The Guardian's Virgin Ward

by Caitlin Crews

  Then, without ever looking back, he walked from the room, quiet and sure, and left her standing there.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LILIANA DIDN’T KNOW how long she stood there, rooted to the floor where he’d left her. It could have been a few minutes. It felt like whole years. A lifetime or two and she was left frozen, unable to make sense of anything that had just happened.

  She stood in the center of her bedroom while her hands crept over her belly to cradle it, and she waited to see if she would thaw. But she was skeptical.

  When there was a noise at the door she looked up, but it was only three members of Izar’s staff. They smiled politely the way they always did, and Liliana drifted off as if she was no longer tethered to this. To what had happened here. To what she’d done by being exactly as thoughtless as he’d always accused her of being.

  She watched as they took the bag she’d dropped near the wall and unpacked it, and then she went into the dressing room and packed it all over again, but with less insane selections. She said nothing when the maid took her arm and led her down the stairs, and still nothing when the driver bundled her into the Range Rover that waited for her outside.

  It was not until the car pulled up in front of one of Saint Moritz’s most famous and storied hotels that she blinked and took stock of her surroundings.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a panic when the driver came to her door. “I don’t want to be here. I need to go back. Izar—”

  “Mr. Agustin has checked you into the hotel,” the driver said apologetically yet firmly. “Once you have chosen a final destination, your things will be forwarded to you.”

  And Liliana...deflated.

  She let the driver help her from the car. She went through all the necessary motions to get into the room Izar had booked for her. The suite was a sprawling affair with several rooms and a stunning view over the whole of the Engadine Valley, but it might as well have been a brick wall for all she cared. When the porter closed the door behind him, Liliana sank down on the nearest sofa.

  And she stayed there.

  One day passed, then another. She ordered room service because she had to eat, then wondered why she bothered when it tasted like sawdust in her mouth. She was sick every morning, like clockwork, only without Izar there to press a damp cloth to her nape and hand her a drink of water.

  She supposed she slept, but what was the difference? It was as if she was suffocating in gray.

  Liliana recognized the feeling. She’d spent years like this when she was a girl. It was grief, suffocating and brutal.

  Izar was the only link to her family she had left. And he was so much more than a link. He was the love of her life. He was her baby’s father.

  He was her family.

  And he didn’t want her.

  Liliana had always known that she didn’t fit in anywhere, that no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t quite make it work. She was too strange. Too different. Too marked, maybe, by what she’d suffered and who she was. But she’d always had Izar. She’d had his letters. They’d followed her everywhere. She’d had the shadow of him over everything. How had she missed the fact that she’d relied on him to always be there for her in his brutal way?

  But now she’d lost him, too.

  She’d lost everything. Again.

  It was Christmas Eve when her phone buzzed and she lunged for it, sure it was Izar at last—but it was only a text.

  And, of course, she could no more imagine Izar Agustin texting than she could imagine him stripping naked and parading through the streets of Saint Moritz, but still. She swiped it open as if there really was a chance that it might be him, after all.

  But instead of Izar, it was Kay.

  You didn’t mention that while you were whisked off to that alien ship that they’d changed your identity...her old roommate wrote.

  Liliana clicked on the link Kay had sent, and then froze, crouched there on the edge of the same couch where she’d more or less taken up residence these past few days.

  The link took her to a tabloid web magazine, and she was the headline.

  Well. She and Izar were.

  Agustin’s Latest Goal Is the Reclusive Brooks Heiress! the headline shrieked. Izar Pops the Question—And Who Cares about the Scandal?

  But if it was a scandal, Liliana couldn’t bring herself to care about it as perhaps she should have. He was her guardian. She was his ward. The article was as speculative and revolting as expected, with a great many insulting asides, but that wasn’t what caught Liliana’s eye.

  It was the pictures.

  She could remember every second of that proposal. The way he’d stood so proud and calm before her. As if he could have stood there for the rest of their lives. She clenched her fist and her left hand felt empty without the ring he’d put there.

  But the pictures showed her far more than her memories. Far more than the kiss that had taken her over and turned her inside out. They showed her Izar’s face as he gazed down at her. His beautiful, arrogant face, not the way she remembered it—all clouded with her own worries and emotions—but without any embellishment. More than that, it showed the way he was looking at her.

  Like a man so deeply in love he didn’t know what to do about it.

  He had asked her to marry him and then he’d swept her off into his bedroom, and it had never occurred to her to question any of it. To wonder why a man who claimed he was nothing but rational would behave like a besotted lovebird. And she’d been too thrown by her pregnancy to recognize what she could see so clearly in all the pictures she clicked through, quicker and quicker, seeing the same hard and marvelous stamped on each and every one.

