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“I wish I could trust you,” she said.
“I’ve never lied to you,” he said, in that same inexorable, impossible way, as relentless as an incoming tide. “You can’t say the same. I suspect it’s you that you can’t trust.”
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms and moved to sit in one of the comfortable chairs across the aisle, pulling her feet up beneath her in as close to the fetal position as she could get while still upright.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Mattie.” He might have been laughing again. She could see it in his eyes , could hear it, rich and thick and entirely too beguiling in his low voice. “I don’t have to force you or manipulate you or strip off my clothes in a clumsy little challenge, do I?” His smile then was beautiful, truly. Stunning and shattering at once, and it poured into her, through her, like light. Like a nuclear blast. Like a death knell, and she knew it. “I only have to touch you, and you’re mine. You’ve always been mine. Perhaps it’s time you admitted it.”
* * *
They arrived on his island a little before noon the following day after a helicopter ride from a private airfield outside Athens, and it took every shred of control Nicodemus had left inside him to keep from simply tossing Mattie over his shoulder and ravaging her the moment they stepped inside his villa. Exactly the way he’d told her he wouldn’t.
This has been a very long game, but the end is in sight, he reminded himself fiercely. Don’t lose your advantage now.
She had to come to him, one way or another. She had to surrender. She had to be complicit in his triumph over her, or he wouldn’t truly win her at all. He knew this as well as he knew his own name. On some level, he supposed he’d always known it.
Nicodemus had bought this island not long after seeing Mattie for the first time at that damned ball of hers, flush with his own burgeoning success and sense of purpose. He’d planned to remake the world in his image and to a large extent, he’d succeeded. He’d built the vast, sprawling villa in the intervening years, making it as much a monument to his own growing power and influence as to the stunning views it commanded from the top of the rocky hill that made up the bulk of the small island, tucked away in a sleepy part of the tourist-heavy Cyclades islands.
It was the kind of house he’d dreamed of while growing up in a crowded flat in the port city of Piraeus outside Athens, mired in his father’s strict rules and then, afterward, the mess of his father’s lies. It was a house filled with light and art and the sea, not the clamor and struggle of the busy, working-class neighborhood of his childhood. Quiet elegance and wealth were evident in every last detail, from the dizzyingly high ceilings to the recognizably famous canvases he’d installed on his walls. All it needed was the perfect gilded lily of a woman to live in it with him, as glossy and as bright and as expensive as the view he’d worked so hard to claim as his own.
Not any woman, he knew. He’d tried simply glossy and pedigreed once, and it had brought him Arista, who had wanted his money and his power and his prowess in bed, but not his ring or his name. It had taken him much too long to see her true face, to understand what it had meant that her family sneered at him and his lower-class roots. Mattie was different—because he’d always seen her true face. He’d known from the start that she was lying about her aversion to him. He’d held her in his arms in that ballroom and felt her tremble even as she’d denied him. More than that, claiming her meant claiming a place deep in the bosom of her family. He knew exactly how highly her father had thought of him, because Bart Whitaker was a self-made man who’d married above his station, too.
It was as if Mattie had been crafted specifically for him.
And now she was here. Right where he’d wanted her for a decade. Standing in his house, contained by the walls he’d designed and built himself, the last component of his dream come true sliding into place with a click he thought was nearly audible.
Few things in life were as good in fact as they seemed in theory, Nicodemus knew from painful experience, but this—she was one of them. He didn’t know what surged in him then, some wild concoction made of equal parts lust and satisfaction and at last, and he simply stood there in the foyer and let it beat through him. As simple and as poignant as joy.
He watched her as she turned around in a circle in the great room that opened up in front of him, that too-pretty face of hers unreadable in the bright fall sunlight. She tipped her head back, as if to bask in all that sunshine, but then she caught him looking and stopped. Hid. Again.
