“Funny you should mention those few boutique hotels,” Molly said softly, her gaze on him. “Because, wouldn’t you know it, she’s completely overextended herself and faces total financial ruin, because someone leveraged them right out from under her.”
“What a sad story this is,” Constantine murmured. “How lucky she must be that she has an internationally famous daughter who she can lean upon for support in such troubled times. Troubled times she brought upon herself, but I digress.”
“I hate to continually tell you things you already know,” Molly said, her voice acidic. She picked up a photograph from one of the incidental tables. A seemingly happy family shot until one looked closer and saw the look of worry on young Balthazar’s face, the mutiny on Constantine’s, and their father’s grim expression that promised retribution.
If he recalled correctly, that time, Demetrius had beaten them both.
Ah, the manifold joys of family, Constantine thought dryly.
“But I know so little,” he said. “Ask anyone.”
Molly turned back to him then, and her gaze was a little too clever for his liking. Only because clever women boded ill, always. It was his own personal curse that he preferred them.
Not that his usual choice of paramour would make that clear.
His typical selections bored him, but they were beautiful. And the more vacant the woman on his arm, the more it was assumed that he, too, must also be shallow to his very core no matter how good he was at making money. He encouraged it.
Better that no one should ever see him coming.
“Since she left England to marry your father, my mother has always had one scheme or another,” Molly told him. “Before these hotels, it was her own fashion line. Before the fashion line, she fell for at least three different scams.”
He affected a vaguely sympathetic expression. “Con men abound.”
“I used to think that she just had spectacularly bad luck,” she agreed. She even smiled, though it was a cold curve of her famous lips. “Recent events have made it clear to me that no, she has one, very powerful enemy. And has always had this enemy.”
Molly glared at him. Constantine grinned.
“That sounds ghastly,” he said. “What do you suppose she might have done to gain such an enemy, if one exists?”
“Since you asked,” Molly said, folding her arms before her, “she had the terrible misfortune of believing a horrible man when he claimed to be in love with her. Only in the end, lo and behold, it turned out he was not. But she only discovered that after a disastrous marriage that came complete with two unpleasant stepsons who made her life a living hell.”
“Surely her choice of husband was the living hell she chose because it came alongside so much money,” Constantine replied, his tone as smooth as it was dark. “These bargains are always so tawdry, are they not? But tell me, what sort of woman blames her stepchildren for her venal little choices?”
“Oh, you mistake me.” Molly sounded as dark as he did, though three times as cold. And her gaze should have frozen him solid. “She doesn’t blame anyone. She doesn’t look back. But I do.”
Constantine wanted to share his thoughts on the dreadful Isabel, Molly’s mother, who should never have been permitted to set foot on Skalas property. Much less take up residence here. When all she should ever have been to Demetrius was a night’s amusement. Possibly two. Who married the housekeeper after a weekend at a business acquaintance’s old pile in the English countryside? Who then paraded about with a housekeeper on his arm?
Only Demetrius.
“Blame is such a funny thing, is it not?” he asked. “Oddly enough, I, too, have those I blame for the misfortunes that have befallen both me and my family. For my part, I find that what goes well with blame is power. For one is whining. The other is winning. And, Molly, you should know by now that I always, always win.”
“I’m tired of playing this game,” she replied, her gaze like ice. “You know that my mother is near enough to ruined and I’m on the verge of bankruptcy. You know it because you did it.”
“I have had no interaction with you whatsoever since you were a depressed teenager,” Constantine said mildly. “I suspect you are well aware that we’ve been at the same parties, from time to time, yet we somehow managed never to speak. How could I possibly be responsible for your inability to handle your finances?”
“She’s my mother, Constantine.” That was the first crack. The first hint of her emotions, and it was all he’d hoped for, a flash of deep, dark blue and that catch in her throat. “What am I supposed to do? Throw her out into the streets?”
He shrugged. “It sounds like that would be a good start if, as you say, she has had such...terrible luck.”
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, very obnoxious 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
MOLLY PAYNE WANTED to 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 actually standing before one 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.
That was bad enough. Hideous, in fact. But such was his bitter genius that it had taken her many more years to realize that what he’d done to her was far more insidious than merely telling her secrets to a tabloid. Molly had come away from her mother’s unhappy, if profitable, marriage to Demetrius Skalas convinced that she was a plodding, embarrassing bit of blancmange, destined for a quiet life of secretarial work, meals from a greasy local chippie with too much wine from the off-license, and the spiraling claws of despair. Had she not been discovered by a modeling agent on the Tube, of all the absurd stories she would have said were fake if it hadn’t happened to her, she imagined that was precisely the life she would be living right this moment. As if those two short years in the Greek sun were a beautiful nightmare she’d had once, long ago while she lived out an unremarkable existence somewhere far away from the concerns of the Skalas family.
