She gripped the edge of the table, showing him that obedience that he never liked so much as when he was touching her. He made a low noise of approval. Then he shoved the acres of her dress up and up, exposing her perfect legs to his hungry gaze. Slender. Toned. Beautiful, like the rest of her, all that exquisite bone structure and the curves of a goddess.
Her mother had been more elegant and perfectly dressed than beautiful. But Liliana was remarkable. The most extraordinary woman he’d ever beheld.
And, more important, she was entirely his.
When he’d lifted the dress to her hips, he used his shoulders to widen her stance, smiling slightly as she let out a little moan so needy and raw it washed through him as if she’d used her hands against his skin. Then he simply bent his head and fastened his mouth to the sweet core of her, directly on top of yet another lacy little scrap of barely there panties.
Liliana bucked and then cried out, long and low and perfect. Izar applied suction, spanning her hips with his hands and holding her where he wanted her. And then he simply...indulged himself. He played with her for a long while, losing track of the world in the scent of her, her graceful thighs framing his face and his only.
Only him. There would not be another, not for her. He was never letting her go.
When he was ready, he simply yanked on the lace panties until they tore with a satisfying little ripping sound. It had an electrifying effect on Liliana. A great tremor worked over her, from her lovely thighs up over her belly, then even farther north. She was breathing loud and harsh. Izar pulled the panties from her body and tucked them in one of his jacket pockets, then hooked his hands around her hips and pulled her where he wanted her.
“Izar...” She sounded strangled. Wild. Wholly unlike herself.
She made his name sound like a song.
“Hush, gatita,” he murmured, his mouth to her core, every muscle in his body tense with the fury of his need, his desire. “Let us see which one of us has the power, shall we?”
And then he licked his way into the center of her need.
It was better than any dessert he’d ever had. Sweet and hot and Liliana. He could feel her hands in his hair, tugging and clenching but not, he understood, because she wanted him to stop. He could feel her clenching all around him; he could hear her sweet moans, and so he toyed with her.
He punished her and he adored her, tasting her and torturing her, making her rock and roll and press herself shamelessly against his mouth. He thought it might have gone on forever. He would have been happy if it had.
And when he was satisfied, when she was making high-pitched noises that made him so hard it very nearly hurt, he sucked the proud little center of her need into his mouth, hard.
Liliana exploded.
She shook for a long, long time. Then she shook some more.
Izar thought she had never been so beautiful as she was then, head thrown back in abandon, naked from the waist down and spread out on his dinner table like his own, personal feast. And she had never been more his.
Entirely, inarguably his. It was high time he stopped easing her into things so gently, he told himself grimly, and got on with the rest of their lives.
He stood then, ignoring the demands of his body as he let her dress fall back into place. This was not about his release. This was about power. She’d said so. He reached out and steadied her when she tried to stand and started instead to slump over against the edge of the table.
As if, he thought with a surge of deeply male satisfaction he made no effort whatever to hide, her legs had gone weak beneath her.
When she could see straight again, enough to focus on him, she frowned.
Of course she frowned.
“I very much enjoyed this conversation about your power over me,” he told her lazily, watching her redden at that. A good man might not have enjoyed that. But then, Izar had never wanted to be a good man—only an independently wealthy and infinitely powerful one who could do as he liked despite where he’d come from. And he’d certainly proved he was that, if nothing else. “We must make certain to have it again. When your breathing returns to normal, perhaps.”
He walked toward the door, fully aware that if he did not leave her at once he would take her right there over the table. There was part of him—a large, aching part of him—that didn’t understand why he refrained.
She was wrecked. She was his. She was looking at him with so much naked longing in her soft blue eyes that it actually made his chest feel tight. Why not prove his point all over again in a manner guaranteed to give him his own joy?
But the part of Izar that had spent so long dominating the corporate world knew better. He’d treated her as if she was soft all this time. Breakable, like something to be collected and kept safe on a shelf rather than any kind of potential partner. Now he knew better. His ward felt the lure of her own power. She wanted a taste, at the very least. And there was nothing more reckless and uncontrollable than an upstart with her first taste of power, no matter what kind.
Perhaps, after tonight, she would reflect on the fact it cut both ways.
“This...” Liliana sounded winded and still half-wild, sprawled there against the table, and Izar didn’t work very hard to hide his smile. “This changes nothing. You must know that. I still know the truth about this. Us. You.”
“If you say so,” he said, then looked back over his shoulder. “It will be a Christmas wedding, gatita. A holiday to end all holidays. We will begin planning it tomorrow.”
And then he left her there, still panting and flushed and trembling with aftershocks and a whole lot of brand-new information, to think about it.
* * *
The next day was bright and clear, and Liliana should have been delighted that after almost two weeks shut up in the villa, Izar had decreed that this was the day they would venture out.
But delighted seemed to be beyond her.
She hadn’t slept at all. She’d been too wound up to fall asleep, her body buzzing with leftover need and yearning as much as it was racked with shame at her own wantonness.
What could she possibly have been thinking? Why had she let him do that?
