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But she didn’t say no.
“Or,” he said, in that dark, low way, “you can tell me one true thing.” His gaze locked with hers. “Just one. The truth, Mattie, or my hand. Your choice. But I’ll have some kind of surrender from you, either way.”
And that was when Mattie realized what she had to do.
Because it was the only thing she had left. And she didn’t know why she’d been avoiding it for so long. As Nicodemus had taught her too well in this last fraught week, there were intimacies much more shattering than sex. The world was filled with one-night stands, bedpost-notchers and all kinds of people who used sex to hide from intimacy, not to enhance it.
She could do it. She should have done it long before now. She should have realized it was the only possible way she could get the upper hand with him.
Mattie swallowed, hard. She searched his face for any give, any softness, any sign that he was something other than this: hard, demanding, implacable. But it was the Nicodemus she knew staring back at her, and the sheer, startling rightness of that—of him and of this decision she’d made so effortlessly after all these years of agonizing—washed over her. It made her remarkably calm for someone who was pinned to a bed and literally trapped between a rock and a hard place.
But it also made it easy. Or maybe that was because it was him.
Maybe, a small voice whispered inside her, it’s always and only been him, and you should have admitted it a long time ago.
Mattie didn’t want to think about that, or all the things it could mean.
“One truth,” he said, as if he thought she wasn’t going to answer him. “That’s all it will take to clean the slate. Can you do it?”
She pulled her fingers out of his, faintly surprised when he let her. Then she reached up and slid her palms along his hard jaw, letting the sensation crash into her. She liked the fact he hadn’t bothered to shave in days, that his skin was rough to the touch. She liked that gleam in his dark eyes. She liked that she was closer to him now, almost too close to bear.
“I want you,” she whispered.
And Nicodemus froze.
* * *
For a shimmering moment, everything was taut. Stretched thin on the edge of a knife—or maybe that was him, holding himself above her, her words like a shout ricocheting within him.
Nicodemus didn’t ask her to repeat herself. Not because her words were burned into him, though they were. Not even because he knew he couldn’t possibly hear her over the racket inside him, the clamor of his heart and the shout of his blood in his veins.
But because he had never seen that look on her face before, in her pretty eyes. Wide open. Clear. Determined, perhaps, and more than a little anxious. Bright.
True.
It moved over him like a wave. Like an ocean’s worth of tides, dragging at him, blessing him or condemning him, and Nicodemus wasn’t sure he cared which. He reminded himself that Mattie was a liar. That like the only other people who had ever meant anything to him, she would lie to him as easily as she breathed. That there was no point in believing her now, when she was only telling him what she thought he most wanted to hear.
When she was right.
She moved then. She slid her hands from his face and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and then she shifted her hips against his, dancing for him again. Making him wish that this once, he could believe her.
“Nicodemus,” she whispered. “I always have.”
And he was still only a man, despite everything. He was as weak as any other. Perhaps even as weak, in his own way, as the man he’d always hated the most—his father. And Mattie Whitaker had been crawling in him like an itch for all these years, whispering his name in his darkest hours whether she knew it or not, and promising him exactly this in every last one of his favorite fantasies.
How could he resist her?
He stopped trying. He simply dropped his head and crushed his mouth to hers, and who cared what came after? If she proved—the way he assumed she would, because she always did—that even this was a lie?
For the first time in his life, Nicodemus didn’t care.
She tasted like fire and longing and all of the wildness that had swirled between them all this time. He kissed her again and again, glutting himself and losing himself at once, feeling that lush, lithe body of hers pressed against him, soft where he was hard, tall and long and perfect.
Mine, he thought, reveling in the word, in her exquisite warmth in his arms and that pounding, beating, hungry demand inside him, spurring him on, making him half crazed with need.
Her hands traced shapes down his back, tested the heft of his biceps, then found their way to his hips. Everything was the heat of her mouth, the glory of her taste, the maddening slide of her body against his. He pulled back to peel off his shirt and she made a soft sound of distress.
