AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Because sometimes that was all he thought about. Another thing he did not intend to share with his brother.
From his vantage point on the balcony off the master bedroom, he could see her where she lay. He could see how she glowed. She was stretched out on the lounger with a book in one hand and not a stitch on, which she had taken to as if it had been her idea in the first place. She wafted about the estate in the same manner, often frowning at him as if it was bizarre that he was actually wearing clothes.
He hadn’t expected that his nudity decree would humble her—she was a woman who was not in the least ashamed of her body, and he liked that. It made her all the more beautiful. But he had expected some pushback, and there was none.
Her own way of fighting back, he supposed.
Constantine wanted her. Badly.
But the waiting only made the wanting better. And it would make her inevitable destruction better, too. Or so he kept telling himself.
“I wouldn’t have mentioned Molly Payne at all,” Constantine said into his mobile. “But she and I are undergoing a small negotiation that is taking more time than expected. I didn’t want you to worry unduly if you heard mention that I wasn’t in the office.”
He ran the Skalas & Sons operation from their London base, but he traveled so much under usual circumstances that it was not as difficult as it might have been to handle his office from afar. And besides, there were so few members of his staff who understood that he was in no way the character he played for the world. He liked it that way.
But his brother was a different story.
“I did not realize that I was your keeper,” Balthazar said, sounding amused when he was usually anything but. “Or your boss.”
Constantine knew that most of the world was convinced the Skalas brothers hated each other. They had split the company after Demetrius’s death—in the sense of their responsibilities, though too many people seemed convinced it had been a civil war. Balthazar spent most of his time in New York, Constantine in London. And because each one of them had chosen his own city and headquarters, and saw no reason to live in each other’s pockets, this was seen as evidence of their undying loathing for each other.
Neither one of them had ever bothered to set the record straight.
The truth was far less interesting. They had grown up under the foot of a cruel man who’d pitted them against each other. They had not learned how to be close. Neither one of them, therefore, had ever craved it.
And yet, when Balthazar had chosen to marry his enemy’s daughter, a move Constantine grudgingly admired as truly leaning into the long game when it came to revenge, Constantine had stood as witness. He had taken his place at his brother’s side in the traditional role ofkoumbaroat the wedding and had been fascinated to discover that his always cold, always business-minded brother was far more emotionally involved with his pregnant new wife than Constantine had expected.
More than he’d thought was even possible for a Skalas, for that matter.
And he had found that while he had not known how to be close to Balthazar growing up, or if such a thing was wise with a father who sought always to crush them both—using whatever weapons came to hand—it seemed less a mystery now that they were grown men. He could simply be a brother. Just as Balthazar could in return.
Though it was easier to think such things and far more difficult to know what to do when opportunities arose to actuallybebrotherly in the way others, as far as he was aware, simply knew how to do since birth.
He found himself scowling down at Molly’s beautiful form, laid out for his pleasure. And was too aware that Balthazar was perhaps the one man alive who would fully understand what he was about here. But that didn’t mean Constantine knew how to go about telling him.
Money was easier. It was either made or lost. The numbers never lied.
They also never hadopinions.
“I ran into Isabel at a charity thing some years back,” Balthazar said, sounding nonchalant and conversational. Two things he had never been before his wedding. Constantine did not know whether to applaud or ask if Balthazar was feeling well. “She seemed far less of a gorgon than I recalled, it must be said.”
“You are mistaken,” Constantine bit off, staring at the gorgon’s daughter. “She remains every bit the horror show she was then. Did you forget what she did?”
“I’ll never forget what sherepresented,” Balthazar said, with a not particularly subtle inflection on that last word. “But what did shedo, really, except marry a man neither one of us liked much either?”
Constantine took that as an opportunity to steer the conversation away from the thorny topic of Isabel Payne, but he was still brooding about it when he and his brother ended the call.
And he continued to brood about it until dinner that night with Molly.
Because he liked her to dress in the evenings, he also allowed his staff in then. He had his cook prepare them the kind of meals he always preferred when he was by the sea. Light and fresh, assembling local ingredients and letting the dishes they ate look as colorful as the table they ate them on.
Tonight he waited for her on the low terrace, the one set even further down the cliffside than the pool. It was accessible only by a winding path, meandering this way and that, with nothing but the sea there below. At night it was lit by lanterns, all of them making little halos against the hill when he looked back up toward the house.
How had he failed to notice how beautiful it was here when he was younger?
But then, he knew. Every moment in this house had been a trial, and when he’d stormed off to Skiathos Town in the evenings, his focus had been on oblivion, not taking in the sights. And he didn’t like to think about what his brother had said. He didn’t want to ask himself what Isabel or her daughter had actuallydone.
They had been here. That was enough.
