Читать книгу Blackmailed By The Greek's Vows - Tara Pammi - Страница 10
ОглавлениеKAIROS STOOD AGAINST the back door, not a single hair out of place.
There was that stillness around him again, a stillness that seemed to contain passion and violence and emotion.
And yet nothing.
Emotions surged through her, like a wave cresting. But just like a wave broken by the strongest dam, Kairos had come pretty close to breaking her.
Ignoring the fact that her dress climbed up her thighs and she was probably flashing her thong at the inebriated Nikolai, she went to her knees next to him, sliding her fingers through his gelled hair.
Nikolai’s hot, alcohol-laden breath fluttered over the expanse of her chest. But it was the silver gaze drilling holes into her back that pebbled goose bumps over her skin.
A sound like a swallowed curse emanated from behind her. She ignored it, just as she tried to ignore her pounding heart.
“What are you doing?”
It had been nine months since she’d seen him. Nine months since he’d spoken to her. The hope that he would come after her had died after the first month. She swallowed to keep her voice steady. “Checking for a bump.”
“Why?”
She snorted. “Because he’s my friend and I care what happens to him.”
Tina stared down at Nikolai’s picture-pretty face and sighed. He was her friend.
He had gotten her the entry-level job in a fashion agency when she had returned to Milan from Paris, her tail tucked between her legs and ready to admit defeat, and found her a place with four other girls in a tiny one-bedroom hovel.
Not out of the generosity of his heart, but because he’d wanted to see her humiliated, wanted to enjoy how she’d come down in the world. Maybe even to get into her pants.
Whatever his motivations, Nikolai was the only one who’d helped her out, the only one who hadn’t laughed at her pathetic attempts.
Unlike the man behind her, whose mocking laugh even now pinged over her nerves. “You have no friends. At least not true ones. Shallow women flock to you for approval of their clothes and shoes. Men flock to you because they...”
Truth—every word was truth. Humiliating, wretched truth.
But it hurt. Like something heavy was pressing down on her chest. “Don’t hold back now, Kairos,” she said, smarting at the stinging behind her eyes.
“Because they assume that you’ll be wild and fiery in bed. That you will bring all that passion and lack of self-control and that volatility to sex. Once your friend here gets what he wants, he will be through with you.”
If she’d had any doubt what he thought of her, he’d just decimated it.
She had fallen in love with a man who thought she was good for sex and nothing else.
A need to claw back pounded through her. “I’m shallow and vapid, si, but what you see is what you get. I don’t make false promises, Kairos.”
The silence reverberated with his shock. “I’ve never made a promise to you that I didn’t keep. I promised your brother to keep you in style when I agreed to marry you and I did. I promised you on the night of our engagement that I would show you pleasure unlike anything you’ve ever known and I believe I kept that promise.”
I never said I loved you.
His unsaid statement hung in the air.
No...he hadn’t said it. Not once.
It had all been her.
Stupid, naive Valentina building castles of love around this hard man.
She found no bump on Nikolai’s thick skull and sighed with relief. His head lolling onto her chest, he fell asleep with an undignified snore. She’d have gagged at the sweat from Nikolai’s flushed head trickling down her meager cleavage if all her reactions weren’t attuned to the man behind her.
The small hairs on her neck stood up before Kairos spoke. “Leave him alone.”
Ignoring him, she rose to her feet, and planted her hands under Nikolai’s arms.
“Move, Valentina.”
Before she could blink, Kairos hefted Nikolai up onto his shoulders and raised a brow at her.
He had carried her like that once, the hard muscles of his shoulders digging into her belly, his big hands wrapped around her upper thighs, after she had jumped into the pool at a business retreat in front of his colleagues and their wives because he’d ignored her all weekend.
He’d stripped her and thrown her into the cold shower, rage simmering in his eyes. And when he’d extracted her from the shower and rubbed her down, all that rage had converted into passion.
She’d been self-destructive just to get a rise out of him.
She looked away from the memory of that night in his eyes.
Masculine arrogance filled his eyes. “Now that the poor fool has served his purpose, shall I throw him overboard?”
“His purpose?”
“You used him to make me jealous—laughing at his jokes, dancing with him, touching him, to rile my temper. It is done, so you don’t need him anymore.”
