The Guardian's Virgin Ward

by Caitlin Crews

  He didn’t mention marriage as he greeted his staff and waved his aide and his luggage inside. Nor did he bring it up when it was only the two of them again. The great room sprawled across the whole of the main level of the chalet and should have felt expansive and airy—but Liliana felt Izar everywhere, as if he was too large to be contained. There was a fire crackling cheerfully enough in the great stone fireplace and lazy couches strewn about here and there with fresh modern lines, and Liliana wanted nothing more than to stretch out on one of them and sleep until she felt less...heavy. She’d been up all night pretending to be dead asleep on that plane, and not only had that been a bad idea, she likely hadn’t fooled her guardian at all. But she didn’t dare sit down now, when Izar had turned that intense gaze of his back on her. It would feel too much like surrender.

  “I am weary,” he told her then, though he didn’t look it. He looked the way he always did, in every picture she’d ever seen of him. Perfectly put together in the jacket and trousers he’d been wearing forever. Gorgeous, she couldn’t help but notice now. And utterly unaffected by anything that happened to him or around him, as if he was one of the mountains that stood, raw and proud, outside the windows. “I am going to take a long shower to wash the slums of New York off my body and then I am going to rest. I suggest you do the same.”

  She bared her teeth at him because it was that or weep. “I would sooner chew off my own arm than join you.”

  “Such drama,” he chided her, and she thought for a moment there was something like laughter in his dark gaze. But that couldn’t be. Especially not when he tilted his head to one side. “Did I ask you to join me?”

  “You asked me to marry you,” she pointed out, through lips that felt thick and stiff. “Who knows what crazy thing might come out of your mouth next?”

  “Ah, but I did not ask.” He didn’t move, and still it seemed as if he grew even bigger. As if he took over the whole of the vast room. As if his hands were wrapped tight around her chest, making it hard to breathe. “I did not fling myself to my knees and tell you grandiose lies about my feelings. I told you what was going to happen next, that is all.”

  “It will never happen, Izar,” she vowed, and she told herself the dark thing in her voice was as much the jet lag as that wave of emotion she would rather pretend wasn’t there at all. And certainly had nothing to do with what he’d just said, his words punching through her like bullets and leaving no exit wounds. “Not next. Not ever. I will never marry you.”

  He shrugged as if it was of no matter to him one way or the other. Or, she realized after a moment, more as if her protestations were pointless.

  “If you say so. When you are ready to stop pretending you’ve been victimized in some terrible way by a luxurious private flight to the known horror of Saint Moritz, the staff will show you to your rooms. If you feel compelled to attempt a breakout, I’d advise against it. We’re halfway up a very steep mountain, in case you didn’t notice. There’s nowhere to go.”

  And then, impossibly, he turned and walked away. Casually and without looking back. He left her standing there as if he really did expect her to gather herself together like a sulky child, have a tantrum perhaps, but then obey him.

  And why wouldn’t he? She’d always obeyed him before. Why should he take her seriously? Tonight was the first time she’d ever directly contradicted a single order he’d given to her, much less outright defied him, as far back as she could remember. Usually he laid down the law and she followed it, the end. No wonder he thought she was having some kind of temporary fit.

  A wave of exhaustion swept over her then. Liliana couldn’t remember the last time she’d stayed up all night. That wasn’t the sort of life she led—she never had. Despite herself, she’d taken Izar’s dire warning about scandal and Madame’s dark pronouncements about the kind of heiress she could be to heart. And of course, she’d never had a night like the previous one. So...unexpectedly physical. There was a pressure at her temples; her eyes and mouth felt as if they were packed with sand, and she honestly couldn’t tell if it was the aftereffects of the wine, the tug of jet lag or, more potent than either, the lingering aftershocks of Izar.

  She moved over to one of the brash windows, as arrogant as its owner, which stretched up the length of the wall and showed off the grand sweep of the Engadine Valley in all its glory this bright morning, ringed all around by the brooding mountains washed crisp and white with snow. She’d never wanted to return to the Alps. She’d vowed she was finished with mountains altogether after her years in seclusion in the Chateau—but then, Izar might as well have been one of them. He was as raw, as immovable. As wholly unyielding.

  Not for the first time, Liliana missed her mother. That was nothing new, but this time she felt it with an acute sort of sharpness that was a bit like a knife in her heart. She could have used Clothilde’s advice, now more than ever. She’d spent more hours than she cared to admit going through every article she could find on the internet about her beautiful, widely admired mother, searching as much for the kindness she remembered in Clothilde’s famously green eyes as traces of herself in her stunning mother’s face. Her mother had been the toast of Europe. She’d dated movie stars and princes before she’d settled down with Liliana’s admittedly dashing father. Liliana imagined that, at the very least, a woman like Clothilde—so utterly French and so obviously worldly—would give good advice on what to do when one had accidentally gone and lost her virginity to the absolute worst possible person alive.

  Who was now raving on about a terrible-sounding prison sentence of a marriage as if it was 1882.

  But her mother was as lost to her as she had ever been. Liliana was all that was left of her.

