“We had sex,” she said some time later, because this new Liliana was nothing if not constitutionally incapable of doing as he wished.
“In case you wondered,” he replied without looking up from his mobile, “I greatly prefer it when you are docile, obedient and quiet. I could do without this provoking, ill-mannered creature you’ve treated me to tonight.”
She let out a crack of laughter that he felt in his sex, like her hands wrapped around him again.
“The provoking, ill-mannered creature is why we had sex,” she pointed out, but her voice wasn’t brazen and carefree the way it had been in her bedroom. There was something else beneath it, hollow and charged at once, that he refused to let scrape at him. He refused. “To the best of my recollection. You didn’t kiss me.”
Izar put down his phone and met her gaze. It cost him to keep his cool, but he’d learned that trick long ago in far more difficult circumstances than these. To at least appear unbothered on the surface when below he was...volcanic.
He couldn’t say he liked the fact that she brought these old ghosts out in him. But now that he knew she could, surely he’d be better prepared. Surely he could keep her from doing any actual damage. He might have succumbed to a hunger he hadn’t known he possessed tonight. He might have been walloped by passion—something he hadn’t believed could happen to him, ever—and he might have done something he’d have imagined was inconceivable only hours before. But he wasn’t going to be taken by surprise again.
Izar had lost his control this once. Only this once.
Once was enough.
“What is it you want?” he asked, razor sharp and ice-cold.
She blinked. “I don’t want anything. I just... We had sex. We. Had sex.” She looked away again, back out toward the road speeding past them in the dark. “I realize that’s something you do a bit more than some, of course. All those busty women who complain in the magazines about your roving eye and so on. So maybe you didn’t notice what happened tonight, but I did.”
Izar had been so sure that the night couldn’t surprise him any further. That she couldn’t. But he was all too able to identify what he felt then, far worse than any old ghosts of his hotheaded youth. It was a dark ribbon of shame, wrapping around him and pulling tight down deep in his gut. Reminding him that whatever else she was, whatever had to happen next between them, Liliana had been an innocent tonight. And she had given herself to him.
She was his and she didn’t even know it.
Izar gave in to an urge he hadn’t known he had and wouldn’t have indulged if he’d thought about it further. He reached over and lifted her, hauling her out of her seat and settling her across his lap. She let out a soft, surprised little sound that raced through his blood and heated it. Then she settled herself against him, and that was an exquisite bit of torture he knew he deserved. She was soft in his arms and her bottom was taut and pressed tight against his lap. She slid her arms around his neck, her gaze solemn in the mix of light and shadow that fell into the back of the car as they raced through the city.
Izar indulged himself. He pulled her closer, holding her where he wanted her so he could taste that mouth of hers again. And again. But a simple taste wasn’t enough, not now he’d had her, and so he drank a little deeper, took a little more—
But he didn’t want to take her in the backseat of a car. Not when he’d taken her virginity in the first place in a grotty old flat. What was happening to him that he would even consider it?
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so close to losing control at all, much less twice in an evening. And he couldn’t have that. He refused to let anyone have that kind of power over him.
But, first, he made his kiss his penance. He owed Liliana at least that much. He let her tremble against him and squirm maddeningly in his lap. He kissed her as if they had all the time in the world, as if there was nothing but the drag of his lips against hers, the touch of their tongues, the sweet burn of her mouth against his.
He kissed her the way he should have earlier. The way a good man might have kissed an innocent. The way a beautiful woman deserved to be kissed, in celebration of her. An act of reverence.
Again and again he tasted her, until he lost track of where he ended and she began. There was nothing but sensation and need and the perfection that was her mouth open beneath his, her soft body in his arms, her need and wonder like a new perfume, surrounding them.
He could have kissed her all night. He thought perhaps he did.
She was breathing hard when he let her go. When he ordered himself to let her go, because the other option was to lose himself inside her again. Here, in the back of a car, like an appalling American pop song. As if he was a man with no restraint, no self-control. Outside the car windows, he could see that they’d left the city behind and had made it out into the western suburbs of the city, which meant they were getting close to the airfield.
What was happening to him? That he should need an external reprieve—that the iron will he had cultivated and made his defining characteristic was no longer sufficient?
“I noticed, Liliana,” he told her gruffly, running his thumb over her impossibly carnal mouth, damp from his. He’d noticed her, first and foremost. He’d certainly noticed they’d had sex. And he’d noticed that somehow, in the middle of all that, his unexpectedly lovely ward had developed a power over him he could never, ever let her know she had. “Believe me.”
Her cheeks reddened again, and he slid her back into her own seat before he gave in to temptation and let the part of him that ached for her the most do his thinking for him. He stared down at his mobile, but he didn’t see a single thing on his screen. Her taste was in his mouth. His hands hurt with the need to touch her again.
He was so deeply in trouble here he hardly knew what to make of it.
But the miles ticked by in the late-fall night, and beside him, Liliana was still. She stared out the windows at the passing lights on the highway, but she didn’t appear to see it any more than he’d been capable of reading his messages. He told himself that was just as well. That this was the Liliana he’d imagined all these years. Quiet, self-effacing. Obedient.