“I told you, Nik is my friend.” She jerked her gaze to his face and flushed. “And I did nothing tonight with you on my mind. My world doesn’t revolve around you, Kairos. Not anymore.” She wouldn’t ask whether his temper was riled.
She wouldn’t.
With a shrug, he dumped Nikolai on the bed like a sack of potatoes.
Nik’s soft snores punctured the silence. If she weren’t so caught up in the confusing cascade of emotions Kairos evoked, the whole thing would have been hilarious.
But nothing could cut through her awareness of six feet four inches of pure muscle and utter masculinity. She pressed her fingers to her temple. “Please leave now.”
“Enough, Valentina. You’ve got my attention now. Tell me, did you really sign up with the escort service or was that just a dramatic touch to push me over the edge?”
“Are you asking me if I’ve been prostituting myself all these months?” She was proud of how steady she sounded while her heart thundered away in her chest.
“I thought perhaps no first. But knowing you and your vicious tendencies, who knows how far you went to shock me, to teach me a lesson, to bring me to heel?”
She walked to the door and held it for Kairos. “Get out.”
He leaned against the foot of the bed, dwarfing the room with his presence. “You’re not staying here with him.”
She folded her hands and tilted her head. The sheer breadth of his shoulders sucked the air from the room. “I’ve been doing what and who I want since the day I left you nine months ago, since I realized what a joke our marriage is. So it’s a little late to play the possessive husband.”
Hadn’t she promised herself that she’d never stoop to provoking him like that again?
She cringed, closed her eyes at the dirty, inflammatory insinuation in her own words.
But she saw the imperceptible lick of fire in his gaze, the tiny flinch of that cruel upper lip. At one time, the little fracture in his control would have been a minor victory to her.
Not anymore.
“It is a good thing then, is it not, Valentina—” the way he said her name sent a curl of longing through her “—that I did not believe all your passionate avowals of love, ne?”
Something vibrated in the smooth calmness of his tone. The presence of that anger was a physical slap. Her eyes wide, she stared as he continued, his mouth taking on a cruel tilt.
“No more pathetic displays of your jealousy. No grand declarations of love. No snarling at and slapping every woman I’m friends with. Now we both can work with each other on the same footing.”
Dios, she’d always been a melodramatic fool. But Kairos, his inability to feel anything, his unwillingness to share a thought, an emotion...it had turned her into much worse. “Non, Kairos. No more of that,” she agreed tiredly.
She didn’t even have cash for a taxi, but if she’d learnt anything in the last nine months of this flailing about she’d been doing in the name of independence, it was that she could survive.
She could survive without designer clothes and shoes, she could survive without the adulation she’d taken as her due as the fashionista that Milan looked up to, she could survive without the Conti villa and the cars and the expensive lifestyle.
She picked up her clutch from the bed, her phone from the floor. “If you won’t leave, I will.”
He blocked the door with his shoulders. “Not dressed like a cheap hooker, strutting for business at dawn, you’re not.”
“I don’t want—”
“I will throw you over my shoulder and lock you up in the stateroom.”
It should have sounded dramatic, emotional. But Kairos didn’t do drama. Didn’t utter a word he didn’t mean. And if he so much as touched her...
“Fine. Let’s talk.” She threw her clutch back on the bed and faced him. “Even better, why don’t you call your lawyer and have him bring divorce papers? I’ll sign them right now and we won’t see each other ever again.”
He didn’t exactly startle. But again, Tina had the feeling that something in him became alert. She had...surprised him? Shocked him?
What did he think her leaving him had meant?
He stretched out his wrists, undid the cufflinks on his right hand—platinum cufflinks she’d bought him for their three-month anniversary with her brother’s credit card—and pushed back the sleeve.
A shiver of anticipation curled around her spine.
He stretched his left hand toward her. Being left-handed, he’d always undone the right cuff link first. But the right hand...his fingers didn’t do fine motor skills well. She’d noted it on their wedding night, how they had felt clumsy when he tried to do anything.
For a physically perfect specimen of masculinity, it had been a shock to note that the fingers of his right hand didn’t work quite right. When she’d asked if he’d hurt his hand, he’d kissed her instead. The second time she’d asked, he’d just shrugged.
His usual response when he didn’t want to talk.
She’d taken his left hand in hers and deftly undone the cufflink on their wedding night. And a thousand times after that.
It was one of a hundred rituals they’d had as man and wife. Such intimacy in a simple action. So much history in an everyday thing.
