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Molly looked down for a moment and he thought he saw the faintest hint of a fine tremor move through her. Though it was gone so quickly, he couldn’t be sure. And he didn’t want to believe she was reacting quite in that way. Constantine only wanted her to feel the things he wanted her to feel. Not fall beneath the weight of them all. Where would be the fun in that?
For him, that was.
“I assume that this is what you wanted,” she said after a moment, no sign of cracks or temper visible on her perfect face. “You left just enough clues. When I put the pieces together, it all made a kind of sick, strange sense. This whole playboy act of yours is just that. An act. You spend a lot of time and energy pretending a flashy car can turn your head and that you’re as vapid as the interchangeable women you squire about. When the truth is, you’re exactly as much of a shark as your brother, you just hide it. I’m sure you have your own, twisted reasons, as ever. I suppose it was silly of me to imagine that after making sure my teenage years were as hideous as possible, you would keep right on going.”
“I think you’ll find that teenage years, as a rule, are hideous for all.” He smiled. “Even me. Though I am interested that both you and your mother seem to have no shortage of people to blame for your misfortunes. Anyone and everyone except yourselves, is that it?”
Again, a splash of color on her porcelain cheeks, but that was all that betrayed the emotions inside her. He was more fascinated than was wise, he knew that. But knowing it didn’t change it any.
Molly regarded him as if he was the devil. It pleased him. “You set a trap and my mother walked right into it, over and over. Congratulations. Now why don’t you tell me what it is you really want?”
So many things in life did not live up to expectations, Constantine knew. Most things deemed decadent, for example. The so-called charms of the yachting set who cluttered up the Mediterranean coastlines and bored him silly. Too many Michelin-starred restaurants, forever attempting to outwit their diners instead of simply feeding them. The notion that because a woman was beautiful to look at, she would be any good in bed.
But this. This was the exception that proved the truth.
For this was even better than he had imagined it—and he had imagined it in a thousand different variations, year after year.
“Why, I thought what I wanted was obvious,” Constantine said, milking the moment for all it was worth.
Because he had waited all this time. Because his mother lay senseless in a long-term care facility, dead in all but name thanks to what had been done to her. Balthazar had handled the architect of their mother’s downfall, the man who had seduced her then discarded her, then laughed when their father had done the same. Constantine was glad his brother had taken care of that egregious loose end. But for his part, he had never forgiven the woman who had truly imagined she could walk in and take their mother’s place.
“Spell it out for me,” Molly urged him. “I know you can’t want my money, because you have far too much of your own. And anyway, all of my money is gone. Because someone had to take care of my mother’s debts when you ruined her again and again—but I think you already know that. So what is it?”
“I told you when you called me, did I not? I do hate to repeat myself.”
“In the very brief,veryobnoxious phone call it took you three weeks to return, you told me that there was a possibility my mother could reclaim her properties and retain her good name, such as it was.” Her blue eyes glinted. “Your words, obviously. I’m betting it will involve intense humiliation for all the world to see, that being your specialty. Just tell me the shape of it.”
“Intensity and humiliation are all a question of degrees,” Constantine mused. Philosophically. “And perspective, do you not think? It should be obvious what I want, Molly.” He smiled. “It is the one thing I am truly known for.”
And he had the great pleasure of watching her face go slack with shock. He saw, very clearly and distinctly, the difference between Molly and Magda, because she lost completely that harder shell he supposed she must have developed over the years. And in its place was the face of a girl he half remembered, wide blue eyes, a sulky mouth, and forever where she didn’t belong.
“You can’t mean...”
“But I do,” he told her, his voice low and deliberate. Revenge served cold, and it made him hot, everywhere. “I want you, Molly. Beneath me. And above me. And in all other ways. Naked, begging, and most of all, completely mine to do with what I wish, for as long as I wish, until your mother’s debt is paid. In full.”
She actually gaped at him. His smile widened.
“Did I not tell you it was a simple thing?” he asked silkily. “You should know this above all else, Molly. I am nothing if not a man of my word.”
CHAPTER TWO
MOLLYPAYNEWANTEDto die.
A not unusual occurrence in this man’s presence. Or in the presence of any member of the vile Skalas family, for that matter, though in the years since her mother’s escape from their clutches she had tried to block out her reaction to actuallystanding beforeone of them.
She’d obviously grown soft over the past decade.
Because this was much, much worse than her memories.
As far as Molly was concerned, the Skalas family was a scourge upon the earth. A very rich, very powerful scourge. When she’d heard the news that cruel old Demetrius had died, though she did not make a habit of thinking ill of the dead under normal circumstances, Molly and her mother had gone out to a lovely meal in London to celebrate. That mean old bastard deserved a few toasts to speed him along to hell, where he belonged.
But Constantine was a special case.
He had always been the seemingly nice one. Where his father was cruel and his older brother, Balthazar, distant and disapproving, Constantine had been friendly. He had encouraged Molly, ungainly and terribly shy, to open up to him about what it was like to be the daughter of a woman like her mother. And she had told him, to her eternal shame. She had spent sixteen years filled with that desperate, helpless love on the one hand, yet cringing all the time at each and every obvious indication that Isabel Payne would do almost anything if she thought it would serve her ambition.
And the friendlier he was to her, the more Molly had told him things she should have kept to herself. Sacred, secret things she had no business sharing with anyone or anything but her own diary.
Things Constantine had gone right ahead and shared with the tabloids, and yet she had been so overawed by him that it had taken the better part of those terrible two years to fully accept that, yes, she was the source of all those gossipy stories about her mother’s ghastly relationship with Demetrius Skalas.Isabel’s True Face Revealed, and so on.
