The Guardian's Virgin Ward

by Caitlin Crews

  “I didn’t mean—” she tried.

  Izar ignored her. His mouth was grim, his eyes ablaze. “I had a ball. That was it. I kicked it against the walls of the falling-down slum my uncle lived in because I wanted to kick it at his self-righteous head. I kicked it through the streets while I outran the police, the priests, and whoever else chased me. That was all I did. There was no cushion. No way out. Nothing but my feet and my fury and the goddamned ball.” He was so still. Too taut. And Liliana couldn’t think of any way to stop what she’d started. “I made every last thing I own. I sweated for it. I sacrificed for it, body and soul. And then I blew out my knees and I started all over again. I made myself into the man I am—twice over—and I made the world I live in, too. And then there is you. What have you made? Except more problems for me to solve?”

  “Please.” Her voice was hoarse, and shame was a thick pool inside of her, black and sullen. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “That,” he bit out, “has been apparent for some time.”

  Liliana cleared her throat. She felt shaken, all the way through, and she took a moment to sip at her wine and calm herself as best she could.

  “What happened to your mother?” she asked. She snuck a look at him and instantly regretted the question. “If you don’t mind me asking. I only wondered...”

  “I have no idea.” His voice was cold but lacking the simmering fury of before. Perhaps foolishly, Liliana opted to take that as a good thing. “She could still be alive. Or she could have overdosed somewhere with nothing to identify her. I cannot say I care either way.”

  For a long time after that, there was nothing but silence. The scrape and mild clatter of silver utensils against fine china. The faint sounds of classical music piped in from one of the speakers. The candles danced in their delicate holders and the wind kissed the windows from time to time, but there was nothing in the dining room except for the genteel chill of an elegant meal gone wrong.

  “I’m glad,” she dared to say when she thought the quiet might kill her. Actually suffocate her and leave her for dead. “That you and my parents got along so well, I mean. It’s nice to think of them having happy dinners in Berlin.”

  She didn’t say even with you, the way she might have earlier. She still hadn’t processed everything he’d told her about his childhood, or that dark fury she’d seen in him that she suspected might be the truth about Izar Agustin.

  He didn’t look at her when he finally spoke. “Your parents were good friends, Liliana. Very good friends. I have felt their loss every day since.”

  There was no reason for that to feel like a slap. She wasn’t even sure he’d meant it that way. But Liliana was acutely aware that she was likely exactly as spoiled and self-centered as he’d claimed she was. Because it had never occurred to her that Izar had lost something the day her parents had died. It had never crossed her mind that he’d had an entire relationship with them she knew nothing about. She had certainly never imagined for an instant that they’d been friends. That he might have mourned them, too.

  She wasn’t sure what it said about her that she’d never considered their role in her guardian’s life, when they’d clearly thought well enough of him to leave him their daughter, as well as their business, but she doubted it was anything good.

  The dinner wore on. One course bled into the next and slowly, Izar seemed, if not to thaw, precisely, to grow less obviously furious. Less deeply black with suppressed rage, in any case. Soon enough he was quizzing her the way he did every night, forever poking and prodding her toward whatever vision he had of her in his head—only tonight, Liliana found the return to form almost a relief.

  “I didn’t realize you took time out from fútbol and world domination to become the world’s foremost authority on manners and decorum,” she said lightly during the salad course. She smiled at him, and for once it was not entirely feigned. “You are a man of many talents.”

  “I am trying to ascertain what, if anything, you learned in that boarding school.” He sounded like himself again, which was to say, forbidding and disapproving. What was happening to Liliana that she should feel that as a victory? “Thus far it appears I paid exorbitant tuition fees for no good reason at all. I might as well have set you loose on the streets of Europe to fend for yourself for all the good your education did you.”

  “I managed to get into college,” she pointed out. “Possibly because the admissions department thought my grades were more important than my ability to smile mysteriously at old men who try to paw me at fund-raisers.”

  She expected Izar to deliver one of his cutting remarks. Or perhaps fix her with one of his skin-prickling glares. The usual.

  But this was not a usual night. And perhaps she should have recognized that she’d already pushed him too far.

  He pushed back from the table and stood in a single movement that managed to be both graceful and shockingly brutal at once, as if all the violence and power he held within him was visible and dancing there in the taut lines of his body. Her heart kicked at her. Hard.

  “I understand that you find this absurd,” he growled at her, his voice low. “But I am not here to cater to you, Liliana. I am here to turn you into a peerless gem among women, admired by all the world. I want every man to want you and every woman to wish she was you. This will not happen while you are holed up in a desperate apartment in the Bronx drinking beer and pretending you are one of the proletariat.”

  “I never did anything of the sort!” she protested, unduly stung. She scowled at him. “I don’t even like beer, thank you very much.”

