Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews

by Caitlin Crews

  USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

  Also by Caitlin Crews

  Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella

  Chosen for His Desert Throne

  Once Upon a Temptation collection

  Claimed in the Italian’s Castle

  Royal Christmas Weddings miniseries

  Christmas in the King’s Bed

  His Scandalous Christmas Princess

  Rich, Ruthless & Greek miniseries

  The Secret That Can’t Be Hidden

  Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

  Her Deal With the Greek Devil

  Caitlin Crews

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  ISBN: 978-0-008-91403-5

  HER DEAL WITH THE GREEK DEVIL

  © 2021 Caitlin Crews

  Published in Great Britain 2021

  by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

  By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Booklist

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Extract

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  CONSTANTINE SKALAS HAD waited a long, long time for this day. What had started as a young man’s rash promise had become a plot. Then a plan. Today that plan had finally borne its intended fruit.

  He intended to savor it.

  And as a man who had dedicated a large portion of his decidedly debaucherous adult life to relishing all the many pleasures life had in store, he knew precisely how best to go about it.

  There were any number of places he could have met the object of all his many plans. He was a Skalas, one of two owners of the sprawling, multinational Skalas & Sons. His father had once been the richest man alive, but Constantine and his brother, Balthazar, had doubled his wealth within the first year of their ownership. He had properties literally everywhere, homes and rentals and hotels, and could have chosen any one of them for today’s long-awaited meeting.

  Naturally, he’d chosen the one calculated to stick the knife in, and he hoped, give it a little twist for good measure. It was an estate in the quiet part of Skiathos, an island off the coast of Thessaly, Greece. Skiathos, where far too many bright young things flocked for the energetic nightlife in Skiathos Town, though Constantine had not availed himself of the local amenities, or talent, in longer than he cared to recall. And Skiathos was also where, once upon a time, he had been force-fed his father’s new and unacceptable second wife and worse, had been required to contend with an awkward stepsister he had never warmed to in the slightest.

  Though that was perhaps understating the case.

  He had despised his stepmother. He had felt only slightly less opposed to his stepsister, who might not have been at fault for her mother’s ambitious marriage—but she hadn’t done anything to oppose it, either. Those feelings had not dimmed over time. His father might have thought better of his second marriage and summarily ended it, as he had been wont to do with his customary brutality, but Constantine could hold a grudge until the end of time.

  And did. Happily.

  He settled back in the chair behind the desk where the late and wholly unlamented Demetrius Skalas, his father, had once conducted his business when he’d called this house his primary home. It had been but a few years of madness before Demetrius had rid himself of the appalling British housekeeper, Isabel, and her hopeless daughter that he’d acquired for reasons unclear. As far as Constantine could tell, Demetrius had only married Isabel in the first place to really hammer home the fact he was moving on from his elegant and fragile first wife. The wife he’d crushed, then discarded, then mocked as she’d cycled deep into despair.

  The wife who happened to be Constantine’s mother, that was.

  But Constantine was not going to think about his mother today, or he would lose his cool. And his quarry did not deserve his temper. She did not deserve to see anything but his vengeance.

  He studied his father’s desk as he sat there. Like all the things Demetrius had used as props to bolster his inflated sense of himself, the desk was a monstrosity. Constantine had entirely too many memories of being forced to stand on the other side of this very desk during those years, his eyes on his father if he valued his hide, while he gave a twenty-year-old’s surly accounting of what he’d done with his monthly allowance. A tedious undertaking when he already knew it would lead to more of his father’s brand of consequences. And all the while the wall of windows down one side—all of which opened up as doors to the terrace no one was permitted to use withou
t Demetrius’s never-proffered permission—let in the pine-covered cliffs. Unusual for Greek islands, as the tourists liked to caterwaul, but pine trees they were and they rose above the private cove the house sat over like the king Demetrius had imagined he was. And more, the great Aegean beyond beckoned, all while Constantine had been required to stand still and pretend penitence.

  It had been torture, in other words.

  A torture he intended to visit upon dear stepsister, Molly, who his staff down at the gate to the estate had informed him had just arrived.

