Liliana was the heiress to an unimaginable fortune and half of his company. She was his ward and his responsibility. In his head she had remained that chubby, awkward and sodden-faced child he’d met all those years ago, no matter that he’d been well aware she’d grown older in the interim. And tonight she was standing there before him entirely grown-up and dressed like a common whore.
And, moreover, had just talked back to him in a manner reminiscent of the streetwalking variety of the same, if his ears had not deceived him and his memories of the unsavory neighborhoods of his youth did not fail him.
Izar couldn’t quite take it all in. He couldn’t quite fathom it, because this level of crude defiance spoke to a failure on his part so deep it should have leveled him. And it was a simple fact that Izar was too unaccustomed to the experience of failure to tell one way or the other.
Her attire was not the worst part. Nor was the fact that she was here at all, apparently living in this ramshackle, flea-bitten flat four rickety flights up in a building she could have purchased outright with the change in her pocket—though that factored. It was that she’d deliberately lied to him about where she was living in this sinful city, making Izar’s trek into the hinterland of questionable neighborhoods in the Bronx, of all places, unavoidable on a night he’d intended to spend in more civilized pursuits, such as the theater with one of his current mistresses.
Izar Agustin—who prided himself on his iron control and ruthless focus in all things, from the fútbol pitch of his youth to his current domination of any boardroom he entered—had allowed this situation to get out of control. Clearly. Yes, Liliana had lied to him. Yes, she had gone to some lengths to deliberately mislead him, allowing him to believe that she’d spent these months since her college graduation living in her late parents’ brownstone in the deeply moneyed and far less dangerous West Village in Manhattan rather than here in this grotty hinterland. Still, he could blame no one but himself.
Not even the woman who stood before him, sulky-mouthed and flushed from what appeared to be equal parts defiance and drink, glaring at him as if he was the devil incarnate.
Izar supposed he was. As far as Liliana was concerned, he was far worse. And he was about to rain down a little brimstone all over her to cement that impression.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” He kept his voice soft. Low. He did nothing to conceal the harsh lash of it that regularly made his underlings and associates cower, stammer and fall all over themselves to apologize no matter if they were guilty of anything or not.
His ward only tipped up her chin as if he’d landed a glancing blow at best. And as if she expected—even welcomed—more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything like it. This was not how people treated a man of his stature. Ever.
“Nothing polite,” she retorted.
It took Izar one beat, then another, to understand that it was temper that wound through him, red and wild, at her bored and disinterested tone. Temper, when he hadn’t permitted himself anything close to such a display of emotion since he’d left fútbol behind him.
It was there in his tone when he spoke. “You cannot possibly imagine that adding insults, however vague, to your deceit and your dishonesty—to say nothing of your appalling disregard for your own safety—is the correct way to handle this situation, can you?”
He could hear the fury in his voice slice through the room, but Liliana didn’t flinch. She didn’t crumble or break. Izar had taken down whole companies with a far gentler tone than the one he’d used on her, but Liliana didn’t appear to notice it.
Izar couldn’t decide if he admired her or wanted to throttle her for that. He only knew that neither feeling was the least bit appropriate.
“The only situation I’m aware of is that there’s an uninvited guest lurking in my bedroom,” she replied, with a level of icy hauteur that would have done a queen proud.
It almost diverted his attention from the fact she’d accused him of lurking. He was Izar Agustin. He did not lurk.
Nor was she finished. “I’d like you to leave. Now.”
Liliana wasn’t a child any longer. The grown-up version stood before him with the carriage of the aristocrat she was, though one would hardly know it surrounded by the relentless, depressing squalor of this place. He’d grown up in a shoddy flat a great deal like this one, if across the world in the outskirts of Málaga, Spain, and he’d vowed he’d never sully himself in such places again. That he’d had no choice in the matter tonight only made his temper that much more precarious. Liliana was entirely too soft and vulnerable to be prancing about in a down-market flat in a questionable section of the Bronx, regardless of her net worth. But the fact that she was Liliana Girard Brooks meant that every time she exposed herself on the unpleasant streets in this neighborhood she made herself a juicy target for any enterprising fortune hunter or kidnapper or miscreant of any description who happened along.
It made him well nigh murderous.
But the questionable neighborhood wasn’t the only problem.
Maturity had brought out those pedigreed cheekbones of hers, which in turn made the seemingly haphazard way she’d styled her masses of golden hair on the top of her head look that much more elegant and chic. The kind of effortless style women the world over spent lifetimes trying and failing to attain. She’d shed her youthful roundness altogether and had finally grown into the interesting face that had been far too much for her at twelve, with all those edges and angles the camera would worship. Taller, slimmer, and far more at ease in her own body than he remembered her, Liliana was nothing short of mesmerizing. All her finely etched angles worked with the sophisticated sweep of dark lashes framing her faintly tilted blue eyes and the sleek curves of her lean body, hitting him like a sucker punch. Hard. And then there was that plump, sweet mouth of hers that, God help him, he felt like a carnal wallop in his gut. And lower still.