  It wasn’t that Izar didn’t want her. Of course he did. It was written all over him. It was obvious.

  Maybe, she thought then, it was that a man who thought he was ruined didn’t know how.

  Someday I’ll come back to New York and we’ll have a really long talk about all kinds of things, including aliens, she texted Kay. Then she smiled, for the first time since she’d woken up in Izar’s bed. For the first time since she’d found out she was having his baby and had spiraled off into her own gripping fear. And have a Merry Christmas.

  And then Liliana Girard Brooks, her mother’s daughter and a peerless gem of a woman if she said so herself, got up from the clutch of that couch—and all that suffocating gray—and went at last to claim the man she loved.

  * * *

  The staff had put up a damned Christmas tree and Izar hadn’t ordered it stripped, chopped and burned.

  If that wasn’t proof that he was a lost cause, Izar didn’t know what was. He sat before the garish thing in the private library on the second floor of the villa, staring at the obnoxiously cheerful lights and wondering what the hell he was still doing here.

  There was trouble brewing in Paris, at the headquarters of Agustin Brooks Girard, in the wake of those tabloid photos. Ordinarily he would have raced back to handle it, but he hadn’t. His phone had been lighting up all day with emails and calls, and he’d ignored them all. He didn’t plan to discuss his relationship with Liliana with anyone. And certainly not with a group of overstuffed, pompous businessmen like his board members.

  It had crossed his mind that he could lose the company over this. They could push that moral clause, he supposed, if they truly wished it—and after all this time and everything he’d put into Agustin Brooks Girard, he found he didn’t have it in him to care. Not anymore.

  It was only a company. He could build another one if he wanted. Companies were replaceable.

  He heard a footfall at the door behind him, but he didn’t turn.

  “I do not wish to be disturbed,” he said in a voice too low to be strictly polite, assuming it was some or other member of his staff.

  “That’s too bad,” came the last voice he thought he’d hear again. Especially not here.

  He turned slowly, expecting to see nothing but the door to the hall. But he wasn’t having an auditory hall
ucination.

  Liliana stood in the doorway, even more beautiful than he’d remembered her. So breathtaking he stopped wondering just how he’d lost himself so completely that night in New York City. Tonight her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright—and none of that mattered. He couldn’t have her.

  How had he ever thought otherwise?

  “I’m sorry to interrupt all of this very productive self-pity.” Clad in a simple sheath dress that proclaimed her pedigree with every elegant line, Liliana leaned one hip against the door. She looked defiant. She looked edible. “It looks like so much fun.”

  He shook his head and turned his attention back to the tree, as if all those gleaming white lights could save him from the things he wanted to do to this woman. Or save her from him, anyway.

  “I set you free, Liliana. You should not be here.”

  “You are the most stubborn, infuriating man I’ve ever met in my life,” she said with a sigh, and it took him a stunned moment to realize that she didn’t sound angry. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, that undercurrent in her voice sounded like...laughter? “Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t want to go anywhere? When I told you I loved you, Izar, I meant it.”

  “Impossible,” he grated out.

  But his hands had clenched into fists without his permission and, somehow, he was standing. Facing her. When it was the last thing he should be doing. Not on a quiet night in a closed room when he wasn’t sure he could bear to keep his hands to himself.

  “I’m going to be the mother of your child.”

  Liliana shook her head at him, sending her thick golden hair slipping this way and that over her shoulders. And Izar knew what it felt like to bury his hands in it. He knew its fragrance. He knew how to sink his fingers in deep to hold her head where he liked it as he thrust deep inside her and made her his.

  None of that was productive.

  “Thank you.” His voice was tense. Hard. Like the rest of him. “I am aware.”

  “I’d like you to take these next nine months as an opportunity to comprehend the fact that I’m not twelve years old anymore,” she suggested. “I know my own mind. We might not agree. But you’re no longer just my guardian and I’m no longer just your ward and you can’t make love to me all night long and then lecture me on what I can and cannot feel the next morning. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “I don’t want it both ways.” He gazed at her, his beautiful Liliana, who finally looked entirely unafraid. Fierce and certain, and he had never wanted her more. He had never wanted anything in his life as much as he wanted her. He understood he never would. And he should have known that was why he could never, ever have her. “I want you to go.”

  “No, Izar,” Liliana said very distinctly. “You don’t.”

  His chest tightened as she walked toward him then, her lips curved in something like a smile, except less sunny and far more dangerous than any he’d seen her wear before. His heart kicked at him. And still she came.

