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