Kitabı oku: «His for a Price»

CHAPTER ONE

IF SHE STOOD very still—if she held her breath and kept herself from so much as blinking—Mattie Whitaker was sure she could make the words that her older brother Chase had just said to her disappear. Rewind them then erase them entirely.

Outside the rambling old mansion high above the Hudson River some two hours north of Manhattan, the cold rain came down in sheets. Stark, weather-stripped trees slapped back against the October wind all the way down the battered brown lawn toward the sullen river, and the estate had shrunk to blurred gray clouds, solemn green pines and the solid shape of the old brick house called Greenleigh, despite the lack of much remaining green. Behind her, at the desk that she would always think of as her father’s no matter how many months he’d been gone now, Chase was silent.

There would be no rewinding. No erasing. No escaping what she knew was coming. But then, if she was honest, she’d always known this day would arrive. Sooner or later.

“I didn’t hear you correctly,” Mattie said. Eventually.

“We both know you did.”

It should have made her feel better that he sounded as torn as she felt, which was better than that polite distance with which he usually treated her. It didn’t.

“Say it again, then.” She pressed her fingers against the frigid windowpane before her and let the cold soak into her skin. No use crying over the inevitable, her father would have said in that bleakly matter-of-fact way he’d said everything after they’d lost their mother.

Save your tears for things you can change, Mattie.

Chase sighed, and Mattie knew that if she turned to look at him, he’d be a pale shell of the grinning, always-in-on-the-joke British tabloid staple he’d been throughout his widely celebrated bachelorhood in London, where he’d lived as some kind of tribute to their long-dead British mother. It had been a long, hard four months since their father had dropped dead unexpectedly. Harder on Chase, she expected, who had all their father’s corporate genius to live up to, but she didn’t feel like being generous just now. About anything.

Mattie still didn’t turn around. That might make this real.

Not that hiding from things has ever worked, either, whispered a wry voice inside her that remembered all the things she wanted to forget—the smell of the leather seats in that doomed car, the screech of the tires, her own voice singing them straight into hell—

Mattie shut that down. Fast and hard. But her hands were shaking.

“You promised me we’d do this together,” Chase said quietly instead of repeating himself. Which was true. She’d said exactly that at their father’s funeral, sick with loss and grief, and not really considering the implications. “It’s you and me now, Mats.”

He hadn’t called her that in a very long time, since they’d been trapped in that car together, in fact, and she hated that he was doing it now, for this ugly purpose. She steeled herself against it. Against him.

“You and me and the brand-new husband you’re selling me off to like some kind of fatted cow, you mean,” Mattie corrected him, her voice cool, which was much better than bitter. Or panicked. Or terrified. “I didn’t realize we were living in the Dark Ages.”

“Dad was nothing if not clear that smart, carefully chosen marriages lead to better business practices.” Chase’s voice was sardonic then, or maybe that was bitterness, and Mattie turned, at last, to find him watching her with that hollow look in his dark blue eyes and his arms crossed over his chest. “I’m in the same boat. Amos Elliott has been gunning for me since the day of the funeral but he’s made it known that if I take one of his daughters off his hands, I’ll find my dealings with the Board of Directors that much more pleasant. Welcome to the Dark Ages, Mattie.”

She laughed, but it was an empty sound. “Should that make me feel better? Because it doesn’t. It’s nothing but a little more misery to spread around.”

“We need money and support—serious money and very concrete support—or we lose the company,” Chase said, his voice flat and low. So unlike him, really, if Mattie wanted to consider that. She didn’t. “There’s no prettying that up. The shareholders are mutinous. Amos Elliott and the Board of Directors are plotting my downfall as we speak. This is our legacy and we’re on the brink of losing it.”

And what’s left of them—of us. He didn’t say that last part, but he might as well have. It echoed inside of Mattie as if he’d shouted it through a bullhorn, and she heard the rest of it, too. The part where he reminded her who was to blame for losing their mother—but then, he didn’t have to remind her. He’d never had to remind her and he never had. There was no point. There was scarcely a moment in her entire life when she didn’t remind herself.

Still. “This is a major sacrifice, to put it mildly,” she pointed out, because the thoughtless, careless, giddily reckless creature she played in the tabloids would. “I could view this as an opportunity to walk away, instead. Start my life over without having to worry about parental disapproval or the stuffy, disapproving Whitaker Industries shareholders.” She studied her brother’s hard, closed-off expression as if she was a stranger to him, and she blamed herself for that, too. “You could do the same.”

“Yes,” Chase agreed, his voice cool. “But then we’d be the useless creatures Dad already thought we were. I can’t live with that. I don’t think you can, either. And I imagine you knew we had no other options but this before you came here today.”

“You mean before I answered your summons?” Mattie clenched her shaking hands into fists. It was better than tears. Anything was better than tears. Particularly because Chase was right. She couldn’t live with what she’d done twenty years ago; she certainly wouldn’t be able to live with the fallout if she walked away from the ruins of her family now. This was all her fault, in the end. The least she could do was her part to help fix it. “You’ve been back from London for how long?”

Her brother looked wary then. “A week.”