Liliana had made herself any number of fierce and solemn vows throughout the long night as she tossed and turned and glared out her windows at the moonlight over the snow. That she would walk out of here if she had to do it on snowshoes. That she would stop acquiescing to Izar’s every whim, at the very least. That she would absolutely never, ever permit him to touch her again, much less between her legs where she’d stayed molten hot and ready for him all night long.
But come the morning, there she was in the shower at her usual time, then marching down the stairs to breakfast like a good little automaton. It was as if she couldn’t stop herself. As if his pull was that strong, even when he wasn’t in the room.
She stopped walking when she entered the breakfast room, which sparkled in the abundant morning sunshine and made even dark, forbidding Izar look limned in gold and very nearly approachable. If she was honest with herself, he took her breath away. A hollow little pit yawned open in her belly and she knew perfectly well it had nothing to do with food. It had to do with him. With the way he sat against the light, his features dark and almost indistinct, not that anything could mute the sheer power of him. The thrust of his jaw and the thick fall of his dark hair. The obviously strong, mouthwateringly lean body that was always displayed with that discerning eye of his, the one that knew he looked even better in rich cashmeres and soft trousers that emphasized all those long, hard muscles.
He was like a force of nature in elegant dress, and that same old humming inside of her was only getting worse.
“Do you plan to stand there all morning?” he asked pleasantly, without looking up from his tablet. “You should have warned me you had a penchant for performance art. Let me guess. This is called My Fast Cannot Be Broken without an Argument.”
The same as any morning, more or less. Because for him, nothing
had changed.
Liliana wasn’t quite sure why she felt that everything had. That the world was unrecognizable this morning. Or perhaps that was just her. She felt as if he’d upended her and shaken her silly, as if she was nothing but the snow-globe version of herself.
“This has to stop,” she told him. She didn’t take her place at the table. She folded her arms over her chest and glared at him, despite the number of times he’d told her that particular position made her look common and coarse like a fishwife, whatever that was.
“If you are referring to you hectoring me with that unattractive look on your face, I agree,” he said smoothly.
“I’m not kidding. I’m tired of you—”
“What?” He set his tablet aside and turned that dark gaze of his to her, pinning her where she stood as if he’d used a set of leg irons. “Bringing you to screaming orgasm at the dinner table? Or telling you a few hard truths you would rather not face? Or was it the one-two punch of both that you find so distasteful in the bright light of day?”
She hadn’t expected that. If she’d expected anything, it was for him to change the subject or lecture her on appropriate times and places for such intimate conversations, blah-blah-blah. Not to...throw down the way he had and then wait. Watching her. His black eyes glittering in that way she felt, now, like his hands all over her body.
Liliana swallowed. Hard. And that gleam in his knowing gaze made her feel...restless. Outside herself. As securely in his hands as she’d been last night when he’d gripped her hips and held her where he wanted her and licked her into bliss. So much bliss she could still feel it today, winding through her and infusing that restlessness and making her...yearn.
She had to stop yearning.
“I did not scream,” she said piously.
And Izar only smiled.
Later, Liliana met him in the villa’s soaring front hall as ordered, with exactly as much grumpiness as before. If not more, since this was the second time in one day she’d done as she was told when she was certain she’d meant to...mount a protest, at the very least. Something, anyway, that wasn’t her usual form of abject surrender to his every whim, no matter what she told herself about claiming her power.
“Dress for après-ski,” Izar had ordered her as they’d walked from the breakfast room earlier. “And remember, if you please, that this is Saint Moritz. It is not some ramshackle Colorado mountain town that caters to bearded, flannel-clad young men who address each other with various diminutives of the word ‘brother.’”
“I have no idea what that means,” she’d retorted. Through her teeth.
“Think sophisticated, glamorous and chic, gatita,” Izar had replied with his usual smoothness. “This is not a time to revel in your collegiate conception of fashion.”
What had annoyed her most was that she’d wanted—badly—to fit in with her friends when she’d been in college. There was no shame in that, surely. She’d wanted to blend in for once in her life. And yet now she found she agreed with Izar, which galled her.
Deeply.
It turned out that she liked very well made, beautifully cut clothes far, far better than the usual big-chain-store attire she’d lived in back in New York. Less than two weeks in Izar’s company and she’d lost her sense of herself entirely.
Or perhaps, after all this time, you’ve finally found it, a contrary voice inside her had suggested. This is, after all, in your blood. She’d ignored it.
“If you don’t want me to show up in a ratty sweatshirt, Izar, you should say so. It isn’t hard. ‘Liliana, please don’t wear a ratty sweatshirt.’ See how easy that was?” She’d scowled at him. “And I’ll wear what I like.”
But she hadn’t slouched down to meet him in anything resembling a sweatshirt and baggy jeans, and not only because he’d provided her with a wardrobe that excluded anything he disliked. Somehow, when she’d gone to defy him while dressing, she’d ended up in thick leggings and a deceptively casual wool dress. She’d draped herself in scarves, shrugged into a cropped puffy jacket and pulled on a pair of snow-ready boots topped with faux fur.
