”

So pompous. So full of himself. But better that than he know anything real or true about her. That was the only way she was going to make it through this.

“Yes, Nicodemus,” she said with an exaggerated sweetness he couldn’t mistake for anything but sarcasm. “You’re a self-made man, as you’re the first to point out at every opportunity. Alas, we can’t all be you.”

His fingers flexed against her arm and she hated the arrow of fire that shot from that faintest contact straight into her sex. She hated that her body had never cared how dangerous this man was, no matter how panicked her brain might be.

He’d proposed again when she’d been twenty-four.

Mattie had been dancing for hours in a dress that was really more of a wicked suggestion with a few cleverly placed straps, a cheeky selection for a night out in London. Then she’d walked outside the club to find him waiting there at the private, paparazzi-free back entrance, leaning up against a muscular little sports car parked illegally in the alley with his arms folded over his powerful chest.

For a moment, Nicodemus had only stared at her, his mouth a sardonic curve and his dark, honeyed gaze alight with a fire that did not bode well for her.

But Mattie hadn’t been a teenager anymore, so she’d dug out a cigarette and lit it as if his presence didn’t bother her at all. Then she’d blown out a stream of smoke into the cool night air, like it was a defensive weapon she could use against him.

“Why bother with those pointless scraps of fabric at all?” he’d asked her, his voice a scrape against the night and a scrape straight down the middle of her, as if his words had their own claws. “Why not simply walk around naked?”

“It’s cute that you think it’s your business what I wear,” she’d said with deliberate nonchalance. As if he’d bored her. She’d wished, not for the first time, that he had.

Nicodemus’s gaze had slammed into her then, making her feel hollow. Dizzy. As drunk and as dangerously out of control as she’d been trying to remain during these blurry, pointless, post-collegiate years. It had reminded her who and what he was. Harshly.

“Oh,” he’d said dangerously. “It’s my business, Mattie. It’s all my business. All the men you let touch you. All the nights you flaunt that body of yours for the world to see. The courtesan’s ring in your belly you show off every time you let them photograph you in various states of undress. That tattoo I warned you not to put on your body. Those filthy cigarettes you use to pollute yourself. Believe me, it’s my business.”

He’d straightened from his obnoxiously hot car while he spoke, and then he’d stood over her, one of the few men she knew who was taller than she was despite her dramatic heels, and she’d told herself she hated the way he made her feel—that shivery, panicky, out of control fire that had burned through her when his dark eyes had fixed on her.

He could take everything, she’d thought then. He could take all of her and she’d be lost, and then what happened when he discovered the truth? What happened when this fire was gone and there was nothing between them but the awful truth of what she’d made happen?

“If you were as smart as you pretend to be, you might realize that I don’t care what you want or what you think,” she’d told him while her heart had slowed then beat harder. Much harder. “Because I don’t. You should find someone who does. I’m sure there’s a website for compliant little girls looking for big, bad billionaires to obey. You could be playing lord and master of your own private castle in a week, tops.”

His lips had quirked, which on any other man might have meant laughter, but it was Nicodemus, with those stern, dark eyes that had drilled into her with all of his disturbingly fierce patience. It had disrupted her breathing.

“Marry me, Mattie. Don’t make this even worse on yourself than it already is.”

“Why?” she’d asked, almost helplessly.

“Because I want you,” he’d said, sounding very nearly grim, as if it was an imposition, that wanting. A trial for him. “And I always get what I want.”

“I’d rather swallow my own tongue,” she’d replied, a wave of a kind of despair swelling in her, because she knew better than to consider the things she wanted. What was the point, when she couldn’t have any of them? “I’d rather impale myself on a—”

“You’re a very foolish girl.” He’d shaken his head, muttering something dark in Greek. “But you’re mine.”

Then he’d jerked her toward him with one hand on her shoulder, knocked the cigarette from her fingers with the other and slammed his mouth to hers.

And all of that dark wonder had simply burst within her. Hunger and heat. That damned harsh mouth of his like a kind of miracle against hers. Claiming her. Branding her.

Shaking her to her core.

But she’d kissed him back, despite everything. She’d tasted him until she’d thought she really was as drunk as she sometimes acted. She’d fallen apart in his arms as if she’d been waiting her whole life for him to taste her. As if she’d always known it would be like that.

On some level, she had.

Fire. Panic. An instant and impossible addiction that had already gnawed at her, even while he’d still been taking his lazy, devastating fill of her mouth, as lethal and sure in the way he’d kissed her as in everything else.

“I told you,” he’d growled into her mouth when she’d been limp and useless against him. “You’re mine. You always have been. You always will be. How long do you plan to draw this out?”

