Katrakis's Last Mistress (11 page)

He pulled her to her feet, sliding a hand around to the small of her back and holding her against his wide chest. He looked down into her face. She felt the heat of his hand seep into her skin, warming her, even as she felt the usual quickening within. She did not know what his expression meant—only that he searched her own, and that his eyes burned into hers.

Did he know?
she wondered in a sudden panic.
Had she somehow given herself away?

“Perhaps you can help me pack,” he murmured suggestively.

Because that was the only fire they acknowledged, the only way they could.

She hid the rest of it. Sometimes even from herself.

“Of course,” she said, like the perfect mistress she was more and more these days. Just as she’d always feared. Just as Peter had predicted. She smiled at him. “I can think of nothing I would rather do.”

Because she knew beyond the slightest doubt that she could not tell him that she loved him. She could not. She could never tell him that she loved him—she could not even think the words, for fear they would bleed onto her tongue without her knowledge.

She could only love him with her body, and the soft strokes and broad lines of her pencils, and pray with all she had that he never, ever knew.

Nikos strode through the villa, his temper igniting with every step.

She was nowhere to be found. She was not lounging suggestively in his bed, wearing something appropriately saucy. She was not taking a coincidentally perfectly timed shower, the better to lure him in. She was not in any number of places
she could have been in—should have been in—and the fact that he had rushed home from Athens to see her made him more furious about her deficiencies as a mistress than he might have been otherwise.

A man should not have to hunt down his mistress. A man should simply cross the threshold and find her waiting there, beautiful and sweet-smelling, with a soft smile on her lips and a cold drink in her hand.

Nikos stopped on the patio, and scowled at the sun as it sank toward the horizon, spilling red and pink fingers over the gleaming sea. It infuriated him how often he seemed to forget the fact that Tristanne was not, in point of fact, his mistress. He was no better than a boy, letting his head get turned by scaldingly hot sex. It had taken today’s meeting with his team in his office to reacquaint himself with his goals. Peter Barbery, as expected, was trading on Nikos’s good name with all manner of investors, Nikos’s people had confirmed. Apparently the man’s personal loathing of Nikos would not prevent Peter from acting as if the two of them were thick as thieves. Which meant that everything was in place. All that Nikos needed to do now was up the stakes. Raise the bar just that little bit higher, so when he sent it all crashing down, it would really, truly hurt. Leave scars, even.

And he knew just how to do it.

He had rushed back to the island, telling himself that he was not
excited
to do this thing so much as finally recommitted to his original vision of how this entire operation would proceed. He had lost his focus slightly, he had admitted to himself on the helicopter ride from Athens. Tristanne was a beautiful woman, and he was a man who greatly appreciated beauty, especially when he found it wrapped around him every morning like a vine. More than that, she grew more mysterious by the day, and he found he was more and more intrigued by his sense that she was hiding more than she shared. But this, he had concluded today, was simply because
he wondered what the Barberys’ end game was; what they thought they could gain from him.

He would accept no other reason for his uncharacteristic obsession with this woman. There was no room for anything but his revenge, surely.

He heard a scuffing sound then, and turned to see Tristanne emerge from the bushes that marked the edge of the cliff. She held her drawing pad in one hand, and looked at the ground as she walked. Her hair was twisted back into one of those smooth, efficient knots he hated, and she wore rolled up denim trousers, thronged-sandals, and an oversize shirt. She looked like a local painter, not a beguiling mistress—and she did not seem to notice that he was standing there, watching her approach.

Of course.
Why had he expected anything different?

He told himself that what he felt was annoyance. Irritation that she should be so desperately inept. He told himself that he was simply shocked that she was so ill equipped to play her own game of deception.

“Look at you,” he said coolly, his low voice rolling through the falling dark and wrenching her head up. “Have you been climbing up and down the cliffs? You look bedraggled enough to have attempted it.”

“Not at all,” she said as she closed the distance between them. Her chin, as ever, firmed and rose. The frown that had dented the space between her brows disappeared as her eyebrows arched. “Did you not indicate earlier that you preferred me to draw inanimate objects? I was merely obeying you. Rocks. Trees. As ordered.”

