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Constantine had been tempted to throw away all his plotting, keep on kissing her, and to hell with their past.
Really, that alone should have had him calling off this whole thing and moving against Isabel a different way. Because clearly, he was unprepared for the reality of his former stepsister, and the fact that he didn’t wish to accept that didn’t make it any less true.
That he’d woken in the night, his body hard and aching for her, his head filled with intense images of the two of them together, had not helped.
He’d stood out on his balcony in the dark, too aware that he need not suffer through his own desire if he did not wish it. He could go down into Skiathos Town and have his choice of women to slake his lust. If he listened, he could almost hear the sound of the island’s nightlife on the breeze. And it had been a very long time since he’d had to control his own desires, if ever. He was not certain he had ever waited for a specific womanin his life.There was never a need for specificity when the world was filled with so many options.
Go,he had ordered himself.Get a woman and get a handle on this madness now.
But he hadn’t taken his own advice.
And he did not wish to acknowledge the sense of something far too close to relief he felt when his staff announced Molly’s arrival. Precisely two minutes before her two days were up.
It wasn’trelief, he told himself now. It was merely a well-earned pleasure that his plan was continuing as it should, particularly now she’d returned.
He did not have her shown into his father’s wretched study this time. He had spent his morning dealing with any number of tedious business concerns and was now sitting out on one of the many terraces, taking in the sparkling blue of the cove below him. Still, he knew the moment she rounded the corner, taking the outside stair from the front of the house, draped in bougainvillea all the way. And this time, there was no click of high heels against the stones.
Constantine smiled, for he could only assume that meant the battle was on.
Sure enough, when Molly finally presented herself before him—clearly in no rush—she wore a black dress that had to be at least three sizes too large for her elegantly slender frame. Her long blond hair was pin straight and tucked behind her ears. She even wore trainers. She looked like what she was, a model dressing down, but if she was trying to make some kind of point about how unglamorous she was in the everyday, it was ruined by the simple fact that there was no disguising the simple perfection of her features.
A truth he had spent very little time acknowledging was that her features had always been perfect. She had been a distracting, arresting teenager, something he at twenty had noticed and then studiously ignored. Her mother’s beauty had been softer, more accessible.More common,he would have said. And had.
All of Molly’s features, taken separately, had seemed too bold or too full-on. Like that mouth of hers or her commanding height. Even back then, the way they’d all come together had always and only led to being found stunning, not pretty. For she was nothing so simple aspretty. She was nothing accessible or easy. Hers was a haunting beauty, and a shapeless black dress could do nothing at all to disguise it.
“I see you dressed up for this auspicious occasion,” he drawled, lounging in his chair as if he had spent the morning here, lazing the day away. He imagined she probably thought he had, and as ever, it amused him to let people think the worst of him.
“I thought you would appreciate the mourning attire,” she said, smiling. “It seemed appropriate.”
“You have no idea how much.” He was wearing his unofficial uniform when in the Greek islands, or forced aboard a yacht. Linen trousers that breathed in the heat and one of his favorite T-shirts, and he was aware that when he had not bothered to shave, as today, it made him look disreputable. All the better. “Have you come to mount more arguments? To see if you can somehow change my mind? You won’t, but it might be entertaining to hear you out.”
“What would I do?” she asked, widening her eyes a little, though he did not believe the innocent act for a moment. “Appeal to your better nature? Does such an animal exist?”
Constantine found himself grinning at that, which was not precisely how he had planned to conduct his great revenge. But what did it matter if they ended up in the same place? They would. He would see to it they did.
“Then dare I trust that you are here for the long haul?” he asked her, idly, as if whether or not she stayed was of little personal interest to him.
Because it should not have mattered.
“You already told me I have a martyr complex, Constantine.” She held her arms out at her side, as if she anticipated a crucifixion. “Here I am, ready and willing to be burned all nice and crispy on the pyre of your choosing.”
“I’m delighted to hear it.”
He stared at her for a long moment, taking in the mulish set of her chin and the way her clavicle presented itself from the wide neck of the dress she wore, begging for his mouth.
Oh yes, this was happening.
Finally.
“I’ll be honest with you, Constantine,” she was saying, her voice bright enough that she might have been at a cocktail party instead of her own doom. “You don’t look delighted. I would say rather that you look a little...dark.”
“You have no idea,hetaira. But enough small talk.” He settled back in his chair and let his smile go lazy. “Take off all your clothes.”
And she was not so mulish suddenly. She did not precisely jolt in surprise, but he thought he saw the hint of it, quickly repressed. Her eyes, that arresting, arctic blue, deepened into something that almost matched the Aegean Sea stretched out behind her.
Almost.
“You don’t waste any time, do you?” she asked, still staring back at him.