  “You have every advantage it is possible to have in this world, yet you feel victimized by your own good fortune,” he said then, and this was worse than before. Far worse. Then he’d been in a temper, wild and rough. Now he was precise. Ruthless and unapologetic. “Your own name. You have been blessed in every possible way—your beauty, your fortune, your entire life—”

  “My life?” She was reeling from the blow, but she sat even straighter in her seat, her gaze fixed on his. “I was fortunate to be born who I was, I grant you. But I was also orphaned. Then left in the care of a man who had no time for me, hated and sent me off to languish in isolation. Out of sight, out of mind. I’m sorry if you consider that a blessing. I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “I know you were orphaned,” Izar gritted out. “But there was nothing I could do to ease that blow. No one could. Instead, I sent you somewhere you could spend your days with aristocrats and royals who had been raised as you were while being watched over by highly vetted women of excellent caliber, all of whom were paid exorbitant fees to ensure your health and happiness. Exactly what comfort do you imagine I, a stranger to you, and merely a man myself could possibly have offered you at such a time?”

  “I wanted...”

  But she didn’t dare finish that sentence. She no longer knew how she’d finish it. This was a long-overdue conversation, perhaps, but she wasn’t a ward having it with her guardian. Or that wasn’t all they were, not anymore.

  And she understood, suddenly, that the fact everything had changed was what was burning along beneath every interaction they’d had. It was the elephant looming in the corner of every room in this villa.

  It was the one thing neither one of them dared address.

  Liliana had no memory of rising to her own feet, but there she was, standing on her side of the table as if they were squared off and ready to fight. She knew she should sit down. She knew she should do something to calm him down or, failing that, to end the conversation altogether. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was almost as if she was...strangely exhilarated.

  Liliana had never seen Izar like this. She hadn’t imagined he could even get like this. His black eyes burned. He was taut and almost vibrating with the temper she could feel pouring off him—until she stepped away from the table, making her dress move with her and revealing that long stretch of her leg visible through the high slit.

 
His black gaze dropped to her leg as if he couldn’t quite help himself. And she recognized that look on his arrogant, beautiful face, then. She’d seen it before, across the world in her apartment in the Bronx, moments before he’d taken her to her own bed.

  And everything shifted.

  The world. Her own temper and that exhilarated, drumming thing that coursed through her. That hard knot so low in her belly and the pressure she didn’t like to admit was there around her heart.

  Because she might not know a great deal about men. She had only scratched the surface with Izar, for that matter. But everything had changed in her bedroom that night whether they discussed it or not, and she knew—she knew—he wanted her.

  In that moment, Liliana understood that he wanted to touch her more than he wanted anything else. It was why he’d stood. It was why he was so angry. It was very likely why he was so damned controlling all the time.

  She knew this, deep and hard and true, as if she’d known it all along.

  Her mind reeled, almost unable to take it in. All the implications. She’d spent so long comparing herself unfavorably to her own mother that she’d never stopped to question the fact that Izar kept telling her she was beautiful. She’d assumed it was more of his same old game, some part of his bid to get the Brooks heiress parading around in company designs while under his influence.

  But what if it wasn’t that—or not only that?

  What if this darkly handsome, impossibly attractive man really did find her as beautiful as he claimed? What if the way he’d touched her back in the Bronx, reverent and hot and greedy, was the truth of what swirled and grew taut between them? What if it wasn’t about the fact he was her guardian and she was his ward, that he was Izar Agustin and she was Liliana Girard Brooks—but was as simple as the fact he was a man and she was a woman and when they touched each other, the world ignited?

  There was no what if. She knew he did, with a deep feminine certainty she’d never felt before in her life.

  Everything had changed in her flat that night. It had started when she’d removed her tunic and stood there before him all but naked, and he...had not been unaffected. He had not thrown a quilt over her or ordered her to put her clothes on. He hadn’t turned away in disgust or anger. Oh, no.

  How had it taken her so long to realize that she’d held the upper hand all along?

  “Why the hell are you smiling?” he demanded from across the table. Surly and furious. And still with that molten gleam of pure desire in his black eyes.

  “Because,” Liliana said. She let her smile deepen, and she held his gaze with hers. “I just realized that you don’t have the power here. I do.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IZAR HAD LET her get under his skin and he couldn’t seem to lock himself down again. He couldn’t seem to pull himself together.

  This night was already in shambles. He never spoke of his childhood. He never, ever told anyone the dire circumstances of his early years. Most assumed his parents had died, not that his father was a mystery and his mother a disaster—and why on earth had he told Liliana, of all people?

  And having told her, for no good reason, why had he made it worse by allowing her to needle him yet again?

  That was all bad enough. He needed to get away from this spell she seemed to cast on him whenever he was in her presence. He needed to calm down and sort himself out—two things he had not needed to do in so long now, Izar was somewhat afraid he’d forgotten how.

  He’d had every intention of walking away from this disastrous dinner and pounding out hard miles on the treadmill or in the pool until he felt like himself again, smooth and calm in in control—but then she’d moved. And Izar had been helpless before that glimpse of her smooth, perfectly formed thigh.

  He, Izar Agustin, helpless.

  And she’d started smiling as if she knew it.

  His untried girl. His virgin ward.

