“Did I say something amusing?” she asked when he finally stopped. A bit peevishly, she could admit.
And then watched, her mouth dry, as Constantine rose in all his considerable glory from behind that dreadful desk.
She had nothing but terrible memories of this place. Which was no doubt precisely why Constantine, who had more houses than he had race cars and he had a fleet or five of those, had chosen this one for their meeting. It was likely purely for her benefit, so she could truly connect with the unutterably stupid teenager she’d been when she’d lived here. How she’d crept in and out of these deceptively welcoming rooms, painted in bright Mediterranean colors that made the sea and sun seem the brighter, trembling like a fawn every time she drew notice from anyone. Staff and Skalas alike.
This particular room had been where Demetrius had liked to exercise the worst of his power—and he’d had entirely too much power. He had loved nothing more than calling Molly in to stand before him, her heart pounding in her throat and her stomach in knots, while he shared with her exactly how embarrassing she’d been at whatever dinner had occurred the night before. How gauche and dull, when he’d expected so much more of her.
Constantine unfurling his magnificence before her while he stood in the very same spot where his father had stood before him was like...cognitive dissonance. Everything that had happened here had been dark. Even though she knew it had been typical Greek weather during those years, she always remembered it as if it had been dark and dreary, because inside her, it had. And then there was Constantine, who somehow seemed to blaze with a golden light when he should not have. Especially not now. But it had always been the same. He had all that Greek sunshine bottled up within him and everywhere he went, it was as if he lit up the world with every step he took.
It was annoying enough even when a person didn’t know the truth about his wretched, twisted soul.
And here, of all places, it left her...shuddery.
“I think perhaps you’re willfully misunderstanding me, Molly.”
He sounded casual and almost offhand. To disguise his true intentions, as always. Accordingly, he was dressed like a businessman, instead of the more casual things she’d seen him in over the years. Not that she was looking, ever, but they were often in the same tabloids. His version of a business suit was always...rumpled. That was Constantine. Always slightly in disarray, so it was impossible not to look at him and imagine what bed he had just rolled out of. Or if he’d troubled himself to find a bed at all.
Stop shuddering, she ordered herself, and had to fight not to press her hand to her belly. It would do nothing to quell her internal reaction to him, but it would certainly give her away.
As he rounded the desk, lazy and languid and seeming not to move at all even as he did, she assured herself that it was not that she was uniquely susceptible to him. It didn’t matter that he had pretended to be her friend or not. Or that he clearly was unhinged to have plotted out an elaborate revenge against her poor mother. Those things were factors, but not in the way her body reacted to him.
She couldn’t help it if she was a woman and he was not just a man, but him.
It was a perfectly natural physical, chemical response.
Molly certainly didn’t have to act on it.
“You and I are going to start a flaming, passionate affair,” he told her, oh-so-casually, as if he had summoned her here to chat about the weather. “It is going to be very, very public. I regret to inform you that like most women who become entangled with me, you will likely lose yourself. Fall in love, find yourself shattered, etcetera. It happens all too often.”
“I’m not Icarus and you’re not the sun, Constantine,” she snapped at him. “I’m aware that might come as a shock to you.”
His eyes gleamed. “We shall see. In any case, when I tire of you and your infamous charms, such as they are, I will discard you. Rudely and unfeelingly, I have no doubt. Then it will be up to you what you do afterward. Will you crawl off into obscurity as you should have done a decade ago? Or will you return to take your place on the runway, though you will be forced to accept that everyone who looks at you will no longer see whatever fashions you might be hawking, but my castoffs? Only time will tell.”
Her brain literally would not make sense of any of that, because it all hinged on an impossibility. “You mean this is some kind of act we’re going to put on... Right? Because, in case you’ve forgotten, you hate me. Remember?”
“I can only speak for myself,” he said, sounding lazy and faintly amazed that she was asking. “But I do not act when I make love. And I do not make love, Molly. I make war. In war, I regret to tell you, there can only be one victor.”
She knew she should have laughed at that. At him. It should have been hilarious. If any other man had said such a thing in her presence, she would like as not have broken a rib laughing too hard. She would have raced out of the room, contacted every friend she’d ever made, and invited them to laugh at him, too.
But nothing about Constantine Skalas was funny. Because she believed him. He’d been at war all along, she had simply been too foolish to see it. And deep inside, where she had always and only melted for him, she knew he meant everything he’d just said.
And then some.
“Why would I ever agree to such a plan?” she managed to ask.
He smiled then, devil that he was, and it was heartbreaking. For he looked positively angelic. His eyes looked almost warm, as if he cared deeply about her—or anything—when she knew that was patently false.
“I cannot think of a single reason that you would.” He shook his head, almost sorrowfully. “I would not, if I were in your place. But then, I would have left your mother to rot long ago.”
“The way you’ve left yours?” she shot back at him.
And knew instantly that she’d made a huge mistake.
Constantine didn’t blow up the way his father would have. He didn’t throw something breakable across the room. He only studied her as if she were an experiment on a slide beneath a microscope—one he intended to dissect—while everything about him went still.
