He was so hard that he ached. He ached. He wanted to throw all his years of careful planning aside and simply take her, as he knew he could. He had not imagined the way she’d responded to that kiss. He had not liked the way he had, come to that. He had meant it as a show, more than anything else. But somehow, what had started as an object lesson had turned into something else.
He was Constantine Skalas and he had spent the last two days reliving a bloody kiss, of all things. As if he was the gawky, awkward sixteen-year-old this time around. As if she had bewitched him, and that easily.
He would not allow it. He refused to allow the daughter of the unacceptable tart Isabel Payne, of all creatures, to affect him in this way. Or at all.
It was a physical reaction, that was all. She had made an entire career out of her beauty. She knew very well how to elicit the reactions she wanted. He should not be so surprised that he was susceptible to it. What man would not be?
Because naked, Molly was even more beautiful than she was draped in all the dramatic clothing she wore on this or that runway. Once again, he was struck by the stark, glorious lines of her body. A work of exquisite art, angles and curves together, creating a woman no one could deny was exquisite.
And now, for as long as he wanted her, she was his.
Molly came to her decision. He could see it on her face in the split second before she swiped up the tube of sunscreen with one hand, then closed the distance between them. With a challenging look on her face as she stood there, naked, as commanded.
“Come closer,” he told her, the terrible wolf to the not-quite-a-lamb, and when she did, he grinned. He held out his hand for the sunscreen, then waited.
And watched his favorite enemy as she fought, then surrendered, right there before him.
The way Constantine intended to see she did over and over and over again, until there was little left of Molly Payne but shattered pieces, and all of them in his hand.
CHAPTER FIVE
MOLLY HAD NEVER been more grateful for her chosen profession.
Because if it weren’t for all her years as a model, could she have handled this? Could she have presented herself, so matter-of-factly, wholly naked in front of a man?
Not just any man. But Constantine Skalas, who had long been a shadow over her life whether she admitted it or not.
She tried to tell herself that there was nothing particularly worthy of her notice here. It was another gig, that was all. And luckily enough, she was more than used to finding herself in states of undress with very little privacy. If she’d been at all prudish about her body, she wouldn’t have lasted a month in the fashion industry. Much less a decade.
Constantine took the tube of sunscreen from her, and Molly told herself to pay no mind to the fact that she was now standing between his outstretched legs. He took a long, lazy survey of her body, and she supposed she ought to have been grateful that he’d chosen to seat himself at the fanciful table she’d been enamored of when she’d been here the first time. This particular table was basically a shelf that ran around the trunk of a large shade tree, making it possible to sit out on this particular terrace in the high heat of a Greek summer day and enjoy the cool breeze from the sea without broiling.
It made her wonder exactly how calculating Constantine really was. But even as she thought that, she had her answer, didn’t she? For here he sat in the shade, demanding her nudity, a convenient tube of sunscreen at the ready.
Molly really ought to have been ashamed that even now, when she had returned to Greece to trade her body for money—dress it up or down as she pleased, that was what was happening, and not, for a change, in the name of high fashion—even in the midst of yet another terrible thing he was doing to her, she wanted to excuse him. To give him some other reason for doing what he did.
When she should know better. The man was pure evil. More, he was proud of it.
He finally raised his gaze to hers again, sensual and heavy-lidded and, as ever, richly intense. She did her best not to react and her reward was the hint of a knowing smile in one corner of his mouth. He lifted an idle hand, then circled one finger in the air before him, telling her without words to turn around.
Molly complied, executing a sharp, crisp turn that would have made art directors sigh with pleasure in at least five languages. She presented him with her back and then she stood still—another skill that the average person assumed anyone could do. When, in fact, real stillness for more than a moment was significantly more difficult than most lay people imagined.
Constantine was also still, and she resented that about him. That he could simply do things it took others a lifetime to learn. Much less execute on a whim.
After a while she had the sense of some kind of movement somewhere behind her and braced herself, but she heard nothing that sounded like Constantine about to strike. There was the sound of the sea in the distance and the waters of the cove against the shore. She could hear the breeze through the trees. She was aware of bees buzzing, birds conducting their officious business, and wind chimes, somewhere near.
All of it seemed entirely too bucolic and sweet when she’d woken up in a gray and wet London morning. Especially when Lucifer himself was here with her. She should have been able to smell the sulfur.
She waited, but nothing happened. Time stretched out. She held her breath, but still, nothing.
The Greek sun she would have sworn she hated filtered down through the branches of the tree above her, yet because it provided her with a canopy, it felt like nothing so much as a kiss. And slowly, against her will, she began to feel the inherent sensuality of what she was doing. Standing there, letting the breeze caress her while the sunshine licked all over her, soft and sweet. There was salt in the air, and the scent of something sweet that she assumed must be flowers, and she was sorely tempted to close her eyes and drift off...
