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.
One minute, she was consigning him to hell for his sins and more, the next, melting into him.
He sank to the floor and leaned his head against the bed, memories he had locked away rushing at him.
He didn’t remember a moment of his childhood without her in it.
She had been such a tall, gangly little girl when he had left, her black eyes filled with fat tears when she had said goodbye.
For years, after he had moved in with Giannis, he remembered that face and her wet kiss on his cheek.
Even now, at first glance, she looked scrawny, the robe sticking on her angular shoulders, drowning her lithe form. But that was where the girl he remembered with such fondness ended.
Honey-gold and smooth, her skin shone with a brilliance no amount of makeup could achieve, transforming her face. There was a lean, tensile strength to her body, a fluid grace and energy that had slammed into him when he had tackled her.
Curves that had pressed against his forearm that he couldn’t see now...
Theos, was he so shallow that he was this desperate for a peek at what she so desperately wanted to hide? Had he truly become that playboy who had the hots for every woman that came into his life?
Was there nothing he wouldn’t take to sate that perpetual emptiness within him?
Because, for once, Stavros was wrong, his faith in Dmitri misplaced. There was something between Jasmine and him, and every inch of him wanted to explore what it was, and she...she was no match for him.
Theos, this was Andrew’s little sister, the last woman he needed to tangle with, however much she made him feel things he had never felt before.
He pushed himself off the floor, called Reception and requested a different suite.
He had plans for tomorrow, for next week, for the next month. And he intended to keep those plans.
And that meant the bachelor party he was throwing Stavros at a strip club in Monaco. Something he had been looking forward to ever since Stavros had pronounced that he was marrying Leah again, properly this time.