The Guardian's Virgin Ward

by Caitlin Crews

  She knew those memories didn’t exactly help.

  Are you sure you haven’t actually been abducted by aliens after all? Kay texted her one afternoon from back in New York City. Because you never sound as irritated by your “family stuff” as I know I would be...

  Liliana was curled up in one of the big, cozy armchairs with a book and a hot chocolate made by the excellent kitchen staff. It was already gathering dark outside, telling her more eloquently than any calendar could that the end of the year was coming. And for someone who had claimed to be held against her will—imprisoned—she certainly seemed very comfortable. She eyed her hot chocolate a bit sourly.

  That depends on your definition of “aliens,” she texted back, looking around at the great room she’d already adjusted to—perhaps too easily, now that she thought about it. Maybe that had been Izar’s plan all along.

  “Alien abduction” was as good an explanation as any other for the Izar Effect.

  Izar—or his minions, more accurately—had removed every last thing she’d owned from that apartment. Every stitch of clothing in her closet, every product she’d ever touched in the bathroom or pot she’d used in the kitchen, everything. Her roommates had woken up the following morning to find a stripped bed, an empty closet and nothing in her desk. It was as if she’d never lived there.

  Needless to say, her friends had been upset.

  Izar, by contrast, had been perfectly calm when she’d burst into his office the day after they’d arrived in Switzerland and had accused him of deliberately trying to scare her friends half to death.

  “They thought something terrible happened to me,” she’d snapped at him, brandishing her mobile at him as if it was the weapon she’d wished it was. “It can’t possibly have been necessary to scrub me out of there as if I never existed.”

  “There is no scenario in which I am going to view your escape from that hovel as anything but a victory, Liliana,” Izar had replied, without bothering to glance up at her from whatever he was studying on his laptop. As if she wasn’t even really in the room with him. “You are wasting your breath.”

  “It was also a waste of time and resources,” she’d thrown at him. “Because I’m moving right back in the moment I get back home to New York. You can count on it.”

  At that, Izar had raised his dark gaze from his laptop and settled it on her.

  He hadn’t said a word.

  She’d told herself she’d felt the bars of this prison of his slide tighter around her, even so.

  But is it really a prison? she asked herself now, sitting up straighter in her chair and putting her book aside. If it is, why haven’t you tried—even once—to escape? He’s locked away in his office. You’re lounging around completely unsupervised. You could be down the mountain and on your way back to New York in a few hours. Why aren’t you?

  Liliana didn’t have an answer for that. Not one that she was willing to entertain, anyway. It was easier to tell herself that she was biding her time here. Looking for her moment.

  Just as it was easier to tell her friends that she’d been abducted by aliens—no really, I’m fine and just navigating some tricky family stuff, she’d texted as merrily as possible once she’d realized she’d be in Switzerland awhile, because what could they do?—than attempt to explain the reality of Izar. The guardian she’d never known and yet now knew... Biblically. And only the once.

  How would that conversation go?

  For one thing, she would have to come clean about who she was. For another, Izar was nothing short of maddening. He was never kind when he could be blunt, instead. He was merciless in all things. He was the bane of her existence, but he was also the man who had presented her with a set of trunks the morning after they’d arrived in Saint Moritz, stuffed full of what she knew at a glance were clothes from the company’s couture houses.

  She knew those inspired, eclectic lines. She knew those quietly elegant cuts. The fabrics and the colors. Of course she knew. She was the last Girard.

  The lump in her throat hadn’t gone away, no matter how many times she swallowed.

  “You are your mother’s daughter,” Izar had told her when she’d only gazed at him, right there in the great foyer, unable to process what he’d done. More, what it meant. Her heart had pounded so hard she thought it might knock her over. “It is time to dress the part.”

  The first night in Saint Moritz, Izar had sent her back to rooms twice before he’d judged her appropriately dressed and allowed her to take her place at the dinner table—not that she’d had any interest in eating with him after that.