But it was as if he knew. As if he could tell. Because the very moment she contemplated surrendering to this unusual moment she found herself in, he touched her.
It was torture in an instant. An exquisite, glorious torture.
And Molly had no idea why he’d turned her around so he couldn’t monitor her expressions, because she was sure he would have seen far too much if he had. She felt her mouth drop open. Her eyes went wide. It took everything she had to keep her hands at her side, instead of letting them rise to cover her mouth. Her face. To do something.
Because Constantine was doing something so prosaic it should hardly have registered.
And yet.
His hands were big, faintly calloused from she knew not what, and slick with sunscreen lotion.
And it turned out that the most debauched and pointless man in the history of Greece was very, very detail oriented when it suited him.
He started at her hips, smoothing his hands to the small of her back, then all over her bottom, making sure to cover each curve. Then he slicked his way, ever so carefully, over her exposed inner thighs, down the backs of her legs, all the way along her calves to her feet, then up again.
Constantine said nothing while he did this. When he needed more sunscreen, his hands disappeared but always returned. The lotion was cool against her skin, but his hands were hot. Or she was hot. It was all too hot.
At some point he stood, and it took everything Molly had to keep from collapsing into a too-warm, coconut-scented puddle at his feet. Or even to keep her eyes open, because they drooped to half-mast as he rubbed lotion up the length of her spine. Then over each of her shoulder blades, then down the sides of her body, grazing her breasts at each side. But only grazing them, and then, as if he didn’t notice, paying close attention to the backs of her arms.
“Lift up your hair,” he murmured, though she did not mistake it for anything less than another command.
And in any case, she would have done anything he asked. Anything at all to keep his hands moving all
over her like this, spreading heat and warmth inside and out and making her rethink her historic dislike of sunlight.
That was what it felt like. As if Constantine was sunshine and more, he was rubbing it straight into her bones.
“Turn around,” he ordered her after a time, his voice gruff, and she didn’t even think about it. There was no bracing herself now. No desperately trying to lock herself away somewhere inside her own head.
Perish the thought. All she could think about was more of that sunshine.
She turned again, and then everything seemed to ratchet up to such a high intensity that on some level, she was sure she had to be dreaming this.
Though she had never known a dream to be so tactile.
Constantine sat back down on the chair before her, picking up one of her feet and resting it on his broad, hard thigh. She had the strange notion that in this position, despite her nudity and all that was splayed before him, she should have felt regal, superior. Because she was not missish about being looked at, by any stretch of the imagination. He was below her, and surely she should have reveled in that.
But the truth was, she felt as if she might as well have been laid out before him on the ground, shuddering and boneless. She felt like a sacrifice. Yet for the first time in her life, she found herself questioning what that word really meant.
She had always used it in a passive-aggressive sort of way, particularly when it involved her mother and her scrapes. The sorts of angry sacrifices that a person made out of obligation, for example, meaning annoyances. Some larger than others but still, only annoyances.
But this man, this devil there before her, was running his hands up her slender calf, his attention seemingly so fixed on what he was doing that it made her feel hollowed out with a kind of shivering within.
And Molly found herself contemplating the notion of sacrifice in a new light. Everyone had seen those movies of girls dragged screaming to terrible deaths in the clutches of horrible monsters that heroes would then ride in to vanquish. But what about the other girls? she asked herself then, almost dreamily.
The ones who woke in the night, hot and desperate to wear a crown of flowers and a white dress. The ones who felt their very cores run hot at the notion of walking, of their own volition, away from the lights of the village, into the dark. The ones who shivered in delight at the idea of surrendering themselves wholeheartedly to the monster who waited there.
Why didn’t they get any songs or myths? Why did no one tell their stories?
But she already knew the answer. No one mourned the girls who flirted with their own disasters. Mourning was for the good girls, the ones who behaved properly on the way to their deaths. All this time, Molly had been certain she was good.
But Constantine’s hands taught her otherwise.
He did not look up at her, almost as if her reaction to what he was doing was incidental to him. And for some reason that made everything...tighter and hotter and wilder, until she felt molten straight through.
He is preparing your body for his pleasure, a voice inside her that sounded far too much like her own whispered then.
Molly should have been horrified. And yet she...was not.
She would not describe the breath she couldn’t catch, or the way her nipples stood proud, or even that slickness between her legs that she was half-terrified and half-hopeful he would see as...horrified.
If he noticed her obvious arousal, he ignored it, moving with a certain briskness up the outside of her thighs. Then over her mound, ignoring the way she jolted as he made sure to rub lotion to cover all she kept bare, save for a tiny strip. Surely now he would shift everything over into a sexual place. Surely now he would make some kind of claim.
