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CHAPTER ONE
CONSTANTINESKALASHADwaited a long, long time for this day. What had started as a young man’s rash promise had become a plot. Then a plan. Today that plan had finally borne its intended fruit.
He intended to savor it.
And as a man who had dedicated a large portion of his decidedly debaucherous adult life to relishing all the many pleasures life had in store, he knew precisely how best to go about it.
There were any number of places he could have met the object of all his many plans. He was a Skalas, one of two owners of the sprawling, multinational Skalas & Sons. His father had once been the richest man alive, but Constantine and his brother, Balthazar, had doubled his wealth within the first year of their ownership. He had properties literally everywhere, homes and rentals and hotels, and could have chosen any one of them for today’s long-awaited meeting.
Naturally, he’d chosen the one calculated to stick the knife in, and he hoped, give it a little twist for good measure. It was an estate in the quiet part of Skiathos, an island off the coast of Thessaly, Greece. Skiathos, where far too many bright young things flocked for the energetic nightlife in Skiathos Town, though Constantine had not availed himself of the local amenities, or talent, in longer than he cared to recall. And Skiathos was also where, once upon a time, he had been force-fed his father’s new and unacceptable second wife and worse, had been required to contend with an awkward stepsister he had never warmed to in the slightest.
Though that was perhaps understating the case.
He had despised his stepmother. He had felt only slightly less opposed to his stepsister, who might not have been at fault for her mother’s ambitious marriage—but she hadn’t done anything to oppose it, either. Those feelings had not dimmed over time. His father might have thought better of his second marriage and summarily ended it, as he had been wont to do with his customary brutality, but Constantine could hold a grudge until the end of time.
And did. Happily.
He settled back in the chair behind the desk where the late and wholly unlamented Demetrius Skalas, his father, had once conducted his business when he’d called this house his primary home. It had been but a few years of madness before Demetrius had rid himself of the appalling British housekeeper, Isabel, and her hopeless daughter that he’d acquired for reasons unclear. As far as Constantine could tell, Demetrius had only married Isabel in the first place to really hammer home the fact he was moving on from his elegant and fragile first wife. The wife he’d crushed, then discarded, then mocked as she’d cycled deep into despair.
The wife who happened to be Constantine’s mother, that was.
But Constantine was not going to think about his mother today, or he would lose his cool. And his quarry did not deserve his temper. She did not deserve to see anything but his vengeance.
He studied his father’s desk as he sat there. Like all the things Demetrius had used as props to bolster his inflated sense of himself, the desk was a monstrosity. Constantine had entirely too many memories of being forced to stand on the other side of this very desk during those years, his eyes on his father if he valued his hide, while he gave a twenty-year-old’s surly accounting of what he’d done with his monthly allowance. A tedious undertaking when he already knew it would lead to more of his father’s brand of consequences. And all the while the wall of windows down one side—all of which opened up as doors to the terrace no one was permitted to use without Demetrius’s never-proffered permission—let in the pine-covered cliffs. Unusual for Greek islands, as the tourists liked to caterwaul, but pine trees they were and they rose above the private cove the house sat over like the king Demetrius had imagined he was. And more, the great Aegean beyond beckoned, all while Constantine had been required to stand still and pretend penitence.
It had been torture, in other words.
A torture he intended to visit upon dear stepsister, Molly, who his staff down at the gate to the estate had informed him had just arrived.
The waiting was exquisite.
After all these years, after all his plotting, after creating the perfect disguise for his true intentions and living it in full view of the world, it was time.
If he was capable of such things, he might have considered himself positively gleeful.
Constantine leaned back in the huge leather chair, itself a monument to a certain kind of overt masculinity. His father’s kind, all bluster and bark, but unlike some of his toxic ilk, with a deadly bite beneath.
His father had died a few years back, and unlike Constantine’s older brother, Balthazar, who had always splayed himself wide open with an unnecessary sense of responsibility, Constantine did not miss him. Perish the thought. The world was a far better place without Demetrius Skalas. His sons, in particular, were incalculably better off without him.
Not to mention, the old man’s absence meant Constantine had finally been able to put the plan closest to his blackened heart into action.
He waited, smiling to himself when he heard the click of very high heels along the hallway floors that led to this study. He had not known which version of his stepsister to expect. But the heels were like a premonition, and then, in the next moment, she appeared.
She stopped in the doorway and regarded him.
Constantine gazed right back, aware of a certain electrical charge that seemed to fill the space between them.
No longer awkward or embarrassing, or anything like gawky, little Molly Payne, the housekeeper’s daughter had transformed herself. She stood before him, framed by the doorway, and stared at him as if she stood atop some kind of catwalk and he was at her feet. It was adorable, truly. And he had seen her blond hair in a number of different styles, but today she had gone for big and lustrous curls, like a cat puffing itself up to make itself seem bigger in the face of a predator.
Poor little kitty, he thought to himself, darkly.Your tricks and claws will not help you here.
Her eyes were a stunning, arctic blue, and today she’d expertly applied the kind of cosmetics that took hours to achieve a barely there look, so that she looked effortlessly sultry, the cold color of those eyes honed to a laser point. Her pout was enough to raze cities to the ground, and that wasn’t getting to her magnificent figure that had been splashed across every magazine cover in existence, then back again.
For awkward little Molly Payne had not had the good manners to fade off into obscurity when her mother’s reprehensible marriage to Constantine’s father had ended. He had imagined she would lead a perfectly unobjectionable porridge sort of life, perhaps away in one of those sad, lesser British cities, where everything was forever gray and depressed. Like she had been.
But no such luck. For instead, his stepsister had gone ahead and had the temerity to become universally, stratospherically famous.
“If it isn’t the eponymousMagda,” Constantine drawled, eventually, using her laughable professional name.
