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

by Caitlin Crews

  And meanwhile, she was absolutely certain that he knew full well the effect he had on her.

  Her lips felt swollen. She could taste him on her tongue, something rich and heady that she was half-convinced had already gotten her drunk. He looked entirely too pleased with himself, so she was sure he not only knew all of that, but more, knew that her nipples had pinched tight with need while the core of her had gone molten.

  Damn him.

  “Kissing?” She called on all the acting she’d learned how to do to have the career she had, and to do it well. Every single time she’d had to contend with a horrible photographer, a grueling schedule, the usual condescending way women in her profession were treated, had been practice for this. And the faintly surprised but mostly bored tone she employed now. “Since when is there kissing when you’re paying for it?”

  Constantine’s smile was a flash of white teeth, just this side of fangs. Or so she assumed when it hit her like a blow and made her feel tottery in her heels when she’d mastered stilettos back at age eighteen.

  “I’m not interested in your ice queen act, Molly,” he said, still smiling.

  “What makes you think it’s an act?” She tilted her head to one side and stood there woodenly, as if she had men’s hands on her and their faces scant inches from hers every hour of the day. Which was not too far from the truth, though usually, at work, there was none of this spiky, brooding tension in the air. “I had a rough adolescence. My mother married a truly awful man and the blended family thing was hell on earth. But luckily enough, it cured me of feeling much of anything too deeply.”

  His smile took on that feral edge she remembered too well, though back then, she’d been foolish enough to mistake it for something else. Like empathy on his part. “I’m sure that’s the story you like to tell, stepsister, but we both know it is not the truth.”

  “All right,” she said, patronizing him. And making sure that he was fully aware that was what she was doing. “You know me better than I do. Got it.”

  Constantine...did something then, though she couldn’t have said what it was. His hands were on her arms still, making her wish she’d worn some kind of sleeve to ward him off. Or to save herself, more like. That smile of his had settled into something worryingly knowing that she didn’t like at all. And the gleam in his gaze was intense enough that it should have pierced her straight through. But then all of that changed, though she couldn’t see how. It was as if he focused in on her, even more intently, and she lost her breath.

  And he knew that, too.

  “I think you’ll find that there is no one on this earth who knows you better than I do, Molly. For your sins.”

  He released her arms and stepped back. And she was buffeted with contradictory sensations then. Relief. Loss.

  And the heat in her rose all the while.

  It did not wane, at all. Not even when it was clear that he was standing there, sizing her up the way they always did at work, as if she was a horse at market. Molly felt lucky that she was used to it. And more, that despite the reaction she was having, there was something soothing about being treated like a mannequin that took direction. It was her life’s work, after all.

  “The only things you know about me,” she said, fighting to keep her voice even, “are the things I never should have told you when I was a silly teenage girl who believed that Constantine Skalas was actually my friend. But guess what? That girl is gone. You got rid of her yourself.”

  “You learned a valuable lesson,” he replied, thrusting his hands into his pockets and giving her a long, thorough, deceptively sleepy once-over that made everything inside her prickle into high alert. “It is an act of supreme foolishness to trust anyone. Some don’t learn this until it’s too late. You learned it while you were but a girl. You should thank me.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice was acidic. “And how proud you must have been to take it upon yourself to teach such a harsh lesson to a lonely girl. Such a humanitarian you are. I’m shocked you haven’t collected awards for your services to mankind.”

  His smile was an exercise in seductive menace. “But we are not speaking of a hapless, awkward teenage girl, the daughter of a grifter of a housekeeper who fancied herself a replacement mother. As well as an actual mistress of the Skalas estates, rather than my father’s tawdry affair that he dressed up in legalities for reasons that died with him.”

  There wasn’t much anyone could say about Isabel that Molly hadn’t thought herself. But that didn’t mean she liked hearing it. “Yes, my mother woke up one day and just imagined herself your stepmother. Nobody pursued her. Or married her. Or told her to do as she pleased with the estates and the stepsons and everything else because, Lord knows, he certainly didn’t care either way.”

  “My father is dead and cannot account for his decisions.” Constantine shrugged, a masterpiece of Mediterranean nonchalance. “And would not have anyway, even had he lived.”

  “Right. You expect me to believe that while he was alive you changed the habits of a lifetime and took him to task for his behavior?” Molly laughed, and then laughed a little harder when she saw how little he liked it. “I’d like to have seen that. You know full well that the only thing he cared less about than what my mother did with his money was you. He likely would have cut you out of his will for suggesting otherwise.”

  She thought she saw the hint of a clenched jaw, which she told herself was a win. But was it really? Because the way he was looking at her...

  “I’m interested that you seem to think insulting my father—and me—is a good way to begin a debt repayment program.”

  “Is it an insult to speak the truth about a man we both knew?” Molly shrugged, aware that when she did it, it was less a study of carelessness and more a sharp little gesture of disdain. She’d practiced it for years. “I wouldn’t even say that’s any kind of insider take on the late, great Demetrius Skalas. He was a complete mystery to me while my mother was married to him. Anything else I might have gleaned about him is public information.” She counted off on her fingers. “He was a terrible person. His sons are terrible people. That’s not my opinion, that’s just a couple of incontrovertible facts.”