  “There aren’t actually a great many occasions to dress like this in my life,” she’d seethed at him, sitting ramrod straight in her chair, feeling flushed and out of sorts because she wasn’t her damned mother. No pretty dress was going to turn her into Clothilde Girard, and it was insulting—and painful—to try. “I’m an intern, not Cinderella.”

  “You are Liliana Girard Brooks,” he’d corrected her softly yet with that iron beneath it, daring her to contradict him. “You were born to wear these clothes.”

  She’d balled her hands into fists in her lap and glared fiercely at her first course, unable to see it through the haze of her grief and fear and discomfort. And the fury she’d channeled it all into and aimed straight at him.

  “I don’t belong in these clothes. They don’t suit me. I look like a girl at a sad prom in a dress that’s much too old for her.”

  “You sound like a petulant child,” Izar had interjected. It had gotten her head up, her gaze on his. He’d sat across from her the way he always did in the formal dining room, there on one end of the highly polished rustic long table. “But if one can look past that unpleasantness and the scowl you are wearing for no apparent reason, you remain a beautiful woman in a dress that fits you perfectly and is itself a minor work of art.” He’d raised his dark brows. “Do you wish to be a work of art, Liliana? Or would you prefer to be mediocre?”

  She had glared at him because that was easier than exploring all the things that rolled through her then, huge and heavy and dark. History and longing and more grief and him, besides, careening around inside of her and making her feel too big for her own skin, much less the beautiful dress she wore.

  “If mediocre means unmarried and left to my own devices and free,” she’d bit out, “I choose that.”

  He’d only tipped his wineglass at her, as if he’d long since given up attempting to reason with her.

  “Think less about your freedom, gatita,” he’d said softly. “And more about your legacy.”

  Every night since had been a variation on the same theme. Liliana didn’t know how long it took her to understand that while this might be another sort of prison, it was also Izar’s personal version of finishing school. He was molding her into the perfect wife. His perfect wife. Night after night.

  “I’m not your Frankenstein,” she’d told him roughly a week into it. He’d spent the whole of their dinner lecturing her on how to talk to the different sort of pompous men she was likely to encounter while out at supposedly social business occasions. She’d scowled at him when he’d gazed back at her in arrogant astonishment. “You can’t cut me up into pieces and then sew me back together into some new, improved version of me that does nothing but your bidding.”

  “Have I cut you into pieces, Liliana?” She hated when his voice went calm like that. As if he was fending off a child’s tantrum. “I might expect there to be rather more blood, if so. I was under the impression I was explaining your place in the world.”

  “Your world, not mine,” she’d insisted.

  But he’d stopped bothering to reply to her when she made that particular accusation. And she knew why. Because with every day that passed, she betrayed herself. She became more comfortable in the clothes she wore, because he insisted she wear them. Cashmere sweaters and soft trousers when she would have chosen a sweatshirt and jeans. Layering pieces in soft wools or suedes when she would have gravit
ated toward basic fleece. All of her choices so far beyond anything a college student might have worn that she was forced to stop thinking of herself as one. And soon after, she stopped feeling like an imposter when she stepped into one of the evening dresses that waited for her in her dressing room each night. She started taking a little more care with her hair, rather than simply throwing it back in her usual haphazard twist. She thought a bit harder about her accessories and her shoes. It was if she was starting to see herself as he did.

  She was doing his job for him, she often thought with something like despair when she looked at her inarguably elegant reflection in her mirror. She was turning herself into his perfect wife.

  Yet, somehow, she couldn’t seem to stop.

  Tonight she wore a piece from one of the current collections, a gown in a shade of violet that swept from a cunning, wide ruffle on one shoulder all the way to the floor, leaving the other shoulder bare. She’d arranged her hair in a complicated chignon made of individually chunky braids swept back and gathered at the nape of her neck, and she’d added a pair of diamond drop earrings that had once belonged to her mother. Then she’d even gone so far as to dab a hint of her favorite perfume at her pulse points.