Mattie had stared at him, unable to speak with all of those dark and wondrous things moving in her, and he’d smiled then, as close to tender as she’d ever seen him. It had transformed his dark face. It had made him something far more dangerous than simply gorgeous.

So she’d run in the opposite direction.

“Play your games, princess,” he’d said, harsh and amused as she’d fled from him. Certain, the way he always was. “When you come to me, I will make you crawl.”

She’d believed him.

“No,” he said, yanking her back into the dangerous here and now. His hand was on her arm, and that heat was stampeding through her and this time, there was no hope of escape. “We can’t all be me. But you can certainly learn how to please me, Mattie. And if I were you, I’d learn it fast.”

It was another threat. Or more of a promise, she supposed. Because despite everything, despite how long and how far she’d run from this man, he’d won. The way he’d always told her he would.

“I’ve never really been a quick learner,” she told him with a kind of manic cheerfulness, because she couldn’t let herself think about what pleasing him might entail. God help her, but she didn’t dare. “Oops. One more disappointment for you to swallow, I’m afraid.”

CHAPTER TWO

HE’D WON.

That was what mattered, Nicodemus told himself as he looked down into the lovely, rebellious face of this woman who had defied him and haunted him across the years, and somehow willed himself not to put her over his knee. Or under him right here on the library floor.

He took a breath, the way he would if this was as simple as the business deal he was pretending it was. Then another, and still she watched him like he was an animal, and she was half-afraid she might pick up a few fleas if she stood too close.

Nicodemus couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel jubilant. Wildly triumphant. Instead of this same dark fury that always beat in him when she looked at him like this, so recklessly defiant when the fact he would win could never have been in any doubt.

He made himself let go of her, though it was hard. Too hard, when everything inside him beat like a tight, taut drum and he wanted nothing more than to bury himself in her, at last. To ride out his victory until she screamed his name the way he’d always known she would, to taste her and learn her and take her, over and over, until this vicious hunger was sated.

Because he was certain it would be sated once he had her. It had to be.

But that would come later.

“Sit,” he ordered her, jerking his chin in the direction of two deep, dark brown leather armchairs before the nearest fireplace. “I’ll tell you how this will work.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very promising start to the marriage you’ve been threatening me with for years,” she said in her usual flippant, disrespectful way that he really shouldn’t find as amusing as he did. Like it was foreplay. “In fact, if you ask me, it sounds like the kind of marriage that will lead to a very big, very public divorce in approximately eighteen months, or as soon as I can escape and file.”

“You won’t escape,” he said, nodding toward the chairs again, and less politely. “Though you’re welcome to try. I’d be happy to chase you down and haul you back.”

He was rewarded with that dark blue glare of hers that had been making him ache with a driving need for almost as long as he’d known her. He smiled and was rewarded with the faintest hint of a shiver that she tried to hide.

She settled herself in the far chair with that wholly unearned grace of hers that he’d found nothing short of marvelous since the day they’d met. Mattie Whitaker had never suffered through any awkward phase as far as Nicodemus could tell. She’d been a gleaming bright beacon at sixteen, with her half-American, half-posh-British accent she’d wielded like a sword, even then. At eighteen, she’d been magnificent, pure and simple. From her glossy blue-black hair to her rich, dark blue eyes, to that wide mouth that should have been outlawed. She’d had poise and elegance far beyond her years, a consequence, he’d decided long ago, of having had to play hostess for her father after her mother had died when she was only eight.

He’d walked into that silly ball, that leftover nod to some gilded-age American fantasy he couldn’t begin to understand, and had been struck dumb. Like she’d been a lightning bolt instead of what she was, what he knew she was: one more pretty little rich girl in a sparkling dress.

But God help him, it was how she’d sparkled.

She’d been so careless—thoughtless and spoiled as only wealthy heiresses could be. He’d suffered through that once already back in Greece, with self-centered, deceitful Arista, who’d nearly taken him to his knees and to the cleaners when he’d been twenty-two and a trusting, stupid fool. He’d vowed he’d never trust so easily nor be so deeply foolish again.

But there was something about Mattie that had drawn him in despite that. He’d watched her careen through all her blessings as if she hardly noticed them. He’d studied the way she’d shrugged off her expensive schools and the featherweight jobs she’d taken afterward, in publishing companies or art galleries or the like that paid so little only heiresses could afford to work at them. Or only occasionally work at them, in her case.

Nicodemus watched her now as she leveled that frank gaze of hers at him, her dark eyes serious, though they were the precise color of after-dinner chocolates with that intriguing shimmer of darker blue. She could be flighty and reckless and sometimes attention-seeking, but she was also intelligent. He’d long suspected she liked to pretend otherwise, for her own murky reasons. Another mystery he looked forward to solving.