“But you only called when you needed me to sell myself. I’m touched, really.”

“Fine,” Chase said roughly, shoving a hand through his dark hair. “Make me the enemy. It doesn’t change anything.”

“Yes,” she agreed then, feeling ashamed of herself for kicking at him, yet unable to stop. “I knew it before I came here. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy to go gentle into the deep, dark night that is Nicodemus Stathis.”

Chase’s mouth moved in what might have been a smile, had these been happier times. Had either one of them had any choice in this. Had he done much smiling in her direction in the past twenty years. “Make sure you tell him that yourself. I’m sure he’ll find that entertaining.”

“Nicodemus has always found me wildly entertaining,” Mattie said, and it felt better to square her shoulders, to lengthen her spine, as she told that whopper of a lie. It felt better to make her voice brisk and to smooth her palms down the front of the deliberately very black dress she’d worn, to send the message she wished she could, too. “I’m sure if you asked him he’d list that in the top five reasons he’s always insisted he wanted to marry me. That and his fantasy of merging our two corporate kingdoms like some feudal wet dream in which he gets to play lord of the castle with the biggest, longest, thickest—”

She remembered, belatedly, that she was talking to her older brother, who might not be as close to her as she’d like but was nonetheless her older brother, and smiled faintly.

“Share,” she amended. “Of the company. The biggest share.”

“Of course that’s precisely what you meant,” Chase replied drily, but Mattie heard something like an apology in his voice, a kind of sorrow, right underneath what nearly passed for laughter.

Because his hands were tied. Big Bart Whitaker had been an institution unto himself. No one had expected him to simply drop dead four months ago—least of all Bart. There had been no time to prepare. No time to ease Chase from his flashy London VP position into his new role as President and CEO of Whitaker Industries, as had always been Bart’s ultimate intention. No time to allay the fears of the board and the major shareholders, who only knew Chase from what they read about him in all those smirking British tabloids. No time to grieve when there were too many challenges, too many risks, too many enemies.

Their father had loved the company his own grandfather had built from little more than innate Whitaker stubbornness and a desire to best the likes of Andrew Carnegie. And Mattie thought both she and Chase had always loved their father in their own complicated ways, especially after they’d lost their mother and Big Bart was all they’d had left.

Which meant they would each do what they had to do. There was no escaping this, and if she was honest, Mattie had known that long before her father died. It was as inevitable as the preview of the upstate New York winter coming down hard outside, and there was no use pretending otherwise.

Mattie would make the best of it. She would ignore that deep, dark, aching place inside her that simply hurt. That was scared, so very scared, of how Nicodemus Stathis made her feel. And how easy it would be to lose herself in him, until there was nothing left of her at all.

But you owe this to them, she reminded herself sternly. All of them.

“He’s here already, isn’t he?” she asked after a moment, when there was no putting it off any longer. She could stand here all day and it wouldn’t change anything. It would only make the dread in her belly feel more like a brick.

Chase’s gaze met hers, which she supposed was a point in his favor, though she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the moment. “He said he’d wait for you in the library.”

She didn’t look at her brother again. She looked at the polished cherry desk, instead, and missed their father with a rush that nearly left her lightheaded. She would have done anything, in that moment, to see his craggy face again. To hear that rumbling voice of his, even if he’d only ordered her to do this exact thing, as he’d threatened to do many times over the past ten years.

Now everything was precarious and dangerous, Bart was gone, and they were the only Whitakers left. Chase and Mattie against the world. Even if Chase and Mattie’s togetherness had been defined as more of a polite distance in the long years since their aristocratic mother’s death—separate boarding schools in the English countryside, universities in different countries and adult lives on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. But Mattie knew that all of that, too, was her fault.

She was the guilty party. She would accept her sentence, though perhaps not as gracefully as she should.

“Well,” she said brightly as she turned toward the door. “I hope we’ll see you at the wedding, Chase. I’ll be the one dragged up the aisle in chains, possibly literally. It will be like sacrificing the local virgin to appease the ravenous dragon. I’ll try not to scream too loudly while being burned alive, etcetera.”

Chase sighed. “If I could change any of this, I would. You know that’s true.”

But he could have been talking about so many things, and Mattie knew that the truth was that she’d save her tears because they were useless. And maybe she’d save the family business, too, while she was at it. It was, truly, the least she could do.

Nicodemus Stathis might have been the bane of her existence for as long as she could remember, but she could handle him. She’d been handling him for years.

She could do this.

So she held her head up high—almost as if she believed that—and she marched off to assuage her guilt and do her duty, at last, however much it felt like she was walking straight toward her own doom.

* * *

The worst thing about Nicodemus Stathis was that he was gorgeous, Mattie thought moments later in that mix of unwanted desire and sheer, unreasonable panic that he always brought out in her. So gorgeous it was tempting to overlook all the rest of the things he was, like profoundly dangerous to her. So gorgeous it had a way of confusing the issue, tangling her up into knots and making her despair of herself.

So absurdly gorgeous, in fact, that it was nothing but unfair.