Tina stared at the blunt, square nails now, her breath ballooning up in her chest; the long fingers sprinkled with hair to the plain platinum band on his ring finger; the rough calluses on his palm because he didn’t wear gloves when he lifted weights. It was a strong, powerful hand and yet when he touched her in the most sensitive places, it was capable of such feathery, tender movements.
A sheen of sweat coated every inch of her skin.
Dios, she couldn’t bear to touch him.
Without meeting his gaze, she took a few steps away from him. “What do I have to do to make you believe that I’m done with this marriage? That my behavior is not dictated anymore by trying to get you to acknowledge my existence?”
He smirked, noting the distance she’d put between them. “Is that what you did during our marriage?”
She leaned against the opposite wall and shrugged. “I want to talk about the divorce.”
“You really want one?”
“Si. Whatever we had was not healthy and I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
“So Leandro enlightened you about the fat settlement you will receive then.”
“What?”
“Your brother made sure you would receive a huge chunk of everything I own should we separate. Bloody insistent, if I remember correctly.” His shrug highlighted those muscle-packed shoulders. “Maybe Leandro knew how hard you would make it for any man to stay married to you.”
“You think that will hurt me? Leandro...” Her voice caught, the gulf she had put between her brothers and her a physical ache. “He practically raised me, he loved me when he could have hated me for our mother deserting him and Luca. And I still cut him out of my life because he thought so little of me that he had to bribe you to marry me. In the grand scheme of things that I’ve lost and learned, this marriage and anything I get by dissolving it...they mean nothing to me, Kairos.”
He was upon her in the blink of an eye. The scent of him—a hint of male sweat and the mild thread of his cologne—hit her first. Awareness pooled low in her belly. He didn’t touch her, and yet the heat of his body was a languid caress.
“How will you afford your haute couture and your designer stilettos then?”
“I haven’t touched your credit cards in months. I haven’t taken a single Euro from Leandro or Luca. Even the clothes I wear belong to Nikolai.”
“Ah...” His gaze raked down the length of her body. The edge of cruelty in it stole her breath even as her skin tingled at his perusal. He nodded toward the happily snoring figure behind him on the bed. “Of course, your pimp dresses you now.”
“Nikolai is not a pimp and he tricked me into believing tonight was just a party.”
“I have to admit, only Valentina Constantinou could make a tacky, slinky dress look stylish and sophisticated. But that skill is not really helping, is it? Paris chewed you out and threw you back to Milan after a mere two months. Since then, you’ve been licking the boots of everyone at that fashion magazine. Fetching coffee for those bitchy socialites, when you had once been their queen bee, running errands in the rain for photographers and models that salivated over you for years...” His gaze swept over her in that dismissive way of his. “Have you had enough of reality? Are you ready to return to your life of luxury?”
She wasn’t surprised he knew what she’d been up to in the last few months. “I don’t care how long it takes, I mean to—”
“Is that why you decided to try your hand at the oldest profession in the world?”
“You’re the one who bought me from Leandro, remember? If anyone made me a whore, Kairos, it was you.” Every hurt she felt poured out into her words, all her promises to herself to keep it civil forgotten.
“I did not pursue you under false pretenses. I did not take you to bed, hoping that a good performance would bring me closer to the CEO position of the Conti board.”
A blaze lit up in his silvery eyes, tight lines fanning around his mouth.
He tugged her and Tina fell onto him with a soft gasp. Hard muscles pushed against her breasts, sending shock waves through her. “Believe me, pethi mou, if there is one aspect of our marriage that both of us agree on, it is in bed.”
His fingers wrapped around her nape in a possessive hold, a flicker of arousal and something else etched onto his features.
“You’re the one who broke our marriage vows, Valentina. You’re the one who avowed her love in passionate statements and sensational gestures, ne? Again and again. All I wanted was a civil marriage. Then, the fickle, spoilt brat that you are, you ran away because your little fantasy world where you rule as a queen and I fall at your feet crumbled. You leave no note. No message. You tell my security guard you’re visiting your damned brothers. I imagined you kidnapped and waited for a ransom note. I imagined your body lying in some morgue because you met with an accident. I imagined one of the women or men you insulted with your cruel words may have been pushed to the limit and wrung your pretty neck.”
Heart thundering, Valentina stared.