She looked like every picture of every celebrity she’d ever seen grace the streets of Saint Moritz. Liliana told herself she hated herself for it.
“Estás bella,” Izar murmured, opening the door for her.
And then she had to lie and tell herself she didn’t feel a sweet little glow of pleasure at that. It worked its way through her, warming her from the inside out, simply because he was pleased with her for once.
Luckily, it faded quickly enough when he handed her into the back of a hardy-looking Range Rover that waited for them at the top of a plowed drive that was cleverly hidden from view of the house by a set of convenient fir trees.
“I thought there was no way off this mountain besides a helicopter or skis,” Liliana said when they were both settled in their seats and the driver had started down the wintry drive, snow-packed walls looming high on either side. “You told me there was no way off this mountain unless I fancied a cold, wet walk.”
If she was expecting Izar to look chagrined, she was destined for disappointment. He only raised those dark eyebrows of his, and the fact he wore mirrored sunglasses did nothing to tamp down the power of that steady gaze she could feel all over her. Almost as if he was using those hard, capable hands of his.
“I lied,” he said succinctly. “But it is of no matter. You have not yet proven yourself to me, have you?”
“I thought I had, actually,” she replied, her cheeks flaring red. She kept her gaze steady, as if her life depended on it, because the truth was that she wasn’t an untouched virgin any longer. It was high time she stopped acting as if she was. “Wasn’t that the entire point of last night?”
His teeth flashed in a sudden, unexpected smile, and another flood of warmth washed over her, this one sharper than the first.
“Not quite, gatita,” he said softly. “Not quite. But I have no particular interest in taking you prisoner. Prove I can trust you, and you can come and go as you wish.”
“How can I possibly prove something like that when you don’t want to believe it?” she asked, and it was a struggle suddenly to keep her voice even. “You want to control me, you don’t want to trust me.”
“If I trusted you, I wouldn’t need to control you,” he replied easily. Too easily.
“You want me to marry you.” She shook her head. “That requires that I trust you, and I don’t. Your motivations aren’t exactly clear.”
“They could not be more clear.” He moved his arm to keep her from jolting forward when the SUV went over a rough patch of road, and then kept it there, and her tragedy was that something in her thrilled to it. The feel of that hard arm brushing over her and caging her against her seat, certainly. But more than that, the evidence he wanted her safe. “I want you to be my wife. How much more transparency do you require? Must I break into song and dance?”
Liliana checked the barrier between the front seat and the back to make sure it was shut tight and the driver couldn’t hear them. And she knew she should push Izar’s arm off her, because not pushing him away was as good as issuing the man an invitation...but she didn’t want to.
That was the trouble with all of this. What she wanted was to surrender. To do whatever he wanted her to do if it would lead to him touching her again. If it would make sense of all this time he’d spent hanging over her life. If it would be the answer she’d always been looking for from him, one way or another, across all these years and in between the bold lines of his letters.
What she wanted was for Izar to fall in love with her—
No.
She sucked in a breath, stunned at the direction her thoughts had taken. Was she mad? Of course, she didn’t want that, not even if Izar was capable of such a thing. She knew full well he was not. But, of course, she didn’t want to sign herself up for the total obliteration that Izar seemed to think was part and parcel of marriage. That was essentially her own suicide.
/> And yet.
“I think,” she said, her voice sounding odd and hollow to her own ears, though he didn’t seem to notice, “that you want me to do your bidding. Just as you outlined on the plane. That’s not a marriage.”
“You are an expert on the subject of marriage, then? How fascinating, given your lack of anything even resembling a relationship over the past years.” Another quirk of his dark brows. “Unless you concealed your veritable parade of men from me the way you did your address?”
“Not at all.” Liliana couldn’t look at him, and not only because he was saying deliberately provocative, baiting things. She stared out the window, instead, at the half-frozen lake and the brooding mountains all around. “I want what my parents had. Love, affection. A true partnership. I don’t see the point of marrying for less.”
Izar sighed beside her, and she wished—fervently—that she hadn’t said that. It was too revealing. Now he would smash her memories of her parents apart in the same way he wrecked everything else. He would turn her inside out and for what? She couldn’t convince him of anything. He was like a stone wall, only less yielding.
“What your parents had was very unusual,” he said, instead, his voice rough, hinting at memories he didn’t share with her. “You cannot sit about in the hope you stumble across something like that, gatita. You may wait in vain the whole of your life.”
She tipped her chin up, keeping her gaze out the window. “Then I’ll wait my whole life. In vain or otherwise.”
“Better, I think, to marry for more immediately practical reasons.” And then he reached over and took her hand with his, sending a burst of sensation and a bright flare of confusion spiraling through her. Some deep, protective instinct warned her to jerk her hand away while she still could—but she didn’t. She couldn’t. And his larger, warmer hand enveloped hers and held her there. She could feel the heat of his touch deep in her belly, like a pulse of flame. “Common goals, common interests.”
“I think you mean fifty percent of a common company.” Her voice was acid. “It’s not quite the same.”
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