This could not be happening.
He never thought of Liliana as anything but his responsibility. His task to complete, nothing more. Her parents would have wanted her to have the business and fortune they’d left her, and so Izar had honored them by making sure both not only existed but thrived. Her looks hadn’t signified. She’d been a child in his mind all this time, entrusted to his care and in need of his firm, if distant, guidance.
But she wasn’t a child now.
Liliana was truly and indisputably beautiful, little as he wished to acknowledge such a thing. She was more than simply beautiful, if he was being honest with himself. Without his permission and entirely against his wishes, Liliana had blossomed into one of the most stunning women he’d ever seen in his life. He thought she surpassed even her own mother, the lost and much-lamented style icon Clothilde Girard, who was still held to be one of the great, elegant beauties of her time a decade after her death.
Maybe it was the fact Liliana was flouting his authority by her presence here at all. It was the first shred of defiance he’d ever had from her, ever, and for some reason, it changed everything.
Or perhaps it was only Izar who had changed. Perhaps, he thought with a certain grudging fury at his own failing, he was perverse enough that defiance attracted him. It was, after all, so very rare.
No one defied him. He was Izar Agustin. No one dared.
If Liliana had been any other woman alive, Izar would have handled her much differently. He would have used his hands against her bared, silken flesh. He would have sampled that sulky, insolent mouth and he would have had her on her back on that bed without a moment’s pause as he sorted out the variety of ways he disliked being spoken to in that provocative, insulting manner. He would have made her beg and then, when he was good and ready, he’d have made her scream.
But she was his goddamned ward.
Izar told himself the tightness in his chest and that raw expanse inside him were more of that unexpected temper, that was all. He focused on the fact this woman, his ward, who should have been somewhere far, far awa
y from this grimy little apartment and the ghastly party taking place in all the other small, tatty rooms, was choosing to defy him while dressed like a trollop.
It was insult upon injury, really.
Tonight she’d chosen to wear something that was more a gesture toward a tunic than any kind of dress, baring her arms despite the mid-November cold outside. It flowed from a distractingly low neck to graze her upper thighs, leaving an unnecessary expanse of smooth skin between its hem and her over-the-knee boots. Perfect for a bit of pickup trade, he thought sourly. And perhaps unfairly.
That it was how all young women dressed these days wasn’t lost on him. But Liliana wasn’t any young woman. She didn’t have the option to careen about through her early twenties like the rest of them, stacking up questionable evenings and choices and then writing it all off as “experience” once she settled down into a dreary suburban existence somewhere. Her sins would be neither forgiven nor forgotten—they would be trotted out at every opportunity by tabloids and business rivals alike. She wasn’t like all the other, interchangeable girls cluttering up the living areas of this flat.
She was legendary. And she was his.
His responsibility, he amended after a moment. A searing, unhelpful moment with nothing but her intoxicating beauty in his head.
“Is this how one dresses here in the toilet of New York City?” he asked edgily, letting his gaze move with cold disapproval from her face to her toes. Then back. “The better to blend in with less-fortunate women on street corners? I must applaud you. How enterprising to attempt to avoid the predators milling about the gutters out there by dressing as if they could simply buy you instead of bothering to go to the trouble of mugging you.”
Liliana sucked in a breath. Izar felt something like remorse—another emotion he was largely unfamiliar with, and he certainly didn’t care for the experience now—swell in him when her bright gaze dimmed, but she only squared her shoulders. As if she thought she was tough enough to fight him head-on.
Izar didn’t care to examine how that notion careened around inside him. The way it left marks.
Liliana frowned at him but didn’t break the way she would have even six months ago. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just call me a prostitute in the first conversation we’ve had live and in person in a decade.”
“I said you appeared to have dressed like one. Is this a costume party? That could certainly explain the number of tarts on parade, yourself included.”
She pressed her lips together. He didn’t want to think about her lips.
“You’re a very small and unhappy man, aren’t you, Izar?”
“When confronting my wayward ward in a flat built on lies and a fake name she thinks makes her fireproof and somehow invisible at once?” She finally blinked at that. That belligerent chin of hers dropped a few notches. He was aware that there was no reason these things should have given him quite so much satisfaction, as if he’d scored some kind of decisive victory. “Yes. You could call this unhappiness, if you wish. If I were you, I would be less concerned with my happiness and more concerned with your own hide.”
“I’ll be really, really scared when I get your letter on the subject three months from now, I promise,” she told him after a moment. With deep and unmistakable sarcasm and no apparent recognition of the precariousness of her situation.
“Careful,” he warned her, and he hardly recognized his own voice.
She sniffed. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Then you are even more foolish than you appear.”
He saw some sort of strong emotion he couldn’t quite identify wash over her then, making her stand straighter and cross her arms beneath her breasts which was...not at all helpful.
She—is—your—ward, Izar snapped at himself.
What was wrong with him that he couldn’t seem to remember that tonight? She and her stake in the company were his responsibility until she turned twenty-five or married, whatever came first. The weight of that had been at the forefront of his thoughts since the day her parents had died. It was why he’d dedicated himself with such ferocity to the business all this time. Why had it deserted him entirely tonight?