The sarcastic inflection to her voice infuriated him. The defiant gleam in her brown eyes, reflecting the last red streaks of the sunset, provoked him. She should have been begging, pleading,
insinuating
herself. Wasn’t that why she was here in the first place? Instead she had challenged him from the
start. She did it even now. He was not even sure she did it deliberately.

She was
naturally
provoking.

“You,” he said coldly, “are very possibly the worst mistress in the history of the world.”

H
IS
words seemed to hang there in the dusk, swirling around them both like the sea air and the sound of the waves against the base of the cliffs far below. He did not know why he felt his heart pound so hard against his chest, much less why he felt himself harden.

“I beg your pardon,” Tristanne said, her eyes throwing daggers at him. He watched her shoulders tense and then square. “I had no idea I was so deficient.”

“Now you do.” He swept his gaze over her. “What do you call this ensemble, Tristanne?”

She stiffened, and her free hand curled over into a fist before she shoved it into her pocket. “I believe the word I would choose is
comfortable
,” she said, very precisely.

“
Comfortable
is not a word in a mistress’s vocabulary.” He shook his head at her. “Unless you are referring to my comfort. I expected to enter this villa and find you arrayed in front of me, like a banquet for my eyes.”

“Are you sure you are discussing a mistress?” Tristanne asked in the same irritatingly cool, calm tone. “Because it sounds to me as if you are referring to a pack mule. Or the family hound.”

“You are argumentative,” Nikos said, as if he were checking off a list. “Independent.” She blinked, and then averted
her gaze, and he hated it. “Unacceptably mysterious,” he gritted out.

“You will find, I think, that those are characteristics of most adults,” Tristanne said. She moved to the nearby table and set her pad down upon it. “Perhaps you do not encounter such creatures in your daily attempts to rule the world, but I assure you, they are out there.”

“And you are too clever by half,” he replied in a silky tone. “And do not mistake me, Tristanne. That is not a compliment.”

She turned toward him then, something he could not understand moving quickly across her face, gone in an instant. Was it…a kind of grief? But that made no sense.

“You will have to excuse my ignorance,” she said, a storm brewing in her gaze, though no hint of it touched her voice. “I thought that your initial objections to my concept of my role as your mistress centered entirely on whether or not we would fall into bed. Having answered that question, in a way that I am quite certain is to your satisfaction, I fail to see how anything else matters.”

“You fight with me at the slightest provocation,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. As if he did not want to explore the satisfaction to which she had just referred, despite his body’s instant and enthusiastic reaction. He crossed his arms over his chest as he looked down at her, enjoying himself. “How is this proper behavior? How is this enticing?”

At that, she actually laughed. “You are claiming that you do not find it enticing?” she asked. “My mistake. I thought your preferred method for conflict resolution proved otherwise.”

Just yesterday she had argued with him about something absurd—some take on an article in the local paper—and he had had her there in the infinity pool while the sun beat down on them and birds called to each other from above, rendering them both happily wordless.
Conflict resolution
, indeed.

He could not help but smile.

“My point is that you do not suit as a mistress,” he said. “How could you? I should have known when you asked for the position that it could never work.”

“And why is that?” she asked, a hint of pink high on her cheeks.

“Because women do not
ask
to become my mistress,” he said softly. “Why should they? They either are, or are not. It is always quite clear.” He was fascinated by the ruthless way she kept her expression under control. Only a twitch near her eyes, and the faintest tremble of her lips betrayed her. “And I am the one to do the asking.”

“I believe I get your point,” she said crisply. “There is no need to belabor it. What is next, Nikos? A play-by-play breakdown of every time we—”

“You do not get my point.” He interrupted her, his gaze hard on her face. “I am only stating a fact, which should in no way surprise you. Do you think I did not know perfectly well that you had no interest at all in becoming my mistress?”

She seemed to freeze then.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said after a moment. He suspected that if she were another kind of woman, she might have stammered.

