His for a Price

Being near him made her feel as out of control and panicky as it ever had. As perilously close to losing herself and all those tightly held spiked things she carried in the deepest, darkest part of her. Worse, now, that he’d kept so many of his promises. That he’d won.

That he kept winning.

“Did you send your staff away with that priest?” she asked. Her voice was quieter. More raw. Too telling by far. And she thought he heard that, because he studied her for a long moment without speaking.

“I did.” She didn’t understand that particular light in those honeyed dark eyes of his. She didn’t want to. “We are very much alone, though there will be deliveries to the dock each morning should you require something. Do you?”

“A ride to Athens?”

His lips crooked. “Other than that.”

“I don’t know what you want from me.”

“You do.” He smiled, and she told herself the chill that snaked down her back was fear, not anticipation. Never that. “Everything, Mattie. I want everything, as I’ve told you from the start.”

She shook her head. “That was all a game. A dare stretched out across the years. Stupidity.” She broke off and tried to find the right words, or, when that failed, any words. “This is different. It’s not a game anymore. I don’t want this, Nicodemus.”

He leaned forward to put his empty glass on the table and then sat back again, and she still couldn’t get that raggedness inside her under any kind of control. She still couldn’t do a thing about that wild red tide that rose inside her, as relentless and unstoppable as he was.

And he simply sat there, unmoved and unbothered, as if everything between them was unfolding according to his plan. She supposed it was, and that made her feel even more trapped, even more hunted, than before.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, with that remarkable, maddening calm. “But even if I did, it’s done.”

“I did what you wanted,” she gritted out. “I married you. Why can’t that be enough?”

Again, that smile, much too knowing. Much too dangerous. “You know why.”

Mattie didn’t mean to move. She had no intention of doing anything but continuing on as she was and hoping that somehow poked holes in his smooth, impenetrable armor....

But instead, she simply burst—reaching out and slapping her full glass of champagne with all of her might and an open hand. It flew through the air, spraying the amber liquid all around and then smashed into pieces on the white marble floor some six feet away.

And for a moment, the only sound was her own harsh breathing and the drumming of her pulse in her ears.

Nicodemus’s too-calm gaze tracked the arc of the champagne glass, stayed on the shattered glass rather longer than it should have then finally cut back to her.

“Ah, Mattie,” he said. Soft. Lethal. And something like kind, which made it that much worse. It told her exactly how much trouble she was in, on the off chance she couldn’t guess. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

* * *

Nicodemus decided he was enjoying himself, after all.

“You’re going to clean that up,” he told Mattie, who had her chin set at that mulish angle that he found far more amusing than was wise, and all that murder in her eyes. “But first, of course, there must be punishment.”

“Punishment,” she repeated, as if she’d never heard the word before.

“It’s what happens when one throws temper tantrums,” he said. “As you would have realized had your father not shipped you off to stuffy British boarding schools for half your life and treated you with benevolent neglect the rest of the time.”

She stiffened, and her lovely, dark eyes flashed with outrage. “You’re insane.”

Nicodemus smiled and settled back against the couch, lazily at his ease.

“I’m feeling benevolent myself, as this is our wedding day,” he told her, injecting a note of magnanimity into his voice, purely to watch the fireworks in her gaze. “So I’ll give you a choice. Either you subject yourself to the task of my choosing, or I spank you.”

For a moment, she didn’t react. Then his words clearly penetrated. She flushed hot. He saw the pulse in her neck leap as she jerked back against her chair.

“You can’t spank me!” But there was that note in her voice, and that heat in her eyes, and he wondered what images she was playing with in that complicated head of hers. If they matched the ones in his.

“Can’t I?”

“You can’t simply...do whatever you want!”

“By all means, Mattie, complain to the local authorities.” He nodded toward the windows and the sea beyond. “It’s a bit of a swim, as I’ve said, but I’m sure you’ll receive a perfectly warm welcome in Libya when you come in with the tide.”