“I think it’s time you told me what this is really about,” she said, and she reminded him of her father then, with that matter-of-fact tone and her direct gaze. Nicodemus pulled in a breath. “I mean it,” she said as if that had been an argument. “I don’t believe for one second that there aren’t parades of more suitable heiresses if an heiress is what you want. Prettier ones, if that’s your thing. Richer ones, certainly. Far more notorious ones and one or two who might as well have spent their lives in a convent. You’ve always struck me as being particularly annoying—” and there was the faintest hint of that dent beside her mouth that he knew was a dimple, that he’d spent many a lazy hour longing to taste “—but there’s no denying the fact that you’d be a nice catch. You’re disgustingly wealthy. You’re very powerful. You’re not exactly Quasimodo.”

“What a resounding recommendation,” he said, torn between laughter and incredulity that she dared speak to him the way she did. She always had. Only Mattie, in all the world. Maybe that was why she haunted him. “Who wouldn’t marry me?”

She eyed him for a moment that bordered on the uncomfortable. “Why me?”

And what could he tell her? That he’d been hit by something he still didn’t understand? He didn’t believe that himself. Nicodemus got what he wanted, no matter what it took. It was how he’d clawed his way to where he was today. It was how he’d first claimed Arista, then rid himself of her and her sharp claws. It was how he’d survived learning the truth about his stern, rigidly moralistic father and what his exposing that truth had done to his mother. It was what he did. Why should this woman be any different? He told himself that was all there was to it.

He’d been telling himself that for years.

He forced a smile. “I like you. That’s why.”

“If you do,” she said drily, “then I suspect you might be mentally ill.”

“Perhaps I am.” He shrugged. “Does that make me less of a catch? A little more Quasimodo than you thought?”

He’d meant to simply outline what would happen from here now that she’d finally come to him. Lay down the law with the supreme pleasure of knowing that this time, she’d do as she was told. Because this time, she had to do it.

And he hadn’t lied to her. He never lied. He didn’t care how she came to him. Angry or on her knees, whatever worked. Nicodemus didn’t waste much time worrying about the cost of Pyrrhic victories. It was the victory itself that mattered.

It was the only thing that mattered.

“It makes you much more likely to find yourself committed to a mental institution by your devoted wife one day,” Mattie was saying. She smiled that fake smile of hers. “Depending on the fine print of our prenuptial agreement, of course.”

She was eyeing him with a certain mild arrogance, as if she was the one with all the power here. When he could tell—from the way she sat with her legs crossed tight and her arms over her middle, from the telltale fluttering of her pulse at her neck and that faint flush high on her cheeks—that she knew she was on precarious ground.

But then, so many things about this woman were an act. Smoke and mirrors. And he vowed he would find the truth beneath it all no matter how long it took him. He would take her apart and put her back together the way he wanted her.

He’d been waiting for this—for her—for years.

“We marry in two weeks,” he said, watching her face as he said it. Something flashed through her dark eyes, but then he saw nothing but that polite mask of hers that he’d always known better than to believe. “It will be a very small ceremony in Greece. You, me, a priest and a photographer. We will honeymoon for two weeks at my villa there. Then we will return to Manhattan, where your brother and I will finally merge our companies, as was the wish of both your father and me.” He smiled and let her see the edge in it. “See? Simple. Hardly worth all this commotion for so many years.”

“And what is my part of this?” she asked as if she couldn’t care less either way.

“During the wedding I expect you to obediently recite your vows,” he said silkily. “Perhaps even with a touch of enthusiasm. During the honeymoon? I have a few ideas. And ten years of a very vivid imagination to bring to life, at last.”

There was no denying the flush that moved over her face then, or that look of something like panic that she blinked away in an instant. Not touching her then very nearly hurt—though wanting Mattie was second nature to him now. What was waiting a little bit longer after a decade?

Besides, he suspected that his feigned laziness drove her crazy, and he wanted any weapon he could find with this woman he still couldn’t read. Not the way he wanted to read her.

“I meant when we return in all our marital splendor to New York City,” she said, and it occurred to him to wonder if it was difficult for her to render her voice so loftily indifferent. If it was a skill she’d acquired once and could put on whenever she liked or if she had to work at it every time. “I have my own apartment there. A life, a job. Of course, I’m happy to live separately—”

“I’m not.”

She blinked. Then smiled. “I doubt very much you’d enjoy moving into my tiny little two-bedroom. It’s very girlie and I don’t think you’d look good in all that pink.”

