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?
She loved him, for all she knew that such a thing was neither wise nor rational, and she had to believe that somewhere inside of him, buried beneath all those layers of masculine pride and years of neglect and solitude, he felt something for her. Surely she had to trust him enough to tell him the truth, if she had any hope at all of trusting him with her heart—or, at the very least, of surviving this relationship with him with any part of herself intact.
She let her fists clench at her sides. She stood straight. She raised her head high, and she looked him straight in the eye. She let his old gold gaze warm her, and she refused to let herself give in to the heat that prickled behind her eyes.
“I cannot marry you,” she said quietly, with as much dignity as she could muster, “because I am lying to you. I have been lying to you from the start.”
Chapter Thirteen
“HAVE you?” Nikos sounded almost offhand, very nearly bored, as if people confessed to deceiving him several times a day. Perhaps they did, Tristanne thought ruefully. Or, much more likely, this show of nonchalance was carefully calibrated to disarm the unwary so he might strike when they least expected it.
“I have,” she said. She studied his dark face. The haughty cheekbones, the full mouth pulled into its characteristic smirk. She wanted to press herself against the heat of him; lose herself in the heady passion that only he had ever aroused in her. But she had already lost too much of herself in this terrible game, so she merely waited.
“Come,” Nikos drawled after a long moment. “We will have some wine and sit, like civilized people, and you will tell me how you have lied to me for all of this time.”
Bemused, Tristanne could do nothing but follow Nikos inside. He poured himself a glass of wine from the bar in the corner of the living room, and merely shrugged when Tristanne refused one for herself. The tasteful room was all done in whites and neutral colors that inexorably led the eye to the spectacular view, visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides. He settled himself into one of the low-slung armchairs and raised a brow, inviting her to continue.
Tristanne laced her fingers together before her, and frowned down at her clasped hands. She could not bring herself to sit down, as if they were having cocktails and everything was perfectly normal. She did not feel civilized in any respect. Her heart beat too fast, and she felt too hot, too restless. Dizzy. She wished she could go back in time and keep herself from speaking at all. She should have either accepted his proposal, or simply said no and left it at that. Why was she exposing herself like this? What was there to gain? He was so remote, so cold now—sitting there as if they hardly knew each other. And she was making it worse by dithering over it, dragging the uncomfortable silence out…
“I remembered you,” she said, not knowing what she planned to say until it was out there, hanging in the air of the elegant room while the Greek night pressed against the windows, dark and rich. “I saw you at a ball in my father’s home when I was still a girl. I mention this because it was the first lie, that I saw you for the first time on your yacht that day.”
He took a sip of his wine, then lounged back against his chair. His eyes were so dark, yet still shone of gold. She took that as a good sign—or, at least, not a negative one. Not yet.
And so she told him. She stood like a penitent before a king, and she confessed every part of it. Peter’s mismanagement of the family finances and her mother’s frailty and ill health. Her need for her trust fund in order to settle her mother’s debts and take her somewhere safer and better, which Tristanne felt she owed her. Peter’s revolting ultimatums, and his obsessive hatred of Nikos, which had been one of the reasons she’d picked him. The things Peter had said about Nikos, and about Tristanne, and what she knew Peter hoped to gain from her liaison with Nikos. What she had expected to gain from her association with Nikos, and how surprised she had been by the passion that had flared between them.
She talked and she talked, a ball of dread growing larger and heavier in her gut with each word. As she spoke, Nikos hardly moved. He drank from his wineglass from time to time, but otherwise merely listened, stretched out in his chair with his hard face completely unreadable, propped up against one hand.