“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.