“Do not mention my mother again,” he said quietly. So quietly it was very nearly a whisper, and every hair on Molly’s body seemed to stand on end. “You will find that there are few topics off-limits to me. I’m not a man with any boundaries, and I mean that in every sense. But my mother is off-limits to you.”
“I haven’t agreed to do any of the things you suggested,” she pointed out with a great surge of bravado she only wished she felt. “If I want to talk about your mother and the simple facts about her that every single person on earth knows—”
“I can’t stop you, of course.” He cut her off in that same quiet manner that made her spine hurt because she was standing so straight, so tall, for fear that if she did not, he would see how she shook. “But know this. Every time you mention my mother, I will take it as an invitation to vent my displeasure on yours.”
And as ever, Molly felt that same sick rush of love and shame, frustration and longing that characterized her entire relationship with Isabel. If she could only find a way not to love her mother, her life would be infinitely simpler. If she could only harden herself and stop caring what became of Isabel, she wouldn’t be standing here right now. She could have carried on living a life completely apart from even the faintest hint of the Skalas family, as had been her preference for years now.
But it didn’t matter how many times her mother called her from the middle of what she liked to call her little scrapes. Or how many times Molly swore she would be done, once and for all, cleaning up all of Isabel’s messes.
Oh, Moll, her mother would say in that rueful, smoky voice of hers, I’ve really done it this time.
And despite the number of times she’d received that call, or had grudgingly agreed to let Isabel stay with her until she sorted it, which she never d
id, Molly still loved her. Molly couldn’t help but love her. That was the whole of the trouble right there.
“Right,” she said now, in Skiathos and in grave danger as well she knew. She kept her tone brisk. “No talk of mothers and I get to be your mistress, not merely a one-off shag. Brilliant. But how does that work, exactly?”
“How do you think it works?” Constantine’s head tilted slightly to one side. Molly had the distinct and unsettling notion that he was less a man in that moment, and instead, some kind of overly large predator more usually found in the nature documentaries she watched when she couldn’t sleep on whatever airplane she was on, jetting off to another job. “Have you not spent many, many years as a mistress to this or that man of appropriate means? What few there are in that tax bracket, of course. I am told it is very difficult to afford you.”
That was possibly meant to be a joke, as there was nothing on earth or in the heavens above that a Skalas couldn’t buy. Twice.
Molly opened her mouth to disabuse him of any notion he might have been harboring that she’d flitted about adorning the arms of the unworthy and unappealing men who thought they deserved her, no matter what the gossips liked to claim. But she caught herself.
Because if this was really going to happen—a possibility she couldn’t quite allow herself to contemplate too closely, because it was too much, and too dangerous on a personal level after all she’d done to climb out of the abyss of her teenage years here—it would suit her far better that he thought of her as her alter ego. Magda.
Magda had been a creation of necessity. Molly Payne, awkward and shy, could not possibly have done the things she had if left to her own blancmange devices. But Magda could do anything. Magda had no fear. She was bright and strong, and when Molly was pretending to be her, the world around her was limitless. And usually hers for the taking besides.
Constantine insisted on calling her Molly, no doubt to remind them both of the power he’d held over her way back when. But clearly, he also believed everything he had heard about Magda. That could only work to her benefit.
Because Magda would think absolutely nothing about launching herself headfirst into a passionate love affair with the devil himself. In point of fact, Magda would find the whole thing unutterably delicious. She would laugh uproariously at the idea that she would ever be diminished by such a liaison. Not Magda. All Magda ever did was glow.
Molly regarded him for moment, collecting herself. Or collecting Magda, as the case might be, because that had always been much easier.
“Every man has a different set of requirements for the trophies he collects,” she said nonchalantly. “And naturally, when the trophy is me, there are different considerations at play. My career is demanding and it will not stop being demanding to please the man in my life. Or even to accommodate him. And, of course, there is no possibility that I will ever waft about, waiting on a man hand and foot as some men long for. I require neither money nor the euphemistic help that such situations are generally made for, suiting all parties. So you see, it is indeed difficult to afford me, but not in the way you mean.”
Well done, she congratulated herself. Maybe next you can open up a brothel and make yourself the madam, since you’re such a believable whore. That will be a terrific use of your talents. For lying.
“That may have been your experience in the past,” Constantine told her, a certain gleam in his coffee-dark gaze that made goose bumps rise all over her skin. “But this will be different. Because again, Molly, you are not the trophy here. You are working off a debt. Meaning, you will be the one doing the work. Because mark my words, you will pay. Again and again, until I am satisfied.”
She believed him.
But she also knew him. And the Constantine she’d known, even if she’d deeply misjudged his vengefulness, had always been a glutton for attention. Good or bad, whatever worked. Molly had spent years trying to understand why, when now that she thought about it in the context of Demetrius’s old office, it made sense. His father only doled out positive reinforcement every once in a blue moon, and usually to Balthazar. It had never seemed to bother Constantine much, for he was perfectly content to receive his father’s negative attention. Just as long as he received it. And certainly all the behavior she’d seen in a thousand tabloid magazines over the years told her the same story. She didn’t need a degree in psychology to work that one out—especially when she’d had a taste of the same hard school that had made Constantine who he was.
