It was the waiting, he assured himself. He had never waited for another woman, not in any sense. It had created an unreasonable hunger—but it would be assuaged soon enough.
Now, in fact.
Once again, all the plans Constantine had toyed with over the years seemed to disappear, in so much ash and smoke.
He lifted her up into his arms, then carried her over to the nearest long, deep sofa, where he laid her out like an offering. To his deepest, wildest greed.
The longings he dared not admit, not even to himself.
Molly might be a martyr, but she was his. His. And he intended to lick up every last drop of this sacrifice laid out so temptingly before him.
He tore out of his own clothes, tossing them aside in his haste to finally get as naked as she’d been in front of him all this time. And he only slowed when he saw her eyes grow wide. He watched as she flushed, a rolling splash of color that moved from her cheeks to her neck, and then all over those sweet breasts.
Sure enough, her eyes were dilated. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she found him just as overwhelmingly tempting as he found her.
Good, something in him intoned, like a vow.
And say what she might about enemies, he knew full well that she hated him. He wanted her to hate him. But that meant he knew that if she was looking at him like this, she meant it.
That gave him a little sliver of space to breathe in.
Better yet, to remember who the hell he was.
To slow it down and take control, before he exploded like an untried boy.
It almost felt like a blessing when he stretched himself out over her, there on that long couch. They both fit, if closely, and he could prop himself up on one elbow. Then look down at the work of art before him.
He took his time looking.
“Constantine...” she began, and there was a little break as she said his name.
He was already hard enough to hurt. But that catch in her voice really took him over the edge.
“Quiet, hetaira,” he ordered her, dark and low. “This is not a time for talking.”
Then he leaned down and set his mouth to her breast. He toyed with her hard nipple with his tongue while his hand busied itself with its twin.
Molly arched up against him and cried out, and so he kept going. Back and forth between each of her lovely, perfect breasts as she writhed and bucked and then, to his delight, shuddered into her first release since long, long ago in Skiathos.
She was so responsive it made his chest feel tight.
She was so responsive he ached to thrust himself deep within her, now.
But he didn’t. Not right now, anyway.
He took her mouth again and settled himself over her, aware on some level that he was rushing things. That he had wanted, badly, to lay her out like a feast and take his time with each and every course.
But he couldn’t seem to do it. He couldn’t seem to wait another moment.
He fished around for his trousers, pulling out protection and sheathing himself with one hand. Molly’s arms moved around his back to hold him, and Constantine had never been aware before of how good it felt to have a woman grip him like that. While her eyes were so wide, her face was still flushed, and she was already looking at him as if he performed miracles.
Just wait, he thought with dark pleasure.
But the waiting, at last, was over.
He settled the broad head of his sex at her entrance, reveling in her softness. Her sweet molten heat.
Below him, Molly pulled her lip between her teeth and nearly undid him with that alone, then gazed at him as if she was close to overwhelmed already.
When they hadn’t even started.
“Hold on,” Constantine advised her.
And then, finally, he began to thrust deep inside her—
Except he didn’t.
Because he felt what could only be the innocence he had thought was a fine joke she’d made. A game she wanted to play.
But it was no joke.
Molly Payne—Magda, for all that was holy—lay beneath him, wincing slightly. Her nails were digging into his back, she was holding herself taut, and she was a virgin.
A virgin.
Constantine knew that this could not be. It could not.
Because if she was a virgin, that meant that he did not know her at all. And more, that every single thing he had thought about her as he’d plotted out his revenge was wrong. That he’d been completely and utterly off course.
And if he was wrong about something he had long since accepted as an incontrovertible fact, what else was he wrong about?
Something in him pitched, then rolled.
“Molly...” he gritted out, in genuine pain.
But she scowled at him, this impossible woman. This virgin in the body of a hetaira, the ancient Greek term for a courtesan.
How could he have been so wrong about her?
“Don’t you dare, Constantine,” she gritted out at him, her scowl deepening. “Don’t you dare stop now.”
And then, to his astonishment, she thumped him one in the ribs.
Hard.
CHAPTER NINE
IT HURT, BUT MOLLY had expected it would.
She’d been told a thousand stories of terrible, horrible pain the first time, but people didn’t seem to let that stop them from having sex. She didn’t intend to let it stop her.
Because there was something right on the other side of the pain. Something almost seductive, like a new kind of fire. Molly knew that no matter what, she wanted to taste it.
For his part, Constantine looked poleaxed. He stared down at her, an expression she couldn’t begin to interpret on that beautiful face of his.
And to her impatient fury, he didn’t move.
So she did.
Molly might not have done this before, but she understood the mechanics. Or she understood them well enough, anyway, to lift her hips and try to press herself into that bright, sharp pain. Especially when it made him tight all around her, that astonishing body of his nearly vibrating as he held himself still.