His fingers dug into her tender flesh with a grip she was sure would leave bruises. She’d never seen him like this, smoldering with a barely banked fire. “Until Leandro took pity on me and informed me that you had simply walked out on me. On our marriage.”
Tina sagged against the wall, a strange twisting in her belly. He had been worried about her safety. Terrified for her. “I’m... I’m sorry. I didn’t think...”
“Too little, too late.”
He was right. If nothing else, he deserved an explanation. “I was furious with you and with Leandro. I had just learned that I was not a Conti but a bastard child my mother had with her chauffeur. That you married me as part of a bloody deal. You’ve had nine months to come after me.” The words slipped past her tongue, desperate, pathetic.
And just like that, any emotion she had spied in his eyes was wiped away. He stared at his fingers pressing into her flesh, his other hand kneading her hip.
His eyes widened fractionally before he stepped back. Stopped touching her. “The moment Leandro informed me what you’d done, I stopped thinking of you. I had other matters—urgent, important matters—to deal with rather than chase my impulsive brat of a wife through Europe.”
A fist to her heart would have been less painful.
But this was good, Tina reassured herself. She’d needed this talk with him. She’d needed to hear these words from Kairos’s mouth. Now, she could stop wondering—in the middle of the night, alone in her bed—if she’d made a mistake.
If their marriage deserved another chance.
After tonight, she wouldn’t have to see him again. Never hear those hateful words again. “Bene. You had important matters and I had enough time to think my decision through. I had nine months to realize what I did on impulse was right. I do not care whether you pay me alimony or not because I would not touch it. I intend to make something out of myself.”
“By whoring yourself out to Russian investors? By dressing like a cheap tramp? Admit it, Valentina. You’ve gotten nowhere in nine months except ending up with that buffoon who wants to get in your pants. You have no talent. No skills. Your connections were the only things of value about you.”
“I know that. Believe me, I have learned a lifetime’s worth of lessons in these nine months. The only good thing about this is that whatever connections you thought I would bring you as the Conti heiress are now lost.”
“Your brothers haven’t disowned you.”
“I have cut all my connections with them. With that life. I’m of no more use to you.”
“Ah...so that is your petty revenge? To deny what I planned to get by cutting yourself off from your brothers temporarily?”
“You give both me and your role in my life too much credit, Kairos. I love my brothers. Every day I spend away from them tears my heart. But it is the price I have to pay to face myself in the mirror.”
Finally, it seemed that she was getting through to him. And still, ruthlessness was etched onto his every feature. “This marriage is not done until I say it is done.”
“All I want is a teeny signature on a piece of paper. Ask me to sign away that alimony Leandro set up and I will. I will do anything you ask of me to be released from this marriage. You already wrote me out of your life when you decided not to come after me nine months ago, Kairos. I was nothing but a disappointment to you. So why drag this on? Is it just because your masculine pride is dented? Is it because, once again, I made you lose your rigid self-control?”
“Whether you want it or not, whether you touch it or not, half of what is mine will be yours for years to come. If I’m going to pay through the nose for the mistake of indulging you in your foolish fantasies of everlasting love, for putting up with your temper tantrums, for the pleasure of having you in my bed, I would like three more months of marriage, agapita. And maybe, a little more of you for that price tag.”
“A little more of me for that price...” Tina whispered, his words gouging through her already battered heart.
Her hand flew at him, outrage filling her every pore.
His lightning-fast reflexes didn’t let her slap land. With a gentleness that belied the hard, wiry strength of his body, he held her wrist between them, crowding her body against the wall until it kissed the line of her spine.
Hardness and heat, he was so male. Her five-inch stilettos made up for the height difference between them until she was perfectly molded against him. Muscular thighs straddled hers. His granite chest grazed the tips of her breasts, making her nipples tighten and ache. And against her belly... Maledizione, his arousal was lengthening and hardening.
Damp heat uncurled between Tina’s thighs. A whimper flew from her mouth—a needy and desperate plea for more. She clenched her thighs on instinct. “I do not even use my hands or my mouth. Yet you’re damp and ready for me, ne?”
Breath shallow, she fought for control over her body, over the hunger he lit so easily. “As you said, it’s why other men follow me around. I’m hot and uninhibited in bed, si? I could always match your sexual appetite and we both know it’s insatiable. That I’m like a bitch in heat right now is not a point in your favor. You give good sex, Kairos. It was the one place where I was happy as your wife.”
