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“Right,” she said now, in Skiathos and in grave danger as well she knew. She kept her tone brisk. “No talk of mothers and I get to be your mistress, not merely a one-off shag. Brilliant. But how does that work, exactly?”
“How do you think it works?” Constantine’s head tilted slightly to one side. Molly had the distinct and unsettling notion that he was less a man in that moment, and instead, some kind of overly large predator more usually found in the nature documentaries she watched when she couldn’t sleep on whatever airplane she was on, jetting off to another job. “Have you not spent many, many years as a mistress to this or that man of appropriate means? What few there are in that tax bracket, of course. I am told it is very difficult to afford you.”
That was possibly meant to be a joke, as there was nothing on earth or in the heavens above that a Skalas couldn’t buy. Twice.
Molly opened her mouth to disabuse him of any notion he might have been harboring that she’d flitted about adorning the arms of the unworthy and unappealing men who thought they deserved her, no matter what the gossips liked to claim. But she caught herself.
Because if this was really going to happen—a possibility she couldn’t quite allow herself to contemplate too closely, because it was too much, and too dangerous on a personal level after all she’d done to climb out of the abyss of her teenage years here—it would suit her far better that he thought of her as her alter ego. Magda.
Magda had been a creation of necessity. Molly Payne, awkward and shy, could not possibly have done the things she had if left to her own blancmange devices. But Magda could do anything. Magda had no fear. She was bright and strong, and when Molly was pretending to be her, the world around her was limitless. And usually hers for the taking besides.
Constantine insisted on calling her Molly, no doubt to remind them both of the power he’d held over her way back when. But clearly, he also believed everything he had heard about Magda. That could only work to her benefit.
Because Magda would think absolutely nothing about launching herself headfirst into a passionate love affair with the devil himself. In point of fact, Magda would find the whole thing unutterably delicious. She would laugh uproariously at the idea that she would ever be diminished by such a liaison. Not Magda. All Magda ever did was glow.
Molly regarded him for moment, collecting herself. Or collecting Magda, as the case might be, because that had always been much easier.
“Every man has a different set of requirements for the trophies he collects,” she said nonchalantly. “And naturally, when the trophy is me, there are different considerations at play. My career is demanding and it will not stop being demanding to please the man in my life. Or even to accommodate him. And, of course, there is no possibility that I will ever waft about, waiting on a man hand and foot as some men long for. I require neither money nor the euphemistichelpthat such situations are generally made for, suiting all parties. So you see, it is indeed difficult to afford me, but not in the way you mean.”
Well done, she congratulated herself.Maybe next you can open up a brothel and make yourself the madam, since you’re such a believable whore. That will be a terrific use of your talents. For lying.
“That may have been your experience in the past,” Constantine told her, a certain gleam in his coffee-dark gaze that made goose bumps rise all over her skin. “But this will be different. Because again, Molly, you are not the trophy here. You are working off a debt. Meaning, you will be the one doing the work. Because mark my words, you will pay. Again and again, until I am satisfied.”
She believed him.
But she also knew him. And the Constantine she’d known, even if she’d deeply misjudged his vengefulness, had always been a glutton for attention. Good or bad, whatever worked. Molly had spent years trying to understand why, when now that she thought about it in the context of Demetrius’s old office, it made sense. His father only doled out positive reinforcement every once in a blue moon, and usually to Balthazar. It had never seemed to bother Constantine much, for he was perfectly content to receive his father’s negative attention. Just as long as he received it. And certainly all the behavior she’d seen in a thousand tabloid magazines over the years told her the same story. She didn’t need a degree in psychology to work that one out—especially when she’d had a taste of the same hard school that had made Constantine who he was.
The hold Constantine Skalas had over her was insurmountable. Because like it or not, Molly could not bear to see her mother suffer. She could beat herself up about that all she wished, but she doubted it would change.
She knew it wouldn’t change, or it already would have, at some point or another over the past ten years. Molly had watched her mother fritter away the fortune that had been her divorce settlement. Then she had drained the fortune Molly had built, too.
Molly did not care to imagine how many times Constantine had indulged his vengeful streak on her in that time when she’d been so blissfully unaware that he was the puppeteer controlling the strings, but it hardly mattered now. Because Molly knew that she was the only stepsister he’d had. That meant she knew a whole lot more about him than the average silly starlet who got mixed up with the famously beautiful and sexually voracious Constantine Skalas, imagining he’d be some kind of a lark.
When what he was, in fact, was lethal. Emotionally lethal.
But she felt that she could ignore all the goose bumps and that sense of foreboding that kept shaking its way through her, because she had her own weapons. Knowing him was the key.
He had rounded the desk and was now looming about within reach, which made her feel far too edgy. She drifted over to one of the chairs that sat about for decorative purposes, as far she knew, for never in her memory had she ever dared sit when summoned into this room. But sit she did now, draping herself across the nearest chair, the very picture of boneless ennui.
“Very well,” she murmured. She draped one long leg over the opposite knee, letting her wickedly high shoe dangle sullenly, and waved a languid hand.
“Very well?” echoed Constantine, and he sounded...incredulous.
He moved to stand before her in all his rumpled male beauty that she knew she should have found malevolent. But her body refused to get that message. No matter how bored she tried to look, inside, she found it hard not to shiver. And melt. And shiver some more. Her breasts felt tight and high, her belly was tied in a knot that pulsed, and between her legs she was slick. Hot.
Desperate and aching.
You are a betrayer, she told herself sternly.
But what she did wasalmostshrug, thenalmostwave her hand, looking as deeply bored as it was possible to look without falling asleep where she sat.
“Very well then,” she said, a little more slowly, as if he was dim. And watched that incredulity make his gaze narrow. She only sighed in response. “Let me know how you want me to do all this debt repayment. Let me guess. You’ll want a sad, tawdry blow job here and now, because nothing says a man has power more than waving his little head around and making beautiful women genuflect before it. Or I know, maybe you want to toss me over some of the furniture for that shag, so it can be as dehumanizing as possible. I hear that’s how the garden-variety seducer prefers to pave his way into deeper and deeper levels of sociopathy. You tell me. I doubt I’ll notice the difference between this and the average photo shoot, if I’m honest.”
And Molly had almost convinced herself that she was that jaded. That it wasn’t even the usual Magda act. That she dripped scorn like a fountain and in doing so, had made herself untouchable, like stone.
Constantine laughed. A dark sound that sunk deep into her bones, making her feel as if they might shiver out of her skin, all on their own. As if the black magic sound of it might render her...someone else entirely than who she’d thought she was when she’d come here today.
Someone she was not at all sure she wanted to meet.
