style="font-size:15px;"> The thought made her blush and a strange wistfulness hit her as she worked off his rings—both the diamond that Trina had given her and the platinum band he’d placed on her finger himself—and set them on the hook meant for facecloths. He was not the sort of man she would ever want to marry. He was far too daunting and she needed her independence, but she did secretly long for someone to share her life with. Someone kind and tender who would make her laugh and maybe bring her flowers sometimes.
Someone who wanted her in his life.
She would not grow maudlin about her sister running off with Stephanos, seemingly choosing him over Viveka, leaving her nursing yet another sting of rejection. Her sister was entitled to fall in love.
With a final deep breath, she emerged into the stateroom.
Mikolas was there, wearing a pair of black athletic shorts and towel-dried hair, nothing else. His silhouette was a bleak, masculine statue against the closed black curtains.
The rest of the room was surprisingly spacious for a boat, she noted with a sweeping glance. There was a sitting area with a comfortable-looking sectional facing a big-screen TV. A glass-enclosed office allowed a tinted view of a private deck in the bow. She averted her gaze from the huge bed covered with a black satin spread and came back to the man who watched her with an indecipherable expression.
He held a drink, something clear and neat. Ouzo, she assumed. His gaze snagged briefly on the red mark on her cheek before traversing to her bare feet and coming back to slam into hers.
His expression still simmered with anger, but there was something else that took her breath. A kind of male assessment that signaled he was weighing her as a potential sex partner.
Involuntarily, she did the same thing. How could she not? He was really good-looking. His build was amazing, from those broad, bare shoulders to that muscled chest to those washboard abs and soccer-star legs.
She was not a woman who gawked at men. She considered herself a feminist and figured if it was tasteless for men to gaze at pinup calendars, then women shouldn’t objectify men, either, but seriously. Wow. He was muscly without being overdeveloped. His skin was toasted a warm brown and that light pattern of hair on his chest looked like it had been sculpted by the loving hand of Mother Nature, not any sort of waxing specialist.
An urge to touch him struck her. Sexual desire wasn’t something that normally hit her out of the blue like this, but she found herself growing warm with more than embarrassment. She wondered what it would be like to roam her mouth over his torso, to tongue his nipples and lick his skin. She felt an urge to splay her hands over his muscled waist and explore lower, push aside his waistband and possess.
Coils of sexual need tightened in her belly.
Where was the lead-up? The part where she spent ages kissing and nuzzling before she decided maybe she’d like to take things a little further? She never flashed to shoving down a man’s pants and stroking him!
But that fantasy hit her along with a deep yearning and a throbbing pinch between her legs.
Was he getting hard? The front of his shorts lifted.
She realized where her gaze had fixated and jerked her eyes back to his, shocked with herself and at his blatant reaction.
His expression was arrested, yet filled with consideration and—she caught her breath—yes, that was an invitation. An arrogant Help yourself. Along with something predatory. Something that was barely contained. Decision. Carnal hunger.
The air grew so sexually charged, she couldn’t find oxygen in it. The rhythm of her breaths changed, becoming subtle pants. Her nipples were stimulated by the shift of the robe against the lace of her bra. She became both wary and meltingly receptive.
This was crazy. She shook her head, as if she could erase all this sexual tension like an app that erased content on her phone if she joggled it back and forth hard enough.
With monumental effort, she jerked her gaze from his and stared blindly at the streak of light between the curtains. She folded her arms in self-protection and kept him in her periphery.
This was really stupid, letting him bring her into his bedroom like this. A single woman who lived in the city knew to be more careful.
“Use the ice,” he said with what sounded like a hint of dry laughter in his tone. He nodded toward a side table where an ice pack sat on a small bar towel.
“It’s not that bad,” she dismissed. She’d had worse. Her lip might be puffed a little at the corner, but it was nothing like the time she’d walked around with a huge black eye, barely able to see out of it, openly telling people that Grigor had struck her. You shouldn’t talk back to him, her teacher had said, mouth tight, gaze avoiding hers.
Grigor shouldn’t have called her a whore and burned all her photos of her mother, she had retorted, but no one had wanted to hear that.
Mikolas didn’t say anything, only came toward her, making her snap her head around and warn him off with a look.
Putting his glass down, he lifted his phone and clicked, taking a photo of her, surprising her so much she scowled.
“What are you doing?”
“Documenting. I assume Grigor will claim you were hurt falling into the water,” he advised with cool detachment.
“You don’t want me to try to discredit your business partner? Is that what you’re saying? Are you going to take a photo after you leave your own mark on the other side of my face?” It was a dicey move, daring him like that, but she was so sick of people protecting Grigor. And she needed to know Mikolas’s intentions, face them head-on.
Mikolas’s stony eyes narrowed. “I don’t hit women.” His mouth pulled into a smile that was more an expression of lethal power than anything else. “And Grigor has discredited himself.” He tilted the phone to indicate the photo. “Which may prove useful.”
Viveka’s insides tightened as she absorbed how cold-blooded that was.
“I didn’t know Grigor had another daughter.” Mikolas moved to take up his drink again. “Do you want one?” he asked, glancing toward the small wet bar next to the television. Both were inset against the shiny wood-grain cabinetry.
She shook her head. Better to keep her wits.
“Grigor isn’t my father.” She always took great satisfaction in that statement. “My mother married him when I was four. She died when I was nine. He doesn’t talk about her, either.”
Or the boating accident. Her heart clenched like a fist, trying to hang on to her memories of her mother, knotting in fury at the lack of a satisfactory explanation, wanting to beat the truth from Grigor if she had to.
“Do you have a name?” he asked.
“Viveka.” The corner of her mouth pulled as she realized they’d come this far without it. She was practically naked, wearing a robe that had brushed his own skin and surrounded her in the scent of his aftershave. “Brice,” she added, not clarifying that most people called her Vivi.
“Viveka,” he repeated, like he was trying out the sound. They were speaking English and his thick accent gave an exotic twist to her name as he