  The waiting was exquisite.

  After all these years, after all his plotting, after creating the perfect disguise for his true intentions and living it in full view of the world, it was time.

  If he was capable of such things, he might have considered himself positively gleeful.

  Constantine leaned back in the huge leather chair, itself a monument to a certain kind of overt masculinity. His father’s kind, all bluster and bark, but unlike some of his toxic ilk, with a deadly bite beneath.

  His father had died a few years back, and unlike Constantine’s older brother, Balthazar, who had always splayed himself wide open with an unnecessary sense of responsibility, Constantine did not miss him. Perish the thought. The world was a far better place without Demetrius Skalas. His sons, in particular, were incalculably better off without him.

  Not to mention, the old man’s absence meant Constantine had finally been able to put the plan closest to his blackened heart into action.

  He waited, smiling to himself when he heard the click of very high heels along the hallway floors that led to this study. He had not known which version of his stepsister to expect. But the heels were like a premonition, and then, in the next moment, she appeared.

  She stopped in the doorway and regarded him.

  Constantine gazed right back, aware of a certain electrical charge that seemed to fill the space between them.

  No longer awkward or embarrassing, or anything like gawky, little Molly Payne, the housekeeper’s daughter had transformed herself. She stood before him, framed by the doorway, and stared at him as if she stood atop some kind of catwalk and he was at her feet. It was adorable, truly. And he had seen her blond hair in a number of different styles, but today she had gone for big and lustrous curls, like a cat puffing itself up to make itself seem bigger in the face of a predator.

  Poor little kitty, he thought to himself, darkly. Your tricks and claws will not help you here.

  Her eyes were a stunning, arctic blue, and today she’d expertly applied the kind of cosmetics that took hours to achieve a barely there look, so that she looked effortlessly sultry, the cold color of those eyes honed to a laser point. Her pout was enough to raze cities to the ground, and that wasn’t getting to her magnificent figure that had been splashed across every magazine cover in existence, then back again.

  For awkward little Molly Payne had not had the good manners to fade off into obscurity when her mother’s reprehensible marriage to Constantine’s father had ended. He had imagined she would lead a perfectly unobjectionable porridge sort of life, perhaps away in one of those sad, lesser British cities, where everything was forever gray and depressed. Like she had been.

  But no such luck. For instead, his stepsister had gone ahead and had the temerity to become universally, stratospherically famous.

  “If it isn’t the eponymous Magda,” Constantine drawled, eventually, using her laughable professional name.

  “Hello, Constantine,” she replied.

  Like all beautiful women whose looks were widely held to be objective fact, not subject to individual opinion, every inch of her was weaponized. Including that voice. It struck him like his favorite spirit, METAXA, smooth and complex before rolling on into a deeper, hotter intensity.

  He had expected to feel the attraction that hammered him then, but it was far worse now that she was in this room than it usually was when he was confronted with her picture. Everywhere.

  “I thought you would enjoy this trip down memory lane with me,” he said, lounging back in the chair. His father had been a rigid man, his only excesses brutal. Constantine, by contrast, had created for himself the most dissipated, dissolute alter ego possible. It had started when he was young. He had learned, as his brother never had, that there was no point in attempting to live up to a madman’s expectations. For every time a certain level was achieved, their father made up seven more. No one could possibly scale those heights.

  Constantine had stopped trying. Then and now, he took great pleasure in polluting his father’s legacy with his own brand of what he liked to call his libertine approach to rakishness.

  The tabloids used other words. He delighted in all of them.

  “Is that what this is?” Molly asked. For he refused to think of her as Magda. “Memory lane? Funny, that. This particular road to hell always seemed remarkably unpaved to me.”

  “How droll. You’ve become so spiky over the years.”

