“And you are, as you know very well, a highly desirable man,” she managed to say after a moment. It was no more than the truth, though perhaps the least interesting truth.
“I do not think you have the slightest idea what it means to be a man’s mistress,” he said from behind her, his voice soft, but with that dark current beneath.
Tristanne could not bear to look at him. She could not understand the wild tumult of emotion that seized her, that filled her eyes with tears she would rather die on the spot than shed, but she knew with perfect clarity that she could not look at him now. She could not.
“I am a quick study,” she heard herself say, because she had to say something.
She heard a soft sound that could have been a low laugh, though she could not be sure.
“Turn around, Tristanne.”
She did not want to. She did not know what he might see on her face—and she was certain it would only expose her further.
But this was not about her. This was about being a good daughter, for once. This was about protecting Vivienne. If she had not run off to Vancouver when her father revoked her university tuition…If she had not abandoned her mother to the tender mercies of both Gustave and Peter…But then, she had always been stronger than her mother. And now she would prove it.
She turned. He was dark and dangerous, and still as breathtaking as when she’d been seventeen. He watched her with eyes that seemed to know things about her she did not know herself, and that ever-present hint of a smile. As if she amused him. She lifted her chin, and waited.
She could do this. She would.
“This boat sails in the morning for the island of Kefallonia, my home,” he told her, his velvet and whiskey voice a rough caress. His eyes gleamed with challenge. “If you wish to be my mistress, you will be on board.”
Chapter Four
HE SAT at a small table on one of the yacht’s decks, newspapers in three languages spread out before him and thick, rich Greek coffee within reach, basking in the morning sunshine. The golden light poured over him, calling attention to his haughty cheekbones and the fathomless dark eyes he’d neglected to cover with sunglasses, before seeming to caress his full, wicked mouth. His long legs, encased in comfortable tan trousers, stretched out in front of him, and he wore a linen shirt in a soft white that drew the eye, unerringly, to the hard planes of his chest and the shadow between his pectoral muscles. His feet, disarmingly, were bare.
He did not look up when Tristanne approached. She was not so foolish as to imagine, however, that he did not know she was there. She knew that he did. That he had tracked her from the moment she stepped onto this deck—perhaps even from the moment she’d climbed aboard the boat itself.
She stopped walking when she was only a few feet away, and tried to regulate her choppy, panicked breathing. She stood straight, her spine stiff and her head high. She hated herself—and him, she thought with a flash of despair, as she continued to stand there, like some supplicant before him. But she would not bow, or scrape, or whatever else she imagined a man like this must require. She would play her role—tough, sophisticated, focused entirely on what he could provide for her. She would think of her poor mother, whose cough was worsening and whose bills were staggering. It didn’t matter, at the end of the day, what Nikos Katrakis thought of her. Much less what she thought of herself.
Whoring yourself out to the highest bidder, are you? Like mother, like daughter after all, Peter had sneered—but she would not think of Peter. The temptation to dissolve into misery was far too great, and far too dangerous now. She resisted the urge to check her smooth chignon, to run her hands along her clothes as if her crisp white trousers and long-sleeved, sky-blue cotton blouse might somehow have become unkempt in the time it had taken her to board the yacht. She could not show nervousness. She could not show…anything, she thought, or she would crumble beneath the pressure of what she must do.
Still, he did not glance up at her, and there was nothing to do but stand there. She knew what he was doing—knew that this was a casual and deliberate display of his power, that he could and would ignore her until he saw fit to acknowledge her presence. Whenever that might be. Her role was to take this treatment. To ignore it, as if she often stood on the deck of luxury yachts, listening to the sounds of surf and water and the distant tolling of church bells, waiting for powerful men to condescend to notice her. The events of the previous day washed over her then and she could feel a scarlet fire roll along the length of her body, making her stomach clench and her breath catch. Had that really been her? That wanton creature, so easily commanded to passion by a man she had once dreamed might one day dance with her? Desire mixed with shame and twisted through her stomach, but she gritted her teeth against both.