  Constantine smiled, and she regretted, deeply, that once again she couldn’t seem to control her mouth in his presence. Damn him.

  “Here are some other facts,” Constantine murmured, all dark undertone and that glinting thing in his bittersweet gaze. “You have a martyr complex, for I assume you must get some sort of pleasure out of sacrificing yourself for your mother at every turn. Or why would you do it, again and again? She is a grown woman, capable of handling her own life—except she need not trouble herself with such things, because you do it for her.”

  Molly assumed he wanted a response from her, so she only gazed back at him, mutely defiant.

  He continued. “For all that you travel about the world, command top dollar for pouting at the camera, and have entertained more rumored lovers than photographers, you’re a very, very lonely woman.”

  She would die if he saw any kind of reaction on her face. Die. And still it took everything she had to simply continue to stare back at him as if he hadn’t done that thing he’d always done. Smile and then skewer her.

  “I know this because I watched you, Molly,” he said, his voice getting quieter. But she watched his eyes. And the way they gleamed, that dangerous gold. “Every year you get thinner. Your eyes go darker. You become more and more brittle. Do not mistake me, your beauty, certainly a surprise to any who saw you as a gawky sixteen-year-old, only grows. But you’re not happy, are you?”

  She continued to stare back at him, but once the silence stretched between them, she gave an over-the-top sort of start. “Oh, my bad, is this the part where I actually respond to the man who’s blackmailing me? I thought this was all rhetorical.”

  “I know what you eat, how long you sleep, even what d
ocumentaries you like to watch,” he told her quietly, his dark gaze all gold, telling her clearly that he was showing her his weapons even if she hadn’t heard him. “I know what you do when you’re without one of your command appearance parties to attend in whatever city you find yourself.”

  “Why, Constantine. I’m flattered.”

  “You walk,” he said, with a certain soft menace. And that time, she doubted very much that she managed to conceal her reaction. And then knew she hadn’t when his gaze lit with victory. “Around and around and around whatever city or town you happen to be in, and you’re not taking in the sights, are you? You prefer to go at night, almost as if there are demons you’re trying to put behind you. Your mother, perhaps?”

  “Wrong again,” she replied, holding his gaze as if none of this scared her. When it did. When he did in more ways than she ever planned to admit. “I’ve only ever known one demon, Constantine. And he is standing right in front of me.”

  “I know you,” he said again, clearly relishing this moment. Clearly enjoying this. “And when I have you, and I will, I will have all of you. And if there’s nothing left after I glut myself on all you have, all you are, maybe you can see how it feels to put yourself back together.” His dark eyes blazed. “The way my mother tried to do after yours took her place.”

  Molly was back home in London by evening, feeling as jittery as if she’d existed on nothing but caffeine and cigarettes for three weeks—a lifestyle she’d given up in her first year of modeling, because that led nowhere good. And was unsustainable besides.

  It was a rainy, cold, and foggy May evening, and the shift in the weather from Skiathos to England’s best plunged her instantly into a mood that was far too reminiscent of sixteen-year-old Molly. First plucked out of gray, miserable England and swept off to the dazzling coast of a Greek island, out of her depth in every possible way.

  The sun had burned her skin a bright, feverishly painful red within an hour of her landing at the Skiathos airport. She should have known, even then, that it was only the first of many ways Greece would sear straight through her.

  And when Isabel had finally left Demetrius and his power games, creeping back to England to lick her wounds and to hire a set of sharks to handle the divorce, Molly had felt the loss of all that terrible light and heat too keenly. It had felt like dying.

  She felt the hint of that feeling again now, as her car bumped along the cobbled mews not far from Hyde Park and dropped her off at the Mews house she’d bought when her career first took off. A stone’s throw from the Marble Arch, Hyde Park, and Oxford Street, her little house was a quiet retreat from the bustling, busy city all around her. It was also hers. All hers. She’d bought it with cash, filled with the naive hope that the one thing that was finally hers and only hers would stand as a symbol toward a bright future. The one she’d been determined to have, because she was sure she could make it different from the childhood she’d lived, the mistakes she and her mother had made in turn, and everything else she wanted to turn her back on.

  Everything tainted by the Skalas family, in fact. And it had worked.

  Her Mews house was a home, not an investment piece. It gave her four walls, three floors, and two lovely terraces’ worth of peace. It was the only place on the planet where she could happily be herself. There were no pictures of Magda gracing the walls inside. There were no magazines. Inside, there were only the things she loved wholeheartedly. Books and art and other things she’d picked up in all the places she’d traveled. Bright colors and deep, soothing chairs and sofas, because every square inch of the place was meant for relaxation and recharging.

  Out on the charming cobbled street as the car pulled away, Molly took a deep breath and let it go into the damp night. But the place still did its magic. Her shoulders lowered. That pounding in her chest settled. The knots in her belly eased...a little.