  And you are not honoring her memory by sulking about like the child you claim you are not, she told herself sternly. She did not want to obey Izar, it was true. Not anymore. Not now that he was a real person instead of a series of blunt messages. Not now that real person had touched her the way he had.

  She would simply have to channel her own mother as best she could. She was no longer a virgin, an oddball, cut off from the world by the lies she told about her identity and the future she’d always known was waiting for her. She was a woman now, in fact and deed.

  It was up to her to prove it. Liliana vowed in that moment that she would.

  She found one of the cheery maids and let the woman lead her up to a bedroom she could only hope was far, far away from Izar’s—though she couldn’t bring herself to ask. And then she drew herself a bath in the impressive tub that stood proudly in an arched window with yet another view over the cheerful little hamlets that dotted the valley and together made up beautiful Saint Moritz, the top of the world.

  And if, when she sank down into the warm water and let it embrace her, a tear or two escaped, well. She was alone. No one could see her and judge her. Izar would never know.

  She could pretend it was the steam.

  * * *

  Many hours later, Izar stood at the windows in the master suite, gazing out over the mountainside and down toward the sparkle and gleam of the villages in the distance. The moon was high, casting lazy light here and there as it pleased, lighting up the snow and making it glow.

  He didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him.

  Travel never interfered with his sleep. He spent most of his life on planes, moving between the world’s capitals to hold meetings all over the planet. He rarely slept more than a handful of hours at a time, so he easily caught up with the time change wherever he happened to find himself. Yet tonight he’d been unable to rest for the first time in as long as he could remember.

  He knew why. He knew it was Liliana.

  More than that—the fact he’d lost control of himself so completely.

  He’d spent a long while in his massive shower, his hands braced on the stone wall while the hot water pounded into him, trying very hard not to think.

  Thinking could lead him nowhere good. He had taken her virg
inity, yes, which was regrettable. Or, more precisely, the act had been anything but regrettable itself, but he had never meant to do such a thing. Still, he’d decided to marry her in the wake of it, and the advantages to that were obvious. He might have exploded out of control in a way he never had before, but the situation was now in hand.

  Thinking about it—remembering it—hadn’t helped.

  He’d tossed and turned when he’d finally tried to sleep. Then he’d given up and had pulled out his laptop, catching up on the work he’d ignored while he’d been traipsing around the outer boroughs of New York City in search of his deceitful ward. When he’d exhausted even that, he’d tried to sleep again, but it had been no use.

  First he’d lost control, however briefly. Now he had insomnia.

  What was wrong with him that he had the very distinct urge to take these frustrations out on her lovely, sleek body?

  Disgusted with himself, he turned from the window and stalked through the house, finding his way down to the pool room. He kicked off the loose black trousers he wore and dove into the crisp, cool water, pouring all of this...rawness into his strokes. He didn’t pause to look up at the glass ceiling and the night sky above him. He didn’t bother, when all he could see was Liliana. When all he could feel was her soft, lush body gripping him. When he was damned straight through and he knew it.

  This was not what her parents had imagined when they’d trusted him with her. It was not what he’d intended, in all these years of entrusting her to those who could care for her far better than he could. He knew that as well as he knew his own name.

  Izar swam until his arms ached and his legs were heavy, but all it did was make him tired. It didn’t excise Liliana from his head.

  “This is unacceptable,” he growled into the quiet of the pool room all around him, in Spanish, and then he cursed long and low and fluently in his native tongue. He switched over to English for a harsher sound when he’d run out of creative Spanish, and then that, too, was exhausted.

  And none of it helped.

  He pulled himself out of the water and swiped a towel from the waiting rack, wrapping it around himself as he walked, hardly seeing the villa around him, all its wood and windows gleaming in the moonlight from the windows.

  It would pass, he assured himself. These things always did.

  Izar shook his head at that as he climbed the staircase. He was not the Heathcliff type. He did not brood and lurk, he stormed in where he liked. He bought out the competition. He dominated every situation he encountered. He was Izar Agustin. He did not...yearn.

  Certainly not for an otherwise untried young thing who had been, until earlier tonight, nothing to him but another item to check off on his list of responsibilities.

  There was no earthly reason he should have found himself at her bedroom door, just down the hall from his. Much less pushed it open. It fell inward soundlessly, and despite ordering himself to walk away at once, Izar moved inside.

  The careless moon poured in through the windows, illuminating the guest suite with its exposed beams up above and the stone fireplace anointed with antlers and brightly colored pieces of art. His gaze ran over the empty seating area before the fire, then on to the sleigh bed on the far wall, its headboard and footboard gracefully curved against the hardwood floors covered in bright, thick rugs.

  Izar hardly ever came in this room, and he knew he wouldn’t again, because it would be impossible to see that bed without seeing what he saw now: Liliana, stretched out and fast asleep. The moonlight danced over her lithe form as she lay there, the covers kicked aside and her wavy hair a puddle of gold around her. She wore nothing but a pair of panties that barely covered her sweet bottom, and he had to fight himself to keep from reaching out and tracing the plump, delectable curves that poked out from beneath the scant bit of lace.

