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So she’d run in the opposite direction.
“Play your games, princess,” he’d said, harsh and amused as she’d fled from him. Certain, the way he always was. “When you come to me, I will make you crawl.”
She’d believed him.
“No,” he said, yanking her back into the dangerous here and now. His hand was on her arm, and that heat was stampeding through her and this time, there was no hope of escape. “We can’t all be me. But you can certainly learn how to please me, Mattie. And if I were you, I’d learn it fast.”
It was another threat. Or more of a promise, she supposed. Because despite everything, despite how long and how far she’d run from this man, he’d won. The way he’d always told her he would.
“I’ve never really been a quick learner,” she told him with a kind of manic cheerfulness, because she couldn’t let herself think about what pleasing him might entail. God help her, but she didn’t dare. “Oops. One more disappointment for you to swallow, I’m afraid.”
CHAPTER TWO
HE’D WON.
That was what mattered, Nicodemus told himself as he looked down into the lovely, rebellious face of this woman who had defied him and haunted him across the years, and somehow willed himself not to put her over his knee. Or under him right here on the library floor.
He took a breath, the way he would if this was as simple as the business deal he was pretending it was. Then another, and still she watched him like he was an animal, and she was half-afraid she might pick up a few fleas if she stood too close.
Nicodemus couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel jubilant. Wildly triumphant. Instead of this same dark fury that always beat in him when she looked at him like this, so recklessly defiant when the fact he would win could never have been in any doubt.
He made himself let go of her, though it was hard. Too hard, when everything inside him beat like a tight, taut drum and he wanted nothing more than to bury himself in her, at last. To ride out his victory until she screamed his name the way he’d always known she would, to taste her and learn her and take her, over and over, until this vicious hunger was sated.
Because he was certain it would be sated once he had her. It had to be.
But that would come later.
“Sit,” he ordered her, jerking his chin in the direction of two deep, dark brown leather armchairs before the nearest fireplace. “I’ll tell you how this will work.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very promising start to the marriage you’ve been threatening me with for years,” she said in her usual flippant, disrespectful way that he really shouldn’t find as amusing as he did. Like it was foreplay. “In fact, if you ask me, it sounds like the kind of marriage that will lead to a very big, very public divorce in approximately eighteen months, or as soon as I can escape and file.”
“You won’t escape,” he said, nodding toward the chairs again, and less politely. “Though you’re welcome to try. I’d be happy to chase you down and haul you back.”
He was rewarded with that dark blue glare of hers that had been making him ache with a driving need for almost as long as he’d known her. He smiled and was rewarded with the faintest hint of a shiver that she tried to hide.
She settled herself in the far chair with that wholly unearned grace of hers that he’d found nothing short of marvelous since the day they’d met. Mattie Whitaker had never suffered through any awkward phase as far as Nicodemus could tell. She’d been a gleaming bright beacon at sixteen, with her half-American, half-posh-British accent she’d wielded like a sword, even then. At eighteen, she’d been magnificent, pure and simple. From her glossy blue-black hair to her rich, dark blue eyes, to that wide mouth that should have been outlawed. She’d had poise and elegance far beyond her years, a consequence, he’d decided long ago, of having had to play hostess for her father after her mother had died when she was only eight.
He’d walked into that silly ball, that leftover nod to some gilded-age American fantasy he couldn’t begin to understand, and had been struck dumb. Like she’d been a lightning bolt instead of what she was, what he knew she was: one more pretty little rich girl in a sparkling dress.
But God help him, it was how she’d sparkled.
She’d been so careless—thoughtless and spoiled as only wealthy heiresses could be. He’d suffered through that once already back in Greece, with self-centered, deceitful Arista, who’d nearly taken him to his knees and to the cleaners when he’d been twenty-two and a trusting, stupid fool. He’d vowed he’d never trust so easily nor be so deeply foolish again.
