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“Not at all,” she said as she closed the distance between them. Her chin, as ever, firmed and rose. The frown that had dented the space between her brows disappeared as her eyebrows arched. “Did you not indicate earlier that you preferred me to draw inanimate objects? I was merely obeying you. Rocks. Trees. As ordered.”
The sarcastic inflection to her voice infuriated him. The defiant gleam in her brown eyes, reflecting the last red streaks of the sunset, provoked him. She should have been begging, pleading, insinuating herself. Wasn’t that why she was here in the first place? Instead she had challenged him from the start. She did it even now. He was not even sure she did it deliberately.
She was naturally provoking.
“You,” he said coldly, “are very possibly the worst mistress in the history of the world.”
Chapter Twelve
HIS words seemed to hang there in the dusk, swirling around them both like the sea air and the sound of the waves against the base of the cliffs far below. He did not know why he felt his heart pound so hard against his chest, much less why he felt himself harden.
“I beg your pardon,” Tristanne said, her eyes throwing daggers at him. He watched her shoulders tense and then square. “I had no idea I was so deficient.”
“Now you do.” He swept his gaze over her. “What do you call this ensemble, Tristanne?”
She stiffened, and her free hand curled over into a fist before she shoved it into her pocket. “I believe the word I would choose is comfortable,” she said, very precisely.
“Comfortable is not a word in a mistress’s vocabulary.” He shook his head at her. “Unless you are referring to my comfort. I expected to enter this villa and find you arrayed in front of me, like a banquet for my eyes.”
“Are you sure you are discussing a mistress?” Tristanne asked in the same irritatingly cool, calm tone. “Because it sounds to me as if you are referring to a pack mule. Or the family hound.”
“You are argumentative,” Nikos said, as if he were checking off a list. “Independent.” She blinked, and then averted her gaze, and he hated it. “Unacceptably mysterious,” he gritted out.
“You will find, I think, that those are characteristics of most adults,” Tristanne said. She moved to the nearby table and set her pad down upon it. “Perhaps you do not encounter such creatures in your daily attempts to rule the world, but I assure you, they are out there.”
“And you are too clever by half,” he replied in a silky tone. “And do not mistake me, Tristanne. That is not a compliment.”
She turned toward him then, something he could not understand moving quickly across her face, gone in an instant. Was it…a kind of grief? But that made no sense.
“You will have to excuse my ignorance,” she said, a storm brewing in her gaze, though no hint of it touched her voice. “I thought that your initial objections to my concept of my role as your mistress centered entirely on whether or not we would fall into bed. Having answered that question, in a way that I am quite certain is to your satisfaction, I fail to see how anything else matters.”
“You fight with me at the slightest provocation,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. As if he did not want to explore the satisfaction to which she had just referred, despite his body’s instant and enthusiastic reaction. He crossed his arms over his chest as he looked down at her, enjoying himself. “How is this proper behavior? How is this enticing?”
At that, she actually laughed. “You are claiming that you do not find it enticing?” she asked. “My mistake. I thought your preferred method for conflict resolution proved otherwise.”
Just yesterday she had argued with him about something absurd—some take on an article in the local paper—and he had had her there in the infinity pool while the sun beat down on them and birds called to each other from above, rendering them both happily wordless. Conflict resolution, indeed.
He could not help but smile.
“My point is that you do not suit as a mistress,” he said. “How could you? I should have known when you asked for the position that it could never work.”
“And why is that?” she asked, a hint of pink high on her cheeks.
“Because women do not ask to become my mistress,” he said softly. “Why should they? They either are, or are not. It is always quite clear.” He was fascinated by the ruthless way she kept her expression under control. Only a twitch near her eyes, and the faintest tremble of her lips betrayed her. “And I am the one to do the asking.”
“I believe I get your point,” she said crisply. “There is no need to belabor it. What is next, Nikos? A play-by-play breakdown of every time we—”
