One Reckless Decision

“I will miss you, then,” she said, in that casual tone that she knew would not set off his alarms. She was so calm, so blasé. She worked so hard to appear that way. “Luckily I have my drawings of you. In case I begin to forget what you look like.”

He pulled her to her feet, sliding a hand around to the small of her back and holding her against his wide chest. He looked down into her face. She felt the heat of his hand seep into her skin, warming her, even as she felt the usual quickening within. She did not know what his expression meant—only that he searched her own, and that his eyes burned into hers.

Did he know? she wondered in a sudden panic. Had she somehow given herself away?

“Perhaps you can help me pack,” he murmured suggestively.

Because that was the only fire they acknowledged, the only way they could.

She hid the rest of it. Sometimes even from herself.

“Of course,” she said, like the perfect mistress she was more and more these days. Just as she’d always feared. Just as Peter had predicted. She smiled at him. “I can think of nothing I would rather do.”

Because she knew beyond the slightest doubt that she could not tell him that she loved him. She could not. She could never tell him that she loved him—she could not even think the words, for fear they would bleed onto her tongue without her knowledge.

She could only love him with her body, and the soft strokes and broad lines of her pencils, and pray with all she had that he never, ever knew.

Nikos strode through the villa, his temper igniting with every step.

She was nowhere to be found. She was not lounging suggestively in his bed, wearing something appropriately saucy. She was not taking a coincidentally perfectly timed shower, the better to lure him in. She was not in any number of places she could have been in—should have been in—and the fact that he had rushed home from Athens to see her made him more furious about her deficiencies as a mistress than he might have been otherwise.

A man should not have to hunt down his mistress. A man should simply cross the threshold and find her waiting there, beautiful and sweet-smelling, with a soft smile on her lips and a cold drink in her hand.

Nikos stopped on the patio, and scowled at the sun as it sank toward the horizon, spilling red and pink fingers over the gleaming sea. It infuriated him how often he seemed to forget the fact that Tristanne was not, in point of fact, his mistress. He was no better than a boy, letting his head get turned by scaldingly hot sex. It had taken today’s meeting with his team in his office to reacquaint himself with his goals. Peter Barbery, as expected, was trading on Nikos’s good name with all manner of investors, Nikos’s people had confirmed. Apparently the man’s personal loathing of Nikos would not prevent Peter from acting as if the two of them were thick as thieves. Which meant that everything was in place. All that Nikos needed to do now was up the stakes. Raise the bar just that little bit higher, so when he sent it all crashing down, it would really, truly hurt. Leave scars, even.

And he knew just how to do it.

He had rushed back to the island, telling himself that he was not excited to do this thing so much as finally recommitted to his original vision of how this entire operation would proceed. He had lost his focus slightly, he had admitted to himself on the helicopter ride from Athens. Tristanne was a beautiful woman, and he was a man who greatly appreciated beauty, especially when he found it wrapped around him every morning like a vine. More than that, she grew more mysterious by the day, and he found he was more and more intrigued by his sense that she was hiding more than she shared. But this, he had concluded today, was simply because he wondered what the Barberys’ end game was; what they thought they could gain from him.

He would accept no other reason for his uncharacteristic obsession with this woman. There was no room for anything but his revenge, surely.

He heard a scuffing sound then, and turned to see Tristanne emerge from the bushes that marked the edge of the cliff. She held her drawing pad in one hand, and looked at the ground as she walked. Her hair was twisted back into one of those smooth, efficient knots he hated, and she wore rolled up denim trousers, thronged-sandals, and an oversize shirt. She looked like a local painter, not a beguiling mistress—and she did not seem to notice that he was standing there, watching her approach.

Of course. Why had he expected anything different?

He told himself that what he felt was annoyance. Irritation that she should be so desperately inept. He told himself that he was simply shocked that she was so ill equipped to play her own game of deception.

“Look at you,” he said coolly, his low voice rolling through the falling dark and wrenching her head up. “Have you been climbing up and down the cliffs? You look bedraggled enough to have attempted it.”