  She let herself in the heavy door and heard the sound of music from the second level in what her real estate agent had loftily called her reception room. It was the heart of the little house. Kitchen on one end, a great hearth, French windows and a terrace over the cobblestones, and all the oversize, cozy things Molly had managed to make fit.

  And since the last great implosion of her latest scheme, courtesy of Constantine Skalas, her mother, too.

  Molly shrugged off the wrap she’d worn on the plane, hanging it near the door in her downstairs foyer. She kicked off her heels, flexing her toes against the polished wood floor as she padded up the stairs, absently reaching up to gather her hair, twist it back, then secure it in a thick ball on the top of her head. She walked up into the great room that had enough windows to make it bright and sunny on the days the weather wasn’t foul, and she liked to sit out on her terrace and soak it in. And the clear nights, too. But tonight it was wet and cold, and anyway, even this magical little house of hers wasn’t quite the oasis of calm when Isabel was around.

  Her mother looked up as Molly walked into the room, looking flustered and determined all at once. “Darling. You’re home at last. I’ve spent all day making the most divine pasta from scratch. As an offering.”

  “I can see that,” Molly replied. The kitchen was a disaster. Pots and pans she didn’t even know she owned were not only out, but half-filled with this or that, every single one of them noticeably dirty.

  “Don’t tell me you’re not eating carbohydrates tonight,” Isabel continued airily. “Pasta is the least you can do for yourself after the day you must have had.”

  And though Molly opened her mouth to say that no, obviously she couldn’t eat bowls of pasta, she stopped herself. Because, actually, pasta sounded absolutely perfect for the mood she was in. She didn’t want anything to do with all the feelings swirling around inside her. Might as well eat them instead.

  Still in the slinky dress she’d worn to Magda up the situation with Constantine, she didn’t comment on the state of her kitchen. She simply set herself to the inevitable task that would fall to her anyway, of washing the dishes as her mother fluttered about putting the final touches to her homemade masterpiece.

  By the time they sat down at the table near the side windows, Molly felt a bit better for having had the opportunity to lose herself a bit in the sheer drudgery of scrubbing and rinsing and drying, all better than thinking or feeling anything. It reminded her of long, long ago, when her mother had been a housekeeper in a grand house and she and Molly had lived in a small rented cottage in the village. On Isabel’s days away she and Molly would cook up fanciful meals and then dress up to please themselves.

  She’d spent so long trying to repress those years in Greece, she too often forgot that she and Isabel had, in fact, had a whole life before the Skalas family had crashed into them and crushed them flat.

  “I’m quite impressed, Mum,” she said after her first, marvelous bite. “I know you can cook when you have a mind to, but I would have thought pasta from scratch was a bridge too far.”

  Isabel was still the beautiful woman she’d been when she’d caught Demetrius’s eye in the stately old home where her family had been in service, in one form or another, since around about the Norman conquest. Beautiful and young, since she’d had Molly when she’d been seventeen—and had never named the father. He knows where we are if he can be faffed, she’d said dismissively. No sense in chasing after a man if he doesn’t want to be caught. There are always more. That attitude hadn’t made much sense to Molly back then, when she’d been the object of scorn and derision in the village herself, little though Isabel ever took notice. Now she understood Isabel’s lack of concern. She was very, very pretty.

  Too pretty to be a housekeeper, the tabloids had screamed when Demetrius had married her, then paraded her in front of the world.

  He hadn’t taken that from her, Molly thought with a rush of that same old love that got her into trouble. Nothing ever dimmed Isabel’s spirits for long, and unlike many in her position, al
l of her looks were natural. No work.

  At the moment, she looked rueful. “I’m not a total disaster, then,” Isabel said with that self-awareness that always took Molly by surprise. “That’s something.”

  “Of course you’re not a disaster,” she replied.

  Isabel sat back in her chair, her bowl filled with pasta and aged parmesan steaming before her. “Go on then. Tell me what the damage is.”

  And Molly had intended to do exactly that. She had practiced fiery speeches on the plane ride home, each more bracing than the last. Hard truths were needed, she’d assured herself. It was high time she and Isabel came to terms.

  It was always easier to fight with the people she loved in the abstract. Or the person she loved, to be more precise. Because it was only this one. Only and ever her beautiful, reckless mother, who for all her faults, loved Molly completely. Unconditionally. Even if that might not look the way Molly wished it would—like those long-ago fancy dress evenings, kitted out in costume jewels and pretending they were in Italy—it was real.

  Molly knew that she could say anything to her mother. Isabel’s guilt was a real thing. She had no qualm whatsoever about admitting fault, and apologizing, and taking it if Molly needed to shout at her.

  But somehow, tonight, Molly felt that shouting at Isabel would be giving horrible Constantine Skalas exactly what he wanted.

  I will need time to consider your charming proposal, she had told him with a regal disdain in that office.

  Think of it less as a proposal and more as a lifeboat you do not deserve, he had replied, looking maddeningly handsome and inexcusably sure of himself. As if he already knew, as she did, that there was almost no way to get out of it and like it or not, she would be slinking back to him to do precisely as he commanded.