That hit Molly like a blow. Hard into her belly.
She whispered his name. And he laughed again, that awful sound.
“Your mother was kind, Molly. Understanding. Warm. And oh, how I loathed her for it.” He moved toward her then, and it felt like fate. Like doom. Then he stopped at the end of the bed and it felt a whole lot more like heartache. “But then you came.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she managed to get out.
Maybe she meant, Please don’t do this.
“But I do.” He raked a hand through his hair as if he would rather have put it on her. She wished he would. And her heart was beating so hard against her ribs that she was surprised she wasn’t rattling with the impact of each hit. “You were so soft. So astoundingly innocent.”
“I think you mean stupid.”
Constantine shook his head. “It was obvious to anyone who laid eyes on you that you could be easily chewed up and spit out and more, would never have the slightest idea what had happened to you.”
It was a searing sort of pain, she found, to imagine her former self like that. Particularly as she knew it was true. And more, could see too well the gap between the girl she’d been then and the woman she’d become.
“Again, I think the word you’re looking for is stupid,” she managed to say. “All I knew of the world was the village I came from. Our neighbors might not have liked my mum much. They might have watched me a little too closely, forever on the hunt for evidence that I was either like Isabel or looked a bit too much like one of their sons, since Isabel never named my father. But at least I knew my place there.”
“You had no business turning up in our world, Molly. You weren’t made for it. You made the terrible mistake of imagining that people, at heart, were basically good. No doubt another gift from your mother.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “You treated me like a friend and I believed you meant it. I’ve had a long time to beat myself up for that, Constantine. A lot of years to regret it, but do you know what? I don’t. I would rather see the world as more good than bad. Or what would be the point of living in it?”
“How can you possibly continue to be this naive?” he asked, his voice filled with sadness and something like wonder at once. “The fashion industry should have succeeded where I failed and beaten this out of you years ago.”
Her smile was rueful then. “Oh, it did. So did you, Constantine. But cynicism is a choice. And I decided I would not choose it, despite all provocation.”
It hadn’t always been easy, because there was a certain ragged pride to be taken in weathering the storms of a volatile industry. Not to mention fame, fortune, and the joys and horrors inherent in both.
But she had decided, with great deliberation, that she would rather be happy.
Wasn’t that why she’d sought Constantine out? Oh, she’d told herself it was to face down the architect of her mother’s financial ruin. She’d assured herself it had less to do with her own demons and far more to do with protecting Isabel.
Yet she knew better. Deep down, she had known that she was never going to be happy until she either exorcised the devil...or embraced him.
He was staring at her as if she’d sprouted new heads. “The Skalas family has ever been a pit of snakes. I would rather have gone off to war than sit down to a family dinner when I was a child. You were woefully unprepared. Outgunned and outmaneuvered before your plane landed on Skiathos. I had every intention of snapping you like a twig. I wouldn’t have thought about it twice. If anything, your total destruction would have amused me.”
She cleared her throat. “My recollection is that you did precisely that. And happily.”
Constantine let out a small, harsh sound. She could not call it a laugh.
“No, Molly. Not quite. Because you lit up when you talked about your mother.”
Molly’s voice hardly seemed to work any longer. “Is that a bad thing?”
His smile was merciless. “You knew her flaws, but you loved her. It was obvious. It made your whole face change even as you shared your frustrations with me. And the stories you told me, your little village secrets, did something I thought was impossible.” That smile carved a deeper groove on his beautiful face and she understood, then, that his lack of mercy was aimed at himself for once. Not her. “You made me feel sympathy for Isabel, Molly. And I couldn’t forgive it.”
“Constantine...” she whispered.
“I never sold your stories to the tabloids, Molly. I was so determined to punish you for the things you made me feel that I gave them all away. For free.”
Molly sucked in a breath at that. Her head was spinning. She had so many questions she wanted to ask him, but he was still glaring down at her in that stern, uncompromising way that should have made her faint.
Or something better than fainting, maybe. Something to address the way she prickled all over with that heat she now knew all too well.
“I don’t require these confessions from you,” she told him then. “I don’t even want them.”
She wanted to tell him she forgave him, but she didn’t quite dare. Even if, as she let that notion take root in her, she knew it was true. Or she would never have taken off her clothes for him. She would certainly never have writhed about in his hands on that first day, all abandonment.
But there had been something about all those sun-drenched days on the island. Something about baring her skin and letting the breeze and the light find her wherever she was. Something about opening herself wide to Constantine’s gaze and never wavering, never hiding, never falling apart.
Molly had forgiven him, yes. But she’d forgiven herself, too.
“I do not care if you want this confession,” Constantine said tightly, as if this was a fight they were having. He certainly looked as if he was prepared to wade into battle, so tautly did he hold himself. “And despite all that, I’m sure I would have forgotten you in time. Isabel’s relationship with my father didn’t last, because nothing my father touched ever lasted, except the fortunes he hoarded. You were no threat. I could have gone quite happily about my life and never thought of you again, Molly. That was the goal all along.”
