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“You’re awfully quiet,” Isabel said softly. She blew out a breath. “Is it that terrible?”
And Molly couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tear out another chunk of her mother’s heart. Because that was the trouble with Isabel. Yes, she was impetuous and ambitious and had always had ideas far above her station. It was tempting to think of it as thoughtlessness, but it wasn’t. It was that heart of hers. Big and foolish, and entirely too willing to think the best of terrible people.
Molly knew. She had the same one in her chest.
“No, Mum,” she said, and summoned up a smile. “It’s really not bad at all. Who could have guessed that in all these years since last we saw him, Constantine Skalas stumbled over conscience?”
“No one will believe that,” her mother replied dryly. “Least of all me.”
“Well, he has,” Molly lied. “You can rest easy. He needs me to play a role, that’s all.”
Isabel frowned. “If the man needs an actress, he has the whole of the West End at his disposal, to say nothing of his liking for all of those bland little Hollywood types. Why would he need you?”
“He’s far too well-known to go out and hire someone. This little spot of blackmail helps him save face, that’s all.”
Molly almost believed herself, she sounded so matter-of-fact. She smiled, then kept smiling, even though her mother’s gaze was entirely too knowing.
Maybe, if she just kept smiling, she would convince herself, too.
“And who knows?” she asked merrily. “It might even be fun.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ITWASNOTuntil Molly reappeared at the house in Skiathos two days later that Constantine admitted to himself that he hadn’t actually known if she was coming back at all.
And he was not suited to uncertainty. Nor used to it.
Not since Demetrius had died, at any rate, taking with him his cruel reversals, endless judgments, and what Constantine had always thought was a truly sadistic delight in the art of the sucker punch, both literal and figurative.
He had not missed any of that since he and Balthazar had buried the old man with all the pomp and circumstance of a monarch, according to his typically narcissistic instructions. Constantine had stood in the famed Metropolitan Cathedral in Athens that surely should have crumbled around him at his entrance, to say nothing of his father’s many offenses against God and man, and had tried to look suitably grim and somber.
When all he’d been thinking was,good riddance, old man.
He did not appreciate the return to unpredictability.He resented any and all memories of his father as it was.
It was one more charge to lay at Molly’s feet.
Constantine had been forced to sit about in that odd old house he’d never cared for, waiting. He had felt so worldly at twenty that he’d thought having to leave his admittedly nonchalant studies in London at all was a personal attack. He had especially disliked having to spend that first year’s holidays marooned on this island with a new family he’d despised, as his father had demanded. This time around, as then, he passed the time by outlining all the ways he would take out his retribution on Molly and her mother. It was an exercise that had once filled him with what he’d assumed was joy. By a process of elimination.
Surely it should have done so again, especially given the fact thatthis time,he had a great deal more leverage. Yet as the two days he’d given Molly dragged by, he found himself far more invested in her return to Skiathos than he should have been.
Because it was only one of the options he had before him, as well he knew. He should have been equally invested in all of them. Forcing her to sell that charming little Mews house of hers would deliver a serious blow, for example. He knew that. He should have been moving on that angle while he waited.
The problem was that now, having seen her in person again, Constantine was far more interested in the angles that involved the flesh. Her flesh and his. He had always viewed sex as akin to the hotel buffets he’d observed in the properties he owned—readily available and very, very rarely worth the trouble. He had certainly never had toconvincea woman to sleep with him.
In point of fact, he was far more often engaged in scraping lovers off, not obtaining them.
Yet Molly was different.
He told himself it was because of their history. Because of her déclassé mother and the fact they’d all been forced to share space—this space. That was what made her an obsession. That was why he sometimes felt haunted by her. And had for years.
But he had the taste of her in his mouth now and he couldn’t seem to get past it.
And he had expected that Molly, in person, would prove the rule that photography was a very specific kind of magic. He’d expected her to look sallow. To have terrible skin, lank hair, or both. To make it clear, up close, that she had good bones but that all those pictures of her were simply make-believe.
Instead, he’d been astonished—and furious, frankly—to discover that if anything, the camera was unkind to Molly Payne.
Because she was far more beautiful in person than she’d ever been on film.