He stood by the French doors on the far side of the library, his strong back to the warmth and the light of the book-laden room, his attention somewhere out in all that gray and rattling wet. He stood quietly, but that did nothing to disguise the fact that he was the most ruthless, wholly relentless man she’d ever known. It was obvious at a glance. The thick, jet-black hair, the graceful way he held his obviously dangerous form so still, the harsh beguilement of the mouth she could only see in the reflection of the glass. The menace in him that his smooth, sleek clothes couldn’t begin to conceal. He didn’t turn to look at her as she made her way toward him, but she knew perfectly well he knew she was there.

He’d have known the moment she descended the stairs in the great hall outside the library. He always knew. She’d often thought he was half cat. She didn’t like to speculate about the other half, but she was fairly certain it, too, had fangs.

“I hope you’re not gloating, Nicodemus,” she said briskly, because she thought simply waiting for him to turn around and fix those unholy dark eyes of his on her might make her dizzy—and she felt vulnerable enough as it was. She thought she could smell the smug male satisfaction heavy in the air, choking the oxygen from the room as surely as if one of the fireplaces had backed up. It put her teeth on edge. “It’s so unattractive.”

“At this point the hole you have dug for yourself rivals a swimming pool or two,” Nicodemus replied, in that voice of his that reverberated in her the way it always had, low and dangerous with that hint of his Greek childhood still clinging to his words and wrapping tight around the center of her. “But by all means, Mattie. Keep digging.”

“Here I am,” she said brightly. “Sacrificial lamb to the slaughter, as ordered. What a happy day this must be for you.”

Nicodemus turned then. Slowly, so slowly, like that might take the edge off the swift, hard punch of seeing him full on. It didn’t, of course. Nothing ever did. Mattie ordered herself to breathe—and not to keel over. He was as absurdly gorgeous as ever, damn him. No disfiguring accidents had turned him into a troll since she’d seen him at her father’s funeral.

He was as smoothly muscled as he’d been when he was in his twenties and honed to steel-like perfection by the construction work he’d somehow catapulted into a multi-million-dollar corporation by the time he was twenty-six. The fine, hard lines of his face were nearly elegant while his corded strength was as apparent in the line of his pugilistic jaw as in that impossibly chiseled chest of his that he’d concealed very poorly today behind a tight, black, obviously wildly expensive T-shirt that made no concession whatsoever to the weather. He was too elemental. He’d always made the hair at the back of her neck stand on end, her nipples pull painfully taut and her stomach draw tight, and today was no different.

Today was worse. And on top of that, Nicodemus was smiling.

I am lost already, she thought.

Nicodemus was a sheer, high, dizzying cliff and she’d spent ten years fighting hard to keep from toppling off. Because she still had no idea what might become of her if she fell.

“You really are gloating,” she said, folding her arms over her chest and frowning at him. It was more of a smirk than a smile, she thought as she eyed him warily, and that too-bright gleam of a warmth like honey in his dark coffee gaze. “I don’t know why that surprises me, coming from you.”

“I’m not sure that gloating is the word I’d choose.”

He was lethal, pure and simple, and his dark gaze was too intent. It took everything she had to keep from turning and bolting for the door. This day was always coming, she told herself harshly. Accept it, because you can’t escape it.

Though she’d tried. God, but she’d tried.

“The first time I asked you to marry me you were how old?” he asked, his voice almost warm, as if he was sharing a fond reminiscence instead of their long, tortured history. “Twenty?”

“I was eighteen,” Mattie said crisply. She didn’t move as he roamed toward her. But she wanted to. She wanted to bolt for her childhood bedroom on the second floor and lock herself inside. She made herself lock her gaze to his, instead. “It was my debutante ball and you were ruining it.”

Nicodemus’s mocking little smile deepened, and Mattie fought not to flush with the helpless reaction he’d always caused in her. But she could still remember that single waltz her father had insisted she dance with him that night. Pressed up against his big body, much too close to his fierce, demanding gaze, and that mouth of his that had made her nothing but...nervous. And needy.

It still did. Damn him.

“Marry me,” he’d said instead of a greeting, almost as if he’d meant to let out some kind of curse, instead.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said, holding Nicodemus’s dark, dark eyes as if they hadn’t bitten deep into her, making her chest feel tight. She’d been a brash girl when she’d wanted to be, back then, forever attempting to get her father’s attention, but her voice had been small. He had terrified her. Or maybe that wasn’t terror, that overwhelming thing that had swamped her, fierce and instantaneous, but she hadn’t known what else to call it. “I don’t want to marry you. Or anyone.”

He’d laughed as if she’d delighted him. “You will.”

“I will never want to marry you,” she’d told him stoutly, some kick of temper—or self-preservation—in her gut making her bold. She’d been eighteen. And it hadn’t been lost on her that Nicodemus was not one of the silly boys she’d known then. He’d been very much a man.

He’d smiled at her as if he knew her and it had connected hard to her throat, her chest, her belly. Below. It had made her toes cramp up inside her ferociously high shoes.

“You’ll marry me, princess.” He’d seemed certain. Amused, even. “You can count on it.”

He seemed even more amused now.

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.