her. She could not seem to avoid his knowing, faintly mocking gaze. “I did not intend…”
Her hands were braced against the wall of his chest, and she curled them into fists, as if…what? She planned to beat him off? After welcoming him into her body with such uncharacteristic enthusiasm? What was wrong with her? She wanted to burst into tears, and she could not understand it. Everything felt too large, too unwieldy, too heavy. Her own body felt like a stranger’s, humming with sensations she could not identify. She could not seem to catch her breath, and he stood so still, so close, only the barest hint of that sardonic half smile on his mouth.
He let her leg slide to the floor. Tristanne realized that her dress was still around her waist, and, flushed in an agony of shame, jerked it back into place with trembling fingers. How could she have done this? When she should be thinking only of her mother?
“Perhaps I misunderstood you,” he said, his voice like velvet, though his eyes were as hard as steel. He did not back away from her. He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, making her choke on a breath. “I was under the impression that you wished to be my mistress. Did you not say so? What did you imagine the position entails?”
“I know what it entails,” she retorted, without thinking.
“Apparently not.” His mouth crooked in one corner. “Or perhaps your experience of such things differs from mine. I prefer my partners to be—”
“I am merely astounded at the speed at which you wished to consummate the relationship,” she interrupted him tartly. “I do not know how things are done where you come from, Mr. Katrakis—”
“Nikos, please,” he said silkily. “I know how you taste. Mr. Katrakis seems a bit absurd now, does it not?”
“—but I prefer a little more…” Her voice trailed away. Exactly what did she expect? This was…a business proposition. She had absolutely no experience to draw from, save what information she had gleaned from novels. Hardly helpful, under the circumstances.
“Wining and dining?” he finished for her. “Artifice and pretense? I think that perhaps you do not understand the requirements here. I make the rules and demands. You do not.” His head cocked slightly to the side as he regarded her with those unfathomable eyes. “Tell me, Tristanne. How many men have you been mistress to, in your glorious career?”
“What?” She was horrified, even as she shivered at the sound of her name in his wicked, talented mouth. “None!”
She should not have said that. She could have kicked herself. She might have, had he not been in the way.
“Ah, I see.” That dangerous satisfaction gleamed in his gaze again. “Then why am I so lucky? What brings the heiress to the Barbery fortune to my bed, offering herself to me? I cannot make sense of such a thing.”
Tristanne felt cold, suddenly; her sense of danger heightened. It was the tone in his voice, perhaps, or the way he watched her. Remember why you are doing this, she cautioned herself. Remember what is at stake!
“These are difficult times,” she said with a careless sort of shrug, though she felt anything but careless. She eased away from him, moving further into the room. She was all too aware that he let her go. She did not mention that her brother was on the brink of losing the family fortune or that Peter was obsessed with Nikos and considered him his main rival and enemy. She knew, somehow, it would not be wise.
“And you are, as you know very well, a highly desirable man,” she managed to say after a moment. It was no more than the truth, though perhaps the least interesting truth.
“I do not think you have the slightest idea what it means to be a man’s mistress,” he said from behind her, his voice soft, but with that dark current beneath.
Tristanne could not bear to look at him. She could not understand the wild tumult of emotion that seized her, that filled her eyes with tears she would rather die on the spot than shed, but she knew with perfect clarity that she could not look at him now. She could not.
“I am a quick study,” she heard herself say, because she had to say something.
She heard a soft sound that could have been a low laugh, though she could not be sure.
“Turn around, Tristanne.”
She did not want to. She did not know what he might see on her face—and she was certain it would only expose her further.
But this was not about her. This was about being a good daughter, for once. This was about protecting Vivienne. If she had not run off to Vancouver when her father revoked her university tuition…If she had not abandoned her mother to the tender mercies of both Gustave and Peter…But then, she had always been stronger than her mother. And now she would prove it.
She turned. He was dark and dangerous, and still as breathtaking as when she’d been seventeen. He watched her with eyes that seemed to know things about her she did not know herself, and that ever-present hint of a smile. As if she amused him. She lifted her chin, and waited.
She could do this. She would.
“This boat sails in the morning for the island of Kefallonia, my home,” he told her, his velvet and whiskey voice a rough caress. His eyes gleamed with challenge. “If you wish to be my mistress, you will be on board.”
Chapter Four
HE SAT at a small table on one of the yacht’s decks, newspapers in three languages spread out before him and thick, rich Greek coffee within reach, basking in the morning sunshine. The golden light poured over him, calling attention to his haughty cheekbones and the fathomless dark eyes he’d neglected to cover with sunglasses, before seeming to caress his full, wicked mouth. His long legs, encased in comfortable tan trousers, stretched out in front of him, and he wore a linen shirt in a soft white that drew the eye, unerringly, to the hard planes of his chest and the shadow between his pectoral muscles. His feet, disarmingly, were bare.
He did not look up when Tristanne approached. She was not so foolish as to imagine, however, that he did not know she was there. She knew that he did. That he had tracked her from the moment she stepped onto this deck—perhaps even from the moment she’d climbed aboard the boat itself.
She stopped walking when she was only a few feet away, and tried to regulate her choppy, panicked breathing. She stood straight, her spine stiff and her head high. She hated herself—and him, she thought with a flash of despair, as she continued to stand there, like some supplicant before him. But she would not bow, or scrape, or whatever else she imagined a man like this must require. She would play her role—tough, sophisticated, focused entirely on what he could provide for her. She would think of her poor mother, whose cough was worsening and whose bills were staggering. It didn’t matter, at the end of the day, what Nikos Katrakis thought of her. Much less what she thought of herself.
Whoring yourself out to the highest bidder, are you? Like mother, like daughter after all, Peter had sneered—but she would not think of Peter. The temptation to dissolve into misery was far too great, and far too dangerous now. She resisted the urge to check her smooth chignon, to run her hands along her clothes as if her crisp white trousers and long-sleeved, sky-blue cotton blouse might somehow have become unkempt in the time it had taken her to board the yacht. She could not show nervousness. She could not show…anything, she thought, or she would crumble beneath the pressure of what she must do.
Still,