She found herself staring back at him at that, mutely, not certain how to respond to that, much less the ferocity she could see stamped all over him.
“But instead, you became Magda. And you were everywhere. It began to feel not only as if you were hunting me, but as if you had played me from the start.” His laugh then was dark. “There I was, the jaded and worldly Skalas son, stamping out an innocent for my amusement the same way my father had always trodden on anything that dared attract his notice. But no. That whole time I thought I was crushing you into the dirt, you had one of the most famous women in the world right there inside of you. Ready to come out the moment you left Skiathos and escaped my family. You became my obsession.”
“I can’t imagine why you would care what happened to me.”
“Can you not?” His voice was a bitter lash. “Because I felt guilty, Molly. Guilty. You are the only thing I have ever felt guilty about in my life. Because for all I have always reveled in sin, for all I have sought out the darkness and the lowest of places, you did not deserve what I did to you. And I knew it.”
Now there was no stopping the way her heart catapulted against her chest. Now there was no hope of doing anything but sitting there, waiting to see what he would lob at her next. What mad grenade. What bomb she wouldn’t see coming.
“Now it turns out that once again, you have shamed me,” he said quietly. Ferociously. “Your innocence is my guilt made new. It proves that all along, I was never who I thought I was. And you... You have been even more pure, from the start, than I imagined anyone could be.”
Molly felt turned inside out. Or maybe she only wished she had been, when all she could see was the rich darkness of his gaze turned bleak.
“This is a lot of talk of guilt and shame,” she said. She found she could move then, so she did, crawling down the length of the bed until once more she could sit there before him, her knees beneath her. “And it seems to me that if we’re going to spend the night castigating ourselves for the despoiling of innocence, there should be more despoiling. Don’t you think?”
“You are not hearing me,” Constantine thundered at her then. “You are the only thing on this earth I have ever felt for, Molly. First it was guilt. Then it was fury. And now—”
“Constantine,” she said, desperate and greedy, her heart a great clatter. Needy and sure, at last. Absolutely sure what this was—what this had always been. “Shut up.”
Then she launched herself at him.
And he caught her.
Molly might not have known what she was doing, but she knew it felt good.
And this time was different all over again. This time was slow. Constantine put his mouth on every inch of her body, as if committing her to memory, one lick of heat at a time.
He settled between her thighs and drank deep from the heat of her core, until all she could do was sob out his name like a prayer.
It felt that sacred.
Then he set her before him on her hands and knees and took her that way, a slow, delirious rhythm that made every part of her body seem to come alive. Then burn bright.
Only when she was sobbing again—but this time in the grip of that fiery need—did Constantine flip her over, gather her beneath him, and drive them both home.
When she woke again, it was morning.
Daylight poured in through the windows, bright and sweet. Molly felt deliciously battered from head to toe, and as she stretched she laughed as she found so many interesting tugs in new places.
She did not see the note until she sat up and looked around for Constantine. He was nowhere to be found in the vast bedchamber, but the note had been clipped to the pillow beside her.
She picked it up, trying to make sense of the words written across the heavy card stock in a slashing, dark hand.
It was a simple message, direct and to the point.
Molly felt it like a stab wound through her heart.
YOUR DEBT IS PAID IN FULL.
CHAPTER TEN
CONSTANTINE FLEW BACK to his antiseptic penthouse in London, a modern masterpiece of low-slung furniture and strange objects that he found neither artistic nor functional. He hadn’t chosen any of it himself. It was the work of the sort of interior design firm who catered to wealthy clients like the Skalas brothers, as it meant their work was always aspirational. The flat had been the subject of at least six different fawning articles about Constantine’s keen eye and flair for esthetics.
It looked like a bloody surgery, he thought now.
But then, that was why he’d chosen it and let the firm run wild. He didn’t want his home to be anything like the house in Skiathos. Memories lurking behind every door, rooms filled with art and nostalgia and ghosts. Feelings oozing from the walls. He had wanted his primary residence to stand as a visual representation of what he was.
Not the playboy, but the sharp-edged angel of vengeance he had made himself into.
He looked around the clean lines and soulless expanse of the penthouse and told himself he was fine. Terrific, even.
Constantine experimented with that theory upon his return to the Skalas & Sons London headquarters, dedicating himself to his work in a way he never had before. Meaning, visibly. He showed up at the office, did not send his usual proxy to board meetings, and generally turned the place on its ear by destroying the long-held fiction that he was the useless Skalas brother who did nothing at all, as a vocation.
And it was only after his trusted assistant suggested, very carefully, that he rethink his approach to the people who believed the hype about him—that he was lazy, sybaritic, more often to be found facedown in a sea of women than in the boardroom, and if he wished to change this that he do so at a more sedate pace—that Constantine accepted the fact that he was not, in fact, fine.
