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Mattie had decided right then and there that she needed to stop talking to him. It was too dangerous. Especially if it led him to put his hands on her.
She’d told herself she was relieved when he let her go again without pressing the issue, but it wasn’t quite that simple. There were the aftershocks to consider—the rumbling, jagged tectonics that shifted and reshaped everything inside her no matter that she didn’t want any of it.
But Mattie was nothing if not pointlessly stubborn. She’d maintained her silence all through the car ride out to the private airfield in the suburbs of Manhattan, through the boarding of the sleek Stathis company jet that waited there and their several hours of flight en route to what he’d called my small, private island in the Aegean Sea.
Because of course Nicodemus had an island, the better to make absolutely certain that Mattie was completely and utterly trapped with him, truly forced to marry him if she ever wanted to leave it again. That or hope she could swim for the mainland. Across the Aegean Sea. In October.
“That wasn’t the silent treatment,” she said now, stretching her legs out in front of her as if she felt as carefree and relaxed as he apparently did.
He shook his head in that way of his that reverberated inside her like another press of his strong fingers against her skin. “I don’t understand why you bother to lie when you must have realized by now that I can see right through you.”
“I merely ran out of things to say to you,” Mattie said loftily. “I imagine that will happen quite often. Yet one more sad consequence of a forced marriage like ours—a lifetime of boredom and silence while stuck together in our endless private hell.”
His lips twitched. “It’s not your silence I find hellish.”
She nodded as if she’d expected that. “Resorting to insults. Quiet little threats. This is what happens when you blackmail someone into marrying you, Nicodemus, and we’re not even married yet. I did try to warn you.”
“There’s no reason to resort to anything quite so unpleasant,” he said silkily, leaning back in his chair. He tossed his pen down on the polished wood surface, and then the heat in his gaze made the narrow walls of the plane seem to contract in on her—or perhaps that was nothing more than the wild drumming of her pulse. “I’m sure we can find any number of things to do that don’t require words.”
Mattie rolled her eyes. “Veiled sexual threats aren’t any less threatening simply because they’re sexual,” she said. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“Is that why you’re turning red?” he asked lazily. “Because you feel threatened?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head again, slower this time. “Liar.”
She reminded herself that just because he was right it didn’t mean anything. He didn’t know that he had this insane effect on her. He only hoped he did.
“I’m assuming you have some idea of how this works,” she carried on, because now that she’d started poking at him, the idea of returning to that heavy silence was stifling. She was afraid it would crush her. “Now that you’re in the process of isolating me from everything familiar, as most men like you do.”
“Men like me,” he said, and there was a dark current in his voice that was either laughter or something far more treacherous, and she felt the uncertainty, the edginess, everywhere. “Are there many? And here I’d considered myself a special snowflake—almost an American, I’m so remarkably unique.”
“It’s a typical pattern,” she assured him and smiled kindly. “Run of the mill, really.”
“If you’re attempting to shame me into 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.”
