Bought for Her Innocence(9)

In a moment of weakness, she had called Katrakis Textiles in Athens once. The receptionist had even politely asked her for her name. In the end, she had chickened out.

In the end, it had been easier to hate him from a distance than take his pity.

“I don’t like depending on anyone for anything,” she said instead.

“Fate has a way of punching us with exactly what we don’t want. There was someone else who bid for you. Which meant Noah had two dogs out for the same bone, and he let us go at it.”

Another bidder? Her knees gave out and she sank to the longue.

Sweat beaded her brow, nausea climbing up her throat. Noah had tricked her. If Dmitri hadn’t come along, he would have sold her virginity to someone else.

The horror of what could have happened filled her with dread.

“Noah said you called it a virginity auction. And that’s what it truly was. What I can’t figure out is who else wanted to pay off that debt and why.”

Her head spun in a thousand different directions and Jasmine struggled to hold on to her sanity. Clutching her head, she walked away from him.

Just leave. Don’t care what he paid, Jas. He can afford it.

Walk away, the survivor in her begged.

“How much did you pay Noah?”

“You’re not my priciest toy, if that’s what worries you.”

Her gut heaved with anticipated dread, her right eye twitching uncontrollably from keeping her gaze so straight. Something was very wrong; she knew it in her bones.

“Stop taunting me, Dmitri. How much do I owe you?”

“A hundred and thirty thousand pounds, but since I’m feeling generous I’ll round it down to an even hundred.”

A hundred thousand pounds? Her gut flopped to her feet. “That can’t be true. That much money... It’s ridiculous, God...”

Clutching the wall behind her, she gasped for breath. “This is my worst nightmare come true... Oh, God...” It would take her ten lifetimes to make so much money. She would never be able to pay him back, never walk away from this.

“Being saved from a life of trading your body is your worst nightmare?”

Uncontrollable shivers overtook her. Hunger and lack of sleep from the past two days hit her like a battering ram, the sheer willpower with which she had kept herself going, shattering finally. “No. Bound to you eternally by this debt is.”

She swayed and sank to the thickly carpeted floor.

A soft curse ripped through the air before she was pulled up like a rag doll. “Theos, Jas.” His voice wasn’t loud, yet it carried something. His gaze searched her, his fingers splayed against her jaw, a strange glitter darkening his eyes. “Now is not the time to lose that reckless pride.”

Pushing his hands away, she sank back onto the chaise longue. Her body felt boneless, as if she would never stop falling.

All she wanted was to curl up and sleep for the next decade. All she wanted was to let someone else bear the burden, just once. “How am I going to pay you back? Lord, what am I going to do?” she muttered to herself.

The bedroom door opened and an army of uniformed staff set down an array of dishes that had her gut twisting with hunger. She looked at the clock, which said five in the morning.

The staff vanished just as they had appeared, with minimal fuss, making her wonder if she had imagined them.

“Until you figure out a way, you will eat, sleep and generally keep your presence in my life to a minimum.”

Swallowing at the mouthwatering aroma from the dishes, she nodded. Eyed the distance from the chaise to the table and groaned.

With a curse that sounded filthy to even her untrained ears, he stopped by the table and lifted a silver dome off a plate. “When did you eat last?”

“A cheeseburger about twenty hours ago,” she whispered pathetically.

Pushing her legs out of his way none too gently, and careful enough to not even accidentally touch her hip that was propped up, he sat down at the foot of the chaise. Forking pasta with his left hand, which was such a familiarly intimate gesture from her childhood that a lump formed in her throat, he brought it to her mouth.

Jasmine closed her mouth over the farfalle eagerly.

“Don’t make a habit of this, Jas.”

He sounded uncomfortable, wary. Was he afraid that she would climb all over him again and embarrass them both?

Closing her eyes, Jas chewed, relishing the thick white sauce. “Won’t even remember this, Dmitri.”

She ate in silence while the influx of carbs lulled her to sleep. She finished off a bottle of water and stretched back down on the chaise.

“I’ll see you later.”

She lifted her thumbs as he stilled by the door, pensive. She felt like that mangy dog again. Only instead of letting the doorman kick her, Dmitri had decided to keep her.