The hold Constantine Skalas had over her was insurmountable. Because like it or not, Molly could not bear to see her mother suffer. She could beat herself up about that all she wished, but she doubted it would change.
She knew it wouldn’t change, or it already would have, at some point or another over the past ten years. Molly had watched her mother fritter away the fortune that had been her divorce settlement. Then she had drained the fortune Molly had built, too.
Molly did not care to imagine how many times Constantine had indulged his vengeful streak on her in that time when she’d been so blissfully unaware that he was the puppeteer controlling the strings, but it hardly mattered now. Because Molly knew that she was the only stepsister he’d had. That meant she knew a whole lot more about him than the average silly starlet who got mixed up with the famously beautiful and sexually voracious Constantine Skalas, imagining he’d be some kind of a lark.
When what he was, in fact, was lethal. Emotionally lethal.
But she felt that she could ignore all the goose bumps and that sense of foreboding that kept shaking its way through her, because she had her own weapons. Knowing him was the key.
He had rounded the desk and was now looming about within reach, which made her feel far too edgy. She drifted over to one of the chairs that sat about for decorative purposes, as far she knew, for never in her memory had she ever dared sit when summoned into this room. But sit she did now, draping herself across the nearest chair, the very picture of boneless ennui.
“Very well,” she murmured. She draped one long leg over the opposite knee, letting her wickedly high shoe dangle sullenly, and waved a languid hand.
“Very well?” echoed Constantine, and he sounded...incredulous.
He moved to stand before her in all his rumpled male beauty that she knew she should have found malevolent. But her body refused to get that message. No matter how bored she tried to look, inside, she found it hard not to shiver. And melt. And shiver some more. Her breasts felt tight and high, her belly was tied in a knot that pulsed, and between her legs she was slick. Hot.
Desperate and aching.
You are a betrayer, she told herself sternly.
But what she did was almost shrug, then almost wave her hand, looking as deeply bored as it was possible to look without falling asleep where she sat.
“Very well then,” she said, a little more slowly, as if he was dim. And watched that incredulity make his gaze narrow. She only sighed in response. “Let me know how you want me to do all this debt repayment. Let me guess. You’ll want a sad, tawdry blow job here and now, because nothing says a man has power more than waving his little head around and making beautiful women genuflect before it. Or I know, maybe you want to toss me over some of the furniture for that shag, so it can be as dehumanizing as possible. I hear that’s how the garden-variety seducer prefers to pave his way into deeper and deeper levels of sociopathy. You tell me. I doubt I’ll notice the difference between this and the average photo shoot, if I’m honest.”
And Molly had almost convinced herself that she was that jaded. That it wasn’t even the usual Magda act. That she dripped scorn like a fountain and in doing so, had made herself untouchable, like stone.
Constantine laughed. A dark sound that sunk deep into her bones, making her feel as if they might shiver out of her skin, all on their own. As if the black magic sound of it might render her...someone else entirely than who she’d t
hought she was when she’d come here today.
Someone she was not at all sure she wanted to meet.
“Oh no, my little hetaira,” he murmured, his voice another dangerous spell, and the gleam in his gaze a weapon. “That is not how this is going to go.”
And then, standing above her like a judge on high, he reached down and hauled Molly to her feet.
Then slammed his mouth to hers.
CHAPTER THREE
MOLLY BURST INTO FLAMES, then exploded, and that was only a hint of the kind of heat that Constantine’s mouth on hers generated.
It was only the start.
Her hands came up of their own accord, fluttering near his shoulders when she had never fluttered a day in her life. He was so big all around her when she was used to towering over most men. His mouth was so hot. And he angled his jaw as his tongue swept hers, making her shiver out as well as in.
His kiss was slick, wicked and insidious, and almost unbearably good.
He kissed the way he did everything. Lazy, reckless, and underneath it all, a dark edge of that same danger she really should have heeded.
She could taste him. Smell him. His tongue was a temptation, his sensual mouth a seduction, and she could hardly make sense of all the sensations that stormed in her.
Molly was lost.
All the dreams she’d had of him when she was a girl. All the stories she’d told herself about what it might be like if ever he actually noticed her. All her wildest fantasies—this was better than any of that.
This was so good she wanted to cry. Strip off all her clothes here and now. Throw herself at him—
Which, she thought with something far too close to horror when he wrenched his mouth from hers, was going to make her plan for surviving this a little tricky.
She hated him in that moment.
Molly hated that satisfied, entirely too male expression on his beautiful face as he gazed down at her, his huge and unfairly hard hands wrapped around her upper arms to hold her in place. How a great boneless cat of a man like Constantine Skalas could somehow, magically, be as fit as if he worked his days away in the proverbial fields was an outrage. It was unjust, was what it was.
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 3
