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“I am only pointing out that I thought there were only the three versions of you. That sixteen-year-old girl, you, and the role you play as Magda. I had no idea how manyotherversions of you there were.”
“Maybe there’s only one version,” she replied, her cool blue gaze somehow filling him with fire. “Maybe you’re the one who splintered into a hundred pieces, so long ago you think everyone else did the same.”
“I am not the one with an alter ego,Magda,” he said, with a laugh.
But she only smiled.
And then the food arrived, thankfully, before he could chase down whatever he saw in that gaze of hers that left him feeling... Edgy.
They ate in the lantern light. Perfectly grilled fish, local delicacies, and a few of Constantine’s favorite forms of comfort food. Spanakopita. Saganaki. Honey-drenched sweets and strong coffee to finish. Far below, the sea threw itself at the cliffs and up above, the Greek summer sky put on a show as the stars beamed down.
And it had been ten days, yet Constantine—who had long regarded himself as wholly irresistible to women, because he had yet to meet one who had not said so herself—was no closer to demolishingthiswoman than he had been before she’d arrived on the island.
That was the trouble, he told himself. That was why he did not feel quite himself. She was proving to be far harder to crack than he’d anticipated.
“How did you get into modeling in the first place?” he asked.
Her gaze flicked to him, looking something like amused. “Small talk? Really? I was wandering around your house today, naked from head to toe, and you thinksmall talkis the appropriate response?”
“Is it that you cannot answer the question or that you do not wish to?” was his cool response.
She shrugged, managing to make even that a kind of pointed blade. “A modeling agent approached me on the Tube. I was eighteen and foolish enough to go around to the address on the card he gave me. That’s it. That’s the story. It was all fairly cut and dried, I’m afraid.”
“But you must connect the dots for me.” Constantine toyed with the stem of his wineglass. “Because the girl who left Skiathos would never have imagined that anyone could consider her modeling material.”
He did not know what he liked about the arctic blast he got from her then. Only that he did.
“You saw to that, didn’t you?”
“I saw to it?” He sat back in his chair, taking his wine with him. “I’m guilty of a great many things, Molly, but I do not recall putting together a campaign against your... What is it you accuse me of? Your self-confidence?”
“But of course you did,” she replied, with a certain simplicity that seemed to slice into him. “It was your only goal, I assume. That and extracting private sentiments from me that you could sell to the tabloids.”
“I never sold anything to the tabloids,” he replied.
It was true. He’d given away those stories for free.
“I’m actually delighted to have the opportunity to discuss this with you,” she said, with a strange light in her eyes, propping her elbows on the table between them. “I used to dream about doing this, though when I did, it was lessdiscussingand more...beating at the side of your head with a stick of some kind. But, you know. Bygones.”
“I’m afraid I’m not following you.” He eyed her, and that light in her gaze. “Surely you are not complaining that I wasmeanto you? I know you were a sensitive girl back then, Molly. But really. There is a vast difference betweenmeannessand a person simply not catering to you in the way you would like.”
“Sensitive,” she repeated, as if tasting the word and not finding she liked it overmuch. “Isn’t it funny how that word is used as an insult? Think about what it means. Yes, I was verysensitiveto your manipulations. And your father’s. And—”
“Are you comparing me to my father?” His tone was light, but he doubted his gaze matched. “Do you dare?”
If he expected Molly to back down, he was in for a disappointment. She only gazed back at him, her expression neutral enough, save the arch of her brows.
“My mistake,” she said in a cool tone designed, he knew, to rub him the wrong way. It worked. He hated that it worked. “There are no similarities. Your father isolated a woman here, constantly veering back and forth between treating her as a lover or treating her like the help. Either way, she was an object entirely at his whim. There is, naturally, no overlap whatsoever between the two scenarios.”
“Is this an example of the sensitivity you claimed not to have?” he asked darkly.
“Am I the sensitive one, Constantine? It seems you’re the one having a reaction.”
He was having any number of reactions, and he doubted very much that she would like it if he shared them with her. He did not care how long it took him to get himself back under control, so long as he managed it. He did not like how close he’d come to losing control altogether. He did not care, at all, for how this woman affected him.
But he didn’t walk away from her or this situation he’d created, either.
“I believe you were going to tell me how it was that I hurt your precious teenage feelings, making me somehow responsible for your lack of self-confidence at the time.” His shrug, it turned out, was no less a weapon than hers. “Though I think you will find that many a teenage girl is in the same predicament. It is theteenage girlthat does it, not me.”