“You do.” He arched a brow. “But you need not concern yourself, Tristanne. I know what you wanted.”

She swallowed. “You do?” Her chin rose. “You must enlighten me. I thought I was perfectly clear about what I wanted. And perfectly satisfied with the result.”

He let the moment drag out, enjoying himself far too much. He loved the panic that flashed in her gaze before she shuttered it, the nervousness she betrayed by the smallest of gestures—
almost
shifting her weight from foot to foot,
almost
biting her lower lip.

“I cannot have you as my mistress any longer, Tristanne,” he said quietly. “You are terrible at it.”

“Very well,” she said, her voice even, her eyes carefully
blank. He wondered what that cost her. “I am devastated, of course.”

He almost laughed at the insulting blandness she managed to inject into that last line—a fighter until the end, this woman. She would go down swinging, or die trying. He could not help but admire the sheer force of her bravado. It reminded him of his own bullheadedness, back in his angry youth.

“You are an idiot,” he said then. He shook his head at her. “I am not casting you aside.”

“Are you certain of that?” she asked dryly. Something flashed in her eyes. Relief? Irritation? “The recitation of my many flaws and the myriad ways I have disappointed you seems to suggest otherwise. Or perhaps this is the Nikos Katrakis brand of affection? How delightful.”

“You cannot help yourself, can you?” he asked, his voice almost mild. He moved closer to her, then reached over to trace the mouth that spat such foolishness at him, the mouth that poked at him and exasperated him—the mouth that he found himself fantasizing about when she was not in the room. “You will keep going until you drop, no matter the cost to you.”

She did not jerk her head back from his touch, nor shiver beneath his hand, but he had the sense that she fought off both. Her gaze searched his.

“I don’t understand this conversation,” she said quietly.

And then, he could put it off no longer. He felt something powerful move through him.
Revenge
, he told himself. Finally he would have his revenge. But it felt much more like a necessity than a tactic or a strategy—though he refused to consider why that might be.

“Marry me,” he said.

“Oh,” she managed to say somehow, her mind reeling, while her heart galloped wildly in her chest. Did she fall back a few
steps? Had she fainted? But no, she was still standing there on the patio, too warm from her hike back up the side of the cliff—and from Nikos’s unexpected, scowling appearance.

Or perhaps the heat that washed over her had more to do with what he had just said.

“I will not get on my knees, Tristanne,” he told her in his infuriatingly arrogant way. He looked almost amused at the thought. “Nor will I spontaneously burst into poetry.”

She could not think. She could not
think
, and that was the danger, because if she could not think, she could only feel…and she did not want to feel the things she felt. She could not allow herself to feel the emotions that coursed through her, buffeting her, as if she were no more substantial than a leaf in high winds.

A fierce, overwhelming joy suffused her, pulsing through her veins, blocking out the world for a moment—blocking out reality. The tantalizing idea, as painful as it was inviting, that she could have this man—really have him, when she knew she could not—called to a deep well of hope she had not known she held inside. But oh, the joy of imagining, even for a second, that she was not deceiving him! That he was proposing to a woman who actually existed—instead of this fake mistress person she had tried so hard to put on, like a second skin. He thought she was a failure at it, but then, he had no idea how far from herself she’d had to go to get here.

He had no idea.

“If I were someone else,” he drawled then, his dark eyes a harder version of amused, “I might be rendered insecure by your continued silence.”

But her mind was still racing, her heart still pounding—and she was frozen solid. Peter, she knew, would exult in this opportunity. Marrying Tristanne off to a rich man he could then lean on for financial support was an abiding fantasy of his; their father had shared it. It would solve all of her
problems. Nikos would help her help her mother, of course, and Vivienne would finally be debt-free and on the way to recovery. Tristanne would be free of Peter, finally, for she could not imagine that her brother would bother with her any longer if he could approach Nikos directly. If he dared.

If only she did not love him.

“I can see your brain working overtime,” Nikos said, tilting his head slightly as he gazed down at her. “What can there be to think about, Tristanne? We both know there can be only one answer.”

If only she did not love him.

