releasing you,” he said drily, “you have seriously misjudged your target.”
“No one is actually shameless, Nicodemus,” she said, and her voice softened somehow—lost that cool, mocking edge. She had no idea why. “No matter what they pretend.”
“Perhaps not,” he agreed, shifting slightly against his seat, though he never took that hot, hard gaze from hers. “But you don’t know me well enough to even guess at the things that crawl in me and call my name in my darkest hours. You wouldn’t recognize them if you did.”
There wasn’t a single reason that should take her breath away, or why her stomach should flip over, and so Mattie told herself it was a patch of turbulence, nothing more.
“You seem to want to make this a squalid little transaction,” he said when she didn’t throw something back at him, and she couldn’t read the expression on his face then. He lounged back in his chair, propping his head up with one hand, and looked at her. Just looked at her. As if her layers of clothes and even her skin were no barrier whatsoever. As if he could see straight through to what lay beneath. “As painful and as horrid as possible.”
“It is what it is,” she said. “I have no idea how these barbaric arrangements work. Will you check my teeth like I’m a horse? Kick my tires like I’m a used car you bought off the internet?”
Something sharp and hot, a little too much like satisfaction, flared in the honeyed depths of his dark gaze, and his harsh mouth pulled into a very dangerous curve.
“If you insist,” he said, lazy and low.
Mattie went still. She felt her eyes widen and could see from that gleam in his gaze that he saw it.
For God’s sake! the hysterical part of her—currently occupying almost every part of her save her big mouth—shrieked. What is the matter with you? Don’t challenge him! Stop this right now before it gets out of hand!
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he practically purred, reading her much too easily. Again. “Was that yet another example of your mouth getting you into trouble? It’s either lying to me or provoking me, I notice. It does make me wonder what it would be like to put it to better use.”
He was right, Mattie realized. If he was truly the man she’d been treating him like he was, she’d be significantly more respectful and careful around him, wouldn’t she? The truth was, she knew he wasn’t. She couldn’t believe that he’d really do this. She didn’t believe it, even though she was currently suspended somewhere over the ocean on her way to Greece.
Granted, he was doing an excellent job of acting like a scary, overwhelming, my-way-or-the-highway barbarian, but she’d known this man for years. More important, her father had genuinely liked him. Had even considered him a good match for his only daughter. She simply couldn’t make herself believe that Nicodemus would honestly force her to marry him.
Much less any of the other things he wasn’t quite threatening to do, that were pressing into her so hard now that she was certain they’d leave marks.
“I wasn’t kidding,” she said, and she stood up then, uncoiling herself to stand there in the aisle before him. She opened up her arms and spread them wide, as theatrically as possible. “I’m sure the third richest man in Greece—”
“That’s rather less of a salutation than it might have been once,” he pointed out, that cool amusement in his gaze. “I can’t tell if you mean it as compliment or condemnation.”
“—doesn’t buy one of those crotch-rocket motorcycles of his without making sure it lives up to each and every one of his exacting standards,” Mattie continued as if he hadn’t interjected anything.
She’d seen him on a Ducati once, roaring up a winding country lane in France to a weekend party in a friend’s chateau she never would have attended if she’d known he’d be there. She’d escaped shortly thereafter, but she’d never been able to get that image out of her head. A powerful man on such a sleek and dangerous machine, like lethal poetry etched against the backdrop of vineyards turning gold in the setting sun, as if they’d been doing it purely to celebrate him.
She glared at him and held her crucifixion position. “Well? Here I am.”
Nicodemus’s dark eyes glittered, and he didn’t move, yet Mattie felt as if he’d leaped up and yanked her to him. She felt surrounded, smothered. And lit on fire.
He raised his shoulder in that profoundly Mediterranean way of his, then dropped it lazily.
“Go on, then,” he said, his voice this close to bored, though his gaze burned through her, churning up too much heat and that dangerous hunger she’d been denying for years now. “Strip. Show me what I’ve chased across all these years and bought, at last.”
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