She didn’t care if it might have been nothing. He had been given a new lease on life, a life none of them had ever dreamed of, and he still had come back for them.
“You gave him money...” She slid onto the bench at the foot of the bed soundlessly, the whole picture emerging in front of her. Her gut turned so painfully that she thought she might be sick. “For how long?”
“Years.”
Shock shattered her, bringing shards of pain with it.
“When I realized what he’d been doing, when his words didn’t add up anymore, I cut him off instantly. But his addiction to gambling was already in his bones. I should have realized he would somehow find the money, that the burden would fall to you. He had already turned you against me, and after he was gone...there was no point in telling you the truth.”
He had protected Andrew even then. And her from the ugly truth. For a man who said he had done everything only to alleviate guilt, Dmitri had done so much for them.
More than their own mother.
“The last time he came to see me, I begged him to tell me where you were. And he said he would if I gave him money.” He pressed his palms to his eyes. “It was the hardest thing to see him like that...”
“He made me hate you.” God, Andrew had not only squandered what Dmitri gave him but borrowed more from Noah... “I’m so sorry...for all the things I said to you. For what he did.”
Dmitri crouched in front of her, his long fingers stroking over her bare arms. She shivered, and pressed her forehead in his shoulder. Shame and grief vied for space within her. “Don’t, Jas. You’ve carried his burden long enough.”
His hands moved over her shoulders and soon she was in his embrace.
Jasmine wished she could cry and let it all out. But fury had turned into a hard knot and settled deep in her chest. She felt like ice.
Andrew had cheated both her and Dmitri to the very end.
That addiction was in their genes, their blood. And she was just as prone to it as they had been. Did hers come in the form of this man? Was it already too late?
But Jasmine found she couldn’t care. She didn’t care.
Her brother’s betrayal cut too deep. All those years of slaving herself over a debt he had made, of defending him in her own mind, of putting her barely clothed body on display every night—all of it had been for nothing. The grief that she hadn’t somehow been enough to get him through it... The crushing weight lifted.
She had paid the price for their weaknesses, their addictions. She would pay no more, not in shame, not in grief, and not by making their weaknesses her own.
The ice cracked just like that, the white-hot flame of her fury, her powerlessness found target in the man in front of her.
She jerked away from him. “Why did you tell me all this today? Why not that first night? Why now?”
Something desperate flashed in his eyes when he spoke. “You wish I hadn’t told you?”
“No, I want to know what changed today.”
Suddenly, she understood the second layer to his reaction when Gaspard had touched her.
She remembered the carnal promise in that blinding, incinerating moment on the flight when he had devoured her mouth, as if he was drowning. Finally, she understood what Dmitri had been hiding since the first night beneath his lacerating contempt for her...
An avalanche of want and need ripped open inside her as she looked at him with new eyes... He had wanted her all along... Then, why had he pushed her away so efficiently?
“Tell me, Dmitri,” she commanded now, fully aware of what she was asking. No longer confused about her own want for him, no longer guilty or ashamed about it.
She’d never been an innocent, except in the most technical sense anyway.
Still, he had given her a choice.
She wanted him; she had known that from the beginning. But tonight, there was no shame or weakness that came with that want. Tonight there was nothing but the two of them.
“Because I realized the inevitability of this thing between us.” His soft voice only amplified the spiraling tension in the room. “If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow... It’s going to consume us both.
“I have never denied myself something I want. I want you. Every time you look at me, all I can think of is being inside you. Every time you lash at me, all I can think of is kissing your mouth... To hell with your debt and my honor, and Andrew... To hell with pretending I’m something I’m not. Nothing in the past decade has made me as hungry or as desperate as you have, Jas. So do you want this for as long as it will last? Do you have the guts to actually take me on, Jas? Because if I touch you, I won’t stop.”
For a seemingly infinite moment, she looked as though she would tell him to go to the farthest corners of hell. Theos, he deserved it just for the way he had treated her this past week. He already had a one-way ticket there for what he was about to do.
