“That’s very insulting, Nikos.”
He turned toward her, leaning against the huge bed. Her arms around her waist, she braced herself.
“This sketch...” He took a deep breath, the expectant wariness in her gaze causing him to choose his words carefully. “It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, opting for unvarnished truth.
Her mouth curved in a wide smile. “Then why were you laughing?”
He waved the paper in her direction. “This is Ms. Havisham, isn’t it? Your heroine? The one the space pirate kidnapped?”
She nodded, her gaze shining with a brilliant radiance. “She is a mousy little woman when he snatches her. But this is her true form. It comes out only when she or someone she loves comes under threat.”
“And the space pirate has no idea what he has taken on,” he said, frowning. He had a feeling he knew exactly what the pirate was going through.
Lexi Nelson didn’t have to change into anything to send a shiver up and down Nikos’s spine. Warning bells clanged inside his head and he kept the sound at bay. For now.
“Yep.”
Nodding, he grasped her wrist and tugged her along with him. He settled her in his lap on a wicker armchair. His curiosity was far more feral than anything else he felt right now. “So tell me. Why does he kidnap her?”
She wrapped her arm around his neck and smiled. And again, Nikos braced himself. Desire and something entirely alien descended on him. It had to be the intimacy of their positions. He had never spent more than a few minutes with a woman outside of a bed or an office.
“He learns that she has the key to a time portal. And he needs it to turn back time. But she’s not exactly what he had imagined. Nor is the key so simple.”
Nikos stared at the picture again and caught the hint of sadness in Lexi’s tone. “She is the key, isn’t she?”
Shock spiraling in her gaze, she stared at him. “How did you guess that?” She didn’t know what she saw in his eyes as she continued. “She is the key. Sacrificing her life will give him the power to turn back time, go to three different times in the past once.”
“What is he going to do?”
She shrugged. “Right now, he’s just learned the truth and is staggering under the weight of what he has to do. Because, you see, the space pirate—”
“Is beginning to like Ms. Havisham.” He finished her thought. “But the realization won’t stop him. He will try to kill her.”
“Unless she kills him first,” she said, laughing. At his disbelieving stare, the smile slid from her face. “Maybe you understand Spike, but Ms. Havisham is not like me, Nikos. Not weak or lonely and forever needing someone to make her feel like she matters. She’s strong, independent, a survivor. She has no qualms about her sexuality or her place in the world. If Spike threatens her survival, she will kill him. As she has already killed before. And have no regrets about it.”
He placed the paper slowly on the nightstand and turned her until she was straddling him. Having her this close was nothing short of torture. He held off the liquid longing at bay with sheer determination. This—this sexual desire, this situation between them, it was still under his control. It had to be. Never before had this kind of control been so important to him. “I don’t think she’s all that different from you.”
“I clung to Tyler all these years. I let Faith walk all over me. All for what? For a few crumbs of affection, to feel like I have someone who loves me? Ms. Havisham is—”
“She might be packing in the boob and leg department,” he said, using her words, and she instantly smiled and swatted his shoulder. “And she might be a badass with that gun, but all those are outward things, Lexi.” He placed his palm on her chest, and her heart thundered under his touch. The words flew out of him on a wave, and he could do nothing to curb them. “Here, you’re just as strong as her or even more. No one else could have lived your life and retained the good you have, the warmth you have. You don’t have to rewrite your story, yineka mou. It is already an extraordinary one.”
Lexi swallowed at the raw honesty that rang in Nikos’s words, the tenderness shining in his gaze. She had been drawing for as long as she could remember. It had started as a comfort, and somewhere down the line had become more than that. It was her lifeline, her way of controlling things she couldn’t change, her way of righting the things that had gone wrong in her life. In her bleakest moments, it had been the only way she could hold on to a life that had been nothing but lonely and sometimes, even cruel.