  When had he drawn so near to her bed?

  He didn’t know, but he didn’t step back. He also didn’t touch her. He didn’t trust himself to stop.

  Her back was a symphony of that satin skin he’d explored with his hands, his mouth, but not enough. Not yet. She slept on her belly with her arms thrust up beneath her pillow and one knee cocked. And that was what slammed into Izar, of all things, with the force of a truth too long denied. The way she slept. So easily and so deeply in the moonlight while he stood here like the looming, brooding creature he had never been.

  Yearning, it turned out, after all.

  He let out a long breath that was too close to shaky for his peace of mind, and then he reached out and gently eased the covers back over her.

  And when he made his way out of her room again, down the hall and back to take his lonely vigil at his own window, it occurred to him that it was high time he stopped lying to himself about what was happening here—and so what that it had come out of nowhere and taken him completely by surprise.

  Marrying Liliana Girard Brooks would be good business, yes.

  But it was the least of his reasons for wanting to do it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “YOU CAN’T LOCK me away on the top of a mountain forever,” Liliana informed Izar some ten days later at one of the meals he insisted they share—breakfast and dinner—every damned day.

  It was a snowy, blustery morning on the other side of the massive windows, the wind visibly attacking the trees and the sides of the villa, wreathed in snow as it blew itself mad. The press and swirl of the storm made her feel claustrophobic as she speared a piece of breakfast sausage with her fork and pretended it was Izar.

  Then again, maybe it was Izar who made her feel claustrophobic. She told herself that was what the sensation was—more intense than a mere itch, like a certain restlessness was attempting to worm its way out of that molten, knotted place deep in her belly.

  “Can I not?” His attention on his tablet, he was sipping at what he called café semi largo, the strong espresso with a bit of milk his staff prepared for him in a small glass instead of a mug in a nod to his native Málaga. Izar read the papers fanatically, she knew now. From five different countries, every morning. “It would appear I have already done so.”

  “I tell myself that though it feels like an eternity or two, it hasn’t been. Not yet.” She sighed. Perhaps theatrically, she could admit. “Eventually, even you will grow bored of this.”

  She heard a smile in his voice, though there was no trace of it on his hard face. “I am known for many things, gatita. Giving up before I get exactly what I want is not one of them.”

  He slid a hot, hard look her way at that, and Liliana felt it everywhere in a slide of red awareness that sizzled all over her skin and then burrowed deep beneath it, pooling around and around that knot in her gut.

  She was certain he knew precisely what he did to her.

  “You can stop that,” she said now, scowling at her plate instead of at him, because it was never safe to scowl at Izar. “I’ve told you a million times that what happened in my apartment—”

  “Yes, yes.” He returned his attention to his tablet, though he didn’t look quite as bored as he sounded. “I am suitably chastised.”

  But that was the thing. He never really was.

  If Izar cared that she was going slowly insane, trapped in this house with him, he never showed it. Every morning he came to the breakfast table freshly showered after some or other athletic endeavor. Sometimes he swam in the full-size pool that took over its own separate part of the building. Sometimes he lifted astonishingly heavy weights in the adjoining exercise room. Other times he ran on the treadmill, fast and brutal and sleek, reminding her of the way he’d charged across the fútbol pitch. Liliana knew his schedule now. She knew how he ordered his mornings. She even knew that he didn’t come by his mouthwatering physique naturally, that he had to work at it like a mortal man, and yet somehow that didn’t ruin his mystique in the slightest.

  She’d decided early on that it would—or something would. That regardless of his ridiculous stance on knowing another person and how unnecessa
ry it was, she would spend however long she had here gathering as much information about him as possible. In the fervent hope that familiarity really did breed contempt. Because it was very unlikely, surely, that she could be so easily cowed by a man once she knew all the strange little details of how he lived.

  But if Izar had any habits that would render him something less than totally intimidating and oddly compelling at once, she had yet to encounter them.

  After breakfast he would move into the office suite on the second floor, where he would proceed to run his—their—company all day long, sometimes with endless conference calls. She could sit in the open living room below and hear his voice float down from the wooden beams above, as direct and uncompromising in Spanish or French or German as it was in English. He usually disappeared into the master suite before dinner for a while if he didn’t get in a second workout, and she had no idea what he did then. He usually reappeared freshly showered, yes, but what else he did in there with his door shut remained a mystery. At night she would lie awake and try to imagine what decidedly human and lowering things he might do. The ruthless Izar Agustin cutting his toenails? The impossible Izar Agustin crashed out on a couch watching reality television with a bag of chips at the ready?

  She often made herself giggle but she never, ever, managed to make him palatable. Not in her daydreams and certainly not in reality. Izar would still come striding out of his room at the appointed hour, dressed with his usual perfect taste and fairly gleaming with all of that leashed power and fascinating masculinity that made him who he was.

  And Liliana knew, now.

  How he tasted. What that massive, sleekly muscled body felt like stretched out over hers and sliding so deep inside of her. What it was like to clutch at his broad, hard shoulders and the exquisite joy that was sliding her palms down his marvelous chest.