His for a Price

But at some point along the way he’d stopped pretending. And now he was married to a woman he couldn’t trust, tied up in a thousand legal knots with her family business, and completely screwed.

Literally as well as figuratively, he admitted darkly, and let out some rendition of a laugh.

And she’d been a virgin.

He still couldn’t believe it. He still couldn’t handle all the implications of that—the one thing she couldn’t fake or lie about. He didn’t know what was worse—his absolute disbelief, because her virginity meant he didn’t know her as well as he’d thought he did, or that primitive part of him that simply wanted to claim her as his, now and forever.

It stood to reason that now he finally had her, now that he’d made her his in every possible way, he didn’t see how he could let himself keep her.

Another blustery autumn night had fallen over Manhattan, blanketing the city with a thick darkness that looked almost soft from inside the office he’d built on the second floor of the brownstone, despite the rain that still pounded down, making the trees along the city street bend and sway.

And Nicodemus ignored the insistent beeping from his laptop that indicated one incoming email after the next. He ignored the buzzing of his mobile phone. He stared out at the cold, wet dark and tortured himself.

One scalding-hot image after the next, as relentless as the freezing rain outside, and as brutal.

Mattie kissing him, using her mouth all over him, beguiling him and enslaving him. Mattie sitting astride him, the most beautiful creature he’d ever beheld, riding them both into all of that white-hot wonder.

Mattie, Mattie, Mattie, the way it had been since the moment he’d seen her in her long-ago ball gown, sparkling so brightly she’d eclipsed the whole of the world.

And that was when the truth of things hit him, making him feel something like sick.

After all this time, after all the effort he’d put into never, ever becoming a man like his father, he’d neglected to recognize that it was his other parent’s influence he should have guarded himself against.

Because he was no different from his sad, discarded mother, was he? She’d taught him how to pine. How to spend years longing for someone who would never return the feeling. Arista had been a mere practice run. He’d built a whole life around his hopes and dreams about Mattie.

“How can you consider taking him back, after all of this?” Nicodemus had railed at his mother in those terrible days after that last scene with his father, when his mother had still maintained her vigil and her beauty regimen as if those things were sacred rituals that would bring him back. “How can you weep for him?”

“The heart is more forgiving than you imagine,” his mother had told him, humming to herself as she’d combed out her hair. “And far more resilient.”

And he’d hated her for it.

He could admit that now, after all these years had passed. After he’d exacted his revenge when he’d gutted his father’s company and stripped him of the better part of his wealth. After he’d gone on to far outshine the man who had ruined them both. God, how he’d hated her. He’d hated her almost as much as he’d loved her, in that same helpless way, so unable was he to fix what was broken in her or save her once his father had abandoned them.

“He is never coming back,” he’d told her when she’d ended up in the hospital and had insisted that he dress her in something nicer than a hospital gown, in case his father deigned to stop by when Nicodemus had known full well he wouldn’t. “He doesn’t care if we live or die.”

“Love is not always a straight line, Nicodemus,” she’d replied in that reedy voice of hers, so thin even he’d known, at sixteen and before the doctors had taken him aside to confirm it, that she hadn’t had much time left.

And the guilt he’d felt over how much he’d hated her obliviousness, her dogged optimism, her reckless belief in one so deeply unworthy of her notice, had led him to approach his father that last time.

His reward for that had been a month in jail, and his mother had died alone.

Nicodemus couldn’t shake aside these old ghosts. He felt as if he was that twelve-year-old boy again, miserable and astonished, with his face pressed to the gates of a fancy house high in the hills above Piraeus. He’d done exactly what he’d set out to do then. The houses. The expensive toys. Whatever he desired was his—precisely as he’d dreamed when he’d first seen the true life his father led. When he’d understood that he and his mother were the dirty secrets.

But he’d forgotten—or chosen to ignore—that the heart that beat inside his chest was softer.