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“You are too kind, Miss Barbery.” This time he traced the ridge of her collarbone, her taut, soft skin. He felt her tremble, just slightly, beneath his fingers, and almost smiled. “But perhaps I do not share what is mine.”
“Says the man on a yacht filled with more guests than he can count.”
“I have not kissed the yacht, nor the guests.” He inclined his head. “Not all of them, that is.”
“You must share your rules with me, then,” she replied, her lips twitching slightly as if she bit back laughter. He did not know why he found that mesmerizing. “Though I must confess to you that I am surprised there are so many. So much for the grand stories of Nikos Katrakis, who bows to no tradition, follows no rule and forges his own way in this world. I think I’d like to meet him.”
“There is only one Nikos Katrakis, Miss Barbery.” He was so close now that her perfume filled the space between them, something subtle, with spice and only the faintest hint of flowers. He wondered if she would taste as sweet, with as much kick. “I hope it will not destroy you to learn that it is me.”
“I have no way to judge what it will or will not do,” she said, her eyes bold on his, “as you have not yet kissed me.”
“Ah,” he said. “And now it is an inevitability, is it?”
“Of course.” She cocked her head to one side, and smiled. It was even more of a challenge, and Nikos had not become the man he was today by backing down from a challenge. “Isn’t it?”
This was not what he had planned. Spontaneity was for those with less to lose, and far less to prove. He owed the late Gustave Barbery and his odious son, Peter, payback on the grandest scale, and he had spent the last decade making certain the opportunity would present itself, which it had, again and again. A push here, a whisper there, and the Barbery fortunes had taken a tumble, especially since the old man’s illness—but he had not intended to involve the girl. He was not like the Barberys. He was not like Peter Barbery, who had seduced, impregnated and abandoned Althea with so much cold calculation. He refused to be like the Barberys! But then, he could not have predicted that his arch-enemy’s sister would approach him in this way.
Or—more intriguing and far more dangerous—that she would tempt him to throw away the iron control he had worked so hard to maintain. He was not averse to using her or any other tool he could find that might lead to her family’s destruction. But he could not have anticipated that he might want her—desire her—in spite of it all.
“I believe you may be right,” he said quietly. Her bold expression faltered, just for the barest of moments, but Nikos saw it. And something in him roared in triumph. She was not as unaffected as she pretended to be. He did not care to explore why that should please him.
He reached over and slid his palm around to cup her nape. The contact sent electricity surging through him, desire and a deep hunger following like an echo. Her eyes widened, and her hands came up to rest on the hard planes of his chest.
He let the moment draw out, aware of the interested eyes on them from all corners of the yacht’s entertainment deck, knowing that no matter what game she thought she was playing, she had no idea who she was dealing with. She had no idea what she’d set in motion by approaching him.
But he knew. He had already won this long, cold battle. She was simply the final straw that would destroy the Barbery empire once and for all, just as they had nearly destroyed him once upon a time.
He had finally done it—and yet instead of reveling in his hard-won victory, his attention focused solely on the rich, lush curve of her lips.
He pulled her to him and fit his mouth to hers.
Chapter Two
FIRE!
Tristanne would have screamed the word if she could.
Instead she kissed him. If that was the word for the slick, hot meeting of their mouths. If that was why every alarm in her body rang out danger, her stomach in knots and her skin ablaze with sensation, as if it was too small or she had grown too big to wear it any longer.
She had not thought too far beyond the simple request—she had not imagined what it would be like to kiss this man. Or, more precisely, to be kissed by him. He was elemental, untamed. He took. He demanded. He possessed.
And she could not seem to get enough of him.
He angled his mouth against hers, exploring her lips, tasting her tongue with his, with an assertive, encompassing mastery that made Tristanne shudder with want. With need.
It was so carnal, so naked—and yet she remained fully clothed. His hand on the back of her neck radiated heat, and something far too like ownership. He tasted like expensive liquor and salt, intensely masculine and frighteningly addictive. Tristanne clutched at his shirt, but her hands melted against the steel-packed muscles of his chest rather than push him away.
