“I pay other people to worry about my wardrobe,” he replied. And smiled. “I already know I will look good in it, after all.”
She lifted her glass in a mocking toast. “There you have it. Innate style. If you were fashion conscious, there would be more preening.”
“You can’t possibly be suggesting that you pay absolutely no mind to what you wear,” he objected, mildly enough. “When you might happen to find yourself on a red carpet at any moment.”
Her blue eyes looked something like merry. “No, of course not. What I’m saying is if I chose to wear a garbage bag to a red carpet, I would do it with such élan that garbage bags might very well become the rage afterward. That’s style.”
Constantine looked down at her and couldn’t shift the same brooding mood he’d been in since his conversation with Balthazar.
“You’re not the girl who lived here all those years ago,” he said, in an abrupt growl. “Sometimes it’s hard to imagine you could possibly be one and the same.”
Her expression changed. And he had a quick, uncomfortable bolt of recognition at the sight, because it was instantly clear to him that she was acting a part. The charming, artless version of her was a role. Perhaps it really was a part of her, too, but it was a part she used for her own devices. Why did Constantine find it so difficult to remember that she could not possibly have scaled the heights she had were she not capable of working a room? Just as he was.
That did not sit well. At all.
“Did you expect me to be sixteen, then?” she asked quietly. She gazed at him with those sharp eyes of hers, and Constantine suddenly felt exposed. The lantern light washing all over him didn’t help. Her mouth curved. “Oh. You did. Let me guess how you thought that would look. You expected that there would be weeping. Maybe even a tantrum or two, since I was always accused of throwing those, though I never did. You expected me to turn bright red every time you deigned to look at me directly. And best of all, pick up where we left off, with me whispering my secrets into your faithless ear so you could use them against me.”
That was as good a description of what had happened between them as any, Constantine knew. So why did he dislike it so intensely?
“If I’d wished for you to be sixteen again, I would hardly insist on your nudity,” he pointed out. “It would muddy the retroactive teenage waters, don’t you think?”
“Constantine.” And Molly shook her head at him as if she’d expected better. “How could you possibly imagine that the same approach would work on me twice?”
“I am only pointing out that I thought there were only the three versions of you. That sixteen-year-old girl, you, and the role you play as Magda. I had no idea how many other versions of you there were.”
“Maybe there’s only one version,” she replied, her cool blue gaze somehow filling him with fire. “Maybe you’re the one who splintered into a hundred pieces, so long ago you think everyone else did the same.”
“I am not the one with an alter ego, Magda,” he said, with a laugh.
But she only smiled.
And then the food arrived, thankfully, before he could chase down whatever he saw in that gaze of hers that left him feeling... Edgy.
They ate in the lantern light. Perfectly grilled fish, local delicacies, and a few of Constantine’s favorite forms of comfort food. Spanakopita. Saganaki. Honey-drenched sweets and strong coffee to finish. Far below, the sea threw itself at the cliffs and up above, the Greek summer sky put on a show as the stars beamed down.
And it had been ten days, yet Constantine—who had long regarded himself as wholly irresistible to women, because he had yet to meet one who had not said so herself—was no closer to demolishing this woman than he had been before she’d arrived on the island.
That was the trouble, he told himself. That was why he did not feel quite himself. She was proving to be far harder to crack than he’d anticipated.
“How did you get into modeling in the first place?” he asked.
Her gaze flicked to him, looking something like amused. “Small talk? Really? I was wandering around your house today, naked from head to toe, and you think small talk is the appropriate response?”
“Is it that you cannot answer the question or that you do not wish to?” was his cool response.
She shrugged, managing to make even that a kind of pointed blade. “A modeling agent approached me on the Tube. I was eighteen and foolish enough to go around to the address on the card he gave me. That’s it. That’s the story. It was all fairly cut and dried, I’m afraid.”
“But you must connect the dots for me.” Constantine toyed with the stem of his wineglass. “Because the girl who left Skiathos would never have imagined that anyone could consider her modeling material.”
He did not know what he liked about the arctic blast he got from her then. Only that he did.
“You saw to that, didn’t you?”
“I saw to it?” He sat back in his chair, taking his wine with him. “I’m guilty of a great many things, Molly, but I do not recall putting together a campaign against your... What is it you accuse me of? Your self-confidence?”
“But of course you did,” she replied, with a certain simplicity that seemed to slice into him. “It was your only goal, I assume. That and extracting private sentiments from me that you could sell to the tabloids.”
“I never sold anything to the tabloids,” he replied.
It was true. He’d given away those stories for free.
“I’m actually delighted to have the opportunity to discuss this with you,” she said, with a strange light in her eyes, propping her elbows on the table between them. “I used to dream about doing this, though when I did, it was less discussing and more...beating at the side of your head with a stick of some kind. But, you know. Bygones.”
