His for a Price

“You’re afraid that if you come inside with me, that means we’ll immediately consummate this marriage,” he said after a moment. His head canted slightly to one side, as if he was imagining it, sending a fist of need punching into her belly, then clenching tight. “Does it happen on the marble floor, in your half-terrified, half-longing fantasies? Up against the wall beneath the paintings? Sprawled out across the couches, to really settle in and take our time?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind.” But she did. She really did, and his scalding-hot images didn’t help matters, not when she knew how he’d hold her, how he’d tease her and torment her. How he’d take her places she’d never dreamed she could go. “We’ve shared a bedroom the past two nights and you haven’t attacked me. I’m not afraid of you.”

His mouth moved into that mocking little crook. “Of course you’re not. That’s why I’ve found you sleeping in the guest suite one night and on that sofa in the solarium the next. Because you are so unafraid.”

Mattie had no intention of telling him about the nightmares—the screech of tires, that endless singing, that empty stretch of road—that had ripped through every night for as long as she could recall, torn it and her apart. It was why she’d never shared a bed with anyone.

And while she might have realized pretty quickly that first day that fighting with Nicodemus on the topic of separate bedrooms was futile, that didn’t mean there weren’t ways around it. She’d done what she’d always done before when faced with unacceptable sleeping arrangements, whether here or in boarding school or wherever she found herself along the way: she pretended to sleep where she’d been put, then snuck away to somewhere her inevitably violent awakening wouldn’t attract any notice.

“You ‘worked’—” and she crooked her fingers in the air to hang quotation marks around that word “—both nights until dawn. What do you care where I slept?”

He studied her the way he did much too often—the way that made her wonder yet again how she’d failed to realize that he’d spent these long years figuring her out while she’d only been focused on avoiding him. And worse, made her remember what it had been like to wake both nights to find herself lifted into his strong arms then carried through the house against the sweet torture of his magnificent chest. Safe, a rebellious part of her whispered. Like when he’d placed her back in that huge bed in the master bedroom that he made feel so tiny and so crowded when he slept beside her for an hour or two, his arms around her like he could fight off whatever came their way.

These are not helpful thoughts, she told herself sternly.

“I care that you continue to be disobedient when I’ve made it fairly clear that there will be consequences for disobedience,” he said, so silkily she nearly missed what he’d actually said. “But you should ask yourself why—if I knew I had to work all this time, and I did—I insisted you sleep in the master bedroom at all.”

“If I cared as much about sleeping arrangements as you seem to do,” she said icily, “I would have asked you.”

“Because I know you far better than you think I do,” he answered for her, those dark honey eyes gleaming hard, his voice even darker, even smoother, confirming a whole handful of her worst fears. “And everything with you is easier if it is introduced slowly, and in stages.”

She really, really didn’t want to think about that, and everything it implied. About their history. About him. About what was going to happen here, between them, if he had his way.

“I’m not a headstrong mustang you can break with a few muttered words and a carrot,” she snapped at him. “You’re definitely not a cowboy, and this isn’t the Wild West.”

“I think you should consider the fact that if I was happy to allow you to get naked on a plane, I’m unlikely to stand much on ceremony on my own island, where no pilot or air steward lurks a few feet away,” he replied, that voice of his lethal. “If I want you, the fact you’re standing outside is hardly going to put me off.”

“Thank you,” she gritted out. “That’s very comforting.”

“If you want me to comfort you, you need only ask, Mattie.” He paused, his dark eyes searching hers, and that soft thing in them again that would be the undoing of her. “Just ask.”

And that was worse. That hint of emotion in his voice, of something like understanding. Sympathy. It choked her, black and thick and terrible.

“What if what I need comfort from is you?” she asked, her voice a jagged little bit of sound, hardly there at all with the sea crashing into the rocks below and a few hardy seagulls cartwheeling in the air around them as if it was still summer. It matched that almost-smile he aimed her way, that sent a bolt of something a great deal like sorrow arrowing through her. As if she’d already lost something here.