She’d come to realize that he’d wanted that to be her fate.
Her curse was that she’d spent even longer than that trying to justify the things he’d said and the way he’d said them to relieve him of any responsibility. It was her fault, clearly. She should have made it more clear that the things she’d told him were private. She had misread him, or misheard him, or taken it all in wrong because—as everyone had reminded her all the time in those days—she was so sensitive.
But no. Over the last few years, as Molly had begun to understand that her mother, for all her faults, could not possibly be quite this unlucky, a different picture of Constantine Skalas had emerged.
Now she knew the truth. The nicest, most approachable Skalas brother was, in fact, the devil.
The tragedy was that, like Lucifer himself—not called Morning Star because he was deformed or horrible—Constantine was beautiful. Ridiculously, absurdly beautiful.
And he knew it.
Everything about him was dark and rich and seductive. Dark brown hair that glinted gold in the Greek sun and always looked as if fingers not his own had moments before raked through it. His eyes were heavy-lidded and suggestive, as impossibly dark and yet inviting as the bitter coffee he preferred. And he used his unfair cheekbones to their full effect, always. He had a generous, sensual mouth that was forever curving with a hint of wickedness. Or grinning widely without a care. Or more often still, laughing lazily at all the women who flailed about at his feet, all the lovers who trailed behind him weeping and wailing and clinging to his trouser cuff, and the whole of the great and glorious world that loved him all the more when he treated everything and everyone in it as his.
As one of the Skalas brothers and thus one of the wealthiest men alive, the truth was that much of the world really was.
And for a man who never seemed to do anything but lounge about, languid and bedroom-eyed, Constantine was obnoxiously fit. He was unnecessarily tall and rangy, with long, lean muscles that he was forever showing off. Glistening his way across exclusive seaside resorts, shedding his shirt to crash a game of footie in the park, leaping in and out of the odd plane yet living, propping up beautiful women on his black-tied arm, and always infusing all of his nearly overwhelming sexual energy with more than a hint of lurking danger.
That was just the grainy pictures in the magazines. Constantine in person was...worse. He had been shockingly attractive when they were younger, something Molly had tried to tell herself had been something she’d made up because she’d been such a young and foolish sixteen. But there had been nothing wrong with her eyes back then. He had been feral and gorgeous, always. And now, all of those relatively softer edges and blurred angles had disappeared entirely.
Leaving him relentlessly, ruthlessly, inarguably masculine. Every last inch honed to brutal, sensual effect.
And that was not the only tragedy.
Molly’s deep and abiding shame was that even now, after all she knew about Constantine Skalas and all he’d done—and had yet to do to her, personally—she still had only to think about him and she felt everything inside her...melt.
She was pathetic.
Especially because, despite everything, she had not been adequately prepared for the reality of seeing him in his considerably mouthwatering flesh today. What was wrong with her? Maybe he’d been right all along when he’d suggested to the impressionable girl she’d been that she was simply wired wrong.
“Struck dumb in
the face of my generosity?” he asked, sounding lazy and amused, as always. “I do not blame you. Being my mistress is a privilege, I grant you. Even under these vulgar circumstances, it would, naturally, constitute quite an elevation for you.”
“Your mistress,” Molly repeated.
Her mind couldn’t take that on, much less the other insults packed into his words. She couldn’t actually let herself visualize what being his mistress entailed because it was too much. It was an explosion of golden limbs and heat and his mouth...
Stop it, she ordered herself. Dear God.
And though it hurt, physically, she pulled herself together. Or tried. “Right. You want a shag. If I was paid for every man who wanted the same, I wouldn’t need to come crawling to you because I’d be far, far richer than you’ll ever be. But by all means, Constantine. If you’re that basic and boring, I’m perfectly happy to lie back and think of England on my mother’s behalf.”
She didn’t know why she’d said that. Molly had no desire whatsoever to trade her body for anything, particularly not when she already used it as a product—and as such, was keenly aware of the kind of slippery slope divorcing her body from her emotions could be. She was fully aware that there was a cottage industry of those who claimed to have had passionate affairs with her, and she liked that. The more people gossiped about her, telling each other and everyone else lies about all the scandalous things she was up to in her spare time, the less likely anyone was to notice that she did very few scandalous things at all.
But she also knew, because she was a grown woman who lived in the real world, that few things irritated men more than being laughed at. Obliquely or otherwise.
So she was totally unprepared for Constantine to throw back his glorious head and laugh himself.
And laugh. And laugh some more.
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 2