She reached into one of the pockets he hadn’t realized she had in that dress of hers to pull out a cigarette and a lighter, then lit the cigarette, watching him blandly as she blew out a stream of smoke.

“Enjoy that cigarette, Mattie,” he told her mildly. “It will be your last.”

She let out another stream of smoke. “Will it?”

“I have very specific ideas about how my wife will behave,” he said, and smiled when that coolly unbothered front of hers slipped slightly. “That she will live in my house and that she will not work, if that’s what you call it, at that laughable excuse for a public relations firm in all those see-through clothes.”

“I see. This will be a medieval marriage, to go along with the Stone Age courtship rituals we’ve been enjoying thus far. What a thrill.”

He ignored her. “I have certain expectations regarding her behavior. Her style of dress, her comportment. The lack of cigarettes sticking from her mouth, making her smell and taste like an ashtray.” He shrugged. “The usual.”

She held the cigarette in one hand, not looking the least bit worried, though that faint tremor in the hand that held that cigarette told a different story, and stared at him. “I understand that this is all a big chess game to you, Nicodemus, with me playing the role of the most convenient pawn—”

“More the queen than a pawn. Unpredictable and hard to pin down, but once that’s sorted, the game is over.” He smiled when she frowned.

“I hate chess.”

“Then perhaps you should choose a better metaphor.”

“I’m a person,” she told him, and he thought that was temper that made each word like a blade. Her dark eyes blazed with heat. And fear. And yet her voice was cool, and he wanted her with that desperate edge that made him loathe himself. The wanting was fine. The desperation was not. He’d thought he’d outgrown that kind of thing when he’d shaken Arista off. “And this is not, despite all appearances to the contrary, the twelfth century—”

“Then why are you marrying me?” he asked, making no attempt to keep that lash from his voice. “You don’t have to do it, as you’ve pointed out. There’s no gun to your head.”

“A merger between our two companies will strengthen both, and bolster Chase’s position as CEO,” she replied after a moment, something shrewd and sad in her gaze. “It changes the conversation he’s been having with the board and the shareholders, anyway. And of course, you’d become the COO, and you’ve proved you’re very good at operating companies and making piles of money. But you don’t have to marry me to make that happen.”

“I don’t.” He shrugged. “I’m not the one crafting objections to this marriage and looking for explanations. You are.”

“But you won’t hold up your end of your business arrangement with Chase if I don’t agree to do this.” Her eyes darkened. “I want to be a hundred percent certain we’re both clear about who’s pressuring who in this.”

“I’m perfectly clear about it.” And practically cheerful, as he smiled at her obvious flash of temper. “But this is all more of these games you like to play, Mattie. We both know you’re going to marry me. You’ve known it since we met.”

She didn’t like that. He could see it on her face, stamped across those lovely cheeks of hers. But it didn’t change that simple truth. Nothing ever had.

“I haven’t done it yet,” she pointed out quietly. “I’m not sure I’d get carried away counting my chickens if I were you.”

He laughed then. “I’m going to enjoy teaching you the appropriate way to respond to your husband, Mattie. I really am.” He leaned forward, took that nasty cigarette from her and tossed it into the fire without looking away from her. “I’m marrying you because I want you. I always have. More than that, I want to merge my company with your father’s, and I want the link between us to be strong. I want to be part of the family, so there can never be any question about who deserves a seat at the table. That means marriage. Babies. A very long life together, because I don’t believe in separations or divorce. Or secrets.”

Especially the secrets, he thought, shoving those terrible old memories aside. The lies and the devastation they’d wrought.

Mattie held his gaze for a long moment, something slick and glazed in hers. The only sound was the storm outside, harsh against the windows, and the crackle of the fire. He fancied he could hear her breath below that, too fast and uneven, betraying her—but he doubted she’d let that show and assumed it was only in his head. More wishful thinking, and he should know better.

“What you mean is, I’m a pawn,” she said evenly. “You can say it, Nicodemus. It’s not as if I don’t know it already.”

“And you’re marrying me because...?” His lips curved when she only glared at him. “You enjoy playing the martyr? You’ve always wanted to barter yourself? You have a deep desire to prostrate yourself before the ambitions of others?”

“Family duty,” she said primly. Piously. “I don’t expect you to understand that.”

“Of course not,” he said, and he wasn’t laughing then. “Because everything I have I tore from the world with my own two hands. My father never believed I would amount to anything.” And he did his best to see that I wouldn’t, Nicodemus thought grimly, those same old lies like painful scars deep inside him. “My mother cleaned houses and worked in the factories. The only thing they gave me was life. The rest I worked for.”