But instead, he sat forward. And took another age to move his slick palms over her belly, below and then above her navel. Eventually he made his way to her rib cage, where he climbed the length of her torso as if he could do so all day, and only stopped when he reached the under slope of her breasts.
Now her breath was coming in shallow little pants, and Molly should have been ashamed. Deeply ashamed. She should have held her breath until she passed out rather than show him how he affected her.
But it was as if her body was going to do as it wished. Or maybe he was simply that talented, even when it was something as small and seemingly nonsexual as the application of sunscreen.
It had never crossed Molly’s mind that the man might actually have earned his reputation.
Constantine took his time putting more lotion on his hands, and then he moved again, standing once more so he could slick his hard palms over her breasts.
And then...he played with her.
Either that, or he was under the impression it took a remarkable level of detailed touching and caressing to protect her breasts from the sun. Not that Molly could really remember the sun or her usual aversion to it at this point or the world they both lived in.
There was only Constantine. There was only his touch.
He massaged her breasts with his palms, teasing her nipples into even stiffer points. Until she could do nothing but arch her back, let her head fall as it would, and press herself into his hands.
She’d never felt anything so delicious her life.
And somehow, without any idea how it happened, Molly found herself closer to Constantine. Had he pulled her there? Or had she simply drifted there of her own accord until she might as well have been in his arms.
Then his thigh was between hers and she found herself pressing the place she ached the most against his brutally hard, deliciously tough thigh. Then rocking herself there, lost in the rhythm of his hands on her breasts and her own movement on his thigh.
And then everything was slick heat and astonishment, and that coiling, shuddering, shimmering tension inside of her.
In the distance, or at her ear, she heard his gruff, dark voice muttering something she didn’t understand. Greek, maybe. Or another incantation. It was too hard to tell.
And then she came apart.
Molly was a thousand shards of glass and still she came apart. Still the shattering went on and on.
She was dimly aware that she was still riding his thigh, that his palms were still working a rough magic against her nipples. And the connection between those two things was so intense, such a bright and impossible shine, that she felt as if all that light and wild heat was inside her. Then shattering outwards like all of that glass.
And then, for a time, she knew nothing at all.
It was only when she felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her and then guiding her down into the chair he vacated, that what she’d let happen here impressed itself upon her.
What she’d let happen and worse, what she’d done.
It took one breath, and then the shock of that realization hit her. Hard.
And right behind it came a wallop of shame. Liberally infused with the kind of self-recrimination she had last felt quite this keenly right here in Skiathos. And back then, she had never been naked in this man’s presence, much less flung herself into his hands with so much heedless abandon.
Had she really been thinking about happy maidens scampering up mountainsides to fling themselves, breasts first, at the nearest scary thing they found?
It cost her more than she wanted to consider to lift her gaze again, then to do her best to regard him coolly. Because it was all she could do.
And he was waiting.
“You come so prettily,” Constantine told her, standing there before her with a little half smile on his perfect mouth and the glittering roar of heat in his gaze. “I hope you enjoyed a little taste of what awaits us on this little journey of ours. And the next time, Molly, you will have to beg me for your release.”
“I think I can promise you that will never happen,” she said, scraping up a truly miraculous tone of voice considering what w
as happening inside her, all scorn and haughty amusement.
But it was lost on him. All he did was let that half smile grow a bit deeper.
“Don’t make promises you cannot keep, hetaira,” he advised her in a low voice. “You will not like how I correct a broken promise, I assure you.”
She could see that he was aroused himself. Yet he seemed to disregard it. To not even notice it, somehow, when she had always been under the impression that Constantine Skalas, above all men, was ruled entirely by that impressive length she could see pressed against his trousers.
Yet all he did was indicate the tube of sunscreen, still with that smile.
“Don’t forget your face and neck,” he said. “You’re already quite red. Though I do not think it is sunburn. Yet.”
And then, to her astonishment—and what she would not have admitted was something far more complex than that, and a whole lot closer to disappointment—he simply turned and left her there.
She sat there, in the shade of that tree, for a long, long time.
And then longer still, as there was no getting past what had happened. What she had not only allowed, but had obviously reveled in.
Eventually, she took his advice and put sunscreen on her face and neck. Then sat there, certain that he must have been watching her, or waiting for her to...do something. It would no doubt indicate what was next on the naked blackmail menu for the day.
The shadows changed, yet Constantine did not reappear.
So even though she would have happily put it off longer if she could, Molly had no choice but to stand up, face the house behind her that she still hadn’t gone inside this time, and then actually walk in of her own volition.
The house already made her feel vulnerable, and she shivered as she stepped inside, and not because of the temperature. She could see ghosts of her younger self everywhere she looked, and having to walk through these rooms literally naked, stripped down and vulnerable, did not help. She padded through the various living areas, trying not to see her memories play out before her, but there was no sign of Constantine.
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 6