A million years passed, a thousand ages in that same impossible fire, and then, finally, he raised his head, his dark gold eyes glittering with an edgy need. Tristanne felt the echo of it kick at her, making her legs feel weak beneath her.
She fought the urge to press her fingers to her mouth—to see how completely he had ravaged her, to feel how totally he had claimed her. Her own lips felt as if they no longer belonged to her. As if he had marked her, somehow, as his. Something inside her, low and deep, sang out at the idea.
Idiot.
She should have known better than to play such games with a man like this, a man she knew with a sudden implacable certainty, as his dark eyes bored into hers and she felt herself shiver where he still held her, she could never control. Never. She was not even sure she wanted to.
She was in terrible, terrible trouble.
She had to remember why she was doing this! She had to think of her mother first!
“I trust that was sufficient?” There was an odd light in his eyes—it made her skin draw tight and prickle in warning. He set her back from him, and drew his hand away from her nape, slowly, leaving brushfires in his wake.
She forced herself not to tremble. Not to shiver in reaction. She knew somehow that he would use her responses against her. She knew it.
“I think so,” Tristanne managed to say, though her voice sounded packed in cotton wool. Her breasts were taut and full, and she longed to press them against his hard chest. It was as if he had somehow turned her own body against her. She ordered herself to stop, to breathe, to contain the hysteria.
But this was why she had chosen him. This, exactly.
“You do not know?” His full mouth curved slightly, making him look both delicious and amused. “Then I cannot have done it correctly.”
Tristanne realized then that she was still touching him. Her head spun and her breath had gone shallow, but her hands still lay against the granite planes of his chest. She could feel the heat of him rise through the cloth of his shirt, and the time had long passed to let go, to step away—and yet she still held on as if he was the only thing keeping her from tilting off the edge of the world.
Get a hold of yourself! she ordered herself, desperately. She thought of Vivienne’s pale, too-slender form; thought of her racking cough and sleeplessness. She had to keep her head about her, or all would be lost. She had no choice.
She dropped her hands. As she did so, she thought his half smile deepened, grew more darkly amused. Somehow, that made it possible for her to straighten her spine, to remember herself, remember what she must do. And for whom.
“You were perfectly adequate,” she told him, trying to sound unaffected. Almost bored, even, while her heart galloped and her stomach twisted.
He did not react to her remark in any way that she could see—yet sensed a certain stillness in him, a certain focused watchfulness, that reminded her of some great predator set to pounce. The dragon, perhaps, a moment before letting loose his fire.
“Was I, indeed?” he asked coolly.
“Certainly.” Tristanne shrugged as if she felt nonchalant, as if she could not feel the heat that burned in her cheeks. As if he had not turned her inside out and wrecked her completely with one kiss. One complicated, unexpected, mindaltering kiss.
But it was not the only thing she could feel. And as intoxicating as Nikos Katrakis was—as deliciously unnerving as that kiss had been—now that it was over she could also feel Peter’s fury. Her brother had moved closer, and was now standing near enough that he was, no doubt, eavesdropping on her conversation with Nikos. This time, she did not look over. She did not have to—she knew exactly how Peter would be scowling at her, with that anger burning in the eyes that should have looked like hers, but were too cold, too cruel.
“Perhaps it requires further experiment,” Nikos suggested, in that velvety caress of a voice that heated her from within. She put Peter out of her mind for the moment. She felt a heavy, sensual fire bloom in her core, and begin to spread outward. “I am happy to extend the favor. I would not wish to disappoint you.”
“You are magnanimous indeed,” she murmured, dropping her gaze—afraid, somehow, that he could see too much. That he could see exactly how much he had affected her.
“I am many things, Miss Barbery,” Nikos murmured, his voice soft though his gaze, when she dared meet it, was hard. “But I am not magnanimous. I have not one generous bone in my body. I suggest you remember that.”
