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Mattie smiled. “So you see my predicament.”
He stared at her for a long time. Too long. Then he reached over and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, sending a bolt of that wildfire straight through her. There had to be something wrong with her that even a touch like that made her melt—but she didn’t care. She was too busy reveling in it.
“Once again,” Nicodemus said in that same dangerous tone that was wreaking havoc with her nervous system, “you play with things you cannot possibly understand.”
“Play with me or I’ll play with whoever I want,” she countered, fairly bursting with all of that fake bravado, because it was the only thing she’d been able to think of that would push him enough, and quickly. “Those are your choices, Nicodemus, though you claim I never give you any.”
His hand tightened around her arm, and he hauled her, gently yet inexorably, around the side of that fortress of a desk that was currently missing its gatekeeper. He towed her down the long hallway, while his employees leaped from his path and did a terrible job of pretending not to stare, until he reached the great, big office in the far corner.
It had a long, deep view of the city along the outside walls, and when he closed the door behind them, they were trapped there together. A wall on one side to block them from prying eyes and the canyons of Manhattan right there on the other.
He let go of her, but she could still feel his fingers and the heat of his skin, like brands into her flesh.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” he told her, his accent under control again, but this time she sensed how hard it was for him to maintain it. “But it will not involve bargaining for sex like an animal.”
“Not like an animal,” she protested mildly. “Unless, of course, you think that’s fun. I’m willing to try anything once. Even spanking. I think.”
He shook his head and leaned against the massive granite desk that should have fallen through the floor beneath it, so gargantuan did it look, and yet somehow it suited him. He ran his hand down his front as if to straighten the tie he wore that didn’t require any straightening, and it would have been easier if he’d glowered at her.
But he didn’t. If anything, he looked sad and tired, the way he had before, and like then, it made her heart clutch inside her chest.
“I don’t want to play games with you anymore,” Nicodemus said quietly. Too quietly. “For too long, I thought this was all a game, and that I knew how to win it in the end, but I was wrong. I’m not accustomed to that. It might take some adjustment.”
She’d expected temper. Accusation and heat. Not this.
But she didn’t know how to do anything with this man but push back.
“Does that mean divorce?” she asked in her same nearly flippant tone, so at odds with the one he’d used. “Or no divorce? I can’t keep track. Though the fact you ran away from Greece rather suggests the latter, if I had to guess. You’re usually far more direct.”
“I did not run away,” he corrected her, his dark gaze narrowing with a temper he didn’t let color his voice. “I had work to do, and let’s be honest, Mattie, though I know that’s a stretch for you. You can’t give me what I want.”
If he’d shoved a red-hot fire poker into her chest, he couldn’t have hurt her more, and she couldn’t control how stricken she felt. He saw it and shook his head as if it hurt him, too.
“I’m not trying to hurt your feelings,” he said after a moment, his voice a fraction less cold. Less painfully precise. “Perhaps it was never fair of me to want the things I demanded of you. I don’t know. Maybe you were right when you said any pretty girl would have done. I can’t take any of that back. But I can stop chasing a person who doesn’t exist.”
This was worse. This made the misery she’d felt without him pale and wither away, and she had no idea what that was that swamped her then in its place. Only that it felt too much like despair.
“And what am I supposed to do?” she asked, and she didn’t understand why she sounded so muffled and squeaky at the same time until she felt that heat trickling down her cheeks. She was crying. After all this time, she was crying in front of him without a nightmare to blame it on, and she didn’t even care.
Nicodemus looked hewn from stone, propped up there against that granite desk with the city laid out at his feet. His gaze was dark and troubled, but he didn’t move.
“I don’t understand,” he said after a moment, and there were too many undercurrents in that voice of his, too much Mattie knew she couldn’t comprehend. “I thought you would rejoice at this. You’ve wanted me to leave you alone for years.”
