Gritting her teeth, she moved on, making her way back to that dreadful study once more. But he wasn’t there, either.
Eventually, she found him in the grand master suite that was its own wing of the house. She had not, obviously, spent much time here, as it was Demetrius’s domain. And woe betide anyone who went somewhere he did not wish them to go. She had only vague memories of the way the suite was set out, with a sitting room here, a media center there. She told herself it was pleasant, by contrast, to walk through rooms with no ghosts at all.
But there was Constantine, and he was something far worse than a ghost. He was stood out on yet another balcony, his gaze on the sea beyond, speaking in impatient Greek into his mobile.
And yet somehow, Molly knew that he was perfectly aware of the very second she stepped out behind him. If not before.
He gave no indication that he cared either way if she was there, but she knew that he did. She just knew.
Constantine finished his conversation, and not particularly quickly, then turned, shoving his mobile in his pocket as he faced her. And she was struck—again—by his wholly unfair beauty. He was too masculine, too sexual, and yet somehow fitted perfectly here, where centuries back he should have been a god.
First monsters, now gods. She was losing it.
“You are lucky you did not attempt to defy me and dress,” he said, though he sounded sorrowful. “I was so certain you would.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think,” she replied loftily, and would keep to herself that new stab of self-recrimination. Because it hadn’t even occurred to her to put her clothes on. What did that say about her?
Nothing good, she replied to herself. Nothing that wasn’t more monsters and gods and willing sacrifices.
“I have a number of calls I must take today,” Constantine told her, his dark gaze moving over her and making her feel as if he was still touching her. “I trust you can amuse yourself without supervision?”
“Am I allowed to amuse myself?”
His gaze gleamed at her dry tone. “In any way you like, save one. I already told you that your pleasure is at my command. And only when you beg me, Molly. I meant it.”
She wanted to shake apart again, into a thousand new pieces because of that. And she was sure that he could see how close she came to doing it.
Instead, Molly pressed her bare feet into the smooth stone below, ordering herself to breathe. To remain calm. To use all the lessons she’d learned over time here. Among them, to stand about wearing or not wearing all manner of strange things while others stared at her.
Pretend this is a job, she told herself. Because it is.
“I don’t think you need to worry about me running off to pleasure myself at the slightest provocation,” she managed to say, just this side of withering. “I realize this may come as a surprise, but some of us are not quite so obsessed with endless sexual exploits as others.”
“You could have fooled me.”
That voice of his was dark like silk, and it curled in her like a threat.
She thought she should refute that. Fight him. Stand up for herself, for God’s sake.
But Constantine only smiled. “You will stay in your old bedroom, naturally.”
“Naturally,” she repeated. Because that would be more torture, wouldn’t it? “How appropriate.”
His eyes brightened. “I saw that you brought only one small bag. I brought it in, but you will not need even that. If I wish you to dress, I will provide whatever it is I think you ought to wear. Nightly, we will have dinner and you will wear whatever is left on your bed. And nothing else. Do you understand me?”
“With perfect clarity,” she said. After all, her entire adult life had been about being someone’s life-size dress-up doll. Why not his?
“Wonderful.” The way he looked at her was predatory, though he did not move from the rail behind him. As if he was letting her know he could have. As if he was making sure she knew that everything that happened—or didn’t happen—was entirely of his choosing. “Off you go then, Molly.”
But she didn’t move. She found herself scowling at him instead. “I have to say, I really thought the naked sex object thing would be a lot more about the shagging and a whole lot less about the endless mind games.”
Constantine laughed, throwing his beautiful head back and making the Greek sky dim a bit behind him. “What would be the fun in that?”
“I rather thought the forced shag was the point. And the fun, from some perspectives.”
“Oh, Molly. You’ve read this situation entirely wrong.” Constantine leaned back against the balcony railing, regarding her with more of that deep male satisfaction that made her feel as if the ground beneath her feet was not stable at all. “I have no intention of forcing you to do anything.”
“Except making me come here, then forcing me to prance around naked for your entertainment, you mean.”
That smile of his was...confronting. “I don’t recall kidnapping you to get you here. Or tearing off your clothes. Or, for that matter, forcing you to orgasm while engaged in so prosaic a task as simple sun protection.”
She felt herself flush, and there was no stopping that. “No, of course not. But persuasion is just a pretty word for force, isn’t it?”
“It’s a completely different word,” Constantine said dryly. “And besides, I think the word that is the most germane to our situation is consequences. You don’t like the consequences of some of your choices, that is all.”
“I don’t like the consequences of any of my choices,” she retorted. And thought, Or my mother’s.
“Such is life, hetaira. And someday, I have no doubt, you will dine out on all the stories of my wickedness. What a monster I am, how terrible, and so on. But between you and me, here and now, let us be clear. I have always given you choices. You always will have choices. And where there is choice, I think you’ll find, there is no force.”
She laughed at that. In disbelief. “Says the man with a sword hanging over my head.”