“Molly—”
But she ignored him, rocking herself against that insistent press of his need until it hurt too much to bear. Then she pulled in a ragged breath and impaled herself.
And then lay there beneath him, panting.
Impaled and panting.
“That was very foolish,” Constantine gritted out, in dampening tones.
“Only if it’s bad.” Molly laughed a bit at that, aware that it was shaky at best, but that didn’t make her stop. “Is it going to be bad?”
And he still didn’t look...quite like him. Something of that internal storm that so marked him was gone. Or not gone, exactly, but not the same. His dark gaze seemed flooded with gold.
Meaning she did, too.
He shifted over her so he could brush moisture she hadn’t known was beneath her eyes away with his thumbs, as he held her head in place. Not in a way that made her feel held down, but in a way that made her feel precious.
She melted a little at that, inside and out.
“No,” he said gruffly, his gaze intense. “I can promise you, it will not be bad.”
And then he kissed her.
Molly found it was different from the kisses that had come before. She would have said it was sweeter, but this was Constantine—and he was inside her. What sweetness could there possibly be?
And yet she thought of the honeyed sweetness she’d eaten in Skiathos, the richness on her tongue.
Constantine was better.
He kissed her and he kissed her, as if he wasn’t buried deep inside her body. As if there was no hurry whatsoever. His chest brushed against her breasts as he held her face, and she hadn’t thought that she was tense at all until she felt herself relax
beneath him. Until she was melting into that kiss, pouring herself into the dance of his tongue and hers.
And slowly, surely, everything changed.
Until she felt as if both of them were liquid sunshine, tangled all around each other. The newness, the shock of his penetration began to change, too, rolling into a kind of molten thing. Bright. Warm, then hot.
Then hotter still, laced through with all that shine.
And only when she sighed a little against his mouth, running her own hands up and down the glorious planes and muscles of his back, did he lift his head and smile down at her.
She thought he was about to say something, likely something cutting and indisputably him.
But instead, he began to move.
And it was unlike anything she had ever experienced before in her life.
The heat of it. That unbearable, unimaginable slide, each one hotter than the last. Each one sending intensity and sensation searing through her. Into her limbs, lighting her up, making her dig her heels into the sofa they lay on so she could lift herself up to meet each impossibly beautiful thrust.
She’d spent her whole life posing for pictures and pretending, but this was real.
This was him, and her, and a slick joining that changed her every time he plunged deep inside. Changed her, then taught her.
Then it made her new.
Until she not only couldn’t tell the difference between the two of them, she lost track of all those differences she’d maintained within herself, too.
This was too real for separations. This was too powerful.
Molly felt a different kind of quaking come over her and almost protested, because it was too soon. She wanted this to go on forever. And she couldn’t tell if she cried because she knew it couldn’t or because of the sudden surge of wildfire ecstasy that ripped through her, making her arch up against him and cry out.
She thought she might even have said his name.
But he didn’t stop. He kept going, and that explosion shifted as his thrusts grew harder, more demanding.
All that golden light turned to fire. And her whole body seemed to light up, burning red and hot from the inside out.
And he knew. She could tell he knew, because he gathered her beneath him, his hands gripping her hips, as he pounded into her.
Molly met him, reveled in him, and to her surprise, shattered once more.
And that time, heard her name on his mouth as he followed.
She could feel a kind of oblivion beckoning, but she fought it off, because she didn’t want to miss a moment of this. Of Constantine, his face next to hers and that remarkably powerful body of his laid out over her as if wanting her that much had made him weak.
How had she missed out on this for so long?
But on the heels of that thought came another one, and she almost made a sound in response. What if she had given in to one of the many invitations she’d received over the years and done that with anyone but Constantine?
She shuddered at the thought.
And nothing had been settled between them, but she didn’t care. Because Molly might have been lost as a sixteen-year-old girl, but she’d been perfectly clear about one thing. That it was him. That it had always been and would always be him.
And she’d been right.
“Come,” he said in a low voice.
Molly didn’t have time to think about how or why his voice was different, only that it was. Because he was lifting her up, hoisting her into his arms as if she was one of those dainty, tiny girls who men were always toting about as easily as they heaved pints to and fro.
She felt a delicious sort of softness everywhere. She liked it. And so she did nothing at all but tuck her head beneath his chin, the better to contemplate the gorgeous strength of his collarbone, his neck, the underside of his jaw as he moved.
He carried her into the bedroom he’d claimed in this penthouse when they’d arrived, then brought her to a large, ornate bed that looked like the sort of thing whole French revolutions had been fought to protest.
Fitting, really, for Constantine Skalas.
He placed her down on the grandiose bed, then straightened, looking at her with a dark, unreadable look on his face that probably should have made Molly feel self-conscious.