And held on to, despite the best effort of grasping materialistic little parasites like Arista.

“No one ever said you weren’t an impressive man, Nicodemus,” Mattie said to him. “But what does it have to do with anything? You’ve been chasing me for so long, I think you don’t even know why you started.”

“No, Mattie,” he said gently. Too gently, maybe. He thought that might have been the trouble from the start. He’d treated her like she was made of glass, and she’d done nothing but cut him with her own sharp edges. It was time he remembered that.

It was time he took control of this.

Her cheeks were flushed and her mouth was so close, and he’d waited so long. He could see the panic in her eyes as she looked back at him, the rise and fall of her perfect breasts against that unfathomably soft dress she wore. He couldn’t stop himself from reaching over and taking her hot cheek in his hand, holding her there and tracing her lips with a single restless movement of his thumb.

He watched her redden, felt himself tighten at once in reaction, and it was like that lightning all over again. A bolt, brilliant and true, burning him alive where he sat.

It had damned them from the start. It had made all of this inevitable.

And made it worth it. He’d been sure of that, too.

“I’ve always known why,” Nicodemus told her, and it was as close to the truth as he could get. The rest hung around them in all that white-hot heat, wrapping them both in the same wild hunger. He could see it in her face, in that bright blue sheen in her dark eyes. He felt it in his own flesh. He smiled. “It’s you who have been confused. But you won’t be for very much longer.”

* * *

They were high over the Atlantic Ocean with nothing but darkness on all sides before Mattie gave up on her internal battle and the magazine she hadn’t read a single word of no matter how fiercely she’d scowled at it. She finally stopped pretending and looked down the creamy, gold-edged interior of the private jet to where Nicodemus sat, looking for all the world like the wholly unconcerned king of his very own castle.

He was sprawled out at the table, sheaves of papers spread out before him and his laptop at his elbow, looking studious and masculine and very much like the deeply clever, world-renowned multimillionaire she was grudgingly aware he was. His dark hair looked tousled, like he’d been running his hands through it, and despite herself, her breath caught.

And he either felt her gaze on him or he heard that telling little catch, because his dark eyes snapped to hers at once.

“Has the silent treatment ended, then?” he asked, dry and amused and so very, very patronizing. “And here I’d got used to the quiet.”

Mattie had been doing such a good job of ignoring him up until then. He’d left her in her father’s house that day with no more than an enigmatic smile, and that had been that. He’d simply...let her stew for the next week and a half with no further threat or argument or input from him.

Mattie had considered running away, naturally. She’d dreamed it at night. She’d gone so far as to plot it all out. One day she’d even booked a plane ticket to Dunedin, New Zealand, tucked away on the bottom of the planet, the farthest place she could find on the map. But despite her wildest fantasies and several more detailed internet searches involving far-off mountain ranges and remote deserts, when Nicodemus had appeared at her door to whisk her off to Greece earlier this evening, Mattie had been there.

Waiting for him, as promised, like a good little arranged bride. Like the daughter she’d never been while her father was alive, as she’d been too busy veering between acting out or acting perfect to get his attention. She’d even packed.

Nicodemus had shouldered his way into her airy, comfortable apartment, walking in that lethally confident way of his that had made a shiver whisper down the length of her spine. She’d assured herself it was anxiety and not something far more feminine and appreciative. Her apartment was in a prewar building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, replete with lovely old moldings, scrupulously maintained hardwood floors and soaring ceilings that made the place seem twice its actual size. And yet Nicodemus made it feel like a closet-size studio simply by standing in it. Like a tiny, claustrophobic box. He was too alive. Too much. He’d nodded at her bags, his people had whisked them away and then he was simply...standing there in a very small, enclosed space. Her space.

Like it was already his. Like she was.

Mattie had refused to entertain that crazy little part of her that had melted at the notion. It would all be so much easier if he was less brutally gorgeous, she’d thought furiously. He wore a dark, fine sweater that did marvelous things for his already too perfect torso and an open wool coat cut to add warmth and elegance, not bulk. And his dark trousers looked both rugged and luxurious at once. He was a remarkably attractive man. There was no getting around it. She’d hated the fact she couldn’t ignore that truth. Even when she’d known perfectly well he’d been there, shrinking down her living room and making her skin feel two sizes too tight, for the singular purpose of towing her off to do his bidding.

The fact that she’d be married to him in a handful of days had felt impossible. Ludicrous. And every time she met his too-knowing gaze, she felt like he’d lit her on fire and tossed her headfirst into a vat of gasoline.

