“You have been thinking about this a lot.”
She commanded herself to not flush. The traitor that her body was, it continued, as it wanted. “This isn’t even your house and you dump me here in the middle of the night, not to mention two nights before the wedding. If Leah hadn’t—”
“I knew Leah would look after you. And this is my house,” he drawled. “Not that it was still okay,” he added when she glared.
Her mouth fell open in an O. “I thought it was Leah’s grandfather’s estate.”
“Giannis was fair to his last breath. According to him, Stavros got Leah and consequently a bigger share in the company, so I got the estate.”
“So you got the bad end of the deal, then?” she couldn’t help pointing out.
Leaning against the traditional, four-poster bed, he laughed. All Jas could think was that they were in a small room with a huge bed and... “Only you and Stavros think Leah is worth more than a thousand-acre estate.”
“You’re like a greedy dragon that hoards treasure. How much is enough, Dmitri? Have you really become that shallow?”
“It enabled me to buy you, Jas, didn’t it?” he said, and then looked away, as if he had said too much.
And Jas scrambled for something to say, something to fight her body’s feverish reaction to him. “I get that you have your own life and that I pushed my way into it. I just... Just don’t dump me on someone else. Once we figure out some kind of plan for my future, I won’t bother you again.”
“I’ve decided that you’re not bothering me anymore,” he said, in an arrogant tone that said he had decided a lot more things than that.
What the hell did that even mean?
That was a complete one-eighty, if she’d ever heard one. She didn’t dare ask him what had caused this. Because she was terrified he would tell her that he’d moved from mild annoyance to pity, that it was something from his past that had fractured through that facade tonight and not her...that she would realize that when it came to him, she would take anything.
God, she couldn’t catch her breath with this man.
“But what you did just now, that was not okay on any level. You humiliated me. It’s as though you really think I’m one of your possessions.”
“Possession, Jas?” A winter storm blazed in his eyes. “You froze like a deer caught in headlights when he touched you.”
“Dmitri, I’m not completely clueless when it comes to men. I know how—”
“Gaspard Devue is the worst kind of man, Jas.” He reached her and Jasmine forgot how to breathe. He took her hand in his and looked down at them. Hers, slender and soft, his dark and rough—it was so...simply sexy. “That he gets to roam free like that after everything he keeps doing... I don’t think Leah knows what kind of a man he is or she would have never let him step foot here. When I saw his hands on you, bile crawled up my throat.
“He has these toxic relationships with women. He abuses them in ways that I can’t even bear to think of. I have seen his handiwork on Anya and—”
“Anya Ivanova, the supermodel? The one you were going to marry?” she piped up. Then wanted to sink through the floor when his mouth tensed.
He stared at her for a long time before he nodded. “He isolated her, beat her and, when she threatened to tell the authorities, he pulled the rug out from under her life by spreading vicious rumors about her work. Terrified to within an inch of her life, she came to me. I offered to stay with her at an Alps resort while she recovered. But however much I reassured her, she refused to press charges.”
And the gossip magazines had thought a woman had finally conquered Dmitri Karegas. Dark and light, they had complemented each other perfectly. Jasmine had bought the tabloid, read it through and then ripped it into shreds, and had stood shaken by the depth of her envy for a woman she knew nothing about.
While he had been helping an abused woman recover her life.
Jasmine had a feeling she was seeing a side of Dmitri no one did. Except the unfortunate woman.
“Gaspard was the one who found her in St. Petersburg when she was barely seventeen, gave her her first big break. And through the years, he isolated her, abused her. Until she thought there was nowhere else to go, caught in that relationship.”
And Dmitri had got her out of it. “She quit modeling, didn’t she?”
“Yes, I helped her get out of some of the contracts.” He shrugged.
When there had been no announcement of an engagement coming, the tabloids had gone berserk. Nothing had come out of it except Anya Ivanova, she suddenly remembered breathlessly, had started a retail clothes store in London.