But it didn’t. Nothing could. Not when she felt like this, loose and beautiful and made entirely new.
His jaw tightened, and he turned, walking off into what she assumed was the en suite bathroom.
Sure enough, she heard the sound of water, and for once, was perfectly happy to simply stay where she was and wait to see what might happen.
Constantine was there at her side again in a moment, with a warm, damp cloth he pressed between her legs, and that was what made her suddenly feel...vulnerable.
“I had no idea that you were serious.” His voice was almost too low to hear, a thread of darkness between them. Almost. “It never occurred to me that you could possibly be an innocent.”
“Not anymore,” she said brightly, and she didn’t know what to do with that look in his eyes. She didn’t know what to do, so she got back onto her knees, and ran her hands over his chest where he stood beside the bed. She reveled in the feel of her palms against his skin, his muscles, him.
“Molly.”
Her name was a command, but she had no intention of heeding it. She let her hands wander where they would until one made its way down that fascinating arrow of hair to find his sex. Almost accidentally.
He was so hard, though not as hard as he had felt inside her. She wrapped her fingers around the width of him and he thickened, and Molly smiled. Because that, too, felt like a power she wished she’d known she’d had all this time.
“Molly,” he said again, now sounding very nearly stern. “I do not think—”
“Can we do that again?” she asked, smiling up at him. She tipped herself forward so she could rub her aching nipples against his chest and taste all the parts of him she’d admired on the walk here. His corded neck, his bold jaw. “Please? I’m begging.”
He made a low sound, but then his mouth was on hers again. And he was picking her up and turning her, rolling with her down onto that wide bed, until they were tangled up with each other again.
Constantine rolled to his back and let her explore him, but when she went to take his hardness in her mouth, he gripped her beneath her arms and hauled her up the length of his body.
“I want to,” she said.
“We do not always get what we want, Molly,” he told her, then kissed her until she melted against him once more.
He taught her how to sit astride him, then take him deep inside her from that different angle.
She rocked her hips against his, staring down at him in a kind of wonder. He looked up at her, his expression so fierce, his hands moving almost restlessly from her breasts to that place where they were joined.
He pressed a thumb down hard at her center and she dissolved, almost sobbing out at the sharp pleasure of it.
Then he flipped her over onto her belly and came into her from behind. He slid one arm beneath her hips to lift them at an angle so that he could pound his way into her, once again taking her from the middle of one explosion and throwing her like a catapult straight on into another. And another still.
And when the last one hit, she heard him roar behind her.
Then she knew no more.
Molly didn’t know what woke her, or how she knew that it was later. Much later, by her guess, and she knew instantly that Constantine wasn’t in the bed with her. She’d slept but she’d been always aware of him beside her, wrapped around her, hot to the touch.
She sat up, her heart pounding at her as if in fright, but then she saw him.
He stood by the window, and for once, she got to gaze upon his glorious nakedness instead of the reverse. The light
s of Paris flowed all over his perfect form, making him seem unreal. Like one of the statues in the Musée Rodin, where she had spent many a stolen afternoon while at loose ends in the city.
He put them all to shame.
“Constantine?” She hardly sounded like herself, but that didn’t shock her. She didn’t feel like herself either, not any longer.
She felt like his.
He didn’t turn toward her, and yet she knew, somehow, that he had heard her all the same. A small, shivery thing teased the nape of her neck.
“I hated your mother long before I met her,” Constantine said, his voice gravelly, his gaze on the city before him. “I hated the idea of her, probably before my father ever met her. But then, there she was. And she had a name and a face, and told me to call her Isabel, as if we were friends already.”
Molly had spent her life wanting to have this conversation, and now that it was happening, she wanted no part of it. She wanted to fly across the room and throw her body against his, hoping that could distract him from whatever he was about to say. But just as he seemed to stand there, frozen solid at the window with Paris at his feet, she couldn’t seem to move, either.
She could only watch the light move over his dark form. And wait.
He seemed to grow even more frozen as she watched. “But as luck would have it, my new friend Isabel gave me more than enough reason to hate her, personally.” Constantine let out a laugh, though there was no humor in it. It sounded like a weapon, and this time, it wasn’t one aimed at her. Why did that make her ache? “She tried, you see. She tried so hard. Not just to make my father happy, a doomed endeavor if ever there was one. But she went out of her way to try to love me, too.”
He turned then, and Molly caught her breath. Because his face was a mask of anguish. Sheer torment. His eyes blazed with it, and she hated that, too.
“Constantine. I don’t understand—”
“And how dare she love me so easily?” Constantine gritted out, as if she hadn’t spoken. “When my mother’s life was a spiral of despair. When my own mother had never been any good at loving anyone or anything because she was so focused on my father—anything to get his attention, good or bad. How dare a stepmother come along and try to do what she had never managed?”
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 11