She knew what she had to do. She had decided, even before Peter had laid out his disgusting conditions, that she was prepared to do whatever it took to emancipate her mother from Peter’s control—to save her. What did she care if the Barbery fortune and financial empire collapsed into dust and ruins? She had turned her back on all of that long ago. But she could not turn her back on her poor mother, especially not now that Gustave—who her mother had loved so blindly, so foolishly—had left her so helpless and so completely under Peter’s thumb. She had stayed out of it while her father lived, but she could not abandon her mother now, so frail and at risk even as she grieved for Gustave. She was all her mother had left. She was Vivienne’s only hope.
Which meant she had only one course of action.
“That is a pity,” Tristanne said, with a calm she did not feel. She felt panic claw at her throat, and rise like heat to her eyes, but she swallowed it. She was determined. She knew her brother was not bluffing, that he had meant every awful word that he’d said to her, that he would not rest until she earned her keep in service of filling the family coffers, and that he would think nothing of tossing her mother out into the street if Tristanne defied him. She knew exactly what would happen if she did not do this.
What she did not, could not know was what might become of her if she did.
“Not at all,” Nikos said, his golden eyes watchful, intent. “Merely the truth.”
Women do this every day, she told herself. Since the dawn of time. With far lesser men than this.
“It is a pity,” Tristanne forced herself to say, the emotions she would not acknowledge making her voice husky, “because I had heard you were between mistresses at present. I had so hoped to be the next.”
His dark eyes flared, then turned to molten gold. She held his gaze as if she were as bold, as daring, as her words suggested. Hoping that she could be. She had to be.
“But, of course,” she continued, because this was the crux of it—because she knew Peter was listening, and so she had to push the words out, no matter how they seemed to clog her throat, “as your mistress, I would require your generosity. A great deal of it.”
For another endless moment, Nikos only watched her, his gaze still searing through her—reducing her to ash, making her breath desert her—but otherwise his big body remained still, alert. It was almost as if she had not propositioned him. As if she had not offered to prostitute herself to him as casually as she might have ordered a drink from the bartender.
But then, making every hair on her body prickle and her nipples pull to hard, tight points, Nikos smiled.
It had been a long time in coming, this moment, and Nikos could not help but savor it. Revel in it. He had never dared dream that his arch-enemy’s sister would offer herself to him, as his mistress, thus ensuring his ultimate victory—his final revenge. But he would take it—and her.
He did not have to look at Peter Barbery to feel the other man’s outrage—it poured from him in waves. It felt as sweet as he had always imagined his revenge would, in all these years he’d so carefully plotted and planned, gradually drawing the noose tighter and tighter around the Barberys, forcing them ever closer to ruin.
He only wished he were not the only one left. That his critical, disapproving father, his tempestuous half sister and her unborn child, had lived to see that they had been wrong. That Nikos really would do what he’d sworn to them he would do: take down the Barberys. Make them pay. They had died hating him, blaming him; first the heartbroken Althea by her own hand and then, later, the father he had tried so hard and failed, always, to impress. But he had only used that as further fuel.
Just as he used whatever befell him as fuel. He had not allowed a childhood in the slums of Athens to hold him back, nor his mother’s callous abandonment of him. When he had finally wrenched himself from the gutter, using tooth and nail and sheer stubbornness, he had not let anyone keep him from locating the father who had discarded his mother and thus him. And once he’d started to prove himself to his harsh, often cruel father, he had tried to endear himself to Althea, the legitimate, favored and beloved child. He had never resented her for her place in his father’s affections, not like she had eventually blamed him, once Peter Barbery was done with her.
He looked at Tristanne, standing before him, her words still echoing in his ears as if they were a song.
He had no idea what game the Barberys were playing here, nor did he care. Did Tristanne Barbery believe she was some kind of Mata Hari? That she could use sex to control him? To influence him in some way? Let her try. There was only one person who called the shots in Nikos’s bed, and it would not be her.
It would never be her. He might have felt a wild, unprecedented attraction to her—but he would take her for revenge.
