“Mattie.” He took her hands in his when she would have put them on his bare skin, and his face was grim again. Dark and forbidding, and that thing inside her that she’d always thought was broken because it only ever responded to him pulled taut. As attracted to his darkness as his light. Attracted, no matter what. “Just tell me the truth. Any truth, damn you.”
But she couldn’t do that. She didn’t know how.
All she’d ever done with Nicodemus was fight. Fight and lie, just as he accused her. It hadn’t been a strategy—it had only ever been survival.
And so, she told herself, was this.
She melted against him. She turned her head to kiss her way along his strong forearm, amazed when she felt him shudder. She tipped forward until her breasts pressed into his chest—and she smiled when he let out a stream of dark, evidently filthy Greek.
He let go of her hands.
And Mattie told him all the truths she knew in the only way she could.
She loved him with her mouth, her fingers, her cheeks against the expanse of his abdomen. She loved him the way she understood, now, she always had. He’d cast his shadow across the last ten years of her life, and she finally understood why.
Why she’d waited. Why she’d had boyfriends but had never felt right about taking that last step with them. Why she’d run so hard in the opposite direction every time she’d seen Nicodemus.
It was this. The things he wanted were uncompromising, exhilarating. The things she felt were the same.
Too much. Everything.
She couldn’t open herself up like that. She didn’t dare.
But she could give him this.
Mattie showed him what lurked in her heart, what she’d never dare say aloud. She lavished him with all the beauty and terror and sweet, hot need he’d introduced her to so expertly. She led him to the bed and crawled over him, leaving no part of him untouched. As if she could press all the things she felt directly into his skin. As if she could tattoo him with her own mouth.
As if this was better than the truth he wanted.
And then, finally, when everything had tightened beyond bearing and both of them were desperate, she climbed on top of him, wincing slightly when she took him deep inside her.
“This is too much,” he gritted out, even now, when she knew he was pushed to his limits. “You are new to this.”
Mattie only held his gaze. And then she began to move.
She built her rhythm slowly, carefully, and then, when she was more comfortable, she picked up her pace. His hands gripped her hips as he met her, thrusting hard and deep and beautiful.
And this, she thought and had to bite her lip from saying, was better than simply true. This was truth itself and this was right and surely, he must feel it. Surely, he must know all the things she felt, yet couldn’t say.
Surely, he must understand how desperately she loved him.
This time, when the fire built and built until it finally burned them both alive, they flew off that glorious edge together.
But when Mattie woke from a shockingly uninterrupted sleep, it was another perfect gold and blue morning outside the windows, there was a servant bustling around in the kitchen downstairs with unwelcome efficiency and cheer, and Nicodemus was gone.
CHAPTER NINE
NICODEMUS’S ENTIRE LIFE mocked him.
There were the papers he’d signed in a grim fury the day he’d returned from Greece to merge the Stathis Corporation with Whitaker Industries, despite that burning thing in him that had wanted nothing more than to fly to London and punch Chase Whitaker in the face, because Chase was the closest thing on the planet to Big Bart. He still didn’t know how he’d managed to keep himself in check. How he’d returned to Manhattan and his office there without causing any international incidents, such was the temper he’d been in when he’d left his island.
There was the brownstone in New York’s West Village he stood in now, that he’d bought and painstakingly renovated years ago and had been calling home when his real home should have been in Athens near his own headquarters. There was even this damned mood he was in, black and dangerous like the autumn storm outside the windows, pelting the city with the same bitter cold he felt inside himself.
It was all about her, and he felt it like one of her mocking little laughs, lighting him up and ripping into him at the same time.
You have to put this behind you, he ordered himself.
Over and over again. But it didn’t seem to work.
The sad truth was, everything he did and everything he’d done for years revolved around Mattie Whitaker, and the fact he hadn’t noticed it even as he’d done it galled him. The fact he’d never seen her for what she was ate at him. At first, perhaps, it had been unconscious. He’d wanted a woman like her, he’d told himself. And he’d admired her father, the first man who’d ever treated Nicodemus as something other than a trashy upstart. The man who’d encouraged him to educate himself and had given him the tools to do it.