The Guardian's Virgin Ward

by Caitlin Crews

  Izar only smiled, his dark gaze hidden but no less potent, somehow. “I will share with you a harsh reality, gatita, but one you must brace yourself for even so.”

  Liliana blew out a breath. “I can’t imagine what you think is harsh. Given what you say to me over the course of a run-of-the-mill breakfast without so much as blinking.”

  She didn’t move her hand from his. There was no pretending otherwise. She didn’t even try.

  “You are beautiful and you are wealthy,” he said in his low, matter-of-fact way. So matter-of-factly that it occurred to her neither was particularly complimentary. They were facts. “If you refuse me, you will spend the rest of your life pursued by men whose ulterior motives will be increasingly opaque. Do they want you because your face or your body is like a collector’s item to them? Are they only after your money? Do they have designs on the company? Do they fetishize you because your parents were so famous and died so young?”

  She tried to take her hand back, but he didn’t release her when she tugged at it. He didn’t appear to notice.

  “Because no one could possibly want me for me,” she said bitterly. “Of course they couldn’t. How silly of me to imagine otherwise.”

  “Perhaps they will,” Izar said calmly. “But how will you know?”

  She jerked her hand in his again, harder this time, and he let her go. But she could still feel his touch. It was as if he’d branded her. Damn him.

  “Is this really your sales pitch?” she demanded. She told herself she was angry. Insulted. But she knew better. She knew. Deep down, she kept expecting him to be someone he was not. She kept imagining he might say the things she knew—she knew—he would never say. Liliana knew it was truly sad that she even wanted him to say them. More than sad. “Choose you because at least with you, I know how little you think of me?”

  “No, gatita,” he said, sounding amused and male and certain in that maddening way of his. “You will marry me because you must. It is the only option before you and, also, it simply makes sense. However scandalized you may act at the idea, you know this. But you will reconcile yourself to it, because I know you better than you know yourself.”

  She gritted her teeth. “I’m sure you think so. That doesn’t make you right, Izar.”

  “But I am,” he said with the easy tone of a man who had not one single shred of doubt. “How else could I make you scream so easily?”

  And he even smiled at her as the Range Rover pulled up in front of one of Saint Moritz’s grand hotels, as if he knew that deep inside, she melted for him whether she wanted to admit it or not.

  Oh, yes, Liliana thought as her heart thudded madly and his smile only deepened. He knows.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DECEMBER CAME IN cold and swift.

  Snow pummeled the Engadine Valley, delighting the skiers who flocked to the famous pistes from all over the world to celebrate the start of the new season. Saint Moritz, which looked like a Christmas card as a matter of course thanks to its position on a frozen alpine lake and beneath the thrust of gloriously snowcapped mountains, shone particularly brightly at this time of year.

  And despite herself, despite all the vows she’d made to stay strong against Izar no matter what he threw at her and no matter how much she wanted to surrender to him, Liliana had somehow let herself slip off into a daydream over the past few weeks.

  It was a daydream, not a white flag. That was what she told herself.

  “I am astonished that your attitude has changed so much, gatita,” Izar said one morning as they sat across the breakfast table from each other. “One is tempted to imagine you have suffered a blow to the head.”

  Liliana clutched her second latte of the day between her palms and smiled serenely out the windows, toward the snow and the sun and the villages clustered at the foot of the mountains.

  “I’m practicing gratitude,” she told him. Fatuously.

  His dark gaze touched hers, burned bright and hot and seared straight through her, then dropped back to his tablet. His mouth twitched, and Liliana bit back an answering smile. It was almost as if there was no animosity between them. If she squinted, she was sure she could see what that would look like.

  “As long as you continue to do it so charmingly,” he murmured after a moment, “I can only approve.”

  She told herself she didn’t care if he approved or not. That she was doing as she pleased, for a change. But the truth was, she liked that he did. And, if she was being entirely honest with herself, she craved his approval more than she wanted to admit.

  It was as if, having slipped enough to entertain the wild thought that she wanted Izar to fall in love with her, even in passing, which she didn’t—of course she didn’t, that had been a mad little dip into an alternate reality for a moment—Liliana had decided to simply...see what it might be like.

  She’d opted to go along with him, or at least to stop arguing about every little thing. It had been unconscious at first. There was no point discussing who had power and who was in charge, because all that seemed to get her was another sleepless night. Instead, she took pleasure in the way Izar’s gaze darkened when he saw her enter a room and his mouth curved ever so slightly, proving that just as she’d discovered in New York, he still wasn’t unaffected by her. Quite the contrary.

  I could live on that, she thought on one excursion.

  They were in one of their company shops featuring extremely high-end accessories. He’d stepped out to take a call, and when he came back inside with a rush of cold air from the street his gaze went to Liliana’s. Instantly. Hard and hot.

  As if there was no one else in the world.

  She smiled without knowing she meant to and hoped he didn’t see the little shiver that coursed over her, then pooled between her legs.

  There was no need to fight so hard, surely, when it was obvious that whatever pronouncements Izar made about stone-cold marriages, there was very little that was actually stone cold about him.