  She looked at him like the woman he’d glimpsed from time to time—the woman he’d been grooming her to become since they’d arrived in Switzerland. Breathtakingly elegant tonight, in a dress that seemed tailor-made to celebrate her curves and the slim length of those astonishing legs. Her hair was swept back in a classic chignon with a wink toward a more urban style with those chunky, messy braids, and she’d done something with her eyes that made her look as mysterious as she did exquisite.

  He had understood she was beautiful. Perhaps he’d always known on some level that she had the genetic material at the ready to claim her mother’s title as perhaps the most admired and fashionable woman in all of Europe, and thus the world. But he hadn’t realized until tonight that it had already happened. That Liliana might have been hiding her light under a grimy bushel in the Bronx, but when given the right tools, she shone. So bright and hot it was almost painful to look at her directly.

  There was no doubt that the crown princess of Agustin Brooks Girard was all grown-up and more than ready to claim her throne.

  He should have been thrilled.

  But that was not at all the sensation that worked its way through him now. Temper mixed with need, roaring through his veins and making him a man he hardly knew. Hard and hot and about three seconds away from hauling her over the table and working out her power issues with his mouth. His hands.

  Perhaps, if she was lucky, his teeth.

  “What did you say to me?” he demanded, hardly recognizing his own voice.

  She lifted her chin, her gaze a bright and glittering thing as it met his. As it challenged him.

  “You can’t force me to marry you,” she told him loftily. He’d never heard that particular note in her voice before. It should not have rolled through him like that, like her delicate hands wrapped tight around his sex. “And you know it. You think you can talk me into it with all these dinners and your endless disapproval. You think I’ll obey you simply because I always have before. But the reality is that you are nothing but my guardian.” She lifted the shoulder her gown left temptingly bare and then dropped it, and all Izar wanted to do was taste her while she did it, again and again and again. “If you want to be my husband, I’d suggest you try impressing me for a change.”

  Which was not, he couldn’t help but notice, a straightforward refusal.

  But before he could point that out, Liliana threw her linen napkin down on the table with a bit of dramatic flourish, then moved toward the door as if she intended to simply sweep off into the evening without a backward glance.

  Izar didn’t think. He’d spent ten days thinking, and to what end? It had done nothing but inspire him to tell his sad tale of woe to the last person on earth who needed to hear it. Instead, he moved the way he’d once done out on the pitch, lost in the moment with his eyes on the goal.

  He caught her arm before she made it to the arched doorway and he spun her around, bringing her back toward him and then flush against his chest. It felt good. Better than good. She was tall and so beautiful it scraped at him like nails in his flesh sometimes, but she fit in his arms like a dream.

  Like a dream he suspected he’d had, and more than once.

  “This is exactly what I’m talking about—” she began, her eyes flashing and her tone furious.

  But Izar was done talking. All talking had done was make him lose his temper and share things with this woman—his bloody ward—that he’d never told another living soul. It was unacceptable.

  He hauled her even closer, let loose that snarling, desperate, greedy monster inside him and then took her mouth with his.

  It was less a kiss than a claiming.

  She tasted better than he remembered, and his memories were as intense as they were vivid. She went to his head, then deep into his sex. She was far superior to any wine he’d ever tasted, even the vintages for which the company was justly famous, hot and sweet and his. God help them both, but whatever they threw at each other, whatever they’d said, one touch of his mouth to hers and she was simply and utterly his.

  Mine, something inside hi
m roared in confirmation. It didn’t care what she knew or what she said. It only knew its mate when Izar kissed her, thoroughly and fiercely.

  He wanted more.

  Liliana moaned against his mouth and he felt that like a wildfire, deep beneath his skin and down into the place he ached for her the most, hard and wild and bordering on desperate. He felt her arms slide around his neck even as he hauled her closer, angling his head to taste more, take more—more.

  He needed more.

  He lost his hands in her hair, spearing his fingers into the delicate construction she’d made of braids and clever pieces pulled this way and that, tugging it all down to tumble around them in a fragrant curtain. He feasted on her mouth, those plump lips and that smart tongue, and it still wasn’t enough.

  It would never be enough.

  Izar was too far gone to take that thought as the warning it was. He couldn’t bring himself to care. He backed her toward the table she’d just stormed away from, moving her until he could settle her bottom against it.

  Only then did he pull his mouth away from hers, taking in the flush on her cheeks and the hectic glitter in her summer-bright gaze.

  He thought that would do.

  Izar sank to his knees before her, aware on some level that he’d once claimed he’d never do such a thing—but then, this was different. He wasn’t planning to propose to her. He planned to eat her whole, like the fairy-tale wolf he had no trouble whatever becoming in her presence.

  Only in her presence, a small voice whispered.

  “Izar...” she whispered. Her voice sounded ravaged. Her chest rose and fell, hard. Her eyes were big and dark with the same need he felt rocketing through him. He smoothed his hands over her hips and felt her tremble at the contact, but she didn’t jerk away from him. She didn’t look the least bit uncertain.

  On the contrary, she looked at him as if there was nothing else in all the world.

  “Brace yourself, gatita,” he warned her, his voice little more than a growl.