“But therein lies the truth you’re so desperate not to face,” he replied, with quiet intensity. “That is not my sword. It is yours. By any estimation, you should never have had any money troubles again. And yet here you find yourself, naked before me, because of the choices you made long before you had the faintest idea what was waiting for you here. Blame me all you like. I’m used to it.” He shrugged, the very picture of unconcern. “But when you’re alone, Molly, and can look at yourself honestly, if you dare—remember. Blame yourself first.”
And then he turned his back to her, leaving her to stew in his words for far too long. Before she slunk off inside...to do just about anything but look at herself in a mirror, honestly or not.
Because Molly already knew she would not like what she saw.
CHAPTER SIX
“I BEG YOUR PARDON.” His brother Balthazar’s voice was bright with amusement, and Constantine could practically see the look on his face, even though he was holed up far away on a private island down where the Aegean flirted with the bigger Mediterranean. He and the woman who was the daughter of the man who had destroyed their mother who Balthazar had married and impregnated, though not in that order. “Did you say Molly Payne? Our Molly Payne?”
“Perhaps you know her better as Magda,” Constantine murmured. “Ridiculous as the name might be, and much as it pains me to admit it, she is universally known.”
Balthazar laughed, which was a strange, new thing he did since his wedding. When, by rights, his marriage should have been as cold as the revenge he had always intended to wreak on his bride’s family. Constantine could not get used to a lighter side of his grim older brother. It was...disconcerting.
“I don’t know her at all, brother,” Balthazar said. “No matter what name she uses. Because she was our stepsister for approximately five minutes and then
I promptly forgot her.”
“I did not.”
The inadequacy of that statement clung to Constantine as the silence dragged out between Balthazar and him. Inadequacy and the fact that while he’d expected his fascination with Molly to wane after ten days in her constant company here in Skiathos, it had not.
And that, too, was putting it mildly.
His brother didn’t have to know that. Just as Balthazar didn’t need to know that Molly was currently dozing in a sun lounger that she’d pulled up beneath one of the umbrellas near the pool that was cut into the cliff below from the house, making its own level in the steep hill. Or that Molly came to him in the mornings, always naked and defiant, and he made sure to put the sunscreen all over her skin—though there was, sadly, no repeat of her ecstatic first reaction to his touch.
Was she fighting the simmering, greedy thing between them as hard as he was?
And did she understand that what he was doing was getting her not only used to his touch, but dependent on it—so that when she begged him for her release, as he knew she would, she would mean it?
Because sometimes that was all he thought about. Another thing he did not intend to share with his brother.
From his vantage point on the balcony off the master bedroom, he could see her where she lay. He could see how she glowed. She was stretched out on the lounger with a book in one hand and not a stitch on, which she had taken to as if it had been her idea in the first place. She wafted about the estate in the same manner, often frowning at him as if it was bizarre that he was actually wearing clothes.
He hadn’t expected that his nudity decree would humble her—she was a woman who was not in the least ashamed of her body, and he liked that. It made her all the more beautiful. But he had expected some pushback, and there was none.
Her own way of fighting back, he supposed.
Constantine wanted her. Badly.
But the waiting only made the wanting better. And it would make her inevitable destruction better, too. Or so he kept telling himself.
“I wouldn’t have mentioned Molly Payne at all,” Constantine said into his mobile. “But she and I are undergoing a small negotiation that is taking more time than expected. I didn’t want you to worry unduly if you heard mention that I wasn’t in the office.”
He ran the Skalas & Sons operation from their London base, but he traveled so much under usual circumstances that it was not as difficult as it might have been to handle his office from afar. And besides, there were so few members of his staff who understood that he was in no way the character he played for the world. He liked it that way.
But his brother was a different story.
“I did not realize that I was your keeper,” Balthazar said, sounding amused when he was usually anything but. “Or your boss.”
Constantine knew that most of the world was convinced the Skalas brothers hated each other. They had split the company after Demetrius’s death—in the sense of their responsibilities, though too many people seemed convinced it had been a civil war. Balthazar spent most of his time in New York, Constantine in London. And because each one of them had chosen his own city and headquarters, and saw no reason to live in each other’s pockets, this was seen as evidence of their undying loathing for each other.
Neither one of them had ever bothered to set the record straight.
The truth was far less interesting. They had grown up under the foot of a cruel man who’d pitted them against each other. They had not learned how to be close. Neither one of them, therefore, had ever craved it.
And yet, when Balthazar had chosen to marry his enemy’s daughter, a move Constantine grudgingly admired as truly leaning into the long game when it came to revenge, Constantine had stood as witness. He had taken his place at his brother’s side in the traditional role of koumbaro at the wedding and had been fascinated to discover that his always cold, always business-minded brother was far more emotionally involved with his pregnant new wife than Constantine had expected.
More than he’d thought was even possible for a Skalas, for that matter.