  She hadn’t asked herself why she’d taken the trouble. Or maybe it was more accurate to say she’d deliberately avoided asking herself such questions until she was walking down the great stair toward the dining room as the grandfather clock chimed out the time.

  Izar stood at the bottom, wearing a dark suit that managed to accentuate his natural athleticism while turning all that brooding ruthlessness into a kind of hard-edged elegance. He looked like the sort of wolfish Prince Charming girls didn’t quite dare dream about. He looked like he knew how to use his hands. And he watched her come toward him with an almost arrested look on his hard face, that muscle in his cheek flexing—and his eyes on the high slit of the dress that reached toward her upper thigh.

  Liliana wanted to say something—anything—to break this spell that worsened every night and was particularly lethal just then. It was dangerous to stay quiet when he was looking at her like that. It was more than dangerous. She knew she was risking...everything.

  But she didn’t say a word.

  He met her at the bottom of the stair and offered her his arm. So formal and correct, it should have made her laugh. How silly was this? They were staying in the same house. They could as easily eat dinner in sweats for all it would matter. This was nothing more than an extended game of dress up and make-believe—

  But she didn’t laugh.

  A strange sort of exhilaration was coursing through her, making her feel alive in a way she never had when she was back in New York. It had something to do with the man who moved with such brutal precision beside her. It was something in the way the exquisitely made dress swept against her skin as she walked, like a caress. It was something about his arm beneath hers, hard and corded and warm.

  When he led her to her seat and helped her into it, Liliana felt fluttery. Light-headed. She told herself she was simply hungry—but then Izar took his seat across from her and she knew better. It was that hungry gleam in his dark, dark eyes. It was the way he studied her as if he knew every single thing she was thinking and feeling, and had every intention of using them against her.

  He made no attempt to break the silence between them, and Liliana thought she might explode.

  “How did you meet my parents?” she asked him. She hadn’t meant to ask that. But it had occurred to her that she didn’t know the answer, and surely she should. Oh, she’d read the articles that gushed about their partnership, but articles weren’t reality. They were spin. One thing Izar could be depended upon not to do was spin. “I realize I have no idea how you came to know them.”

  She thought he looked surprised, in his ruthlessly capable way. But if he was, he hid it in an instant, his hard face revealing nothing. That was the strangest part of getting to know this man better. The more she spent time with him, the less she could read him.

  “Your mother was a fútbol fan,” he said after a moment. His dark eyes flashed with something very nearly affectionate. “Quite a passionate one, in fact.”

  The first course came as Liliana digested that. When the staff retreated from the dining room, there were pretty plates of country pâté with a jubilant garnish of chutney and pickle, accompanied by baskets of freshly baked bread. But even though her stomach felt scraped empty, she concentrated on Izar, instead.

  “My mother was a fan?” She blinked, trying to reconcile the idea of her mother in fútbol regalia—face paints and ribald songs—with her memories and all those photographs of an aristocratic fashion icon, elegant and serene. “Are you sure?”

  This time that affectionate look took over the whole of his face. Liliana had never seen an expression like that on him. Not ever, not in the hundreds of photographs she’d pored over. And certainly not since he’d appeared in her bedroom on her birthday. Until this moment she’d have said the man was wholly incapable of it. Something scraped at her deep inside, dark and ugly, making her breath feel shallow.

  “Your father preferred a bit of rugby, but your mother was a fútbol fanatic,” Izar confirmed. Was that a smile that lurked around his mouth then? “Once I retired from the game and started in business, she sought me out. As much because she’d enjoyed watching me play as because she had any particular interest in what I was doing in my post-fútbol career. I think it was an excuse.” He definitely smiled then, with an ease Liliana had never seen on his face before. She’d have said it was impossible. Something deep inside of her clenched tight. “But once she met me, things changed.”

