The Guardian's Virgin Ward

by Caitlin Crews

  She told herself that’s exactly what she was.

  But the brazen, carefree creature she’d been playing all night seemed to have deserted her, and Liliana was very much her usual self as she reached down toward the foot of the bed for the quilt. The better to hide herself away before she died of embarrassment, lying here naked and exposed in front of her fully clothed guardian.

  He must have heard her move, because he glanced up and caught her gaze. She froze, not wanting him to see her cover herself, because surely that would tell him all sorts of things she didn’t want him to know. But not covering herself meant she was...uncovered.

  And he was Izar.

  Liliana was sure she turned even more hues of scalding red, because she could feel the way she flushed and how her skin felt tight and itchy. Everywhere. Izar, by contrast, could have been a field of freshly fallen snow for all the discomfort he showed. If he felt anything at all—and despite what she’d been so sure of when they’d been locked together on this bed, Liliana had no idea if that had been nothing more than her own wishful thinking—it didn’t show.

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  She’d spent a decade parsing every word he said in interviews. His inflection, his tone, the look in his eyes as he said it. Liliana had long considered herself something of an expert when it came to reading him. She’d been sure she could see when he was amused, impatient—all while he stood and let the press have their way with him.

  But tonight she got nothing. He was entirely neutral—or entirely shut down and self-contained. She couldn’t read his darkly handsome face one way or another, and that hollow thing inside her seemed to yawn wider. It was hard to imagine this was the same man who had just surrendered to the same passion she had. If she hadn’t been there herself, she’d have been certain it wasn’t possible.

  “I thought maybe I’d take a nice warm bath,” she managed to say. Compared to earlier, she was sure she sounded subdued. Well, there was no helping that. “But thank you.”

  “Not that thing you were wearing earlier,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. The very physical manifestation of his dismissive, condescending letters over the years. You are too young for Paris. Or, There is no reason at all for the Brooks heiress to immerse herself in unnecessary theater courses. “Something more suitable for a woman of your station, I think.”

  Liliana didn’t want to do what he asked, purely to spite him. But cowering on her bed, naked and at his mercy, was also less than appealing. She gritted her teeth and she climbed out of the bed. She wanted to snap something at him, throw something, say something cutting about his bedside manner—but refrained. He would reply, in all likelihood. That was the trouble. All the fights she’d had with him before tonight had been entirely in her head.

  And losing her virginity might not have hurt the way Madame had always direly promised it would, but Liliana had no doubt whatsoever that if Izar wanted, he could tear her apart with a few words. She contented herself with wild fantasies of a variety of painful ways to rend him to pieces as he simply stood there, eyes on his phone, while she moved past him with as much dignity as she could muster.

  Stark naked.

  Honesty compelled her to admit, if only to herself, that she didn’t know if she was more stung by the fact that he was ordering her around as if nothing had changed between them tonight—or the fact he was apparently perfectly content to ignore her while he did it.

  Her closet wasn’t so much a walk-in as it was half-empty, so she stepped inside it as best she could and pretended it was a separate, private dressing room. She let her gaze move over her careful collection of wardrobe staples, trying to decide what Izar meant when he said suitable. There was a part of her that seriously considered throwing on a bikini and a pair of absurd heels for the pure joy of messing with him, but she thought better of it in the next instant. She’d pushed enough boundaries for one night. Heaven help her if he pushed back.

  Liliana pulled on a much-beloved pair of upscale corduroys, the fine-gauge wales buttery soft to the touch, her favorite sweater that also happened to be a quiet sort of classic that was as easily worn at church as out to dinner, and a far more sensible pair of knee-high boots than the ones she’d been wearing. She twisted her hair out of her way and knotted it at the nape of her neck without having to glance in a mirror, one of the more useful skills she’d learned in boarding school. It was a favorite casual work outfit, and just like that she looked pulled together. It was as suitable as she could get when all she really wanted was to sink into a very hot bath and process what the hell had happened here tonight.

  Here. Inside her. To her.

  With him.

  When she stepped back into the bedroom, Izar had put his phone away and was watching her. With an intent, dark focus that made something inside of her twist into a knot, then shiver. Liliana had wanted that only moments before, yet now she thought she might have preferred it if he’d continued to ignore her.

  His eyes were too black. An inky midnight with that glitter she still couldn’t read though it made her feel soft and hot all over again.

  Worse, she thought he could tell.

  “Satisfied?” she asked as brusquely as possible, to divert attention from the red in her cheeks. She held her arms out from her sides, trying to channel the crazy person who had inhabited her body earlier and thrown herself at him. Images and remembered sensations threatened to pour over her, but she fought them back. It was that or crawl into a ball in the corner and stay that way for an ice age or two, and she doubted he’d let that happen. “Do I pass the mysterious Izar Agustin prostitute test?”

  “The test has nothing to do with me.” His voice was such a dark confection. Her body thrilled to it. Something turned over, deep inside her, and pulsed. “It is about you. Who you are, not who I am.”

