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“Be still my beating heart,” she’d snipped at him, and then had tried her best to ignore him.
It hadn’t worked then. It didn’t work now.
“Will we reminisce all day?” she asked, injecting a note of boredom into her voice that she dearly wished she felt while he continued to hold her immobile. “Or do you have a plan? I’m unfamiliar with the ins and outs of blackmail, you see. You’ll have to show me how it’s done.”
“You’re free to refuse me yet again.”
“And lose my father’s company in the process.”
“All choices have consequences, princess.” He shrugged, much the same way he had at that benefit dinner. “Your father would have been the first to tell you that.”
That he was right only infuriated her more.
“My father was misguided enough to consider you like a son to him,” Mattie said, and there was no keeping the emotion at bay then. It clogged her throat, made her eyes heat. But she didn’t care if he saw this, she told herself. This wasn’t the emotion that would destroy her. “He adored you. He thought more highly of you than he did of Chase, at times.” She paused, as much to catch her breath and keep from crying as for effect. “And look how you’ve chosen to repay him.”
She’d expected that to be a blow to him, but Nicodemus only laughed again then dropped his hand from her hair, and it took everything Mattie had not to rub the spot where he’d touched her. The worst part was, she didn’t know if she wanted to wipe away his touch or hold it in. She never had. He canted his head to one side as he studied her face and then laughed some more.
“Your father thought I should have dragged you off by your hair years ago,” he said with such lazy certainty that Mattie flushed with the unpleasant understanding that he was telling the truth. That Nicodemus and her father had discussed her like that. “Especially during what he liked to call your ‘unfortunate’ period.”
She flushed even darker, and hated that it hurt. And she suddenly had no trouble at all imagining her father discussing her regrettable, motherless and rudderless early twenties with Nicodemus, no matter how much it scraped at her and felt like a betrayal.
“I did the best I could,” she bit out, and she broke then, because that was scraping a bit too close to truths she didn’t dare voice, and that terrible guilt that lay beneath everything. She stepped back and would have put even more distance between them, but Nicodemus’s hand shot out and wrapped around her upper arm, stopping her that easily.
She refused to think about the impossible strength in that hand, much less its dark heat, no matter that it blasted into her through the soft, black cashmere knit of her dress. She wouldn’t think about it and she wouldn’t react to it. She wouldn’t.
“You know very well that you did not do anything remotely like your best,” he said evenly, with only the faintest hint of old tempers and half-remembered harsh words in his voice. “You made it your business to shame your father. I would say you shamed your family name, but we both know your brother had that well in hand. How a great man like your father managed to raise two such useless, ungrateful, overly entitled children remains one of life’s greatest mysteries.”
Chase was right. Her father might have agreed with Nicodemus while he’d lived, but Mattie couldn’t let herself live down to those low expectations any longer. She could smell the leather again, feel the heat of the South African sun. Then the screech—
“Almost everyone is useless, ungrateful and overly entitled in their early twenties,” she told him, forcing herself to face him, to hold that judgmental gaze of his, and not try to jerk out of his hold. She suspected he wouldn’t let go, and then what? “The trick is not remaining any of those things.”
“Some of us had far more serious things to do in our early twenties, Mattie. Like survive.”
So pompous. So full of himself. But better that than he know anything real or true about her. That was the only way she was going to make it through this.
“Yes, Nicodemus,” she said with an exaggerated sweetness he couldn’t mistake for anything but sarcasm. “You’re a self-made man, as you’re the first to point out at every opportunity. Alas, we can’t all be you.”
His fingers flexed against her arm and she hated the arrow of fire that shot from that faintest contact straight into her sex. She hated that her body had never cared how dangerous this man was, no matter how panicked her brain might be.
He’d proposed again when she’d been twenty-four.
Mattie had been dancing for hours in a dress that was really more of a wicked suggestion with a few cleverly placed straps, a cheeky selection for a night out in London. Then she’d walked outside the club to find him waiting there at the private, paparazzi-free back entrance, leaning up against a muscular little sports car parked illegally in the alley with his arms folded over his powerful chest.
