“I’ve never liked you, either, if you want the truth,” Theo remarked as the women disappeared.
“Is that the best you can do?” Demitri scoffed with a fake husk of a laugh, pretending the lazy blow hadn’t landed hard enough to leave a mark.
“No,” Theo said flatly.
Demitri rocked back on his heels, nodding as the silence stretched. “No, you can refuse to talk to me at all. It’s a brutally effective punishment, Theo. I don’t have a spare in Nic the way you do. Gideon can’t stand me. You’re all I’ve got for a brother.”
Theo didn’t look at him. He’d gone very still. Slowly he took a sip of the soda he held. “Gideon runs a tight ship. He doesn’t put up with jackassery of any kind. I never make mistakes, so he doesn’t have anything to call me up for. You’ve made yourself a pet project for him, though. That’s the only reason he rides you.”
Theo was letting a few emotions creep into the conversation—annoying ones like superiority and weary exasperation. It was his version of warming up. Demitri took heart.
“And Nic—” Theo began, but Demitri stopped him.
“I know. You would have talked about him if you could have. Frankly, I’m glad that you have at least one good memory from our childhood,” he said sincerely, unable to suppress the deep anguish anymore, aware it flashed into his expression before he was able to control his emotions outwardly even if they threatened to overwhelm him internally.
Theo acknowledged the statement with a lowering of his brows and tightening of his lips.
“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Demitri added, guts clawing with shame. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I am sorry.”
Nothing for a long moment, then, “Those things weren’t your fault. I shouldn’t have made out as if they were. We were kids. None of that was our fault. And you’re not like him. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Their gazes met for a fraction of a heartbeat, just long enough to see the shattered emotion in the other and look away to hide their own.
A weird relief weakened Demitri’s limbs. He’d needed to hear it. It allowed him to believe he might be good enough for Natalie after all.
“For what it’s worth,” Theo continued drily, “Nic has himself so together he makes me feel like the idiotic younger brother. So you’ll always have a place in my life.”
“Good to know,” Demitri said with a catch of laughter, pleased to be back on trashing terms with Theo. “By the way, you don’t pay Natalie enough. I’ll be stealing her for the firm I’m starting.”
“Is that what you’re doing with her?” Theo asked, giving him a sharp look.
“No,” Demitri said in a rare moment of complete sincerity. “I’m going to ask her to marry me.” It made him proud to say it, and he liked the way Theo absorbed the news with a thoughtful, approving nod.
“Good luck.” He even sounded like he meant it.
* * *
Natalie dropped her lipstick into her pocketbook and met Jaya’s gaze in the mirror. “That’s ten minutes. Have we given them enough time?”
Jaya’s painted smile twitched. “Was I that obvious? I really have been wanting your impressions on how the new software was received.”
Natalie shrugged, not feeling she’d told Jaya anything she wouldn’t have heard through other channels, but the topic had been a nice path around the scandal that had arisen from Natalie’s assignment in France.
“I think we were right to let them duke it out in private,” Natalie said, referring to Demitri and Theo. “I just hope they have. Family isn’t something you can have so much of that you can afford to throw any of it away.”
“That’s what I kept telling Theo after he ignored Demitri’s call!” As they walked back, Jaya told her about a disagreement in her own family involving her cousin. It had gone on for years, breaking many hearts. She was so engaging, Natalie started when someone touched her arm.
It was Rowan. She waved them into conversation with her and Gideon, leaning gleefully toward Jaya as she gave a little nod to something across the room. “Don’t look now, but the planets have aligned.”
Natalie followed their gazes to all four siblings standing in a group, talking animatedly.
“Oh,” Jaya sighed, setting a hand over her heart. “I was starting to worry it would never happen.”
“This will mean the world to Nic,” Rowan murmured with a poignant creak in her tone.
“And Adara,” Gideon said.