And he had found that while he had not known how to be close to Balthazar growing up, or if such a thing was wise with a father who sought always to crush them both—using whatever weapons came to hand—it seemed less a mystery now that they were grown men. He could simply be a brother. Just as Balthazar could in return.
Though it was easier to think such things and far more difficult to know what to do when opportunities arose to actually be brotherly in the way others, as far as he was aware, simply knew how to do since birth.
He found himself scowling down at Molly’s beautiful form, laid out for his pleasure. And was too aware that Balthazar was perhaps the one man alive who would fully understand what he was about here. But that didn’t mean Constantine knew how to go about telling him.
Money was easier. It was either made or lost. The numbers never lied.
They also never had opinions.
“I ran into Isabel at a charity thing some years back,” Balthazar said, sounding nonchalant and conversational. Two things he had never been before his wedding. Constantine did not know whether to applaud or ask if Balthazar was feeling well. “She seemed far less of a gorgon than I recalled, it must be said.”
“You are mistaken,” Constantine bit off, staring at the gorgon’s daughter. “She remains every bit the horror show she was then. Did you forget what she did?”
“I’ll never forget what she represented,” Balthazar said, with a not particularly subtle inflection on that last word. “But what did she do, really, except marry a man neither one of us liked much either?”
Constantine took that as an opportunity to steer the conversation away from the thorny topic of Isabel Payne, but he was still brooding about it when he and his brother ended the call.
And he continued to brood about it until dinner that night with Molly.
Because he liked her to dress in the evenings, he also allowed his staff in then. He had his cook prepare them the kind of meals he always preferred when he was by the sea. Light and fresh, assembling local ingredients and letting the dishes they ate look as colorful as the table they ate them on.
Tonight he waited for her on the low terrace, the one set even further down the cliffside than the pool. It was accessible only by a winding path, meandering this way and that, with nothing but the sea there below. At night it was lit by lanterns, all of them making little halos against the hill when he looked back up toward the house.
How had he failed to notice how beautiful it was here when he was younger?
But then, he knew. Every moment in this house had been a trial, and when he’d stormed off to Skiathos Town in the evenings, his focus had been on oblivion, not taking in the sights. And he didn’t like to think about what his brother had said. He didn’t want to ask himself what Isabel or her daughter had actually done.
They had been here. That was enough.
As always, he heard her coming a few moments later. And was perhaps too grateful to turn from his thoughts to watch Molly as she moved in and out of the halos strewn across her path. Then stepped onto the terrace that had lanterns everywhere, casting her in a golden glow that seemed to beat back the night sky.
For glow she did. Still. Perhaps always.
Her blond hair swirled all around her and the dress he had chosen for the evening was a splash of a deep blue that made her look almost otherworldly.
“Your dress-up doll is reporting for duty,” Molly said. Then executed a sharp pirouette, swirling around before him in a manner he knew she meant to be mocking.
But he did not feel in the least bit mocked. Because the way this particular dress clung to her was a revelation. The fabric clung and swung, both calling attention to and yet concealing everything at the same time.
Constantine had discovered that the more she was d
ressed or undressed according to his whim, the more possessive he became. And he enjoyed knowing that she wore nothing but the dress, as he had requested.
As if he might, at any moment, have his hands all over her. He liked her to spend a lot of time, every day, thinking about that possibility.
He knew he did.
“I apologize that my sartorial selections do not live up to those of a woman renowned the world over for her style,” he said dryly. “Which, as far as I can tell, involves wearing extraordinarily ugly things as a measure of defiance.”
“You’re not wrong,” Molly agreed. She drifted closer to him and accepted the glass of wine he handed her. “But fashion is a self-conscious art by its very nature. Style is innate.”
“Now you sound like one of those dreadful magazines. I thought you were more often seen draped across their covers.”
Molly took a sip of her wine and, not for the first time, he was struck by her total lack of self-consciousness. She was disarming, this stunning woman who should have been prostrate in her room, weeping at the cruelty being visited upon her here. Instead, she seemed effortlessly charming—as she had been each and every one of the past ten days.
As a strategy, he was forced to admire it. Because she chose to engage with Constantine as if he was her host. Not her jailer.
When she was naked, it was easy to remember their actual roles here. But these dinners blurred the lines. They made him almost forget why they were really here—and he knew he couldn’t allow that. He should put a stop to any part of this that did not serve his vengeance.
But though he told himself the same thing every night, he kept on with these dinners anyway.
He chose not to ask himself why.
Molly was studying him, her gaze cool but not unpleasant. It was clearly a part of her charm offensive—and he assured himself he was merely learning how she operated. Her weaknesses and fragile spots. Her surprisingly effective weapons.
“When you wake up of a morning,” she said, “I doubt very much that you preen about in front of your mirror until you have achieved exactly the right level of casual chic. Mixed liberally with contempt at the very notion of casual chic, obviously. I think you likely...just get dressed.”
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 7