His for a Price

“You obviously want me to be nervous,” she snapped.

“Perhaps you should be. Perhaps it’s past time you took this seriously.”

And he could see that she was as nervous as he could hope. Finally. But it wasn’t as simple as nerves. There was that longing beneath, that need. And that other, electric current that looked a great deal like anticipation.

He’d spent a long time learning how to read this woman. It was finally paying off.

“You used to tell me how much you liked to dance,” he said when he could see it had built in her to a fever pitch, and he wasn’t sure what she’d do next. “Do you remember? Every time you explained to me why it was necessary for you to spend quite so much time falling in and out of clubs.”

She clenched her hands tight, then opened them.

“Yes.” He hardly recognized her voice when she finally spoke. “I like dancing. Is that another manufactured crime you can claim you need to punish me for?”

“Then dance.” It was a dare. A command. He waved a hand, taking in the vast, empty room, nothing in it or the whole villa but the two of them and this bright, greedy thing that grew tighter between them with every breath. “For me.”

“I...what?”

But she swayed where she stood, in unconscious obedience, and it sent a spike of pure need straight through him, deep and hard. She might not know how much and how deeply she wanted him. She might not be able to admit it. But Nicodemus knew. He’d known since that very first dance they’d shared all those years ago now.

How much different would all of this be—would they be, he wondered, if she’d allowed him to claim her then? If she hadn’t led him on this merry chase across the years?

“Pretend,” he invited her, and it was as if the space between them shrank. Disappeared. “Pretend you want me so much it’s like a fist in your gut, making it hard to breathe. Pretend you desire me almost as much as you fear me, like a terrible flu you worry might carry you off. Pretend you can claim a little bit of your power this way, by beguiling me and seducing me.” His gaze was hard on hers, the way he wished his hands were. “Do it well enough, my sweet little wife, and perhaps you won’t be pretending. Do it better than that, and perhaps we won’t need to call any of this punishment, after all.”

CHAPTER FIVE

INSTEAD, MATTIE FLED.

She ran through the sun-bathed halls of the villa, past the awe-inspiring paintings she refused to look at too closely for fear they would tell her things about their owner she didn’t wish to know. She ran all the way to the master bedroom and that huge bed she didn’t want to share with him, and then she locked herself in the bathroom.

Like a child. Again.

And then she waited there, her heart pounding so hard she could feel its staccato rhythm when she swallowed, for Nicodemus to storm in on her. For him to pound on the door, rage and shout on the other side, even break it down before him—

But he did none of those things. She couldn’t even tell if he’d followed her wild dash through the house or if he was still sitting where she’d left him, that harshly seductive mouth of his crooked to one side and his low voice urging her on.

Pretend you desire me almost as much as you fear me.

Mattie didn’t have to pretend when it came to Nicodemus, and she was terribly afraid he knew that, the way he seemed to know everything else.

She still didn’t understand how he knew. How he’d always known.

The shadows lengthened. The bathtub was a grand affair, set high on its own dais with a wide window facing the slumberous expanse of the sea, and Mattie curled up there, taking an austere sort of comfort from the rigid porcelain beneath her. She watched the sun sink toward the horizon, then disappear in a blaze of brilliant reds and oranges. She watched the stars come out, only a few as twilight stole the bright colors of the sunset away, then too many to count as nighttime fell in earnest.

She fell asleep eventually, then woke in her usual state of tumult and desperation, the nightmare clinging to her as she tried to fight her way free of its sinewy grip. The crash. The horror. The hours trapped in that backseat with her face pressed into the leather and Chase holding her there, both of them shaking—

Mattie wiped her eyes, waited for the same shaking to pass in the present, then fell back asleep.

And when she woke in the morning, the light was pouring in, dazzling her, so it took her a few critical moments to realize that she was no longer in the bathtub. She was in the big bed in the master bedroom and Nicodemus—her husband—was stretched out beside her.

Just like every morning since they’d arrived here, only this time, Mattie had no memory of him carrying her from the bathtub to the bed. She could remember nothing but the nightmare. How had he moved her without her knowledge? Had she told him the truth while she slept? And what else had happened that she couldn’t recall?