“None of this is pink or even particularly girlie,” he’d said, his harsh mouth curved with that sardonic amusement that had made her feel much too jittery. She’d felt stretched thin between a reckless hunger and a driving panic already, and she’d been back in his clutches all of five minutes. His dark eyes had held hers, hard and mocking at once. “You really do lie about everything, don’t you?”

“Are you really starting out our glorious Two Weeks of Love by calling me a liar?” she’d asked, and she didn’t care how brittle she sounded. How cold and obvious. She’d let out a laugh that hadn’t sounded any better. “That bodes well.”

“I suppose it must be me,” he’d said quietly, eyeing her in a way that had made her feel flushed and flustered while something deep in her gut knotted into a red-hot fist. “If I stood in the pouring rain you’d tell me the sky was the brightest blue you’d ever seen. I inspire this in people, apparently. Especially women. I think you should worry about what will happen, Mattie, when I figure out how to read the truth no matter what lies you choose to tell me. Because I will.”

“I’ve worried about very little else since that delightful meeting at my father’s house,” she assured him.

“Another lie.”

“That was actually the truth. Amazing, I know.”

And he’d reached over and taken hold of her chin like that was his right, the way her body had seemed to think it was as it had burst into all those hectic fireworks and roaring brushfires, nearly knocking her from her feet where she stood.

“That’s not what you’re worried about,” Nicodemus had said, much too close and entirely too sure, as if he could taste that humming need in her that she’d wanted so badly to deny.

Mattie had decided right then and there that she needed to stop talking to him. It was too dangerous. Especially if it led him to put his hands on her.

She’d told herself she was relieved when he let her go again without pressing the issue, but it wasn’t quite that simple. There were the aftershocks to consider—the rumbling, jagged tectonics that shifted and reshaped everything inside her no matter that she didn’t want any of it.

But Mattie was nothing if not pointlessly stubborn. She’d maintained her silence all through the car ride out to the private airfield in the suburbs of Manhattan, through the boarding of the sleek Stathis company jet that waited there and their several hours of flight en route to what he’d called my small, private island in the Aegean Sea.

Because of course Nicodemus had an island, the better to make absolutely certain that Mattie was completely and utterly trapped with him, truly forced to marry him if she ever wanted to leave it again. That or hope she could swim for the mainland. Across the Aegean Sea. In October.

“That wasn’t the silent treatment,” she said now, stretching her legs out in front of her as if she felt as carefree and relaxed as he apparently did.

He shook his head in that way of his that reverberated inside her like another press of his strong fingers against her skin. “I don’t understand why you bother to lie when you must have realized by now that I can see right through you.”

“I merely ran out of things to say to you,” Mattie said loftily. “I imagine that will happen quite often. Yet one more sad consequence of a forced marriage like ours—a lifetime of boredom and silence while stuck together in our endless private hell.”

His lips twitched. “It’s not your silence I find hellish.”

She nodded as if she’d expected that. “Resorting to insults. Quiet little threats. This is what happens when you blackmail someone into marrying you, Nicodemus, and we’re not even married yet. I did try to warn you.”

“There’s no reason to resort to anything quite so unpleasant,” he said silkily, leaning back in his chair. He tossed his pen down on the polished wood surface, and then the heat in his gaze made the narrow walls of the plane seem to contract in on her—or perhaps that was nothing more than the wild drumming of her pulse. “I’m sure we can find any number of things to do that don’t require words.”

Mattie rolled her eyes. “Veiled sexual threats aren’t any less threatening simply because they’re sexual,” she said. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Is that why you’re turning red?” he asked lazily. “Because you feel threatened?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head again, slower this time. “Liar.”

She reminded herself that just because he was right it didn’t mean anything. He didn’t know that he had this insane effect on her. He only hoped he did.

“I’m assuming you have some idea of how this works,” she carried on, because now that she’d started poking at him, the idea of returning to that heavy silence was stifling. She was afraid it would crush her. “Now that you’re in the process of isolating me from everything familiar, as most men like you do.”

“Men like me,” he said, and there was a dark current in his voice that was either laughter or something far more treacherous, and she felt the uncertainty, the edginess, everywhere. “Are there many? And here I’d considered myself a special snowflake—almost an American, I’m so remarkably unique.”

“It’s a typical pattern,” she assured him and smiled kindly. “Run of the mill, really.”

“If you’re attempting to shame me into releasing you,” he said drily, “you have seriously misjudged your target.”

“No one is actually shameless, Nicodemus,” she said, and her voice softened somehow—lost that cool, mocking edge. She had no idea why. “No matter what they pretend.”

“Perhaps not,” he agreed, shifting slightly against his seat, though he never took that hot, hard gaze from hers. “But you don’t know me well enough to even guess at the things that crawl in me and call my name in my darkest hours. You wouldn’t recognize them if you did.”

