“You do not know?” His full mouth curved slightly, making him look both delicious and amused. “Then I cannot have done it correctly.”
Tristanne realized then that she was still touching him. Her head spun and her breath had gone shallow, but her hands still lay against the granite planes of his chest. She could feel the heat of him rise through the cloth of his shirt, and the time had long passed to let go, to step away—and yet she still held on as if he was the only thing keeping her from tilting off the edge of the world.
Get a hold of yourself! she ordered herself, desperately. She thought of Vivienne’s pale, too-slender form; thought of her racking cough and sleeplessness. She had to keep her head about her, or all would be lost. She had no choice.
She dropped her hands. As she did so, she thought his half smile deepened, grew more darkly amused. Somehow, that made it possible for her to straighten her spine, to remember herself, remember what she must do. And for whom.
“You were perfectly adequate,” she told him, trying to sound unaffected. Almost bored, even, while her heart galloped and her stomach twisted.
He did not react to her remark in any way that she could see—yet sensed a certain stillness in him, a certain focused watchfulness, that reminded her of some great predator set to pounce. The dragon, perhaps, a moment before letting loose his fire.
“Was I, indeed?” he asked coolly.
“Certainly.” Tristanne shrugged as if she felt nonchalant, as if she could not feel the heat that burned in her cheeks. As if he had not turned her inside out and wrecked her completely with one kiss. One complicated, unexpected, mindaltering kiss.
But it was not the only thing she could feel. And as intoxicating as Nikos Katrakis was—as deliciously unnerving as that kiss had been—now that it was over she could also feel Peter’s fury. Her brother had moved closer, and was now standing near enough that he was, no doubt, eavesdropping on her conversation with Nikos. This time, she did not look over. She did not have to—she knew exactly how Peter would be scowling at her, with that anger burning in the eyes that should have looked like hers, but were too cold, too cruel.
“Perhaps it requires further experiment,” Nikos suggested, in that velvety caress of a voice that heated her from within. She put Peter out of her mind for the moment. She felt a heavy, sensual fire bloom in her core, and begin to spread outward. “I am happy to extend the favor. I would not wish to disappoint you.”
“You are magnanimous indeed,” she murmured, dropping her gaze—afraid, somehow, that he could see too much. That he could see exactly how much he had affected her.
“I am many things, Miss Barbery,” Nikos murmured, his voice soft though his gaze, when she dared meet it, was hard. “But I am not magnanimous. I have not one generous bone in my body. I suggest you remember that.”
She knew what she had to do. She had decided, even before Peter had laid out his disgusting conditions, that she was prepared to do whatever it took to emancipate her mother from Peter’s control—to save her. What did she care if the Barbery fortune and financial empire collapsed into dust and ruins? She had turned her back on all of that long ago. But she could not turn her back on her poor mother, especially not now that Gustave—who her mother had loved so blindly, so foolishly—had left her so helpless and so completely under Peter’s thumb. She had stayed out of it while her father lived, but she could not abandon her mother now, so frail and at risk even as she grieved for Gustave. She was all her mother had left. She was Vivienne’s only hope.
Which meant she had only one course of action.
“That is a pity,” Tristanne said, with a calm she did not feel. She felt panic claw at her throat, and rise like heat to her eyes, but she swallowed it. She was determined. She knew her brother was not bluffing, that he had meant every awful word that he’d said to her, that he would not rest until she earned her keep in service of filling the family coffers, and that he would think nothing of tossing her mother out into the street if Tristanne defied him. She knew exactly what would happen if she did not do this.
What she did not, could not know was what might become of her if she did.
“Not at all,” Nikos said, his golden eyes watchful, intent. “Merely the truth.”
Women do this every day, she told herself. Since the dawn of time. With far lesser men than this.
“It is a pity,” Tristanne forced herself to say, the emotions she would not acknowledge making her voice husky, “because I had heard you were between mistresses at present. I had so hoped to be the next.”
His dark eyes flared, then turned to molten gold. She held his gaze as if she were as bold, as daring, as her words suggested. Hoping that she could be. She had to be.
“But, of course,” she continued, because this was the crux of it—because she knew Peter was listening, and so she had to push the words out, no matter how they seemed to clog her throat, “as your mistress, I would require your generosity. A great deal of it.”
For another endless moment, Nikos only watched her, his gaze still searing through her—reducing her to ash, making her breath desert her—but otherwise his big body remained still, alert. It was almost as if she had not propositioned him. As if she had not offered to prostitute herself to him as casually as she might have ordered a drink from the bartender.
But then, making every hair on her body prickle and her nipples pull to hard, tight points, Nikos smiled.
It had been a long time in coming, this moment, and Nikos could not help but savor it. Revel in it. He had never dared dream that his arch-enemy’s sister would offer herself to him, as his mistress, thus ensuring his ultimate victory—his final revenge. But he would take it—and her.
He did not have to look at Peter Barbery to feel the other man’s outrage—it poured from him in waves. It felt as sweet as he had always imagined his revenge would, in all these years he’d so carefully plotted and planned, gradually drawing the noose tighter and tighter around the Barberys, forcing them ever closer to ruin.
He only wished he were not the only one left. That his critical, disapproving father, his tempestuous half sister and her unborn child, had lived to see that they had been wrong. That Nikos really would do what he’d sworn to them he would do: take down the Barberys. Make them pay. They had died hating him, blaming him; first the heartbroken Althea by her own hand and then, later, the father he had tried so hard and failed, always, to impress. But he had only used that as further fuel.
Just as he used whatever befell him as fuel. He had not allowed a childhood in the slums of Athens to hold him back, nor his mother’s callous abandonment of him. When he had finally wrenched himself from the gutter, using tooth and nail and sheer stubbornness, he had not let anyone keep him from locating the father who had discarded his mother and thus him. And once he’d started to prove himself to his harsh, often cruel father, he had tried to endear himself to Althea, the legitimate, favored and beloved child. He had never resented her for her place in his father’s affections, not like she had eventually blamed him, once Peter Barbery was done with her.
He looked at Tristanne, standing before him, her words still echoing in his ears as if they were a song.
He had no idea what game the Barberys were playing here, nor did he care. Did Tristanne Barbery believe she was some kind of Mata Hari? That she could use sex to control him? To influence him in some way? Let her try. There