“Come,” he said.
He took her bare arm, relishing the feel of the supple smoothness of her bicep beneath his palm. He nodded toward the interior of the yacht, indicating his private quarters. The urge to gloat, to taunt Peter Barbery as the other man had done years ago, was almost overwhelming, but Nikos repressed it. He concentrated on the Barbery he had before him, the one whose scent inflamed him and whose mouth he intended to taste again. Soon.
She looked at him, but did not speak, her eyes dark—again with an emotion he could not name.
“Second thoughts?” He was unable to keep the taunt from his voice.
“You are the one who has yet to answer,” Tristanne said, that strong chin tilting up, her shoulders squaring. As if she intended to fight him—as if she were already fighting him. He wanted her naked and beneath him. Now. For revenge, he reminded himself, nothing more. “Not I.”
“Then it appears we have much to discuss,” Nikos said.
She swallowed, the movement in the fine column of her throat the only hint she might not be as calm nor as blasé as she pretended to be. Her eyes darkened, but held his.
“You are taking me to your lair, I presume?” she asked.
“If that is what you wish to call it,” he replied, amused. And powerfully aroused.
She said no more. And he made sure every eye was on them, every head was turned, her brother’s chief among them, so there could be absolutely no mistake whose arm he held with such carnal possession as he led her across the deck.
Toward the master suite. Away from prying eyes—or any recourse.
Straight into his lair.
Chapter Three
SHE had seen him once before.
Tristanne remembered it as if it were moments ago, when in truth it had been some ten years earlier. She walked across the crowded deck next to Nikos with her head high, her spine straight, as if she walked to her own coronation rather than to the bedroom of the man she had just offered to sleep with. For money.
But in her mind, she was seventeen again, and peering across the crowded ballroom of her father’s grand house in Salzburg. It had been her first ball, and she had had too many dreams, perhaps, of waltzing beneath all the shimmering lights of the chandeliers and candles in her pretty dress. But Nikos Katrakis had not been a dream. He had strode across her father’s ballroom as if it belonged to him. He had been dark and dangerous, and potent, somehow. Tristanne had not understood, then, why she was so mesmerized by the sight of him, even from afar. Why she caught her breath, and could not seem to draw a new one. Why her heart pounded in a kind of panic—and yet she could not bring herself to look away from the darkly handsome stranger who moved through her father’s house as if it were his own, or ought to be.
“Who is that man?” she had asked her mother, feeling a strange, new heat move through her, along with an unfamiliar kind of shyness. It terrified her. She did not know if she wanted to run toward this oddly compelling man, or away from him.
“He is Nikos Katrakis,” Vivienne had said in a soft tone. Had she also sensed his power, his magnetism? “He has business with your father, my dear. Not with you.”
And now, ten years later, Tristanne still did not know whether she wished to run toward the man or away from him. She knew that his kiss was far much more than she had ever imagined it might be, ten years ago when she was still a girl. And she knew that his hand felt like a brand against the bare skin of her upper arm. And that she was going with him willingly. She had suggested it, hadn’t she?
This was her choice.
He led her away from the crowd, away from the shining late afternoon sea, far into the opulent depths of the ship. Tristanne had only the faintest hectic impressions—gleaming wood and lush reception rooms, windows arching high above the dancing waves of the Mediterranean, letting in the golden Côte d’Azur light—because the only thing she could concentrate on was Nikos.
She was aware of every breath he took, every stride, every movement of the powerful body so close to hers. She could feel the hot, bright heat that seemed to burn from inside his very skin, and she knew that the heaviness in her belly, the softening below, was all for him. Her face felt red, then white, then red again, as if she was feverish.
But she knew better.
She had to get herself under control, she thought desperately. She could not lose herself in this man’s touch, no matter how formidable and attractive he was. She was only using him, she told herself. He was but a means to an end.