“I’m afraid I’m not following you.” He eyed her, and that light in her gaze. “Surely you are not complaining that I was mean to you? I know you were a sensitive girl back then, Molly. But really. There is a vast difference between meanness and a person simply not catering to you in the way you would like.”
“Sensitive,” she repeated, as if tasting the word and not finding she liked it overmuch. “Isn’t it funny how that word is used as an insult? Think about what it means. Yes, I was very sensitive to your manipulations. And your father’s. And—”
“Are you comparing me to my father?” His tone was light, but he doubted his gaze matched. “Do you dare?”
If he expected Molly to back down, he was in for a disappointment. She only gazed back at him, her expression neutral enough, save the arch of her brows.
“My mistake,” she said in a cool tone designed, he knew, to rub him the wrong way. It worked. He hated that it worked. “There are no similarities. Your father isolated a woman here, constantly veering back and forth between treating her as a lover or treating her like the help. Either way, she was an object entirely at his whim. There is, naturally, no overlap whatsoever between the two scenarios.”
“Is this an example of the sensitivity you claimed not to have?” he asked darkly.
“Am I the sensitive one, Constantine? It seems you’re the one having a reaction.”
He was having any number of reactions, and he doubted very much that she would like it if he shared them with her. He did not care how long it took him to get himself back under control, so long as he managed it. He did not like how close he’d come to losing control altogether. He did not care, at all, for how this woman affected him.
But he didn’t walk away from her or this situation he’d created, either.
“I believe you were going to tell me how it was that I hurt your precious teenage feelings, making me somehow responsible for your lack of self-confidence at the time.” His shrug, it turned out, was no less a weapon than hers. “Though I think you will find that many a teenage girl is in the sam
e predicament. It is the teenage girl that does it, not me.”
“How many teenage girls do you know who had their confidences funneled directly to the gossip rags?”
He eyed her. “Do you imagine that I will apologize for this?”
Her lips curved, but there was only frigid cold in her gaze. “A Skalas? Apologize? The very earth would tremble.”
“If you resent finding yourself in these crosshairs, Molly, I would suggest that you address yourself to your mother. As she is the one who put you there.”
Molly scowled at him. “I get it, Constantine. You didn’t want a stepmother. Boo-hoo. It may shock you to discover that I didn’t particularly want a stepfather, either. Particularly not one like your father, who was, at best, sadistic. And that’s about the nicest thing I can think to say about him.”
He made a scoffing sound, but she didn’t subside. Instead, she leaned over the table, still aiming that scowl right at him. “It amazes me that you seem to think my mother, a housekeeper with no formal education whatsoever, managed the astonishing feat of trapping Demetrius Skalas, who was at that time the richest man on earth. Trapping him. What a joke. If she had that kind of power, why would she have stopped with a simple trap? Why wouldn’t she have used her power to either make him a better husband, or, failing that, kill him off so she could live out her days as a very wealthy Skalas widow?”
Constantine couldn’t say he liked either one of those questions very much. “You are naive in the extreme if you don’t know precisely how your mother ensnared my father.”
“Because... What? Demetrius Skalas, once again the richest man in the world—and also well renowned for the parade of women on his arm all throughout his marriage—suddenly tripped over one particular woman and could no longer function? My mother worked some kind of spell, is that it? And he was susceptible for only as long as it took to race off and marry her. Then, in another bit of magic, he became completely impervious to her in every way.” She rolled her eyes. “Come on, Constantine. You can’t really believe any of that.”
He found his ribs were too tight, suddenly. He was too aware of his pulse, and the way it racketed around inside him. He glared at her, wishing the lantern light didn’t make her look even more beautiful than she already was. Because the beauty was distracting, and somehow made the charges she was levying against his father—and against him—seem that much starker.
And something he almost wanted to call painful.
“Nothing you can possibly say to me is going to make me change my opinion of your mother, Molly,” he said.
When he could speak with the voice that was only dark with warning, not bright with his temper.
“Of course not,” she said quietly, her arctic blue gaze pinning him where he sat. “Because if you did that, you would have so many other unfortunate questions to ask yourself, wouldn’t you? If you’re wrong about my mother, then all the years you spent sandbagging her every move would seem...vicious, wouldn’t they? If you’re wrong about my mother, this price you intend to extract from me by naked days and romantic nights really does make you a monster, doesn’t it? And that’s not even getting into what you did to a lost teenage girl who could have used a friend. The less said about that the better, I think you’ll agree.”
“I think that’s enough,” he managed to growl.
“I’m sure it is,” Molly said with a rueful little laugh that set his teeth on edge. “It gets scary straying that close to the truth, doesn’t it?”
He was on his feet, though he didn’t recall when he’d decided to move. Constantine stood over the table, staring down at her, and for all her talk of what was and was not a spell, he felt cursed.
She had haunted him for years. And over the past ten days, that haunting had only grown worse. Because everything had gone according to plan here, except his reaction.