A lick of temper awakened in his silver eyes. “Tell me, Valentina. Do you get hot like this for any other man? For the fool lying in the bed behind us?” He twisted his hips in that way of his.
His erection rubbed against the lips of her sex and she jerked.
Pleasure was a fork in her spine, setting fire along her nerves. She could feel that thick rigidness inside her, could see the tight control etched onto his features as he moved inside her. She craved the softening of his gaze, the few moments of the real Kairos, tender and caring, that she used to glimpse after he found his release.
And she still wanted that man. Like a puppy that had been kicked but still came back for more.
His mouth was at her cheekbone and his stubble chafed her lips. A wet, open kiss at her pulse. “I have other uses for you, wife...along with a few more months in my bed.” His hands moved to cup her buttocks and pulled her against his hardness.
His mouth trailed lazily along her jawline, heading for her lips—the depth of her want, the fire along her skin—and she could taste the release in her fevered muscles.
“Admit defeat, Valentina. You can pretend all you want but your best bet is to be a rich man’s trophy wife. It is not a bad role for you. Accept your limitations. Adjust your expectations. Just as I did when your brother Luca stood in the way of the Conti board CEO position. I want nothing more from a wife, and who knows? You can maybe even persuade me to give this marriage another try.”
He was angry she had walked out.
No, not angry, she realized, running shaking hands through her hair.
He was furious with an icy, cold edge to it. Every word and caress of his was meant to provoke her with its cruelty. She’d never seen him like that.
It was more temper than she’d seen of him in all of their relationship so far—and, by God, she’d done every awful thing she could think of to provoke it.
But he wasn’t asking her back. He didn’t want to give their marriage another chance. He didn’t want to give her a chance.
No, all he wanted was a sop to his male ego. All he wanted was to punish her for daring to leave him, for calling him out on his ruthless ambition.
That pain gave her a rope with which to climb out of the sensual haze. To deny herself what she’d never been able to before—his touch.
“Please, Kairos, release me.”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, he let her go. Pupils drenched with lust, he stared at her as if he couldn’t believe she could put a stop to it.
Shaking but determined to hold herself up, she met his gaze. “What do I have to do to get you to agree to a divorce? To get you to leave me alone?”
He looked taken aback but recovered fast. “Three months as my wife.”
“Why? Why do you need me now? Other than because you want to punish me for walking out on you?”
“I have a debt to pay to Theseus.”
“The man who brought you home from the streets, the one who adopted you?”
“Ne.”
“And for this, you need to have a wife?”
“Yes. His daughter Helena—”
“Is causing trouble between you and him? You want me to take her on? I don’t understand how your wife’s presence will help...” The words trailed away from her lips as she saw his closed off expression. A mocking laugh rose. “Non, I’ve got it, I think. The daughter wants you and you want to say no without hurting anyone’s feelings. How noble of you, Kairos.”
His brow cleared, relief dawning in his eyes. “Theseus deserves nothing less from me.”
The depth of his sincerity shook Tina. She had never seen Kairos feel that strongly about anyone or anything. Except wealth and power and the amassing of it.
“This is the only way you get your divorce, Valentina.”
“You cannot drag me back into that life against my will.”
“But I can fight the divorce proceedings. Make your life into the media circus that you suddenly appear to abhor. And even worse, one wrong word or move from me toward you will bring forth your brothers’ fury upon me and their interference in your life...if you truly intend to make it on your own, that would be hell.”
Tina stared at him, amazed despite the anger pouring through her. He was calling her bluff about all this—the new direction she wanted to take in life.
She was damned if she answered it, damned if she didn’t. She didn’t want to spend another moment with him and yet he had left her no choice.
She sighed. “You will release me when things are clarified?”
“When things are clarified to my satisfaction, yes. No sooner. I’m warning you, Valentina, I want a perfect wife. No tantrums. No reckless escapades. You could even leave with the fat settlement the divorce will award you with the satisfaction that you’ve truly earned it. A novel feeling, I assure you.”
“And if I sleep with you to earn it, you will have truly made me a whore, si, Kairos? Will your dented ego be repaired then? Because, hear me out, Kairos. My body might be willing but my heart is not.”
The growl he swallowed down filled her with vicious satisfaction.
Valentina smiled for the first time in nine months.
Now all she’d have to do was convince herself of what she had told him.