But she did love him, every arrogant, demanding, exasperating inch of him. She loved the way he moved through the world, using that powerful body and his far more impressive mind to cut a swathe before him. She loved the way he held her so tenderly sometimes, though she knew he would deny any and all softer emotions—or any emotions at all—were she to say such a thing aloud. She loved the defiant way he spoke of his past, as if it did not hurt him, as if it had not shaped him.
She loved.
She loved with every breath, with every caress of pencil against paper, with every touch of skin to skin. She loved him more than she had ever loved another person in her life, more than she could ever say, and she knew that she could not marry him. Not when almost everything she’d said to him, more or less, was a lie.

He had not spoken of love, she knew, nor would he. But did that matter? She knew the truths between them that only their bodies could speak. He did not have to feel as she did. She was not certain that he could, even if he’d wanted to do something so anathema to him.

Which only made it more clear what she must do, though every part of her rebelled. Every cell rose up in revolt, almost choking her to keep her from saying what she resolved she must say. She felt a sharp heat behind her eyes, but she would not cry. She would not.

“I cannot marry you,” she said at last, the words ripped from her, seeming to tear at her throat, her tongue, her lips. She was not sure how she managed to do it. But she could not lie to the man she loved, not any longer. She simply could not. She would find some other way to save her mother, somehow, but she could not do this anymore. The fact that she had done it at all was something she would regret for the rest of her days.

“No?” He did not seem particularly taken aback by her declaration. “Are you certain? I feel sure that you can.”

“I mean that I
will not
marry you,” she amended, with every last drop of bravado she possessed. As if it did not kill her to say it. As if it were not a supreme act of sacrifice to say such a thing to him when she knew, she just
knew
, that she could love enough for both of them. She could feel the force of it, thudding heavy and hard against the walls of her chest.

“Ah.” He studied her. “Have you gone over all romantic, Tristanne? Has talk of marriage led you to fantasize about notions of forever and matching rings?” He laughed, shortly. “I assure you, I will have my lawyers bury us both in prenuptial contracts. I imagine that will prove a cure for any lingering romantic fantasies.”

“That would be a relief, I am sure,” Tristanne somehow brought herself to say, even managing a certain level of dryness. As if she could be as cynically detached as he was—as he expected her to be.

“Then what is your objection to my proposal?” He shrugged with the supreme confidence of a man who knew himself to be one of the world’s greatest catches, wanted by untold numbers of women on innumerable continents. “You cannot say we do not suit.”

“You just spent some time detailing the ways in which we do not suit,” Tristanne said, almost testily. She did not know why she continued to spar with him. She should simply leave
him, she knew. She should do it now, while she still felt virtuous for refusing him. Before the pain caught up with her and laid her out, flat, as she suspected it would. As she feared it would.

She had always known he would haunt her—and that was before she’d been foolish enough to fall head over heels in love with her.

“A man does not expect to argue with his mistress,” Nikos said, his mocking half smile appearing again. “But that is the province of a wife, is it not?”

“I do not think you believe half of the things that come out of your mouth,” Tristanne threw at him, fighting the swell of her own emotions. She wanted, too badly, to be the woman she’d pretended to be. The woman he’d actually proposed to, instead of the woman she was. “I think you simply say these things for effect!”

“Marry me, and see for yourself,” he suggested, completely unperturbed. Daring her, in fact, to marry him!

Tristanne felt something break inside of her, and had to bite back a gasp that she feared would come out more of a sob. She could not cry. She
would not
cry, not now, not in front of him. But she felt all of her fight, all of the bravado she’d clung to as her only defense against this man, go out of her in a great rush.

What was she fighting for? Why was she being so noble? The truth was that she was selfish, not sacrificing, because she wanted to say yes more than she could remember wanting anything else, ever. She wanted to disappear completely into the life that Nikos offered her, and bury herself in the sizzling heat of his embrace. The truth was that she loved Nikos, and while it was something Peter could never possibly understand, she knew in her heart that her mother would. And how could she walk away from him without even trying to tell him the truth about herself? How would she ever manage to live with herself if she did such a thing?