LITMIR.BIZ

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      Nicodemus closed the distance between them almost lazily, but Mattie knew better. There was nothing lazy about him, ever. It was all misdirection and only the very foolish believed it.

      “Have we ever determined what was wrong with you that you wanted to marry a teenager in the first place?” she asked him now, trying to divert whatever was coming. But he only stopped a scant few inches in front of her. “Couldn’t find a woman your own age?”

      Nicodemus didn’t reply. He reached over and raked his fingers through the long, dark hair she decided instantly she needed to cut off, then wrapped it all around his hand, like he was putting her on a leash.

      Then he gave it a tug. Not a gentle one. And she felt it deep between her legs, like a flare of dark pleasure.

      Mattie wanted to smack his hand away, but that glinting thing in his dark gaze dared her to try, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction when she was already tilting her head back at an angle that made a dangerous heat kindle to bright life inside her. Then build.

      “That hurts,” she told him, horrified that there was a hint of thickness in her throat when she spoke. That gave him ammunition. It couldn’t be allowed.

      “No, it doesn’t.” He sounded as certain as he had when she’d been eighteen, and it was infuriating. No matter if it made everything inside her tilt again and then tighten.

      “I realize I’ve been bartered off like chattel,” she bit out. “But it’s still my hair. I know how it feels when someone pulls it.”

      His smile deepened. “You lie about everything, Mattie,” he murmured, the slap of the words at jarring odds with the way he crooned them, leaning in close. “You break your word the way other women break their nails.”

      “I break those, too.” It was like she couldn’t stop herself. “If this has all been a bid for the perfect, polished trophy wife, Nicodemus, you’re going to find me a grave disappointment.”

      He laughed softly, which wasn’t remotely soothing, and tugged again, and it wasn’t the first time Mattie regretted the fact that she was both tall and entirely too vain. Five feet ten inches in her bare feet, and the gorgeous black boots she was wearing today put her at a good six feet and then some. Which meant that when Nicodemus loomed over her and got too close to her, that mouth of his was right there. Not miles above her, which was safer. Within easy reach—and she imagined he was deliberately standing this close to her because he wanted to remind her of that.

      Like she—or her shuddering, jolting pulse she could feel in a variety of worrying places—would be likely to forget.

      “I told you a long time ago that this day would come,” Nicodemus said now.

      “And I told you that I wasn’t going to change my mind,” she replied, though it cost her a little more than it should have to keep her chin up and her gaze steady on his. “I haven’t. You can’t really believe that this grotesque, medieval form of blackmail is the same as me surrendering to you, can you?”

      “What do I care how you come to me?” he replied in that low, amused voice of his that kicked up brushfires inside her as it worked its way through her and made her feel a delicious sort of weak. “You mistake me for a good man, Mattie. I’m merely a determined one.”

      And despite herself, Mattie remembered a long, formal dinner in Manhattan’s Museum of Natural History for some charity or another and her father’s insistence that she sit with Nicodemus, who, he’d informed her when she’d balked, was like another son to him. A far-better-behaved one, he’d added. Mattie had been all of twenty-two—and infuriated.

      “I’m not trying to change your mind, princess,” Nicodemus had told her in a voice pitched for her ears alone, at odds with the way he’d spoken to others that night—mighty and sure, bold and harsh. He’d shifted in his seat and pinned her to hers with that knowing dark glare of his she’d come to know far too well. “We both know how this will end. Your father will indulge you to a certain point, but then reality will assert itself. And the longer you make me wait, the more I’ll have to take it out of your rebellious little hide when you’re where you belong. In my bed. Under my...” He’d paused, his dark eyes had glittered, and she’d felt it as if he’d licked the soft skin of her belly. Like a kind of glorious, transformative pain. His lips had crooked. “Roof.”

      “What an inviting fantasy,” Mattie had retorted, aware he hadn’t meant to say roof at all. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping me from leaping at the opportunity to experience that great joy.”

      “Suit yourself,” he’d replied. He’d shrugged, but she’d been far too aware that every inch of him was hewn of steel, that he was himself a deadly weapon. She’d felt the power he wore so easily like a thick, hot hand at her throat. Worse, she’d been aware of that part of her that craved it. Him. More. “I have a very long memory, Mattie, and a very creative approach to retribution. Consider yourself forewarned.”

      “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

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