His for a Price

The woman’s lips all but disappeared, she pressed them together so hard, but she didn’t say another word.

And Mattie waited. She used her smartphone to page through tabloid articles heralding the quick end to her hasty marriage and did her best to look as relaxed and confident as she wanted to look—as she’d dressed.

Once again, for him. Killer heels not suited for New York City sidewalks in the wet, slippery fall, a pencil skirt that made poetry of her long frame and a silk blouse that wrapped around her torso lovingly yet failed to show anything a possessive Greek husband might find objectionable.

At least, Mattie fervently hoped he was still both of those things. Possessive and her husband. Or this meeting she’d engineered was going to be significantly more devastating than she was prepared to handle.

But it was still a very long time before a sharp, expectant sort of silence descended over the waiting room, like the fall of an ax. Mattie sat a little straighter in her chair, but she didn’t look up. Not while she heard a low, quick conversation in a voice she knew all too well, one that made her whole body shiver into immediate goose bumps. Not when she felt a very familiar dark glare sear into her flesh from across the room, making it difficult to sit still.

Not until he was looming over her and she had no choice whatsoever but to crane her head back and look up that mouthwatering length of him, packaged to extremely gorgeous effect in one of the dark suits he favored that made him look like he really was king of the goddamned world.

He wasn’t smiling. His eyes were cold—colder than she’d ever seen them before.

And both of those things hurt in ways Mattie hardly knew what to do with.

“Are you pregnant?” he asked. Not at all gently, or even politely.

She didn’t blush. She didn’t look around to see if anyone had heard. She knew Nicodemus well enough by now to know he never would have said that if anyone was listening.

Or she hoped she did.

“No,” she said, very calmly, which wasn’t at all how she felt.

“Then I fail to understand what consequences there could be that require not only my presence upon demand, but your theatrical appearance here at all.”

If he was having trouble with all of that subzero wind chill that dripped from his low voice and oozed from every taut, unwelcoming line in his body, he certainly didn’t show it.

Trust only went so far, Mattie decided, and snuck a glance around him to see that—as she should have expected, because he might be furious with her but he was still Nicodemus—he’d dismissed the receptionist and cleared the room.

“I’m not happy with you,” she informed him.

Something in his hard jaw twitched. “I will cry myself to sleep over that, Mattie, I promise you. But in the meantime, I have a company to run and a merger with an unpleasant family company I regret already to oversee. I left your histrionics and your lies in Greece for a reason.”

“And I slept with you,” she retorted.

He hadn’t expected that—she could see it in the way his dark eyes widened slightly, then narrowed. He frowned at her, and there was something wrong with her that she saw that as a kind of progress. Better than all that ice, anyway.

“Thank you,” he said, in such frozen tones she almost missed the fact that his accent was heavier—also a good sign. “But my memory works perfectly.”

“I’m twenty-eight years old and I’ve never slept with anyone but you,” she said, and she pushed up out of the chair then, so she could face him. So he wasn’t towering over her, especially not with the shoes she had on. So she could look him in the eye, the way that had always made her feel so strong and so weak at once. Today was no different. “You gave me one night and then you disappeared.”

His stunned pause was so brief that she almost missed it.

“I’m reliably informed that is the plight of many a young woman in this dark, dirty city,” he told her, with all that menace and ruthlessness in his voice, in the way he looked at her, and her curse was that it moved through like a long, low lick of heat. “You should count yourself lucky I didn’t make you walk home from Greece.”

“I waited a long time to have sex,” she said, keeping her chin high and her eyes on him. “I want more of it.” She felt more than saw the way he caught his breath at that, but she had no trouble identifying that flash of murder in his dark gaze. “And I’m married to you, which means that if I head out for the bars like so many young women in this big, bad city, I’d be committing adultery.”

“That,” he said, his voice a mere rasp of darkness despite the bright lights all around them, “and I’d kill you.”