Chapter Nine
NUSH HAD NEVER believed in love at first sight. That was until she’d seen the house on the island that Caio had personally overseen the restoration of in the last few months by his own admission.
Everything that had stood before had been razed to the ground, he’d told her, because the very foundation of it had been rotting from the inside. And what he’d had built in its place had stolen a piece of her heart.
Three floors of honey-colored, hand-grained hardwood floors, huge open spaces with exposed beams and sloping ceilings and loads of light, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree glass walls with views of the ocean and a few splashes of color in the form of local art, the house was an architectural marvel.
An infinity pool, a second-level deck with a hot tub, and on the beautiful grounds, an orange grove, there was so much to explore.
White walls and white furniture and simple but elegant touches made the house warm and welcoming, even in its austerity. Like Caio himself.
We can live here part of the year if you like it, he’d said, eyes dancing with pleasure when she’d gushed over the sloping roof and the orange bougainvillea creeping up and covering all of one side of the house.
We need only return to your grandparents’ house when Mira or Yana are visiting, he’d added.
Nush had simply smiled, excited to explore rooms upon rooms but loathe to give her assent to his determined plans for their future. Not even to please him in the moment could she give in.
Though it was far from easy to resist.
He kept dangling such scenarios in front of her, drugging kisses laced with whispered demands that she take that final step with him—pretty much her fantasy and dream future rolled up into alluringly aching promises, and she tried her best to not react, to not reach for everything he offered.
To retain some sense of self-preservation.
The first couple of days, she’d been sleeping and eating as her wrist had been hurting a lot more than she’d expected. Then she explored the house, one expansive enough to raise the big, boisterous family she’d always dreamed of having. Which led her to wonder if Caio felt the same.
How could he when he was tight-lipped about his own family, when in the fifteen years she’d known him, he’d never even mentioned them except for his father? Even then it had been to draw her out. As many times as she’d probed about the acquisition, he’d batted away her curiosity by distracting her.
She had let it go. For now. Especially since she’d barely seen him in the week since they’d arrived. He’d even apologized for leaving her alone for so many days.
Having fended for herself during her childhood and early adolescence, the quiet solitude didn’t bother her one bit. She’d simply got back to work on the pending software model. The rest of the time she explored the grounds and the beach and kept in touch with her sisters.
She called Mira, who was in Athens, daily and was glad to hear that she and Aristos were giving their marriage a second chance. Which had been a love match.
At least that was what she and Yana had assumed when their reserved, practical sister had turned up married after one weekend in Vegas to a man she’d barely known.
Yana was harder to pin down as she traveled for shoots all over the world. Still, she texted whenever she could, sometimes in twenty to thirty strings of one-sided conversation, and Nush loved seeing her sister’s naughtiness come through.
So Nush would’ve been content. Except for Caio, who seemed determined to control how much he was prepared to open up to her. Though to be fair, he was gone before she woke up and when he returned, she was knocked out by the pills.
On the couple of occasions that she’d been awake when he’d crawled into bed, freshly showered and in silk boxers she’d barely got a peek at, he’d peppered her with questions about the day, about design elements for the model she was currently working through on paper, about Mira and Yana and any number of things.
All about her, while venturing nothing about his day or himself.
And Nush was beginning to see how easily he distracted her every time she asked after his family or his past or even the acquisition that had been so important to him.
Soon, Princesa. Once I have everything in place, was all he would say.
Another time his abrupt taunt had been, When you give me your commitment, when you promise me you’re with me for the long term, Anushka, you’ll know all the dirty details of my past.
Even in her half-asleep state, she’d wondered at what he didn’t want to share with her.
Worse, only now, in broad daylight, did she realize that he was both surprised and displeased that she was holding out on him, could she see how he used her artless desire for him as a tool to distract her.
Just last night, she’d been awake enough for once to see the bleakness in his eyes, the hard twist of his mouth when she’d walked into the bathroom and found him staring at his reflection in the mirror.