Something strange was going on with him. The fleeting thought came to her even as her head felt as if it was filled with cotton candy.

One minute, he was shredding her into pieces with such ruthlessness, and the next...such tenderness showed in his eyes that she thought she would shatter in the face of it.

“Where are you going? When will you return?”

He stared at her for a long, disturbing, soul-crushing moment before he covered the distance between them. Still reclining on the chaise, she waited with bated breath, her heart hammering behind her rib cage.

He would surely cut her to pieces for asking that question, for assuming such...

Kneeling down to her level, he took her hand in his. Her hand was delicately slender in his huge one, and suddenly, she felt a sense of security she hadn’t known in a long time. It was as if a fuzzy feeling unspooled in her gut.

“I have a very irate portfolio manager that I have to mollify after my latest bout of shopping frenzy,” he whispered, and she laughed through the weariness.

“Tonight I can sleep, can’t I? For as long as I want?”

He squeezed her hand, and she thought how rough his palm was. “Yes, you can, Jas. No one will come in. You’re...safe here.”

Her eyelids felt as if they would glue together forever. Jas squeezed his hand back and whispered, “Thank you,” before giving in to the sleep claiming her.

Maybe she didn’t have to hate Dmitri so thoroughly, the thought came to her. She would still pay him back, yes, but they could at least be friends, couldn’t they?

As much friends as she could be with a man who had bought her and who set her pulse racing like nothing in life ever had.

A man who was making it harder for her to hate him.





CHAPTER FIVE

DMITRI RETURNED WELL past eleven, his entire morning spent in a fruitless search. He still had no answers whatsoever as to what Noah had intended. He had been shut down at every avenue he had pursued and he knew why. Noah didn’t want word getting out about Jasmine getting out of her debt. Even though the greedy old bastard had milked the occasion for all its worth.

Bad for his business.

And he knew he could expect no answers from the infuriatingly deceptive woman herself.

There were too many unknowns about what she had done these past few years. And then there was her assumption that he had never looked back for Andrew or her.

Even though he had.

Andrew had been viciously angry with Dmitri that last time they had met, just months before he had died, because Dmitri had refused to give him any more money. Because Dmitri had wrongly hoped that cutting Andrew off after so many years would curb his gambling habit.

He had never thought Andrew would poison Jasmine against him, however, that he would lie about all the times Dmitri had lent him money.

But then he shouldn’t have been shocked. Didn’t he know firsthand the consequences of addiction and self-loathing it built up? How it only looked for a scapegoat?

For years, Dmitri had faced his father’s fists just because his father hadn’t been man enough to accept that his alcoholism had been responsible for the miserable state of their lives. No, his cowardly father had blamed his mother instead.

After everything he and Andrew had been to each other, Dmitri had become that scapegoat for Andrew.

No wonder Jasmine despised him. And he had no intention of telling her the truth, either. He needed the distance her hatred for him put between them.

But the sense of honor Giannis and Stavros had instilled in him wouldn’t let him wash his hands of her.

It meant he couldn’t just pad her bank balance and remove her from his life. Not until he figured out this whole auction mystery about her. Not until he was completely sure that Jasmine could walk away from that life.

Unbuttoning his shirt, he entered the bedroom and stilled.

The blinds were open and the sunlight made every inch of the room glitter with a soft, golden glow.

And in the middle of it, on the chaise longue, lay Jasmine. Her hands were folded under her cheek, her long legs half dangling on the other side revealed delicate feet with red-tipped toes.

She was only a few inches shorter than him, which meant she had to be uncomfortable as hell on the chaise. While a perfectly good king-size bed lay in touching distance.

Stubborn woman!

If not for sheer exhaustion, she would have crawled out to the corridor rather than take his help, he knew.

Without intending to, he found himself moving closer to her.

Her dark hair was finally out of the knot and spread against the beige upholstery like nightfall, lustrous and wavy. Spiky eyelashes curved against her cheeks, her plump, wide mouth, for once not pursed in disapproval.

She looked like a wild, beautiful horse he had once seen on Stavros’s farm, a horse that had refused to be mounted by anyone. An incongruous, irresistible combination of untouched innocence and untamed wildness.