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“I might be less sarcastic, were I on my knees,” Nicodemus observed.
That curve in her mouth deepened, her eyes were bittersweet chocolate with that blue besides and still seemed like sunlight next to the glossy midnight fall of her hair, and he knew that this could go on forever. That it would.
It made him inexpressibly sad.
They’d been sniping at each other for a decade, and there was no end in sight. Playing power games, raising the stakes. He’d forced this marriage and she’d only today touched him for the first time entirely of her own volition—and not, he understood and hated that he did, because she’d been overcome with the longing to do so.
He’d told her he didn’t care how she came to him, and on some level, that was true. But it was also true that there was a restlessness in him, like an uneasy winter wind, and a howling expanse inside that he didn’t want to admit was there.
Finally, everything was exactly how he wanted it. Everything was in its rightful place. He had every single thing he’d ever desired—and yet this was still nothing more than an echoing, cavernous house filled with things. The world in his pocket, the woman of his dreams at his feet with his rings on her finger, and he was still as entirely and utterly alone as when he’d realized what Arista really was all those years ago. What she’d really wanted from a low class man with high class aspirations and too much money too fast.
How was this any different?
He realized, then, the depths of the fantasy he’d built up around Mattie Whitaker. The things he’d imagined she could do, the magic she could work, and why? Because she’d been the prettiest thing he’d ever seen when he was twenty-six and so far away from the ugly little place he’d come from. Because, as she’d accused him, he’d wanted that access to her father and to Whitaker Industries. Because he’d wanted her and had convinced himself that he’d already learned his lesson with Arista. That he’d never repeat those mistakes.
Nicodemus was, as he had always been, the king of the damned. A lie his father had told and nothing more. And the worst part was that he knew he wouldn’t change a thing he’d done to get here. Not one thing. Not even this.
Especially not this.
“Are we going to stare at each other forever?” Mattie asked, her voice easy but those dark eyes of hers intense. “Or is it that you don’t have an answer?”
“I have an answer.” He thought he sounded far smokier, darker, all the way through, but she didn’t seem to notice any difference, and why would she? She didn’t know him. No one ever had, and he understood then that no one ever would. Especially not this woman he’d made his wife, a word she’d claimed was meaningless, anyway. He believed her. Finally, he believed her. “I doubt you’d like it.”
Nicodemus dropped his hand from her face and when she rose to her feet in a lithe sort of ripple that made all sense desert him for a beat of his heart, then another, he didn’t object. She reached over and helped herself to his coffee, swirling the traditionally thick mixture around in the cup before taking a dainty sip.
“This is about control, isn’t it?” she asked. But it wasn’t really a question, and he found he was preoccupied with the fact that the soft, airy sweater she wore matched the darker parts of her eyes. “You’re obsessed with making sure I don’t have any.”
“No,” he said. He wanted to be the coffee cup she pressed to her lips. He wanted to lick the little bit of moisture away when she lowered it. He wanted her to want him, and not because she thought she could leverage it. Maybe that was all he’d ever wanted. More fool, him. It was Arista all over again, and he wasn’t twenty any longer. He had no excuse this time. “This is about lies. It always is. And I’m afraid you’ve miscalculated.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, but didn’t speak, not even when he reached over and traced a path along her delicate jaw, over that little dent that made him foolish with longing, then on down the elegant line of the aristocratic neck she’d inherited from her titled English mother. Then he found his way along the collarbone that led to her exposed shoulder. Her skin was so soft, so warm. She was still so pretty, as gleaming and lovely in his house as in her father’s.
And she was no more than what he’d made her inside his own head. A stranger with a perfect face. One more critical mistake in a long line of them.
Another damned lie and this one all the worse because he’d told it to himself. For years.
“I’ve known for a long time that everything you said to me was untrue,” he said after a moment, and he wasn’t playing up that dark note in his voice then, like grief. That was what this was. What he’d lost. “But your body, I believed. I told myself it whispered the truth no matter what you said.”
