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It was annoying enough even when a person didn’t know the truth about his wretched, twisted soul.
And here, of all places, it left her...shuddery.
“I think perhaps you’re willfully misunderstanding me, Molly.”
He sounded casual and almost offhand. To disguise his true intentions, as always. Accordingly, he was dressed like a businessman, instead of the more casual things she’d seen him in over the years. Not that she was looking, ever, but they were often in the same tabloids. His version of a business suit was always...rumpled. That was Constantine. Always slightly in disarray, so it was impossible not to look at him and imagine what bed he had just rolled out of. Or if he’d troubled himself to find a bed at all.
Stop shuddering,she ordered herself, and had to fight not to press her hand to her belly. It would do nothing to quell her internal reaction to him, but it would certainly give her away.
As he rounded the desk, lazy and languid and seeming not to move at all even as he did, she assured herself that it was not that she was uniquely susceptible to him. It didn’t matter that he had pretended to be her friend or not. Or that he clearly was unhinged to have plotted out an elaborate revenge against her poor mother. Those things were factors, but not in the way her body reacted to him.
She couldn’t help it if she was a woman and he was not just a man, buthim.
It was a perfectly natural physical, chemical response.
Molly certainly didn’t have toacton it.
“You and I are going to start a flaming, passionate affair,” he told her, oh-so-casually, as if he had summoned her here to chat about the weather. “It is going to be very, very public. I regret to inform you that like most women who become entangled with me, you will likely lose yourself. Fall in love, find yourself shattered, etcetera. It happens all too often.”
“I’m not Icarus and you’re not the sun, Constantine,” she snapped at him. “I’m aware that might come as a shock to you.”
His eyes gleamed. “We shall see. In any case, when I tire of you and your infamous charms, such as they are, I will discard you. Rudely and unfeelingly, I have no doubt. Then it will be up to you what you do afterward. Will you crawl off into obscurity as you should have done a decade ago? Or will you return to take your place on the runway, though you will be forced to accept that everyone who looks at you will no longer see whatever fashions you might be hawking, but my castoffs? Only time will tell.”
Her brain literally would not make sense of any of that, because it all hinged on an impossibility. “You mean this is some kind of act we’re going to put on... Right? Because, in case you’ve forgotten, you hate me. Remember?”
“I can only speak for myself,” he said, sounding lazy and faintly amazed that she was asking. “But I do notactwhen I make love. And I do not make love, Molly. I make war. In war, I regret to tell you, there can only be one victor.”
She knew she should have laughed at that. At him. It should have been hilarious. If any other man had said such a thing in her presence, she would like as not have broken a rib laughing too hard. She would have raced out of the room, contacted every friend she’d ever made, and invited them to laugh at him, too.
But nothing about Constantine Skalas was funny. Because she believed him. He’d been at war all along, she had simply been too foolish to see it. And deep inside, where she had always and only melted for him, she knew he meant everything he’d just said.
And then some.
“Why would I ever agree to such a plan?” she managed to ask.
He smiled then, devil that he was, and it was heartbreaking. For he looked positively angelic. His eyes looked almost warm, as if he cared deeply about her—or anything—when she knew that was patently false.
“I cannot think of a single reason that you would.” He shook his head, almost sorrowfully. “I would not, if I were in your place. But then, I would have left your mother to rot long ago.”
“The way you’ve left yours?” she shot back at him.
And knew instantly that she’d made a huge mistake.
Constantine didn’t blow up the way his father would have. He didn’t throw something breakable across the room. He only studied her as if she were an experiment on a slide beneath a microscope—one he intended to dissect—while everything about him went still.
“Do not mention my mother again,” he said quietly. So quietly it was very nearly a whisper, and every hair on Molly’s body seemed to stand on end. “You will find that there are few topics off-limits to me. I’m not a man with any boundaries, and I mean that in every sense. But my mother is off-limits to you.”
“I haven’t agreed to do any of the things you suggested,” she pointed out with a great surge of bravado she only wished she felt. “If I want to talk about your mother and the simple facts about her that every single person on earth knows—”
“I can’t stop you, of course.” He cut her off in that same quiet manner that made her spine hurt because she was standing so straight, so tall, for fear that if she did not, he would see how she shook. “But know this. Every time you mention my mother, I will take it as an invitation to vent my displeasure on yours.”
And as ever, Molly felt that same sick rush of love and shame, frustration and longing that characterized her entire relationship with Isabel. If she could only find a way not to love her mother, her life would be infinitely simpler. If she could only harden herself and stop caring what became of Isabel, she wouldn’t be standing here right now. She could have carried on living a life completely apart from even the faintest hint of the Skalas family, as had been her preference for years now.
But it didn’t matter how many times her mother called her from the middle of what she liked to call herlittle scrapes. Or how many times Molly swore she would be done, once and for all, cleaning up all of Isabel’s messes.
Oh, Moll, her mother would say in that rueful, smoky voice of hers,I’ve really done it this time.
And despite the number of times she’d received that call, or had grudgingly agreed to let Isabel stay with her until shesorted it,which she never did, Molly still loved her. Molly couldn’t help but love her. That was the whole of the trouble right there.
