It was amazing how remote he could sound, he thought. As if these things had happened to someone else. But he could still feel his father’s security guards’ hands on him, his father’s foot against his neck, as he was held facedown in the dirt. He still remembered the stink and the din of that grotty cell.
“While I sat in jail, my mother died. And when I got out, Mattie, I dedicated my life to making certain that no one would ever use their wealth or power to get the better of me. And that no one would ever lie to my face again. I was sixteen, and I maintained this position for at least a couple of years. And then, when I was twenty and full of myself and all the new money I’d made running construction sites, I lost my head over the boss’s daughter.”
“Nicodemus,” she said in that thick, ragged way that he feared would be his undoing.
“Her name was Arista and she was much too pretty,” he said. “It blinded me. She took my money and my adulation and she liked what I could do for her in bed, but when it came time for her to marry she chose a rich boy from her social circle and laughed at me that I’d expected anything else. I was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe, nothing more. I thought I’d learned my lesson, at last.”
She looked at him for a long time, and Nicodemus wished things could be different. Wished all of this was different. And wishing had never led to anything but trouble.
His smile felt bitter. “And then I came to the States and I saw you. And you were everything I ever wanted, Mattie. More than I dared dream. Your father treated me better than my own ever had, and I could see all that heat in your eyes when you looked at me, and I knew you were the one I wanted. You and no one else.”
She jerked slightly. And when her gaze met his again, it was something more than troubled.
“You wanted a pretty girl you saw dancing at a party,” she said, very carefully. Very distinctly. “I could have been anyone. I could have been that girl in Greece. You didn’t know anything about me. You still don’t.”
“I love you,” he told her, because there was no point pretending any longer, and it didn’t matter, anyway. “And everything you’ve ever told me is a lie.”
Her breath caught, then came fast, like that flush across her cheeks and the upper slopes of her breasts. Her mouth opened, but she snapped it closed, and he saw a whole world of misery in those bittersweet eyes of hers.
Still, she said nothing. But then, had he expected anything else?
“And when I tell you I cannot abide liars, Mattie, I mean it. I mean this. I mean you.”
Everything had gone too dark, despite the golden light that made the room seem so cheerful, so bright. Too raw. Too stark. And she looked at him like he’d broken her heart. Like he’d torn her in two.
It said terrible things about him, he knew, that he wished he had. That he wished he could. That he wished she felt something for him when he knew—he knew—that would only make this that much worse.
“Tell me the truth,” he said then, his voice final, and he could see she heard it. “I won’t ask again.”
* * *
It was as if a thousand words fought inside her, pushing at her throat and making it feel tight, turning into the tears that pricked at the back of her eyes, running over her skin and into her veins like some kind of poison—but Mattie knew she didn’t dare open her mouth. She didn’t dare try to speak.
She knew, somehow, that she wouldn’t stop.
And the idea of that—of spilling her guts the way Nicodemus had done, of letting out all the brutal things that had lived inside her all this time—swelled in her like a terrible wave.
She couldn’t do it. She would rather he hate her forever for the things he thought he knew about her than tell him the truth and see it right there on his face. Unmistakable and real.
Mattie fought back a wave of panic and crawled to the edge of the bed, then onto her feet. Only then did she let the sheet drop, and was rewarded for that with the sharp sound of Nicodemus’s indrawn breath.
“Don’t play these games with me,” he warned her. “You didn’t like how it ended the last time you tried to manipulate me with sex.”
But he didn’t move from where he stood near the window, and that was what she focused on.
I love you, he’d said, and the words tumbled around and around inside her, picking up mass and speed with every second until she thought they were all she was. That and all the things she couldn’t say in return.
She moved closer to him, feeling that pull, that electricity that called to her whenever he was near. And now she knew what it meant. What it was promising.