There wasn’t a single reason that should take her breath away, or why her stomach should flip over, and so Mattie told herself it was a patch of turbulence, nothing more.

“You seem to want to make this a squalid little transaction,” he said when she didn’t throw something back at him, and she couldn’t read the expression on his face then. He lounged back in his chair, propping his head up with one hand, and looked at her. Just looked at her. As if her layers of clothes and even her skin were no barrier whatsoever. As if he could see straight through to what lay beneath. “As painful and as horrid as possible.”

“It is what it is,” she said. “I have no idea how these barbaric arrangements work. Will you check my teeth like I’m a horse? Kick my tires like I’m a used car you bought off the internet?”

Something sharp and hot, a little too much like satisfaction, flared in the honeyed depths of his dark gaze, and his harsh mouth pulled into a very dangerous curve.

“If you insist,” he said, lazy and low.

Mattie went still. She felt her eyes widen and could see from that gleam in his gaze that he saw it.

For God’s sake! the hysterical part of her—currently occupying almost every part of her save her big mouth—shrieked. What is the matter with you? Don’t challenge him! Stop this right now before it gets out of hand!

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he practically purred, reading her much too easily. Again. “Was that yet another example of your mouth getting you into trouble? It’s either lying to me or provoking me, I notice. It does make me wonder what it would be like to put it to better use.”

He was right, Mattie realized. If he was truly the man she’d been treating him like he was, she’d be significantly more respectful and careful around him, wouldn’t she? The truth was, she knew he wasn’t. She couldn’t believe that he’d really do this. She didn’t believe it, even though she was currently suspended somewhere over the ocean on her way to Greece.

Granted, he was doing an excellent job of acting like a scary, overwhelming, my-way-or-the-highway barbarian, but she’d known this man for years. More important, her father had genuinely liked him. Had even considered him a good match for his only daughter. She simply couldn’t make herself believe that Nicodemus would honestly force her to marry him.

Much less any of the other things he wasn’t quite threatening to do, that were pressing into her so hard now that she was certain they’d leave marks.

“I wasn’t kidding,” she said, and she stood up then, uncoiling herself to stand there in the aisle before him. She opened up her arms and spread them wide, as theatrically as possible. “I’m sure the third richest man in Greece—”

“That’s rather less of a salutation than it might have been once,” he pointed out, that cool amusement in his gaze. “I can’t tell if you mean it as compliment or condemnation.”

“—doesn’t buy one of those crotch-rocket motorcycles of his without making sure it lives up to each and every one of his exacting standards,” Mattie continued as if he hadn’t interjected anything.

She’d seen him on a Ducati once, roaring up a winding country lane in France to a weekend party in a friend’s chateau she never would have attended if she’d known he’d be there. She’d escaped shortly thereafter, but she’d never been able to get that image out of her head. A powerful man on such a sleek and dangerous machine, like lethal poetry etched against the backdrop of vineyards turning gold in the setting sun, as if they’d been doing it purely to celebrate him.

She glared at him and held her crucifixion position. “Well? Here I am.”

Nicodemus’s dark eyes glittered, and he didn’t move, yet Mattie felt as if he’d leaped up and yanked her to him. She felt surrounded, smothered. And lit on fire.

He raised his shoulder in that profoundly Mediterranean way of his, then dropped it lazily.

“Go on, then,” he said, his voice this close to bored, though his gaze burned through her, churning up too much heat and that dangerous hunger she’d been denying for years now. “Strip. Show me what I’ve chased across all these years and bought, at last.”

CHAPTER THREE

MATTIE GAVE UP her charade of even, calm breaths. She stared at him—and he only smirked back at her.

Because he didn’t think she’d do it, she realized. He thought he’d push her the way he had outside that club in London—until she broke and ran.

Not this time, Mattie thought icily. If he wanted to act like the kind of man who bought wives, she’d act like the kind of woman who could be bought.

She dropped her arms and shrugged out of the long red sweater jacket she’d been using as much like a blanket as a coat. She tossed it on the leather bench beside her, then kicked off her short boots.

Nicodemus said nothing.

Mattie pulled her cashmere V-neck up and over her head, aware as she did it that a fair swathe of her belly was exposed as she stretched her arms over her head. She thought she heard him mutter something, but when her head was free again he was still right where she’d left him, still watching her as if this was the safety demonstration on a commercial flight and about as entertaining.