  Not that she was considering marrying him. Not really.

  Liliana knew she was playing a dangerous game. She knew it was something far more than merely silly to even pretend that surrender was a possibility. Izar was the kind of man who would take everything if she was foolish enough to give it to him. But even so, she found that she was helpless to keep herself from relaxing a bit into this make-believe little world Izar had created for them here.

  Here, with him—whatever else it was—she could be herself.

  Moreover, the high mountains, clear air and dizzying sunshine seemed to underscore the fact that Izar Agustin, her arrogant and terrible guardian, truly did find her beautiful. And even more astonishing, in that warm, black gaze of his that she found she could lose herself in more and more all the time, she believed she really was.

  It was as if she’d made a decision, somewhere back in her murky teenage years, that she couldn’t achieve the sort of elegant confidence her mother had seemed to ooze from every pore, so she’d taken herself out of the running. There was no way she could transform herself from an ugly duckling into the face of an iconic fashion house, so why bother? She’d assumed it was a lost cause and she’d stopped trying.

  Izar made her want to try again. More than that—day after charmed and fantastical day, he convinced her that she didn’t need to try. That all she needed was to accept who she’d been all along, like it or not.

  The Brooks heiress. Her mother’s daughter. Not a pretender to a crown she’d always assumed could never quite fit her.

  Liliana told herself it wasn’t forever. This was an interlude, that was all. There wasn’t any sense in banging her head repeatedly against the same hard wall when there was nothing to be gained from it. She told herself that Christmas was coming and she might as well enjoy the fact that she was in one of the most beautiful places in the world, high up in the Swiss Alps, where it was all too easy to pretend the rest of the world had never existed in the first place.

  And she told herself that Izar w
as prepared for her to fight him. Maybe he even craved her resistance, her rebellion. So that gave her all the more reason not to give him what he wanted.

  She assured herself that this was a tactic, a strategy on her part, not an actual surrender.

  Once Izar started the wedding planning as threatened—which as far as Liliana could tell involved making sweeping announcements, having courtiers fly in from Paris to take her measurements for a rush dress with very little input from her, and then calling up the grandest hotel in town to throw money at them until they allowed as how they did, in fact, have a ballroom available after all during the busy holiday rush—she simply gave up arguing with him about it. It wasn’t that she wanted this wedding to happen. She didn’t, and it wasn’t going to take place. But until she could figure out a way to escape Saint Moritz, there was no point getting worked up about it and causing the sort of fights that would leave her screaming and panting on the dining room table.

  Because it was clear to her that the more Izar got his hands—and his mouth—on her, the less strongly she felt about leaving him.

  And Liliana told herself it was worth being perfectly agreeable, or at least not outwardly hostile, if only for the way it utterly confounded him.

  But late at night, tucked away in her wide, warm bed beneath the eaves with only the moon and the stars outside her windows to bear witness, Liliana knew the truth. It was easy to give in. Too easy. It was like sitting down on a sled and letting gravity whisk her down the mountainside with little to no effort on her part.

  You are not going to marry this man no matter what he seems to assume, she told herself sternly every day, and a hundred times more every night. This is like working undercover, that’s all.

  But “undercover” with Izar meant they went out in public. Together. In one of the most celebrity-dense places in the world, especially now that the season had started and the holidays were coming. Which meant there was nowhere to hide from the paparazzi Liliana had been avoiding the whole of her life. Especially since Izar wasn’t trying to hide anything in the first place.

  “We can’t go there for lunch,” Liliana said one afternoon five days before Christmas, balking at the restaurant Izar named. They stood in the upscale pedestrianized part of the village, seasonal lights winking at them from all corners though it was not yet dark. “There are too many photographers.”

  “Why should it matter if there are a thousand?”

  Liliana hadn’t much liked his careless tone. “We have to be careful, Izar.”

  “I am marrying you in a matter of days.” It was not her imagination, surely, that there was a dark undercurrent in his voice then. As if he distrusted her sudden about-face yielding as much as he should. “Exactly how careful do you imagine we need to be at this point?”

  “There’s no need to rub it in people’s faces,” she argued.

  She wished she could take it back, but Izar only stepped closer, forcing her to either dance away from him or tilt her head back to keep her eyes trained on his. She chose the latter—but only because she thought he’d likely just yank her back to him if she tried to step away. And she knew better than to give him a reason to touch her if it could be avoided.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said crossly, before he could ask her to clarify what she’d said. Because she knew he would as surely as she knew the sun would rise the following morning.

  Izar studied her for a moment that seemed to swell up and last the whole of the Christmas season. And then some. Liliana was aware of so many things. The last of the day’s light. The bite in the air and the smell of fresh snow on the wind. The crowd all around them, equally divided between skiers in off-the-slope clothes and fashionable tourists with the look of spas and shopping on their minds. She was aware of it all, but then Izar lifted his hand and fit it carefully, so carefully, to her cheek, and it was as if the bustling street where they stood...fell away.

  He wore the kind of thin leather glove that only accentuated the heat and strength of his hand. And it would have taken a far stronger person than Liliana had ever been to keep from leaning into his palm. She couldn’t help herself.