  Liliana couldn’t breathe. “Are you...are you saying that you and my mother...?”

  Izar’s gaze met hers then, something like startled. Then he laughed, as much in surprise as amusement.

  “Certainly not,” he said after a moment. “Your mother was kind to me, yet wanted nothing from me. This, you must understand, was highly unusual.”

  Liliana sniffed. “Because you are usually knee-deep in clamoring women, all of whom are desperate for a piece of you.”

  There was something very male in his dark gaze then. It wound through Liliana, making her feel flushed. Needy. She directed her attention to her untouched plate and hoped he couldn’t see that she was flustered.

  “You would be surprised,” Izar murmured. He clearly knew exactly how flustered she felt. “Sometimes I am doing nothing but minding my own business when women strip down and offer themselves to me. Can you imagine?”

  It occurred to her that he was teasing her. That this odd version of Izar who felt things and laughed with an ease she could hardly believe she was witnessing was poking at her, nothing more. There was a part of her that had longed for something like this all these lonely years when she’d been lonely and alone, with only the occasional letter to remind her someone out there was invested in whether she lived or died. But she couldn’t bear that it happen on the back of that night in her apartment.

  She couldn’t bear it. And she had no idea why.

  “But my mother, presumably, was not one of the naked masses,” Liliana said, instead, perfectly aware that she sounded dour and even harsh. Missish in the extreme.

  Izar’s gaze turned speculative, but he didn’t comment on it.

  “We had a long dinner in Berlin.” He shrugged. “We got along well. More than this, we had similar ideas about the future and our businesses. It seemed like fate to merge.”

  “I would have said the great Izar Agustin believed in himself and his own glory, not fate.” Was that bitterness in her tone? Was she actually...jealous of a dinner that had occurred when she was a small child? “Or is that more something you say to make others feel badly about themselves and not something you actually believe?”

  Izar studied her from across the table for what seemed a very long time, or perhaps it was simply that she felt so...small.

  “If you feel badly about yourself, Lili
ana, I have only one suggestion.” He reached for his wine, his gaze never shifting from hers. “Stop.”

  “Yes, thank you.” She felt drawn tight into a mean little ball and she couldn’t seem to stop it. Nor do anything to temper her hard tone of voice. As if she wanted to bludgeon him with it. “That’s very useful advice. Exactly the sort men like you give with no earthly idea that some people are not born with your particular gifts and privileges.”

  Izar blinked. Then seemed to turn to stone right there before her eyes.

  You did that, a voice inside her hissed. You made him go dark again.

  “Izar—” she began, because she regretted it.

  But he cut her off with a look so black it made her toes curl in her fanciful shoes.

  “I cannot imagine what goes on in your head,” he bit out, his voice like iron. Worse than mere iron. Blacker by far.

  He didn’t move from his seat. He didn’t burst through the bespoke suit he wore or explode into a rage. He didn’t reach across the table and choke her. And yet Liliana felt as if he’d crushed her. Set her on fire. Thrown her out the window that loomed behind her though she knew she hadn’t moved an inch. All with the searing way he studied her then, fury like a live thing pressed against the bones of his beautifully chiseled face.

  “But it is more than a mere insult for the Brooks heiress herself to sit at my table and lecture me about gifts and privileges.” Izar laughed, though this time, there was nothing remotely amused in the harsh scrape of sound. “I was born in a jail cell to an unwed mother, Liliana, in a time and place where her unwed status was considered a sin far greater than her petty drug offenses. They told me I was fortunate I wasn’t sold on the black market like so many others. Oddly, I did not think I was very lucky at all. My mother got out when I was two and raised me, if that is what such dedicated neglect can be called, in a variety of slums and on the street until she abandoned me altogether. I was four. My uncle reluctantly took me in, this wild homeless savage he was related to by blood and a sister he had long since disavowed, because it was the right thing to do—not because he or his wife wanted anything to do with an unmanageable bastard like me.”