“I brought you something to wear tonight,” he had said when they entered the flat. His distance and cool tone should have alerted her, but did not. “I will leave it for you when you are finished with your shower.”
“Tonight?” she had asked, her emotions still in a nearpainful jumble. She’d told herself that was why his suddenly brusque tone seemed to rub her the wrong way, after those unexpected moments in the archway. Or perhaps it was just her impatience with herself, for being so emotional when she could so little afford it.
“It is a small business function,” he had said with a dismissive shrug, and she had thought no more about it until it came time to pull the dress from the hanger where he had left it, suspended from the door inside the guest suite he had indicated she should use to get ready.
Now, her hair dried and blown out to hang in a straight, gleaming curtain, cosmetics carefully applied to accent and emphasize her eyes, she stared at herself in the full-length mirror that stood at an angle in the corner of the richly furnished room. But she could not see the royal blue and gold accents that graced the walls and brocaded the commanding, four-poster bed. She could hardly catch her breath. She could only stare at her reflection, literally struck dumb.
She felt herself flush, deep and red and panicked, so red she nearly matched the scarlet fabric that barely made up the dress she wore. He could not mean that he wanted her to wear what little there was of this dress, could he? She could not go out in public dressed like this! She could not leave the room dressed like this!
She tried to take a deep breath, and made a sound like a sob instead. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her hands into fists. Then, slowly, she opened her eyes and forced her hands to open, too.
The dress was obscene. There was no other word for it.
It clung to her body like paint, leaving nothing to the imagination. There was not a single curve that was not outlined by the tight, clinging garment that slicked its way from tiny capped sleeves to her midthighs. If she tried to cover a decent amount of her breasts, the hem rose to a scandalous height, and if she tugged the hem lower, she risked having her breasts fall out of the tiny bodice. There was no happy medium. It required that she remove her undergarments entirely, or risk calling more attention to them, so clearly outlined were they by the tight, too-tight, material.
There was only one kind of woman who wore a dress like this, Tristanne thought, humiliation thick in the back of her throat, and she was pretending to be one of them. Was this Nikos’s goal? Did he want her to feel this way? Did he take pleasure in imagining Tristanne walking into a public event like this? So scandalously, tackily, barely attired?
Or, she thought, fighting back the angry tears that flooded her eyes, that she refused to shed, perhaps she was missing the point entirely. Perhaps he was not trying to embarrass her, necessarily—perhaps this was how he preferred to see his women dressed. Perhaps he liked to make his mistress’s position perfectly clear to everyone he encountered. It need not be personal at all. It should not have felt like such a slap.
She glanced at the clock and saw that she had wasted far too much time, and was once again late. She bit at her lower lip as she looked at herself again, but she knew she had no choice but to brazen it out. She had to do what he wanted for just a little bit longer. Her mother had made it sound as if Peter was already in a much better frame of mind, which made Tristanne hopeful that her plan was working and this mad scheme of hers could end. Because she was not at all sure that she could take too much more of this…exposure, in all senses of the term.
But whatever might happen in the days to come, she still had to walk out of this room in this scandalous, appalling dress. She closed her eyes for a brief moment, a breath, and then turned on her heel and forced herself to leave the room before she could think better of it.
She found him in the living room, swirling whiskey in a crystal tumbler and staring out at the glorious Dome before him. He turned slowly, and Tristanne came to a stop in the center of the room to let him look his fill. Surely that was his intention—the point of this whole exercise?
“Is this what you had in mind?” she asked, her voice throatier than she would have liked, from all the emotions she was fighting to keep to herself, to keep inside. To pretend she did not feel at all.
His face was in shadow, yet she could still feel the searing heat of his dark gaze. She could feel it traveling over her exposed skin, making her nipples contract and goose bumps shiver across her shoulders. It was as if some unseen cord connected them, forcing her to react to him, however little she might wish to do so.
“Do I please you?” she asked, an edge in her voice that she could not control. “Is that not what mistresses ask?”