In any way.
If he was brutally honest with himself, he wasn’t sure that he would ever be anything like fine again.
Because he had excavated entirely too many of his own deep, personal motivations, and the feeling that left in him was unbearable.
Constantine preferred the clarity of revenge. The force and thrust of a life committed to nothing but vengeance. Every temper, every dark feeling, every wild and stormy thing within him—it had all been excused by his focus on getting even with Molly.
And through her, at last, Isabel.
Now all he could think about was Molly. That wasn’t new. But the way he thought of her had changed. Instead of brooding over what he would do to her and the many ways he would crush her and her mother to dust, he woke in the night in a fever of need. Instead of finding ingenious new ways to put pressure on Isabel, he found himself lapsing into daydreams about sunny afternoons in Skiathos and the sheer glory that was Molly on her knees before him, smiling up at him as if she wanted him.
As desperately and comprehensively as he wanted her.
Constantine suspected he had changed. That Molly had changed him, somehow, with her frankness and her laughter and that spirit of hers that had seemed to bloom brighter the more she was tested. The more he had tested her, the stronger she had seemed.
His revenge had backfired spectacularly, loath as he was to admit it, even as one week turned into another, then another still, and he was as unsettled as he’d been when he’d left Molly in Paris.
Because everything was different. He was different, and he disliked it intensely.
It was possible he disliked himself intensely.
Because he’d seen himself too clearly. He could not seem to claw his way back from that.
“You do not sound well, brother,” Balthazar commented when Constantine finally gave in and called him. He told himself it was only because his brother, too, knew the lure of revenge. And the particular way a woman could twist it all around—for how else was there to explain Balthazar’s shockingly uncontentious marriage? “And how can that be? For I have never seen you look as happy as you did while engaged in your little experiment with flashbulbs and infamy.”
“You’re the last person in the world who should believe a press release,” Constantine said tersely, glaring out at London as if his brother’s face hovered there above the Shard.
“I would never believe a press release,” Balthazar returned with a laugh. A laugh. Constantine still couldn’t believe his older brother laughed these days, as if it was an ordinary, everyday thing instead of wholly out of character for the man he’d been until now. “But I’m referring to the expressions I saw on your face. Please remember, I actually know you. And more, am all too aware that you would make an absolutely dreadful actor.”
“You’re confirming my aptitude, then. For I assure you, it was all an act.”
“If you say so.” Balthazar was quiet for a moment, and Constantine could hear the sound of the sea in the background. It made him wish, with a deep passion he would have sworn could not possibly exist within him, to return to Skiathos.
To go back in time, and stay there for far longer than ten days, with nothing to do but appreciate Molly’s sun-kissed limbs. And this time, not to wait.
His fist was clenched so tightly his bones ached. He forced his palm open, scowling as he did it.
“But why do you use the past tense?” Balthazar asked at last. “Do I dare even ask this question?”
“Molly has paid her debt to me in full,” Constantine said. His voice sounded gritty. Rougher than it should have, and he was afraid he gave far too much away.
Surely this is why you rang your brother in the first place, a voice in him said testily.
Constantine rubbed his aching hand over his face, wish
ing he knew how to do more than want.
On his end, Balthazar made a considering sort of sound Constantine opted not to interpret. “Has she indeed. That is enterprising of her.”
And Constantine had half a mind to throw his mobile across the cavernous great room he had heard described as containing a loftlike vibe. Surely a little bit of destruction would liven the place up. Chip one of the sharp edges of his furniture that was decidedly not made for human habitation. This was a flat to admire from afar, or peer at in the pages of architectural magazines, not live in. Because Constantine did not live anywhere. He traveled between places and personas, always with the same goal in mind—revenge.
But now he had no goal and all his years of plotting vengeance sat heavily in him. He wanted to take the strange overly modern pieces in this flat and hurl them out one of his vast windows. Because it did not escape his attention that he had taken Molly on a tour of only his most beautiful properties. As if he had needed to make sure that a creature as beautiful as she was could only ever be surrounded by similar beauty.
As if he had imagined that he could bask in both. He had.
Now he stood in the reality of his life, such as it was, without her. Without the idea of her that had sustained him for years. And without the live, flesh-and-blood woman who had turned him inside out.
And it was cold. Impersonal. Incomprehensible in places.
He was all of those things.
And here he was on the phone to an older brother who had only ever been another soldier in the same dreadful foxhole. It had never occurred to Constantine that a brother could be—or should be—anything else.
But he wanted...
The mawkishness almost drove him to his knees, but he knew. What he wanted was a friend. Constantine certainly had none of those. If he wanted one, he would have to take his chances here.
And so, feeling very much as if he was flinging himself off his own balcony in lieu of his terrible, uncomfortable furniture, he told Balthazar...everything.
Her Deal With The Greek Devil (Mills & Boon Modern) (Rich, Ruthless & Greek, Book 2) - Caitlin Crews Page 12