He was going to slake his lust and move on... Because that was all he did. That was all he had ever been capable of.
But he was through with being something he was not. He was through with denying himself. And he didn’t allow himself to think of the consequences tomorrow. He’d deal with it.
Right now all he wanted was to taste that lush mouth again, remove that hurt from her eyes.
“You were attracted to me all along?” she demanded.
The gold fabric molding her lithe body, she looked like a goddess who had only just realized her power.
His heart threatened to shove past his rib cage. “Attraction is such a lukewarm word, pethi mou.”
Even in that desperate last moment, he had tried for honor, Dmitri told himself. He had sounded nothing like a lover should. Christos, he was more tender with women whose name he didn’t know, but with her, he sounded like an arrogant, lust-riddled jerk.
But at least he had told her what his terms were. If she didn’t want him like that, she could walk away.
He was not seducing her, he told himself.
And then suddenly, she was walking toward him, and he shuddered with relief and tension and anticipation.
Before his next breath, her hands were in his hair and pulling his head down to meet her mouth. They groaned and pressed closer to each other, as if they couldn’t get enough already.
He took her mouth with desperation and rough need, swiping at her trembling mouth with his tongue, impatient to possess her. And she...she was draped around him like ivy, her breasts rubbing and pressing his chest, one long leg wrapped around his as she moaned.
And the last flicker of self-restraint he possessed went out.
The taste of her had clung to him for two days, her jagged whimpers etched on his brain. Never had a woman so thoroughly consumed his every thought, never had she felt so out of his reach... He didn’t question the possessive fire he felt as he learned her.
He had already decided when it came to Jasmine, he was mad.
Dmitri ran his hands over the taut line of her back to her rounded buttocks, the narrow flare of her hips. There were so many places to touch, so many places to learn. And she sank into his rough caresses, gasping and moaning under his mouth. As if she was as out of control for him as he was for her.
He dipped his hands into her hair and molded her scalp, bending her to his plundering mouth. Like raw silk, her hair cascaded through his fingers. She smelled of wildflowers and summer, and he breathed it in, hungry for every texture of her.
The more he touched her and stroked her and tasted her, the smooth forehead, the narrow bridge of her nose, the already red curve of her mouth, the pulse that skittered at her neck, the rim of her dainty ears, the more he thought of someone else’s hands on all of it...on all of her...
Of someone, scum like Gaspard or John King or someone like his father, laying a finger on her, marring skin that was like satin, touching curves that were pure perfection, forever ruining that innocent yet wild spirit inside her, the hotter his anger and desire burned...
He took and took, licked and bit, stroked and tasted, plundered and devoured her mouth until she was panting and moaning, and gasping his name...
“Dmitri...” she whispered against his bristly jaw.
The trailing heat of her mouth against his neck made his throat dry. He pulled her up again, afraid that he would ravage her if she so much as kissed his skin...
Then she said it again, his name.
It fell from her mouth like a warm caress, an entreaty and command all wrapped in one... Hearing his name on her lips did what the little will he had over his body couldn’t... It calmed him down, called him down from the edge.
He couldn’t take her like every other woman in the world, not because of her innocence, but this was her...
“Keep saying my name like that,” he commanded, looking for a hook, or a zipper, something that would reveal her to him.
Her arms around his nape, her mouth against his, she complied. “Dmitri.”
Too impatient now to think straight, he caught the crisscrossing strips of the gold silk and pushed it down her shoulders. Not before running the back of his hands over the hard nipples visible through the silk.
She made a sound, like a throaty purr, at the back of her throat, her gaze unabashedly meeting his. The liquid longing he saw there threatened to undo him.
The dress slithered down her breasts and hips with a silky whisper and pooled around her legs.
Dmitri stepped back, the better to see her, his breath knocking about in his throat. And almost lost it then.
It felt as though he had waited forever to see Jasmine like this and hadn’t even known it.