Her heart had ached for the pain stamped all over him. And yet when she’d hugged him from behind and begged him to tell her what was eating at him, all he’d said was that he needed her. And she’d felt him channeling all of that pain into his caresses as he’d carried her back to their bed.
He’d kissed her and teased her with those clever fingers, his hard chest pressed against her back and her legs raised and open in an indecent but utterly erotic position that had made her sex clench greedily.
It had been the most gloriously slow climb to the peak, as he touched her slowly at first, then fast, then penetrated her with one, two and then three fingers, introducing her to a sweet, painful burn that made the pleasure he doled out in controlled measures all the more lush and welcoming.
Like he was in every other walk of life, the man was extraordinarily thorough with her body, and the cues she gave, driven by some feral need that he’d learn every inch of her body and what turned her on, what made her sigh and groan and scream, that had driven him to drag out her orgasm for so long that when it had hit her finally, it had left her fractured and sobbing at the intensity of it.
Caio had held her with a tender reverence that had calmed her, coaxed her down from the volatile energy of her release, pressed soft kisses to her damp brow all the while whispering to her that her willingness and vulnerability were a gift he’d relish unwrapping again and again.
But even in the part Vicodin and part orgasm-fueled molasses that had been her mind, she’d known that he hadn’t let her touch him.
As if whatever had chased him during the day needed to be cleansed by splintering her apart and putting her back together all over again.
If she hadn’t felt him, thick and hard against her behind, she’d have thought he wasn’t affected at all. But he’d been. There had been a desperate intensity to his caresses but he asked nothing of her.
Nush might have let it go until she’d seen the email that had popped up in her inbox by accident.
Until she called Peter Sr. and inquired after the acquisition Caio was working on and learned that Thaata had been expressly against the very thing.
Which explained why he hadn’t left the stock to Caio.
Caio hadn’t lied to her and yet he’d hidden something big from her.
Every question of hers about the acquisition had been unanswered. Worse, he’d distracted her, used her own desire against her.
Even now, as she walked back into the house after an early evening stroll through the orange grove and donned a swimsuit for a soak in the hot tub, she decided things would have to change.
Caio walked into the deck that provided a spectacular view of the sunset over the dark waves of the ocean providing a symphony.
With the orange horizon behind her kissing the silky golden brown of her bare shoulders, and the flimsy triangles of her bikini top drawing his attention to the swells of her breasts, she was a sight he wondered if he could ever get used to.
Jets of water bubbled around her, kissing all that bare skin and it was all he wanted to do.
The first few days, it had been extremely disconcerting to find Nush in his bed, tangled up in the sheets, arms and legs thrown akimbo, thick wavy locks of her hair spread over his pillow.
Smiling in the dark, he’d collected various arms and legs and bed covers and slowly tucked her to his side, making sure she didn’t jostle her wrist.
He didn’t remember the last time he’d had a woman sleeping in his bed.
Probably never. Even when he and Sophia had been together, it had been all hush-hush, a dirty secret she hadn’t wanted to reveal to anyone.
Being led by his groin and by the idea of thwarting his stepbrother, his nineteen-year-old self had found it intensely satisfying. He’d been a poor, gullible bastard.
It hadn’t taken longer than a day for him to get used to Nush there.
And worse, every evening he returned wondering if she would still be there.
His rational mind knew she didn’t know of his activities during the day and yet, with her probing questions about his family, about the acquisition, it wouldn’t be long before she’d know what he was up to.
Before he couldn’t hide the reality of who he was from her anymore.
And the more she resisted giving him her commitment, the more he resisted giving her the truth, and the more he didn’t want to let her go.
Because for all the years and strategies he’d spent to corner his stepfather like a hunted animal, Caio hadn’t calculated how he’d feel when he’d arrived there.
Of how empty and dissatisfied and purposeless it would all seem.
How his half brother Javier’s face as Caio refused to see him again would torment him.
Cristo, it should’ve been a celebratory moment. He should’ve felt free. Instead all he felt was...this feeling of betrayal.