Demitri had needed this, too. Natalie felt a wistful pride in being part of making it happen. For a moment, she even felt equal to these other partners in this mystic circle, gazing with happiness for the group of laughing adults who hadn’t known joy as children.
Not long after, they toasted Adara with champagne and sang along when Adara’s favorite chart-topping crooner led the crowd in “Happy Birthday.” Then the dancing started.
“Evie wants Zoey to spend the night,” Rowan found Natalie to say. “Would you mind? She’ll be heartbroken if Zoey leaves. One of us will have to go up to her.”
Rowan had booked several rooms for the musicians she’d hired to entertain the crowd, but one of those suites had been set aside for Natalie and Demitri. If Zoey needed her mother in the night, they’d only be a few doors away. Natalie made the call to Zoey and had to pull the phone away from her ear when her daughter squealed, “She said yes!”
The enchantment of the evening deepened as Natalie absorbed that she would be making love with Demitri tonight. Resting her head on his shoulder, she surrendered to the sexual pull he always exerted over her. Her jacket was off and his lips touched her bare shoulder. Male fingertips caressed up her arm. She lightly traced the hollow at the back of his neck.
This was so perfect. So loving.
Holding eye contact with him was always a stumble into sexual heat. Tonight it was a blind gallop into a conflagration. He was so handsome, carefree in an authentic way that hurt to look at. Every point where she came in contact with him stung with need, tightening her airway and wetting her eyes at the magnitude of the moment.
She loved him so much.
“We have a room,” she reminded in a voice husked with growing passion.
“Do you want to leave?” He searched her gaze, the delving deep enough to make her insides shake.
She nodded, ducking her head to hide her reaction, tracing a hand beneath his open coat across the tensed muscles of his waist.
The crowd had thinned. Nic and Rowan had already left, since they had to be up with the children in the morning. Adara hugged them and Gideon bussed Natalie’s cheek with a kiss, sounding sincere when he said, “Thank you for coming.”
She and Demitri walked out hand in hand, sexual tension climbing between them with each step. When they entered the suite, he threw the entry card on the table and said, “Come here, beautiful.”
She spun into his arms, crashing herself against him so he grunted at the hit and wrapped her arms around his neck in abandoned joy. His mouth was everything she’d been waiting for, his hair spiky between her fingers, his body already aroused and thick against her—
“Easy, Natalie,” he soothed in a masterful voice, arms hardening to still her from wriggling through his skin to adhere to his bones. His nose grazed her cheekbone; his brow touched hers. “We have time. Lots of time.”
A lifetime? It wasn’t like her to believe in permanence, but for once she let herself trust he would always be here for her.
And he wouldn’t be rushed when it came to getting what he wanted from her. He would seduce her, holding her pinned to his steely body while he drew out his long, lazy kisses that thoroughly plundered her mouth.
She couldn’t move in his hold, could only tell him with her lips and tongue and a ragged, lusty moan that he was torturing her. Her blood pounded her arteries in painful hammer blows of need. His heart slammed behind his chest wall, reverberating against her resting palm, the only evidence he matched her excitement.
That and their breaths mingling in shaken hisses.
“I want you so much,” she whispered when he nipped at the straining cord along the side of her neck, then closed her eyes, abandoning herself to his caresses.
“This is all I’ve been thinking about since I first saw you tonight. Your skin. Your laugh. The way you catch your breath.”
She did it now as he tilted her hips into his, sex to sex, need to need.
Stropping her face against his spicy-smelling neck, she said, “I want to be naked. I want to feel you.”
“Yes.” The word hissed out of him and he stepped back to turn her, lowering her zipper down her spine with sensual care, forehead tilted against her crown. His soft laughter pooled hotly against the back of her bare neck. “These dimples are my fatal weakness, Natalie,” he said as her gown slid to the floor. He set two thumbs against the upper swells of her bottom, where the high cut of her French lingerie framed them. “After Lyon, I agonized that I would never see them again.”