If he hadn’t cared, he wouldn’t have been so angry with her, then or tonight when she had suggested a way to pay off her debt.
“Is it so hard to admit that you feel something for me, Dmitri? Even if it was just an echo of our horrible past life together? Everything has to be this sanitized, sterilized version of you?”
His head recoiled back, tension swathing his entire frame. As though she was a danger to him. When he looked at her, his head cocked and eyes narrowed, Jas didn’t buy it.
It was as if a storm was brewing in his eyes as he stood up. “That Dmitri was violent and deranged, Jas.”
She had shocked him. Into what, she had no idea, but she had. Satisfaction swelled inside her. “At least that Dmitri was real.”
“You’re like that mutt Andrew saved once, remember? Even after it got better, he wouldn’t go away. Kept coming back to him, desperate for another nuzzle.”
Instead of the smooth, uncaring tone that he delivered all his insults in, he sounded ragged, on the edge, furious.
And just like that, his insults didn’t hurt anymore.
Instead, she felt victorious, as if she had drawn him out finally.
Feeling more out of control of her own fate than her worst working nights had been, she sighed. “You said Stavros was Leah’s husband. Are they really getting married again?”
“Stavros married Leah under the worst of circumstances.” His voice took on a softer tone when he spoke of Leah. “To make up for it, he is giving her a wedding now.”
“He looked so stern and forbidding...but he’s doing it for her? That is so romantic. No wonder Leah looks as if she’s glowing from the...”
His pointed look told Jasmine clearly what he thought of her gushing. A burn began to climb up from her chest to her throat.
“Is that what you want, Jas?” he said without scorn or mockery.
“What I want... I’ve never even had the indulgence to think of what I want from life. It doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate someone else’s happiness. Despite what I’ve had to do to survive, there’s some innocence left inside me, Dmitri.”
“Some innocence, Jas?” A light came on in his eyes, rendering Jas still. As if she had gained a little traction with him. Just a little but enough. “Have I been duped in the quality of my purchase? Is there a return tag, then?”
It was an outrageous situation they seemed to be caught in. And it was of their own making, too, Jas realized with a hollowness in her gut. But neither of them, it seemed, would walk away.
And if she didn’t laugh, she was afraid she would cry. Or do something equally disastrous, like wanting to prove that she was woman enough for the arrogant rogue in front of her.
Prickly and high maintenance? Oh, how she wanted to do something that broke that smugly satisfied smile. How she wished she could shatter that facade of careless debauchery...
How she wanted him to kiss her, not because she thrust herself at him, not because he thought he should teach her a lesson, but because he wanted to, more than anything in the world.
Nothing more self-destructive in wanting to prove that she had a place in a man’s life when he couldn’t give a flying fig about it... She had seen her mother do it and had the worn-out child and adult T-shirts to wear for it.
“One of these days, you’re going to wish you had sent me on my way, Dmitri,” she said, because empty challenges didn’t cost anything.
She was far too invested in this strange relationship they had, she realized, fresh panic blooming in her gut.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JASMINE HAD NEVER imagined that she could feel lonely surrounded by at least a hundred guests at the estate where Stavros and Leah were getting married. It seemed as if the entirety of Athens’ high fashion society was attending the party that night and would stay for the wedding.
Dmitri had dumped her once again at the estate in the middle of the night and disappeared after he had blurted out, “We’ll talk about your future after the wedding.”
He had quite literally handed her over to a maid and stormed back into the night.
Clamping her teeth so tight that it hurt, she had forced her mind away from where, and whose bed, he would be going to in the middle of the night.
Having fallen asleep at some strange hour of predawn, she had woken up this morning to the sounds of guests having a lazy, laughing breakfast in the courtyard outside her balcony. Disoriented by the amount of jet-setting she seemed to be doing, she had pulled on a sweater and ventured out to see Stavros and Leah and an assortment of strangers staring up at her.