  “Maybe I want the Brooks heiress to be known for her daring fashion choices.” She shook her head at him, hoping she looked more certain of that than she felt. “Or for failing to make any fashion choices at all, and simply walking around in regular clothes like anyone else.”

  “But I do not,” Izar said quietly. When she glared at him, he shifted slightly, then sighed. And there was no reason she should have felt that like some kind of tiny victory when she didn’t even know what it meant. His gaze was level. Steady. “You own half of some of the finest couture houses in the world. Your name is synonymous with luxury. Your taste must necessarily be widely regarded as impeccable. That means there is no room for childish flirtations with the execrable trends your collegiate friends think are fashionable. You do not follow trends, gatita. You cannot. You are Liliana Girard Brooks, and you must set them.” He nodded toward the door before she could process that. Any of that. “And it is time for us to go.”

  Momentum and habit had her through the door and into Kay’s bedroom before she knew what she was doing. Liliana checked her roommate’s bed as a reflex and was relieved to find it empty, for once. But she stopped dead on the far side of the small room and turned back to face him.

  “Wait. Where exactly are we going?”

  “Date prisa,” he muttered impatiently, and clearly not to her. He reached past her and pushed open the next door, then guided her through it with a not precisely gentle hand in the small of her back. “I am not going to stand in a stranger’s bedroom in this appalling flat discussing my plans or my agenda, thank you.”

  She let him move her through Jules’s darkened room, where snores from the bed suggested all sorts of things that she was certain Izar would take the wrong way. Sure enough, the look he slanted down at her as they stepped out into the living room was condemning. To put it mildly.

  “These are the people you choose to live with?” he asked, his voice as scathing as that look. “This is the life you want for yourself?”

  She might not have felt particularly bold in the aftermath of...whatever that had been. But it was one thing to snipe at her. Liliana could take that on the chin if necessary. What she
refused to tolerate was listening to him cast his nasty aspersions on her friends.

  “Are you about to make one of your snide little comments about virtue, Izar?” she asked him. “Aren’t you afraid your hypocrisy will choke you if you dare?” She waited that simmering, deliberate beat. “Sir?”

  Izar went very still, in a manner that made her think of dark forests and the predatory things that lived there, lurking. His face was like a blade in the shadows of this far corner of the living room. A very sharp, very lethal blade—but she didn’t back down. She couldn’t, no matter how little her wobbly knees seemed to want to challenge him. She might dress as he dictated and follow his orders by rote, but she couldn’t let him insult her friends. She simply couldn’t.

  “Get your coat, Liliana,” he said. Very quietly yet with utter authority. She felt it move inside of her, as if his words were tipped in iron. “We are leaving this place. Now.”

  Liliana stared back at him. She heard the television from the main part of the living room, something involving grand explosions. And there were a few voices farther away, as if there were still people gathered in the kitchen the way there always were at parties. And she’d certainly heard that note of finality in Izar’s voice.

  “You can’t actually force me to leave with you,” she pointed out.

  Unwisely.

  An unholy light flared in Izar’s dark gaze then, slamming into her even as he reached across the distance that separated them and took her chin in his hand. Not in any kind of hard or bruising grip, but not exactly gently, either. She didn’t know what was more overwhelming, that light in the darkness of his eyes or the definitive way his hand curled around her jaw. Or maybe the fact her body didn’t seem to care how he touched her, so long as he did, and hummed.

  She understood that humming now. That prickling sensation. She knew exactly what it meant.

  “Listen to me very carefully, Liliana,” Izar said, each word like a bullet. “I am not playing these games with you. You are mine.”

  She didn’t react to that. Of course she didn’t react to that. It didn’t burst open inside her and make her feel...a bright many things she had no intention of naming. It certainly didn’t make her tremble—helpless and needy and despite herself—which he could almost certainly feel as his hand gripped her chin, forcing her to keep her eyes on his.

  And Izar wasn’t finished. “And nothing of mine is staying in this hovel. I do not care at all how you leave this dire place. I’ll carry you out kicking and screaming if I must.”

  Liliana wanted to divert his attention from her silly reaction to him, to what he’d said. To you are mine, which he likely meant the way he meant it about, say, his cars. His famous collection of astoundingly expensive timepieces too artisanal to be called mere watches. His scattered investment properties in every gorgeous corner of the world, from the untouched sands of far-off Pacific Islands to high in the mighty European Alps. Not...how it had sounded.

  Possessive. Hungry.

  “They’ll stop you,” she warned him.

  “Who will?” Izar’s voice was scornful. “These drunken children at the end of yet another run-of-the-mill debaucherous evening? I doubt that very much, even if they could stand.” His grip on her chin tightened. “The choice is yours. Walk out with some measure of dignity or go out over my shoulder like a child in the midst of a tantrum. I do not particularly care which you choose. The outcome will be the same either way.”

  She didn’t know how she kept herself from shaking even harder then. How she kept the emotion that threatened to swamp her from spilling out in tears, which would shame her beyond reason. Or how she managed to meet and hold that lethal glare of his.