He had wanted her to be lulled into a false sense of security. He had wanted her to stop worrying he might pounce on her at any turn and to embrace both the insistence upon nakedness as well as the sunscreen he ritualistically applied to her body every morning.
But while she seemed to have acclimated with ease, all Constantine seemed to do was lose sleep.
“You seem to have forgotten your place,” he managed to get out.
But Molly rose, too, like a shimmering blue flame. She was a gloriously tall woman, no doubt used to looking men in the eye. Or looking down at them. Yet she had to tilt her chin to manage it with him, and Constantine found he liked that he did not loom over her as he normally did over women.
Because it put her mouth that much closer to his.
“You’d better teach me my place then,” she shot back at him. “Don’t you know? We Payne women have a terrible habit of casting spells on unwary men like witches of yore, then making them do our bidding. Behold my success, for it has made me...your plaything.”
“Shut up,” he growled at her.
And then he took her mouth in a fury.
It had been too long since that last kiss. It had been too long.
He found his hands on the sides of her jaw, holding her mouth right where he needed it. He kissed her and he kissed her, a wild taking. A claiming, possessive and dark.
He kissed her until he realized that if he didn’t stop, he would take her right there, out on the terrace beneath the stars.
And that was not the plan.
Just as the fire that coursed through him was not the plan, because it threatened to undo everything. It got in his head, it made him far too hard, it made his hands move over her as if all he’d been put on this earth to do was worship the glory she wore so easily.
He kissed her until he thought it might break him, and then he thrust her away from him.
And took some solace in the fact that however wrecked he might feel, she looked worse. Her blue eyes had gone dark, needy.
The sound she made was of loss.
“Tonight is our last night here,” he told her. “We have a series of extremely high-profile events to attend, Molly. Remember. This affair will be very, very public.”
“Is it an affair? Or an impromptu bit of theater you’ve set up for your entertainment?”
But she didn’t ask that quite as sharply as she might have. And he could hear the tremor in her voice. He could see the flush on her face and against the fabric of that dress of hers, the telltale press of her hard nipples, giving her away.
“Don’t you worry about when our affair will begin in truth,” Constantine said, dark and hot. “You’ll know. You’ll find yourself on your knees, begging as beautifully as you do anything else.”
And then he left her there, still obviously trying to hide the fact that she was shaken before she could tell that he was, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOLLY SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED, Constantine being Constantine, that the publicity tour he had apparently put together in his spare time—all while seeming to do nothing but drive her to the brink of distraction with his daily sunscreen ritual, then taunt her every evening—was comprehensive. And would catapult them to the forefront of every gossip’s mind, not to mention every tabloid’s main page, with a vengeance.
Because vengeance was his goal, and she needed to remember that. She had almost started to think that his goal was to keep her completely off balance, because he was succeeding at that, and brilliantly.
Though she thought she would rather fling herself from one of the Skiathos cliffs, like the Gothic heroine she told herself she was, than admit it.
That next morning he drove them both in a simmering silence to the Skiathos airport. His jet waited for them there, prepared to whisk them off across the world to Los Angeles, stop one on their world tour. It might look like a romantic interlude to some. It was meant to look like a happy accident of press appearances while engaged in some of that high-profile celebrity charity that famous and infamous p
eople alike used the way teenagers used the hallways in their schools, all see and be seen.
But Molly knew the point of it was neither romance nor charity. It was her eventual humiliation. He’d said so.
“If we are attending some kind of gala event,” Molly remarked as they started their descent into a surprisingly clear day over the Los Angeles basin, “does that mean that you have also selected my wardrobe? Or is this more naked time. That will cause a stir.”
Across from her, Constantine barely looked up from the laptop that had consumed his attention for the whole of their flight. Too busy checking for mention of himself in several languages, she could only assume. Because it was too strange to think of Constantine Skalas actually working. Surely that was what Balthazar was for.
She couldn’t have said what Constantine was for, save her own, personal destruction.
“Your role is simple,” he said now. “Keep your mouth closed and act adoring. Easy enough, no?”
“Easy, yes,” she agreed. “But unusual, certainly. I’m not exactly known as the shy and retiring type.”
Constantine slapped his laptop closed as the jet’s wheels touched the ground. His gaze seemed to touch hers with a similar impact. “But you are besotted, hetaira. You hardly know yourself. Your body betrays you with the things it wants and you tell yourself you ought to be horrified, when in truth, all you are is wildly, madly in love. So much so that it is astoundingly visible to all and sundry and possibly even from space.” Then his mouth curved in that mocking way that always seemed to pierce straight through her. She assumed he must know that. “Or is that too much of a stretch?”
“Don’t you worry,” Molly said, as if trying to soothe him. She smiled. “I’m very, very good at my job.”
But she was just as happy when his attention was redirected to his mobile, because that had all been...a little too close to the truth for her liking.
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 8
