One Reckless Decision

“That hurt you?” He frowned.

“No,” she lied, shame twisting through her, cramping her stomach. “It was a sudden chill, I think…”

But he ignored her, and drew the billowing sleeve of her shirt up along the length of her arm. Tristanne did not know why she simply stood there and let him do it, as if he had somehow mesmerized her into compliance. But she did.

He muttered something harsh in Greek, and stared at her upper arm. Tristanne knew what he would see—she had seen the livid marks after her shower this morning, red and blue and black. One for each of Peter’s fingers.

She felt a rush of that toxic cocktail of shame, rage and fear that always flooded her when Peter’s aggression came out—and when it was noticed. When she was forced to explain that this was how her only sibling treated her. She felt that blackness roll through her, tears much too close—

“It is nothing,” she said in a low voice, and then, finally, jerked away from him, pushing her sleeve back down. She tilted her chin up, not sure what she would do now. What she would do if she saw even the faintest hint of pity in those dark gold eyes where there had been so much heat—

But his gaze was unreadable. He only watched her for a long moment, and then stepped away from her in one of those impossibly graceful movements that took her breath away and in the same instant reminded her of how dangerous he was.

“I must tend to some business affairs,” he told her, towering over her. She told herself that it was the simple fact of his height that made her feel so small, so vulnerable—not what he had just seen. Not what he now knew, that she had never meant to share. “I suggest that you slip into something significantly more revealing and enjoy your indolence. We will dock this evening in Portofino.”

He sent her another long, intense, unreadable look, and paused for a moment. A shadow moved across his face, and she thought he might speak, but it passed as quickly as it had come. He turned and walked away without another word, leaving her to the tumult of her own thoughts.

A proper mistress would have availed herself of the opportunity to flaunt her wares, Nikos thought later that afternoon as he concluded another in a long series of tedious phone conferences with business associates in Athens who could not, apparently, follow simple instructions. A malady that was going around.

An enterprising mistress might have indulged in topless sunbathing, perhaps. Or in the lengthy and comprehensive application of unnecessary lotion while in deliberately provocative poses, having known full well that he was watching. A mistress would have known that a day on a yacht was meant to be spent securing her position, and the best way to achieve that was to make certain her every word and deed served to arouse her protector.

Tristanne Barbery, yet again, proved that she had no concept at all of what made a decent mistress. She had spent the entire day with her face pressed into a novel. A large, heavy paperback, with exceedingly dense and small print. The sort of novel that announced its reader had thoughts. Deep and complex thoughts, no doubt, which no man sought in his mistress—as she might look to share those deep and complex thoughts with him when he wished only to be soothed and eased and pampered. Still, the book might have been marginally acceptable had she been wearing something appropriate to her station. A miniscule bikini, perhaps, to soak in the Mediterranean sun. One of those gauzy so-called cover-ups that clung to each curve and begged to be removed. But Tristanne, despite what he had told her earlier, quite clearly, he’d thought, had not changed her clothes.

He would assume she was defying him, deliberately, had he not had the lowering suspicion that she was genuinely caught up in her reading and had forgotten him entirely.

He had no earthly idea why he found her so entertaining, when she was meant to be no more than the key to his revenge. The means to a long overdue end.

“Arketa,” he said into the telephone now. “Teliosame etho.”

He did not need to give the conversation more than a shred of his attention to know that it should end, and now. After some back and forth regarding the details of a particular contract he had expected to have signed weeks before, he finished the call. He rubbed his hands over his face, leaning back in the great leather chair that sat behind the highly polished wood of his desk. He knew that if he turned around and looked out the window, he would see Tristanne as she had been for hours now—curled up on one of the bright white loungers beneath an umbrella out on the deck, her attention entirely focused on the book in her hands.

But he did not need to turn, because the image was already seared into his brain. Why should he find her so arousing? So amusing? Why did he feel a smile on his own lips, even now, when he was alone?