The more dramatic papers claimed she’d lured him into this marriage, that she was a siren who’d enslaved him with her infamous charms, that she was her brother’s instrument sent to bring him to heel. He watched her now and wished that any of that were true. That he could fool himself for a little bit longer.
“My body and I are not separate entities,” she said, grittier than whatever too-sweet voice she’d been using, but at least that was real. At least that was her.
“And now I know it,” he said quietly. He dropped his hand and stepped back, away from her, the way he should have done when she’d come to him in the first place. The way he should have done ten years ago when he’d found himself drawn to yet another pointless, pretty little heiress who would never do anything but look down her nose at him. “Which means there’s not a single thing about you I can believe, Mattie. And from this moment forward, I promise you, I won’t.”
That shouldn’t have hurt her, given how deliberately she’d played out this scene, and it certainly shouldn’t have sat on him the way it did, so heavy and dark he thought it might crush him, but there was no mistaking the ravaged look on her face then.
“I wouldn’t have—” She stopped, and he got the impression she’d surprised herself by speaking. “Nicodemus, if I didn’t want—”
But she didn’t finish. Her expression was equal parts misery and resignation. What he would have called longing, before, when he was still clinging to all his fantasies. When he’d still imagined that this was a game he could win.
That she was.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said. “I finally see this for what it is.”
“A mess?” she supplied bitterly, and he smiled.
“Just another lie,” he told her. And he’d had his fill of them so long ago, hadn’t he? How had he done this to himself? “But it’s our lie, Mattie, and there’s no escaping it now.”
He knew he had to leave her there in the kitchen before he made himself a liar, too. Before he forgot what he was doing and lost himself in her, instead, that gorgeous deception she’d offered on her knees with a smile. That marvelous deceit he wanted to believe more than he wanted his next breath.
More than he wanted anything.
Nicodemus didn’t know how he made himself walk away. Only that he did.
* * *
“If I had known that you planned to work through our honeymoon, such as it is,” Mattie said in a very bored tone, lifting her gaze from the tablet computer, where their wedding pictures were splashed across all the tabloids, and glared at Nicodemus’s profile as if it was his fault she looked besotted and in love in every one of them, “I might have brought my own along.”
Nicodemus had his laptop open before him on the glass-topped table between them, his smartphone in his hand, and he didn’t bother to look over at her. As if they’d been unhappily married for years, Mattie thought darkly.
“Your work?” he asked, perfectly politely. “I was unaware that you had more than a passing acquaintance with the term.”
And that right there was the problem. He’d been nothing but polite since that scene in his kitchen almost a week ago now. Nicodemus was scrupulously courteous. Unerringly distant. And that gleaming thing she’d taken entirely for granted, she only realized now that she couldn’t see it, was gone from those dark eyes of his.
He insisted she sit with him. Sleep in that bed with him whenever he was in it. Eat all her meals with him. He was still attempting to gentle her, like she was an obstreperous cow. But the Nicodemus she hadn’t realized she’d come to know—and, on some level, depend upon—was gone.
Mattie hated it.
“You know perfectly well that I work in PR,” she said now. “I can think of at least three occasions in the past five years you’ve referenced it directly.”
She was curled up in a corner of the sofa in the great room while Nicodemus sat in one of the armchairs, leaning forward now to tap at his keyboard. He still didn’t look at her. Not even to point out that none of the references he’d made to her career were positive.
“You do not work in PR,” he said when he finally deigned to answer. That harsh mouth of his didn’t curve the way it would have, once. There was no hint of that rich laughter in his low voice. “You get paid to attend parties with the paparazzi in tow. You get paid more to call up your equally rich, bored and pointlessly famous friends to come along with you. You raise the profile of already sensationalized events by your exalted presence. Is that PR? Or a slightly more sanitized version of prostitution?”