This was the Liliana he wanted as his wife.
Whatever had gotten into her tonight was the aberration, he was certain. And while he couldn’t quite regret that as he should, Izar refused to resign himself to a fractious married life with some strident termagant simply because it might make good business sense. He wouldn’t, come to that. He could chalk up her uncharacteristic behavior to too much wine and far too much unchecked freedom, something Liliana was unlikely to experience again if he had anything to say about it.
And he did.
The benefits of his marrying the Brooks heiress far outweighed any potential ethical questions about his guardianship. Marrying his former partners’ daughter made financial sense, pure and simple. It would consolidate all the company’s power in their marriage—and, more to the point, in his own two hands—and leave no openings for anyone else to get in there and cause trouble.
He assured himself there was absolutely no reason he couldn’t treat her as he always had, with the added benefit of access to her succulent body. Liliana would make him a lovely wife. Izar was not pedigreed in any sense, but he was so wealthy it made people forget that he’d come from less than nothing and had made every last cent at his disposal. Liliana, meanwhile, was blue-blooded enough for the pair of them, dating back a century or two on both sides. Moreover, she would look like a rare gemstone on his arm, polished and gleaming, and their business was one of lavish appearances and exquisite taste on display. He’d meant what he’d told her earlier. She was the heiress to a very particular, very chic and elegant throne. She needed to look the part. Together they would look like an old-school power couple, all understated, high-class elegance. Now that he was allowing himself to consider it, he couldn’t think of anything that would move more product than a high-couture fairy-tale wedding, decked out in
the diamonds, gowns and to-die-for clothes and accessories that made Agustin Brooks Girard the institution it was.
Izar didn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of this before, and much more seriously.
He was congratulating himself on his ability to make colossal mistakes that were actually strokes of brilliance in disguise as the car made it to the airfield at last and drove straight out onto the tarmac. He climbed out, enjoying the slap of the cold air against his face. Then he reached in and pulled Liliana out behind him, delivering instructions to his driver in rapid-fire Spanish as she stood there beside him, looking around in confusion as if she’d never seen a private airfield before.
“Come,” he said, and the sound of his voice made her start. She blinked at him as if she’d never seen him before, either.
Izar took her hand and started toward the plane, and he had almost begun to imagine she would simply obey him the way he’d like when he felt her pull against his hand and slow down.
He could have dragged her. But the fact he even considered doing so appalled him and made him stop walking at once. He was not going to drag Liliana onto this plane. She was going to board it of her own free will.
Or, at least, she would do so because he wished it.
“You look overwhelmed,” he said calmly, a bit coolly, his gaze searching hers. “I feel certain this is not the first time you have seen an airplane, Liliana.”
She looked fragile. That was what was getting beneath his skin, out here in the cold with the November wind cutting through him. He wanted to bundle her up and carry her off somewhere where nothing could threaten her again, not even him.
And he had no idea where such an absurd thought came from.
“Where are we going?” Liliana pressed her lips together as if they were dry. He should not have wanted to taste them to find out. “Are you dragging me off to another prison in the middle of nowhere?”
“Saint Moritz,” he told her. “Not quite the middle of nowhere and certainly not a prison.” He had a very private villa in the hills outside the world-famous ski resort high in the Swiss Alps, though the season wasn’t due to start for another week or so. “You know how to ski, do you not? I thought it was one of the numerous ways your boarding school prepared you for its very narrow, remarkably well-heeled version of life.”
“I haven’t skied since I was a teenager,” she said, frowning, but when he tugged her along with him she kept walking, and there was no reason he should feel that like a victory. “And I can’t go off to Saint Moritz for the weekend. I have things to do here.”
Izar didn’t correct her impression that she was going away for a mere weekend. The aide who traveled with him had stayed behind at her apartment to initiate the emptying of it and would arrive shortly with all of Liliana’s necessary documents. She could figure out she wasn’t coming back at her leisure—in Switzerland, perhaps, when there was even less to be done about it than there was here.
“It is your birthday, Liliana,” he reminded her. “Surely you can be forgiven an indulgence or two.”
She frowned up at him again as they approached the folded-down stairs that stretched from the plane to the tarmac. She paused at the foot, but then she blew out a breath into the night and Izar told himself that feeling rushing through him was not relief as she moved forward. There was no reason his chest should feel so tight, as if he was personally invested in this. In what she did or how she did it. As if it was something more than good sense and good business.
As if the truth was not in the decisions he’d made, but about that flash of fire and the thoughtless tumble he’d taken deep into the heart of it.
Liliana climbed up the stairs and he followed, ushering her into the plane’s lavish cabin that better resembled a very high-end hotel suite. There was no reason she should look around as if she had never been on a plane before. And even less reason that her obvious fragility should...gnaw at him.
She sat down on one of the couches with a certain preciseness to her movements that set off alarms inside of Izar. He tensed where he stood, watching her smooth her hands down her thighs as if gathering strength from her markedly well-made corduroys.
