A Deal with Demakis(69)

                Still clasping her wrist, he pulled Lexi along with him. “You have it,” he threw at Tyler, who stood looking at them with a nonplussed expression on his face.

                * * *

                Did she leave now?

                The innocuous question attacked Lexi as Nikos pushed her into her bedroom and disappeared to answer a phone call. She knew the question had been coming, but she had shoved it away while figuring out how to handle what Tyler had told her this morning.

                Now that everything between Tyler and Venetia was resolved, at least for now, the fact was that what she had come to do was no longer valid.

                Tyler didn’t need her anymore. Which meant her deal with Nikos was done.

                Her stomach twisting into a painful knot, Lexi got off the bed and walked to the connecting veranda. She didn’t want to sit there and let Nikos see the confusion in her eyes.

                Because she didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to walk away from Nikos. Not yet.

                If ever, a sinuous voice whispered. Rubbing her clammy hands on her T-shirt, she leaned against the wall, fast tears gathering in her throat.

                She would not cry, as much as it hurt. She needed to be grown-up about it. Deal with it like a holiday fling.

                “Lexi?”

                She heard Nikos’s tread in the bedroom, drew in a deep breath and ventured back in. Feeling as though she was marching into battle.

                Nikos stood beside the bed, his knees propped against it. Undoing the cuffs of his shirt, his gaze traveled over her pale face with increasing curiosity. By the time he was done, wariness entered his face. “I thought this was what you wanted for them—a real chance.”

                She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling inexplicably cold. “It is.”

                “It would have never worked out between you and him,” he said in a soft voice full of emotion.

                “What?” she said automatically, frowning. Realization dawned. “Nikos, I’m not moping over Tyler.”

                Reaching her, he took her hands in his. Her hands were the size of his palms, the rough grooves and ridges now as familiar to her as her own. She trembled as he ran one finger over her cheek and the circles under her eyes. “Thank you for trusting me with the truth today.”

                She smiled up at him, wondering if everything she felt was written in her eyes. And if he would run if he saw it. “I think you like deluding Venetia, your grandfather, and even yourself into thinking that you don’t understand love or affection or any matters of heart. But I know that you do. I believed that in the face of Tyler’s honesty, you would give him a chance.”

                He inclined his head and smiled. The warmth of it enveloped her. “Then why that look in your eyes?”

                She tried for casual nonchalance and utterly failed. “You don’t need me here anymore. It’s time I returned to New York.”

                “Ahhh...so you won’t want this then?” With his hand on her wrist, he tugged her from the room, giving her no chance to answer.

                They walked through the corridor, went down the steps, through the lounge into one of the rooms to the side. It was the room she loved most in the villa. Very sparsely furnished, and during most of the day, sunlight filled the room.