So she peeled off her tight T-shirt, too, and refused to allow herself a single shiver of response when his gaze dropped to move over her breasts and the burgundy-colored bra she wore. She didn’t move a muscle on the outside—but her stomach pulled itself into a tight, hard little ball and she could hardly breathe around the fire of it. She stood there, so hot and so long she was sure her skin matched the bra, and still, he took his time returning his gaze to hers.

“Do you like the merchandise?” she asked coolly.

“How can I tell?” he asked in a similar tone. “It remains covered. Surely not an attack of modesty, Mattie? Not after that topless shot that so entranced your adoring public two summers ago?”

“There’s nothing wrong with sunbathing topless on a yacht in the middle of an ocean,” Mattie said, and only when she heard her own voice did she realize how defensive she sounded. “I thought I was alone. Am I supposed to live my life wrapped up in a shroud on the off chance there might be a helicopter above me?”

“Perhaps you could simply pay slightly more attention to how you display your body,” Nicodemus suggested, with a hint of steel in his voice. “Particularly now that it’s mine.”

He watched her for a moment, and she felt too obvious, too exposed. He was right. It was silly. She’d worn dresses to banquets that covered less than what she was wearing right now. Why should this feel so much more intimate?

She decided she didn’t particularly want to explore that line of thought.

But she’d started this. She’d push it all the way to the finish. She’d push him.

“Do you have any other awkward, pathologically possessive remarks to make?” she asked, nothing but brisk politeness in her tone. “Do you perhaps feel the urge to fire up your company logo and brand it into my skin?”

That curve of his harsh mouth. That bright, hot gleam in his dark eyes. That languid, offhanded way he lounged there, as if he was something other than the most physically powerful man she’d ever let this close to her.

She swallowed, hard. Betraying herself. Nicodemus smiled.

“I’ll let you know,” he said, and then he inclined his head in a regal sort of way that was as infuriating as it was strangely attractive, silently bidding her to continue.

Mattie despaired of herself. But she leaned over and pulled off her socks then stood again and shimmied out of her skinny black jeans, kicking them out of her way when she was done. And then she stood there. In nothing but her bra and panties.

And told herself—over and over again—that it was like a bathing suit. It was fine. It was nothing.

Nicodemus’s gaze was so hot it hurt. But he still didn’t move.

“I can’t tell if this is modesty or a dramatic pause,” he said after a moment, his voice insultingly bland. “But it bores me.”

For the first time, a little trickle of fear dripped down the length of her spine, and it occurred to Mattie to wonder who was pushing who.... But she only lifted her chin up then reached behind her to unclip her bra. She pulled it from her body slowly, exposing one breast and then the other, and then she dropped it. He watched, a kind of fierce concentration stamped over his strong face. So she hooked her fingers in the sides of her panties and tugged them down to her knees, then let them fall the rest of the way to the floor so she could move them aside with her foot.

Then she was standing naked in front of Nicodemus Stathis, the bane of her existence, who was now her fiancé. Who would soon be her husband, if he had his way. Her mind shied away from all of that. The terms themselves. The reality.

And she was still completely and utterly naked.

Which was really not the best time to question the decision-making that had led her to this point—so Mattie held her head at a belligerent angle and waited, as if she was perfectly comfortable hanging around planes in the nude with infuriating men.

Nicodemus let out a low sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, and then he stood up. Mattie’s mouth went dry and for a stark, spinning second her mind blanked out.

He was too big for the plane—for the world, she thought wildly when she could think again, and certainly much bigger than he’d seemed when she’d had her clothes on—and he only took a single step closer then braced himself on the ceiling above them and left the rest of his lean, powerful body angled away from her. Looming and not looming at the same time.

It didn’t make him any less dangerous. Mattie didn’t feel remotely safe. But she didn’t dare examine what she felt too closely.

He frowned down at her, and it occurred to her that she should have paid more attention to the things he’d said before. About how little she knew him when they both knew he’d studied her very closely indeed over the past decade. It put her at a distinct disadvantage.

That and the fact she was naked.

“Why are you standing there?” She only blinked at him in confusion, and he made a spinning motion with one long finger. “Turn, please.”

She told herself he only wanted to humiliate her. To break her. And she was still holding out hope that he wouldn’t take this as far as he could. That this was all some kind of extended practical joke. Or, if not a joke, precisely, that he wanted to teach her some kind of lesson for rebuffing him all these years. He’d back down. He had to back down.

But that meant she couldn’t.

Mattie turned, and she took her time doing it. She even put her hips into it, so it was a little bit of a show—

Then she felt his hands on her. And froze.

It took her a moment to understand that it wasn’t a random touch, or even a particularly sexual one. He was tracing the delicate tattoo that flowed over one hip and up her side to cradle the lower edge of her ribs.

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