And when Liliana looked at him this time, her blue eyes were uncomfortably clear.
“Why are you pretending to care about me?” she asked. Very calmly. “It’s starting to unnerve me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ever since we got in the car. It’s not like you at all. You sent me a rude little note months ago about my investment portfolio, so I wasn’t expecting to hear from you until spring. The Izar Agustin I know would no more take me on a birthday ski weekend than he would fly naked over the moon.”
“Am I so unpleasant?” he asked drily. “And here I thought I had convinced you otherwise tonight. At some length.”
Her delicate skin flamed red, which only made her look more exquisite and delicate at once, but she still kept her gaze on him, steady and clear.
“I’ve already slept with you, so this can’t possibly be some ham-fisted attempt at seduction.”
Izar was starting to think she had no idea how insulting she was. Because if it was deliberate, it would mean she had the sort of death wish that likely required medical intervention. Meanwhile, he was standing entirely too straight. Like a statue of himself.
“Allow me to assure you that you are the only woman alive who has ever described anything I did, much less my seduction methods, as ham-fisted,” he told her. Stiffly.
“You don’t seduce, Izar. You threaten and overwhelm.” Liliana shrugged, but the offhandedness of the gesture didn’t reach her eyes. “Why waste time on seduction when anything and everything you want is thrown at you? I don’t blame you for being more a sledgehammer than a soft touch.”
There was not one single part of him that wanted to be anything like a soft touch in any respect, and yet he did not particularly care for being called the sledgehammer in this scenario, either. He found his jaw was set.
She was getting to him. Again. It was unacceptable.
“When did you become so unpredictable?” he asked her softly. “I told you I prefer you obedient and docile. The way you have been for years, or, believe me, I would have intervened sooner.”
She smiled. It was not a real smile. It was a sophisticated twist of her lips that made her look every bit the Brooks heiress. Powerful and elegant. It seared through him like a bolt of lightning.
“I should have mentioned this before,” she said in much the same tone he’d used on her. “That was an act.”
“If it was all an act, you would not now spend half your time red in the face when you meet my gaze,” he told her, almost offhandedly, as if the notion she might have been playing him while he’d imagined she was a cossetted princess locked away somewhere safe didn’t bother him. Intensely. “I would be very careful, little girl, that you do not overplay your hand.”
He looked away from his maddening ward when his aide appeared and nodded at him, indicating the man had done as asked and had located her passport. He inclined his head, giving permission for takeoff, and went to take his own seat.
“I’m not playing a game,” she said after a moment, and he noticed with a certain satisfaction that she was looking at the floor, not at him. “I only want to understand.” She waved her hand in the space between them. “You’ve avoided me for a decade. It seems unlike you to suddenly want more time with me.”
“I told you there would be consequences to what happened tonight. Did you imagine I said that to be droll?”
He’d said it to himself, he was aware. But he didn’t tell her that.
“I have never imagined you to be anything remotely like droll.” Her blue eyes met his. “But this is all beginning to sound like a threat.”
He ignored that as the plane started taxiing down the runway, because it was done. He’d made the mistake, yes. But he’d arrived at the solution almost instantly.
“One consequence is this.” He smiled at
her then, and he was surprised to find that he was enjoying himself far more than perhaps he should. “We are getting married.”
CHAPTER FIVE
LILIANA STARED BACK at him in shock as the powerful jet surged down the runway and leaped into the air, telling herself it was the sudden upward thrust into the night sky that made it hard to breathe for a moment. That was all.
It was certainly not that insane part of her that spun a little madly and hummed a bit too loudly at the idea of marrying Izar.
That can’t happen, she told her traitorous body sternly. That can never, ever happen.
Because the very idea was laughable. Of course it was. And not only because he was sitting across from her in this gold-plated and overly polished airplane cabin, as remote and forbidding as if he was one of his chilly letters, studying her with a cold ruthlessness she suspected was typical for him. Not exactly how she’d imagined being proposed to someday, if she was entirely honest with herself.
“I can’t get married,” she told him, once she could speak past the pressure in her head that had precious little to do with altitude.
“Can you not?” Izar was lounging on the low-slung couch opposite her, his arms spread out along its back as if he made marriage proposals seventeen times a day. It made her feel...edgy. “I believe you need only your guardian’s blessing to marry. Between you and me, I suspect he will give it.”
Was that an attempt at levity? From Izar—the last person on earth she’d consider likely to make any sort of joke, ever? Liliana sat up straighter in her own seat. She’d never felt like this before in all her life—simultaneously more aware of her body than she’d ever been before and yet as if she’d been flung across the cabin to observe this impossible scene from afar. She hardly knew how to process it. And Izar, meanwhile, merely sat there in that calm, powerfully restrained way of his, as if he was this close to exploding—though he never did.
“We can’t get married,” she amended after a moment, when she was certain she could tamp down on the riot inside of her and sound at least a little bit like a rational adult.
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