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“Come inside,” Nicodemus said again. It wasn’t a request.
If you can’t be in control, Mattie’s father had always said, you can at least be practical. So she gathered herself together as best she could. She kept her spine straight and her head high, and she marched through the open glass doors like she was proceeding straight off a plank into shark-infested waters.
He slid the doors closed behind her. Mattie heard the click when they shut like a gun to her ear. She walked to the seating area nearest the great windows and sat down in an armchair with great deliberation, so Nicodemus couldn’t sit next to her. He watched her, his mouth twitching again as if he could read her mind as easily as breathe, and then went to the bar tucked into a cabinet to the side and poured two flutes of champagne.
“Take this, please,” he said when she only glared at the glass he brought over and held out to her.
She felt numb, but she took it, staring at it as if it was poison.
“Eis igían sas,” he said. When she frowned up at him, he lifted his champagne in a toast she was certain was mocking. “To your good health.”
“I’m not sure good health is anything I should be aspiring to, in my situation,” she said crisply. She set the flute down on the vast, glass-topped table before her with a decisive clink without so much as tasting it. “It seems to me that a tidy little virus that will carry me off with a minimum of fuss is what I ought to be hoping for. It might be my only escape.”
“I’m sorry to tell you that with great wealth comes immediate access to the best physicians across the globe,” Nicodemus said, seeming perfectly content to stand there, tall and dark and her husband. “I’d make certain you were cured.”
“Exactly how long am I to be trapped in this marriage?”
“You should have paid better attention earlier. Until death,” he said quietly, and there was something in the way he looked at her that made that heavy knot low in her belly flare to life again, hot and needy. Longing and betrayal at once. “Forever.”
“Until death is not the same as forever.”
“Then yes, Mattie,” he said in a mild tone that made her feel like a tantruming toddler. She supposed it was meant to do exactly that. “You may have all the freedom you could possibly desire. In the grave.”
“Wonderful.” She treated him to a tight, fake smile. “Well. This has been delightful. Every girl dreams of being hurriedly married across the planet from all the people she cares about. And half in a language she doesn’t understand. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll take a nap to recover from the thrill of so much fairy-tale glamour at once.”
“You’ve taken quite a few naps since we arrived here.” He moved then, draping that absurd body of his on the nearby couch, at an angle to her, and her heart kicked into a higher gear. “I wonder why?”
“Jet lag?” Mattie supplied tartly. It wasn’t as if she’d slept during those naps she’d claimed she’d needed, of course. She’d been keeping as far away from him as possible.
“Perhaps.” His long fingers toyed with the delicate crystal he held, and she remembered, with startling accuracy, the feel of those fingers dancing across the skin at her side, tracing the sweeping lines of her tattoo. “Or perhaps you are merely trying to avoid the consequences of the past ten years, to say nothing of what happened on the flight over.”
“You talk a lot about these consequences,” Mattie said in as unbothered a tone as she could manage. “But I already feel humiliated. That happens when one is forced into a marriage she doesn’t want. What’s a little in-flight entertainment on top of that? I hope you filmed the whole thing and are planning to upload it to YouTube. Sixty million page views and a host of vile and insulting comments are about the only thing that could make this any worse.”
“That’s more your province than mine, I think,” he said, his dry tone reminding her of that unfortunate video a “friend” of hers had uploaded when Mattie was twenty-three and very drunk. “I’ve never graced the internet without my knowledge, as far as I’m aware.”
“Do you own the internet, too? Or just every person who might post on it?”
“I’m so pleased,” he said after a moment, “that none of this has dulled your sense of drama.”
Mattie found that her hands were in fists again, stuck in the voluminous dark gray skirt of the dress that had seemed like such a good idea when she’d packed it in New York, and now felt nothing but childish. Just as he’d accused her of being, directly and indirectly, a thousand times. It made her heart ache and her head pound today.