But he knew why. It was the way she stood before him, beautiful and wholly unimpressed with him, which was a true novelty. It was that mouthwatering expanse of her thighs, bared for all the world to see. Worse, for him to see. It was the sad truth that, apparently, he really was that twisted, after all. That ruined, from the inside out, exactly as he’d always suspected.
“I told you I would bodily remove you from this city the moment you became any kind of scandal,” he bit out at her, and it was an effort to keep himself from raising his voice. He didn’t entirely succeed. “Congratulations. You lasted longer than I thought you would, but that day has finally arrived.”
Liliana frowned. “You told me that when I was eighteen and setting off for college. Newsflash, I survived. The city didn’t burn down around me and your precious company is fine. No luxury brands have been harmed by my attempt to have a life, Izar. You can exhale.”
Yet another unfamiliar sensation washed over him then, and once more, it took Izar a long moment to recognize it. It had been a while since anyone had gotten under his skin like this. Or at all. Not since his days on the pitch, in fact, where he’d been a bit of a hothead and his opponents had sometimes used that against him. He’d thought he’d locked that side of himself away for good when he’d left the sport.
Why Liliana, of all people, should have the power to needle him when no one else alive could or would dare, Izar could not imagine.
Nor did he care for it.
When he spoke again his voice rivaled the cutting November winds outside.
“You remain my responsibility, whether you like it or not. That means that you cannot live in an unprotected slum like this, no matter how bohemian you currently imagine yourself to be. You are entirely too wealthy for these games.”
“I’m not bohemian.” She laughed as if he’d told her a joke. “At all.”
“On that we agree. It was one thing to hide behind a false name while you were in school. This is not school any longer, Liliana. How long did you really think it would take for someone to discover who you are and use it against you? And let us be clear. When I say against you, what I mean is against the company, which is the same thing as against me.”
She shook her head at him as if he was being ridiculous. As if he, Izar Agustin, renowned the world over for his business acumen and corporate vision, was capable of being any such thing.
“I moved in here five months ago and, so far, the only undesirable person to discover me is you.”
“That is where you are wrong.” He tried to keep the edge out of his voice, but he saw her stiffen. He tried and failed to regret the fact he clearly got to her, too. “Why do you think I am here?”
“Because you live to stamp on dreams and ruin lives, I assume. Mine in particular. You know, the usual.”
“Of course.” It was amazing how hard it was to hold on to his temper tonight, truly astonishing. “And because I was approached by a piece of tabloid journalist scum who told me he intended to run a vile little article on how I took over the company and consigned the much-adored if seldom-seen Brooks heiress to a life of poverty and toil. Right here in this grimy little hellhole.” Izar did nothing to soften his scowl. He didn’t even try. “I assured him that was not possible, as no one would describe your parents’ perfectly good brownstone in Greenwich Village as grimy, much less a hole of any kind. Imagine my surprise to discover that you did not live there, as you had assured me you did following your graduation. In writing. I was forced to track you down. To this place. Which is so much worse than a mere grimy hole it defies description.”
He didn’t know what he expected. But it wasn’t for Liliana to do nothing for a moment. Then, after another long moment, blow out a breath and roll her eyes as if what he’d said was...annoying. Nothing more than annoying.
&
nbsp; He felt his entire body go taut in disbelief.
“The Brooks heiress can go to hell,” she announced, and Izar noticed she swayed ever so slightly on her feet as she made this proclamation. He’d thought she’d looked a bit flushed before, hadn’t he? “And so can you.”
“Liliana.” Her name was a grim thing in his mouth. “Are you drunk?”
“Certainly not.” She moved across the room and placed the mostly empty wineglass she’d been clutching in one fist on her desktop. With rather more theatric care than was strictly necessary. “I may have had a glass of wine. Like any grown-ass woman over the age of twenty-one in this country, not that it’s any of your concern.”
“I think you’ll find it is, in fact, my concern. As is everything else you do. This is unacceptable, all of this. I trusted you.”
“You did not trust me.” Her back was an unfortunately fascinating line, graceful and supple and—stop this. Now. “You delivered a set of instructions you expected me to obey because I always have before. Your failure to notice that I’m not actually as spineless and obedient as you’d like me to be is your issue, not mine. But that’s what happens when you abandon someone for a decade.”
“Again, it appears I must correct you. My issues are your issues when and if I say they are.”
She turned back to face him then, her gaze dark. “Enjoy yourself while you can, Izar. The clock is ticking. You only have two years left to bully me. What happens when your time runs out?”
He had the urge to put his hands on her and show her exactly what could happen—
But no. Of course he did no such thing. He was her guardian, not an animal. And he hadn’t let passion rule him so completely since he was a small boy kicking footballs against crumbling, graffiti-covered walls in his run-down neighborhood, imagining that might transport him out of his dreary life as the unwanted charity case in his resentful uncle’s overcrowded home.
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