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Until she had walked out onto the deck, and seen him, and then she’d known exactly what she’d been doing, and why. That knowledge poured into her, filling her and washing through her, nearly making her stumble as she walked. Her motivations were suddenly as clear to her as if she’d written them out in a bullet-point list. As if they were glass. It had been all for that quicksilver gleam in his eyes when he looked around from his position at the railing and saw her. That sudden flare of heat in his old coin eyes, quickly shuttered.
And what did that make her, already far too susceptible to the one man to whom she could never, ever surrender herself? What in the world did she think she was doing with him—when she should have thought of nothing but her necessary goal? Her poor mother? She should have dressed in sackcloth and ashes—anything to repel him.
But she did not wish to repel him, a traitorous voice whispered. Not really. Perhaps not at all. She pulled her wrap closer around her shoulders, and frowned intently at the cobblestones beneath her feet as they made their way along the harborside quay toward the bustling center of the small village.
“That is all you have to say?” Nikos asked, a certain tenseness in his voice. Tristanne looked at him then, no less imposing in the soft, Italian night than he was in the stark light of morning.
“Must I defend my family?” she asked, with a casual sort of shrug that she did not feel. She had perfected it over the years, to deflect exactly this kind of attention. “All families have their little skirmishes, do they not? Their bad behavior and regrettable scenes?”
“I am no expert on families,” he said, with a derisive snort. “But I am fairly certain most restrain themselves from physical displays of violence. Or should.”
“I bruise very easily,” Tristanne murmured dismissively. Better Peter should take out his rage on her than on Vivienne, Tristanne thought, as she always had. She did not want to think about the way Peter’s fingers had dug into her flesh, nor the words he had thrown at her, his face contorted in fury. And she did not want to talk about this. Not with Nikos. Not ever. She felt the punch of something edgy and heavy in her gut, but she struggled to repress it.
Not now, she ordered herself fiercely, blinking back the heat behind her eyes. Not with him. It does not matter what I dreamed of when I was seventeen—he can be nothing to me!
Nikos stopped walking, and she did, too, turning toward him warily. He stood with his back to the famous Piazzetta, the faint breeze from the water playing through his thick, black hair. His gaze was dark, troubled.
“What kind of man is your brother, that he would put his hands on you in this way?” he asked, condemnation ringing in his voice. “Surely your father would not have countenanced such behavior, were he still alive.”
It was the certainty in his voice that did it, somehow. It was all…too much. Tristanne flushed hot with that toxic mixture of shame and fury, and it was all directed at the man who stood there before her, beautiful and disapproving in the lights that spilled from the restaurants that lined the Piazzetta.
It was all his fault! He was beguiling when he should have disgusted her, and she hated that he knew what Peter had done. That he knew exactly how little her own brother thought of her. What did that say about her? About how worthless her own brother found her?
And what did it say about her that she cared what this man thought about it? About her? When his thoughts should not matter to her at all?
“What kind of man is Peter?” she asked, her temper kicking in again, harder, and scalding her from within. At least it was better than tears. Anything was better than tears. “I don’t know how to answer that. A typical man? A normal man? They are all more or less the same, are they not?” She felt wild, as if she careened down a narrow mountain pass, out of control and reckless.
The elegant arch of his dark brows did nothing to stop her. “Careful, Tristanne,” he said softly, but she did not wish to be careful.
“They control. They demand. They issue orders and care not at all for the feelings or wishes of anyone around them.” She threw her words at him like blows, for all the good it did her. He did not move. He did not flinch. He only stared at her with eyes that grew darker by the second. And still she continued. “They crush and flatten and maim as they see fit. What is a little bruise next to everything else a man is capable of? Next to what you are capable of, for that matter?”
It seemed as if the world stopped turning. As if nothing existed save her labored breathing and the sounds of la dolce vita all around, spilling out of the cafés and trattorias and somehow failing to penetrate the tense, tight bubble that surrounded them.