  She was sure she heard his swift intake of breath.

  And she felt him everywhere, as if his hands were all over her bare skin, as if his mouth was fastened between her legs again, as if they weren’t on a crowded street at all but were somewhere far more private.

  What was wrong with her that she wished they were?

  “I am delighted to imagine you have become so circumspect at last,” he said after a long while, years maybe. His eyes were too dark. His mouth was too close. “But I begin to wonder if you wish to avoid the paparazzi for different reasons altogether.”

  “What other reason could I have?” Liliana’s voice was barely a whisper. She cleared her throat. And his hand was still holding her there, face tipped to his, and she did nothing at all to stop it. To change it or end it. Worse, she didn’t even want to stop it. “I’ve grown used to being far outside the spotlight, that’s all.”

  “Prove it,” Izar dared her, intense and quiet.

  Liliana told herself she was only biding her time until she could walk away from this madness, but the truth was that some part of her...wanted to see what it was like. She’d watched Izar with his various mistresses over the years, like everyone else with an internet connection or who happened to glance at one of those magazines in supermarket checkout lines. She’d seen all the pictures. She might have clicked on more than her fair share.

  She couldn’t possibly be the only woman in the world who’d wondered what it might be like to be the focus of all his dark, hot attention, the way she was right now. Right this minute. Right here, on this street in a December afternoon that was already gathering dark around its edges in the run-up to the longest night of the year.

  She was immune to him, of course. She told herself she was only acting.

  But even so, it was breathtaking.

  “How would you like me to prove it?” she asked, and she even smiled at him. As sunnily as possible, to cover the desperate clatter of her pulse. “If it involves nudity of any kind, I’ll have to ask that we find a place that is not outside, literally knee-deep in the snow. If it involves public displays of affection for the cameras, well. It’s not that I’m opposed, but that you made your feelings about such things so clear when I was younger. It will be hard to set all that aside and really commit to the performance.”

  Izar dropped his hand, and Liliana understood that she would have to spend a long time in her bed tonight examining the fact she felt the loss of his touch like a deep and ravenous grief. A long, long time.

  “But if you want me to prove something to you, Izar, then by all means,” she said grandly, and she could only hope that he couldn’t sense that strange, gripping feeling that knotted deep inside her. “Let’s do it.”

  “No need for fireworks or theatrics, gatita.” His face was dark and forbidding, as ever, but his black eyes gleamed almost gold. “I need a one-word answer, that is all.”

  And then he reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a rich red box embossed in gold filigree and so instantly recognizable that a passing woman gasped, then murmured something in admiring French to her companions.

  But Liliana couldn’t look at anything but Izar and the box he held.

  Something inside her howled then—insisting she swat that box out of his hand and run, now, while she still could. While there was still a part of her that knew she should. Her heart was a desperate, terrible thud in her chest, making her worry she might lose her footing in the wake of each kick of it against her ribs. The same sort of foreboding that had swept over her outside her own bedroom in the Bronx swamped her again now, except this was worse. Deeper and darker and far more intense.

  And she ignored it just the same.

  There was nothing but that splash of red against the snow and the hills and the buildings all around them, cradled there in Izar’s big, steady ha
nds.

  “Look at me,” he ordered her softly, a husky sort of steel.

  Far off, she heard someone translate that from English to German. There was a whole world out there somewhere, she supposed, and maybe they were all watching this—but for her, there was only that depthless black gaze and that arrogant mouth of his. There was only Izar.

  There has only ever been Izar, something deep within her acknowledged, like the ringing of a bell.

  She thought she said his name, but she made no sound. She thought she shook, but her feet stayed put on the ground, right where she’d left them. She was flying and yet she was tethered to him, to this, to now.

  You always have been, that same voice told her.

  “Gatita,” Izar said, in his voice like the dark of night, “will you marry me?”

  And Liliana understood that the fact he’d phrased it as a question was a gift. He hadn’t simply grunted out an order and shoved a ring on her finger, as he was perfectly capable of doing. He hadn’t tossed a box across the table and demanded she wear it.

  He’d gotten something in a box in the first place, for that matter. She was foolish enough that the gesture made her heart leap.

  There was a Christmas tree in the courtyard of the hotel behind him, bursting with decorations and tall enough to be seen from halfway across the village, and still the only colors she could see were in his gaze and in his hands.

  Until he opened the box he held there before her, and light and color seemed to burst forth, blazing bright enough to sear the sky.

  The ring looked like a knot, ropes of diamonds wrapped around and around a single center stone, all gleaming so brightly they drowned out the village and Christmas and even the snow. It was unusual. It was beautiful.

  Liliana had never wanted to touch a piece of jewelry more. She hadn’t known it was possible to want so badly.

  And she couldn’t possibly accept it. If he’d ordered her to take it that would have been one thing, but he’d asked. He was proposing, not setting out a list of commands. Which meant that she had to refuse him. There was choosing not to put up a fuss and then there was actively deceiving him, and this, right here, was that line. She knew it.