  She did not shift from where she stood, shown to perfection in the doorway to the study. And Constantine had taken on a deep, personal study of the rise of Magda, a modern supermodel in a time when supermodels were widely held to be a thing of the past. He knew she was fully aware that the sun streamed in from without, lighting her beautifully, and dancing all over the exquisitely skintight gown she wore in a deliberately overbright shade of gold. The sunlight made her glow like an angelic host. He knew that she was well aware of the position in which she stood, designed to call attention to the impeccable lines of her body that left fashion designers beside themselves as they draped their latest creations all over her frame. Here, in this study, she simply looked magnificent. And untouchable.

  Too bad for her that he had other ideas.

  “Everyone grows up, Constantine,” she replied. She considered. “Or, I should say, almost everyone.”

  “Was that a dig?” He made a tsking sound. “That is no way to convince me to be merciful, Molly. You must know that.”

  “I would prefer it if you called me Magda.”

  He grinned, enjoying himself immensely. “I am certain that you would. But I think I will stick with Molly all the same. Just to remind ourselves who and what we are.”

  Fascinated, he watched as a storm moved through that cool blue gaze of hers before she shuttered her gaze.

  And then he waited, letting the silence spill out between them. Until, to his very great pleasure, she stopped holding that commanding position in the doorway and took a step farther into the room.

  Betraying herself, he thought.

  “I know you know why I’m here,” she said, sounding far more brisk, then. “I suppose we might as well get down to business.”

  “Refresh my memory,” he invited her.

  “I see that we’re going to play games. Lovely.”

  He remembered the sixteen-year-old who had foolishly confided in him and saw no trace of her on this woman’s face. But that was just as well. Constantine did not traffic in guilt or shame, so he would never use those words to describe how he felt when he thought of that time. And yet sometimes it haunted him, all the same.

  “Is that really necessary?” she asked.

  “You will know what is necessary and what is unnecessary,” he assured her. “Because I will tell you.” He inclined his head, then waved a lazy hand. “For now, by all means, tell me your sad tale of woe, Molly.”

  “I do not wish to bore you.” Her cool eyes glittered, like shards of ice, and he suspected she was thinking of a great many things she would like to do to him, none of them boring. All of them violent. “I know you remember my mother.”

  “As it happens, I have known a great number of grasping, petulant, jumped-up whores in my life,” Constantine drawled, each word deliberate. Each word its own sharp blade. “And yet, you are correct, your mother managed to distinguish herself.”r />
  A faint splash of color stained Molly’s cheeks. Her eyes blazed with fury. And he had the sudden, near uncontrollable urge to rise from his chair, throw himself across the room, and get his hands and his mouth into all of that fire.

  But too soon, she reined herself in, iced over, and regarded him coolly once again.

  Interesting, he thought. He would have to make a note of how she protected herself with that aloofness. And set it ablaze.

  “I am not here to debate my mother’s faults with you, or anyone,” she said crisply.

  “And yet I feel certain that should I wish to discuss your mother’s many faults and terrible decisions, I will. Entirely as I please. With or without your permission. Molly.”

  She took a long, visible breath, but did not object. Because she was not a stupid woman, Constantine knew. And she was not in the dark as to why she was here, any more than he was.

  “My mother has always fancied herself a businesswoman of sorts,” Molly said, her voice ever so slightly strained. She moved further into the study that he knew she hadn’t seen since she was still a teenager. It was unchanged. He watched with interest as she took that in, her gaze moving with arctic precision from the ponderous choice of art on the walls to the crystal decanter on the sideboard, which was the last in a long line of similar decanters his father had shattered against the wall. Such pleasant memories. “This is not a business in the sense of Skalas & Sons, of course. What is? But whenever she found herself with some money—”

  “Such as her divorce settlement,” Constantine interjected silkily. “Three million euros to silently go away when she should have done so on her own, had she the faintest shred of shame.”

  Molly ignored that. He hoped it was hard. “She did some investing, here and there. And she began to imagine herself something of a hotel mogul.”

  “Surely that would be better termed a delusion and used to secure medical attention.” Constantine laughed when Molly’s frigid gaze swept to him. “I have many hotels. In my personal portfolio, not underneath the Skalas & Sons umbrella. I hardly think a few poorly chosen boutique options scattered about the globe make a mogul. But to each her own.”