  “I want to know where we’re going,” she managed to say, and she thought she almost sounded in control—

  But then his hard mouth curved, and she realized belatedly that the question itself implied the surrender she hadn’t quite meant to hand over so easily. If at all.

  “I want a great many things,” he told her, and Liliana could hear the very male, very stark triumph in his voice. She could see it on the face she knew, somehow, she’d never again think was anything but beautiful no matter how overbearing or awful he was, and it was the same as handing him a weapon.

  “Life is unfair, gatita.” It was as if Izar read her mind. He let go of her and jutted his strong chin in the direction of the front door, and that look on his hard face dared her to challenge him. “Start walking or prepare to be hauled out of here. Now.”

  * * *

  Izar didn’t give his ward time to stage any more protest scenes, however ineffectual. The moment she made her choice and started walking toward the door, stiff legged and clearly furious as she grabbed her coat from the line of pegs on the wall, he hurried her out of that ghastly apartment and into the decidedly sketchy stairwell, which was an improvement only because it meant they were leaving. No time for goodbyes to the drunken idiots who remained, splayed out on the couches and the sticky floor. No chance for any second thoughts.

  By the time they made it to street level, his initial fury was back and at the boiling point.

  He told himself it was about the fact she’d lived in such an unsafe place. That she’d lied to him. That she seemed to have absolutely no sense of who she was and her place in this world and had made herself a target for a worm of a paparazzo.

  “I suggest you refrain from speaking to me until we are out of this neighborhood and I can forget it exists,” he growled at her when they were finally safely in the back of his waiting car and speeding away from this benighted place.

  She should have been grateful, of course. The twelve-year-old he’d been imagining all this time would have been, he was sure of it. This Liliana shot him a look that suggested all kinds of insulting things, none of them her gratitude. She sat on the whisper-soft seat next to him, close enough that her scent was in his head and driving him mad all over again, and scowled. At him.

  “I don’t think you’re doing a very good job.”

  “As your guardian? I could not agree more.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Izar shrugged. “There are always consequences. I feel certain I mentioned that.”

  What he was certain of was that no one in his entire life had ever looked at him the way she did then. As if he was a crashing bore and she was barely able to tolerate his presence. He, who routinely declined the naked invitations of crowds of stunning women wherever he went. He, who was regularly hailed as one of the most eligible bachelors in the entire world. He could click his fingers together in any country on earth and have battalions of women and men alike prostrate before him, desperate to do his bidding, yet this little twenty-three-year-old who’d spent her life locked away in convent-like boarding schools and women’s colleges found him tiresome. It was so outrageous it was almost funny.

  Almost.

  “You should have mentioned that these consequences would involve racing around the freezing cold city late in the night when all I wanted was a warm bath,” she told him in a tone he could hardly fail to notice was completely devoid of any respect. “I thought you meant, you know, a tedious lecture on my vague responsibilities you might or might not allow me to take on one day. Not torture.”

  And everything was different now. Izar’s hands itched to grab her and haul her into his lap, the better to teach her the sort of object lessons he craved to impart in this particular mood—but he had to play this correctly. If he knew anything about his ward, it was that she was far more bloody-minded and stubborn than she should have been. That ramshackle apartment was proof. How she’d lowered herself to live in such a place when she didn’t have to he would never know—but the fact she had meant he had to carefully ease her into a new future.

  Because he’d planned it all out. The single course of action available to him, having betrayed himself and his responsibilities so spectacularly, had come to him in a rush while he’d still been in her bed.

  T
he truth was that Izar Agustin could not date the Brooks heiress, known the world over to be his ward. He should never have slept with her, but having done so, he could not ignore it. He could not have any kind of casual relationship with the woman who owned half his company and would run it with him, as an equal, in two short years.

  He’d touched her. He’d taken her. He’d claimed her innocence.

  This meant he would have to keep her. Marry her. Make her his in every conceivable way, forever. There was no just this once, no so-called birthday gifts, no playing around with the future he’d dedicated his whole life to preserving for her. There was no going back from this epically bad decision.

  It almost amused him that of all the many women in the world who would have swooned with glee at the very notion of marrying him, he’d located the only one he knew who would definitely not have that reaction when he told her the good news. Quite the opposite, in fact. But he had always done what was best for her. Whatever else might have changed tonight, that had not.

  So he didn’t tell her.

  He didn’t respond to her deliberate provocation. He didn’t engage. He ignored her the way he always had before this night that he refused to view as catastrophic. It was a change, certainly. It might cause some comment when it became public, but when had he not caused comment? He was Izar Agustin. He’d decided this sudden shift in their relationship was an opportunity, and so it would prove.

  Izar sat back in his appropriately well-appointed car and let his driver whisk them off toward the private airfield where his plane waited. He fired off emails to his staff as his bride-to-be sat beside him, quite obviously fuming into the night. He would have every last trace of her removed from that apartment before dawn, as if she’d never set foot in the Bronx at all, which would make it difficult to take the pictures necessary for a truly damaging tabloid exposé. He would erase this entire chapter of her life. And by the time she really understood what was happening, he intended to be on a plane and far away, when it would be far too late for her to do anything about it.