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“Without consequences?” she asked, her voice shakier than she liked. She raised up her hand with its heavy rings. “What do you call this?”
His mouth curved. “I can do this for another decade if I have to, and I’ll still win. It’s entirely up to you.”
* * *
He was right. She was going about this all wrong.
Mattie came to that conclusion in a near-violent rush while she stood in the spacious shower, her hands braced against the lovingly crafted stone wall and her head tipped back, letting the water fall down on her like rain. She’d spent all this time treating Nicodemus like he was an unfightable force of nature, some impossibly powerful creature made of myth and magic, when the truth was he was a man.
Just a man, like all the rest.
And when she put her wildly beating heart aside, when she shoved off the things he made her feel against her will and the very real fear that she was already coming undone because of him, she knew that she’d been playing this the wrong way from the start. Because he’d taken her breath away when she was still eighteen without even trying, and she’d forgotten the simple truth she’d known even then: men were easy.
Men were creatures of simple needs and impulses that could be directed and finessed and yes, used. Fathers, brothers, boyfriends—it was the same thing, really, if different tools. Mattie had learned that a long time ago in the glare of cameras usually wielded by men, none of whom were immune to the judicious application of a little bit of feminine charm. It was easy to flirt or flatter her way out of trouble, to misdirect, to indulge in a little sleight of hand. It was easy to change the conversation from the things she didn’t wish to give up to other things she didn’t much mind surrendering.
Mattie hadn’t been able to do much about her guilt. But a little bit of charm had gone a long way with Big Bart, especially because she’d been willing to move back to the States and under his thumb. And if she could charm her father, who she’d hurt so terribly twenty years ago, she knew she could charm anyone.
If she wanted to gain back any of the ground she’d lost in these explosive few days, Mattie needed to treat Nicodemus like any other man she’d ever known. Mortal. Manageable.
She started by dressing for him.
Mattie tried to remember every single thing he’d ever said to her about her appearance—all of it negative, generally, and delivered in that withering tone of his—and dress around it. She ended up in a soft, cocoa-colored cashmere sweater that was airy enough for the Greek sun and warm enough for the hint of autumn chill beneath it. She layered it over a pair of white trousers and left her feet bare in a touch of feminine vulnerability. She twisted her hair back into a casual chignon with a few strands left loose, and when she was done she looked a good deal more like the kind of woman Nicodemus had always seemed to think she should have been than she usually did. The kind of woman she might have been naturally had she not felt compelled to dress in dark, moody colors and clothes he found inelegant to convey her defiance every time she saw him.
And then she squared her shoulders, reminded herself how many times she’d done something like this before when she’d needed to appease one of her boyfriends who’d grown too demanding and went to find him.
He was only a man, she reminded herself again as she moved through the villa. No matter how he made her feel. No matter that he’d somehow managed to make her forget herself completely almost every time he touched her. No matter that he’d taken a piece of her no one else ever had.
None of that mattered. She had to even this playing field, or she’d disappear.
He sat with his laptop at the gleaming counter in the expansive, light-filled kitchen on the lower level of the villa, a Greek coffee steaming at his elbow. She hesitated in the doorway, assuming he’d heard her approach the way he always had before, though he didn’t glance her way.
And for a moment, she forgot about her strategies and her plans. She forgot what he was or wasn’t. What she could or couldn’t do. Because he was staring off into space with an unguarded, wholly un-Nicodemus-like expression on his face. Not fierce, not hard. Not myth or magic.
She couldn’t categorize it. She didn’t recognize it.
Mattie only knew it made her throat feel too tight.
But then it was gone as if it had never been, and all the dark steel she recognized as pure Nicodemus returned. He shifted slightly in the high stool, frowning at the screen before him.
“Has the funeral ended so soon?” he asked mildly enough, making her wonder exactly when he’d seen her there in the arched doorway when he still didn’t bother to look her way. “I expected to see you draped in shrouds and mantillas for at least the next week.”
