His for a Price

“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—”