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But it was as if he knew. As if he could tell. Because the very moment she contemplated surrendering to this unusual moment she found herself in, he touched her.
It was torture in an instant. An exquisite, glorious torture.
And Molly had no idea why he’d turned her around so he couldn’t monitor her expressions, because she was sure he would have seen far too much if he had. She felt her mouth drop open. Her eyes went wide. It took everything she had to keep her hands at her side, instead of letting them rise to cover her mouth. Her face. To dosomething.
Because Constantine was doing something so prosaic it should hardly have registered.
And yet.
His hands were big, faintly calloused from she knew not what, and slick with sunscreen lotion.
And it turned out that the most debauched and pointless man in the history of Greece was very, very detail oriented when it suited him.
He started at her hips, smoothing his hands to the small of her back, then all over her bottom, making sure to cover each curve. Then he slicked his way, ever so carefully, over her exposed inner thighs, down the backs of her legs, all the way along her calves to her feet, then up again.
Constantine said nothing while he did this. When he needed more sunscreen, his hands disappeared but always returned. The lotion was cool against her skin, but his hands were hot. Or she was hot. It was alltoo hot.
At some point he stood, and it took everything Molly had to keep from collapsing into a too-warm, coconut-scented puddle at his feet. Or even to keep her eyes open, because they drooped to half-mast as he rubbed lotion up the length of her spine. Then over each of her shoulder blades, then down the sides of her body, grazing her breasts at each side. But only grazing them, and then, as if he didn’t notice, paying close attention to the backs of her arms.
“Lift up your hair,” he murmured, though she did not mistake it for anything less than another command.
And in any case, she would have done anything he asked. Anything at all to keep his hands moving all over her like this, spreading heat and warmth inside and out and making her rethink her historic dislike of sunlight.
That was what it felt like. As if Constantine was sunshine and more, he was rubbing it straight into her bones.
“Turn around,” he ordered her after a time, his voice gruff, and she didn’t even think about it. There was no bracing herself now. No desperately trying to lock herself away somewhere inside her own head.
Perish the thought. All she could think about was more of that sunshine.
She turned again, and then everything seemed to ratchet up to such a high intensity that on some level, she was sure she had to be dreaming this.
Though she had never known a dream to be so tactile.
Constantine sat back down on the chair before her, picking up one of her feet and resting it on his broad, hard thigh. She had the strange notion that in this position, despite her nudity and all that was splayed before him, she should have felt regal, superior. Because she was not missish about being looked at, by any stretch of the imagination. He was below her, and surely she should have reveled in that.
But the truth was, she felt as if she might as well have been laid out before him on the ground, shuddering and boneless. She felt like a sacrifice. Yet for the first time in her life, she found herself questioning what that word really meant.
She had always used it in a passive-aggressive sort of way, particularly when it involved her mother and herscrapes. The sorts of angry sacrifices that a person made out of obligation, for example, meaning annoyances. Some larger than others but still, only annoyances.
But this man, this devil there before her, was running his hands up her slender calf, his attention seemingly so fixed on what he was doing that it made her feel hollowed out with a kind of shivering within.
And Molly found herself contemplating the notion ofsacrificein a new light. Everyone had seen those movies of girls dragged screaming to terrible deaths in the clutches of horrible monsters that heroes would then ride in to vanquish.But what about the other girls?she asked herself then, almost dreamily.
The ones who woke in the night, hot and desperate to wear a crown of flowers and a white dress. The ones who felt their very cores run hot at the notion of walking, of their own volition, away from the lights of the village, into the dark. The ones who shivered in delight at the idea of surrendering themselves wholeheartedly to the monster who waited there.
Why didn’t they get any songs or myths? Why did no one tell their stories?
But she already knew the answer. No one mourned the girls who flirted with their own disasters. Mourning was for the good girls, the ones who behaved properly on the way to their deaths. All this time, Molly had been certain she was good.
But Constantine’s hands taught her otherwise.
He did not look up at her, almost as if her reaction to what he was doing was incidental to him. And for some reason that made everything...tighter and hotter and wilder, until she felt molten straight through.
He is preparing your body for his pleasure, a voice inside her that sounded far too much like her own whispered then.
Molly should have been horrified. And yet she...was not.
She would not describe the breath she couldn’t catch, or the way her nipples stood proud, or even that slickness between her legs that she was half-terrified and half-hopeful he would see as...horrified.
