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I close my eyes and count to three. Like a little girl. One. Two. Three. When I open my eyes, Tristan is still standing in front of me, still looking at me with eyes that strip me bare to my bones.
I had a sudden yearning to revisit the past.
More like a sudden yearning to torment, to bruise, to punish…
Silently, I curse Peter for surrendering me so easily to a plundering wolf. He has no idea, of course, nobody does. He probably thought he was doing me a favor. What young curator wouldn’t kill for an introduction to Tristan Kane? Tech billionaire, philanthropist, rich as Croesus but with the face and body of an Adonis. He is a god, a hot property, one that unfortunately has already burned my fingers too many times before.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here, or what sick game you are playing, but I want you to leave and never come back.”
His damn eyebrow arches up again. “Really?” He laughs. “Were you always this unreasonable, or is it a new facet to your character?”
My eyes water with tears of frustration. “Don’t mock me,” I spit. He has already frayed my composure to ragged threads.
He considers me for a long, silent moment, his eyes cold and expressionless. “I have a little less than half an hour before my meeting. Your boss promised me a tour.” He smiles blankly, as if the game of mocking me has already lost its charm for him and I’m nothing more than a stranger.
Somehow, his thoughtless dismissal heightens the unfocused pain raging inside me. Like torture, his eyes skip to the paintings hanging behind me. “Let’s begin,” he says quietly. “I’m ready when you are.”
CHAPTER5
TRISTAN
Ican hear the carefully suppressed tension in Cora’s voice as she describes the early twentieth century art movement in a tone that, on the surface, sounds like something she would use for any regular museum visitor on a tour.
“The expressionists would often distort physical reality to create an emotional effect,” she says, walking ahead of me, the stiff set of her shoulders communicating how she would much rather leave me behind.
Far, far behind.
She stops in front of an oil painting with dense, dark strokes arranged in a shape that vaguely resembles that of a man, mouth open in a silent scream.
Emotional effect indeed.
Cora’s tone is dispassionate, yet my senses react wildly to the low huskiness of her voice. Eagerly, my mind unearths memories of a warm Italian summer, whispered promises, heated kisses.
With difficulty, I pull my thoughts from my memories and focus on the knowledge that my silence…my presence is grating on her nerves. She starts to walk again, her body held stiffly, but not stiff enough to hide the soft curves with which I am intimately familiar.
Or was, a long time ago.
Familiar anger wells up inside me, and I want to lash out at her, to hit her with all the questions that have tortured me for five years.
As if she feels the same thing, she suddenly stops walking and whips around to face me.
“Why are you here?”
Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes flashing and angry. I resist the urge to reach out and touch her, to trace my finger from her cheekbones to her chin, and lower, until fabric prevents me from exploring bare skin any further. I want her. In a visceral, sexual, irrational way that has nothing to do with the reasoning parts of my brain. I want to touch her roughly, then gently, to pleasure her and punish her…
That’s not the plan, Tristan.
Looking down at her face, I let my lips curl slowly. “You heard your boss, Cora. I have a meeting.”
“Really?” She crosses her arms over her chest and eyes me with unconcealed disgust. “You expect me to believe your presence here has nothing to do with me?”
“Believe whatever you want, Cora. It means nothing to me.”
She flinches, and for an instant, there’s a cloud of hurt in her eyes. Once, I would have turned myself inside out to comfort her, ease her pain, make her happy, but now I want to hurt her, to tear her to pieces the way she’d done to me.
“I won’t let you disrupt my life.” Her eyes flash at me, and I wonder how dead I’d be if she could shoot sparks from those twin pools of gray smoke.
“Is that what I’m doing?” Laughing softly, I walk right up to her, so close that my nose fills with the exquisite lavender fragrance of her hair and the scent of her skin. My senses come to life, and as her eyes widen and her skin flushes, I want nothing more than to take, to devour, to bury my senses in her, to pull her down with me until we’re both drowning.