Nikos ushered her into a room, finally, slapping the door shut behind them. Tristanne looked around, but could hardly register a thing. She had only the haziest notion that this was an elegant, spacious stateroom, and that it contained a bed. A large bed. And that she was in it, by her own design, with the most sensually dangerous man she had ever encountered.
“Mr. Katrakis,” she began, spinning around to face him. It was not too late to wrest control of this situation. That was what all of this was about, in the end—control. She had only to assert herself, surely. She had only to be strong.
“It is too late for that, don’t you think?” he asked, too close already, so close she could have reached out and laid her hand on that swathe of olive skin at his neck, directly in front of her eyes.
Tristanne could not help herself. She backed up a step, then froze, sure that simple reaction would give her away—would show him that she was not the sophisticated mistress sort of person she was pretending to be, that she was just an artist from Canada swept up in events outside her control. But he only smiled.
Tristanne’s entire body kicked into red-alert. She felt poised on the brink of some kind of cliff, something steep and deadly, and it was as if he was the harsh, strong wind that might toss her over the side.
Dragon, she thought again. She had known it from the start—she had known it on some level ten years ago, at a distance. And yet here she was, begging to be singed. Or worse—burned to a crisp.
Nikos seemed to take over the room, as if he expanded to fill all the available space, crowding everything else out. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his denim trousers, but that in no way contained the unmistakable sensual menace he exuded like his own, personal cologne. His shoulders seemed broader, his chest wider, his height excessive. Or was it that Tristanne felt so small? So vulnerable, suddenly—completely devoid of the bravado that had carried her this far. She knew what it was now, his particular brand of potent charisma. She knew what it meant.
You must not let him shake you, she cautioned herself. You must think only of Vivienne.
And still he watched her with those old coin eyes, as if he was merely waiting for the right moment to pounce.
“Call me Nikos,” he invited her after a moment, when the sound of her own breathing threatened to drive Tristanne to the brink.
She knew she should say something. Even, as he’d suggested, his name. But she could not form the word. It was as if she knew that once she said it, there would be no turning back. As if his familiar name was the last boundary between her old life and this new one she had to pretend to live.
And she could not seem to cross it.
His smile grew darker, more sardonic.
He leaned back against the door he’d closed, his eyes hooded. He said nothing. Then—when Tristanne’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point, when she was certain she must scream, or sob, or run as her body ordered her to do, anything to break the tension—he raised his hand and crooked his finger, motioning for her to come to him.
Arrogantly. Confidently. Certain of instant obedience.
Like he was no different, after all, than men like her father and her brother.
Like she was a dog.
A sudden wild anger pulsed through her then, but she stamped it down somehow. Was that not what a mistress was, when all was said and done? A woman on command? At a man’s whim? Wasn’t this precisely what she’d claimed to want?
What did it matter how this arrogant man treated her? She did not, in truth, wish to become his mistress. She wanted only to make Peter think she had done it—she wanted only the appearance of this man’s interest, his protection.
A few days, she had thought. What harm could truly come to her in a few short days? They would have a few dinners, perhaps share some more kisses—preferably within sight of the paparazzi who hung about the sorts of places men like Nikos Katrakis frequented. It would all be for show, and Nikos Katrakis himself need never be any the wiser.
And it was all for a good cause, lest she forget herself entirely. For her beloved, incapacitated mother, who could not seem to understand that her stepson was a monster, nor that he had no intention of caring for her as Gustave had intended. Tristanne needed access to her trust fund—which would not come to her until her thirtieth birthday, unless Peter, as executor, allowed it—so she could pay her mother’s debts, see to her health and protect her from further harm. She had no choice.
So Tristanne did not laugh at Nikos, or slap him, or storm from the stateroom as she yearned to do. She was not auditioning for the role of this man’s partner, much less his wife. A mistress was a mistress—and Tristanne had the feeling that Nikos Katrakis was a man who made very sure that his mistress knew her place. Instead of reacting as she wanted to, as everything in her screamed to do, she moved toward him, her hips swaying as her high heels sank into the plush carpet at her feet.