  “Perhaps you are too unfamiliar with emotions to understand them when you encounter them,” she suggested as she came to a stop a scant inch away from him, and he was dimly aware that she was echoing something he’d said to her a long time ago.

  His hands itched to touch her. Her scent teased him. This was pure torture and it would end in nothing. He’d forgotten who he was, but he remembered now. It felt stamped deep into his bones.

  “Enough,” he managed to say. He sounded furious and he was—but not with her.

  Liliana smiled as if she knew it.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret.” She tipped her head back and reached out to him with a finger. A single finger. And yet when she poked it into his pectoral muscle, he felt it as if she’d wrapped herself around him and taken him deep inside. “You’re in love with me, Izar. That’s why you felt the need to come over so noble and self-effacing—the very opposite of anything I’ve ever seen you do.”

  He felt as if she’d pushed him out the window behind him. “Do not be absurd.”

  “You love me, Izar,” she said gently, and then she made it worse by moving even closer and taking one of his hands in hers.

  He didn’t know what she meant to do with it—he might have stared down at the place they touched in a kind of horror—but she only moved his hand to her belly and flattened his palm over it. If there was the faintest swell, he couldn’t feel it, but he could feel her. Liliana, everywhere. As sweet and pure as the mountain air.

  “You love me and you will love this baby,” she told him.

  He cracked at that. Shattered. As if she’d broken him all over again. But he didn’t move his hand. He couldn’t.

  “You did not want this child a few days ago,” he reminded her, his voice a dark and terrible thing. “Now you speak of love?”

  “I was scared,” she said softly, her blue eyes wide. “Overwhelmed. I’m so used to pitting myself against you, Izar, that it took me a moment or two to realize I’d much rather stop doing that.”

  “Ah, gatita.” And his voice was low, broken like the rest of him. “I am no less feral now than I ever was. You have the entire world at your disposal. You could choose anyone. You will.”

  “But I want you.”

  He said her name again, but she ignored him.

  “Let me be very clear,” Liliana told him, still holding his hand against the place where his child already grew, with that same light of mischief in her eyes making her seem to sparkle before him, like the kind of magic he didn’t believe in. “I don’t want any kind of spiteful marriage. No fighting for supremacy at the table every night. I expect very little, really. I will love you. I think I always have. And all you need to do is love me in return.”

  “Liliana.” But it was hardly a word at all.

  “I know you have a great many more requirements,” she said softly, “but I don’t. I want you. I want this.”

  “I love you,” he said, because he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t keep it inside. It burst out of him, and he didn’t know why he’d thought the words were so terrifying and wrong when she smiled at him like that. “I do not care about the rest of it. I have never loved anything in all my life, my gatita, but you.”

  “I know, you silly man,” she whispered, her eyes shining and bright. “I know.”

  And this time when he kissed her, it was forever.

  He could taste it. He meant it.

  And he might stop being Liliana’s guardian the moment he married her—and he had every intention of marrying her—but he would spend the rest of his life protecting her either way.

  It was only when she laughed up at him that he realized he’d said all of that out loud, pressing kisses in between his words all over her upturned face.

  “I know you will, my love,” Liliana told him. “You can start right now.”

  And so Izar did. Right there before the fire, in the sparkling lights of their very first Christmas tree.

  * * *

  Izar Agustin married his ward on the day after Christmas in one of the most elegant weddings Europe had ever seen, which was saying something. She wore an exquisite dress from one of her own couture houses, was draped in her mother’s jewels and featured a veil that had been in her father’s family for generations.

  “I want them with us,” she told him at the reception, where they danced together in a very crowded hall and saw nothing but each other.

  “Your parents will always be with us,” Izar told her.

  He wasn’t sure he believed it. But he wanted to believe it, and he thought that counted for something.

  They weathered the storm their relationship caused by ignoring it. If the board had issues with Izar marrying Liliana, they certainly didn’t mention it to either one of their faces when Liliana took her place in the company.

  And once she started to show, no one mentioned it at all.

  “It is amazing, gatita, how much the world wants a happy ending,” he told his wife one night in their Parisian ho
me. She was huge with his child and, if anything, it had made her more beautiful. She had her feet in his lap and her head tipped back over the side of the sofa, but she lifted it to study him for a moment.

  “The world may want it,” she agreed. “But you deserve it, Izar. I promise you.”

  He wanted to believe it. Oh, how he wanted to believe it.

  Their daughter was born in Paris a few weeks later, delivered into his very own hands, red faced and vocal. Two years later she was followed by a son, chubby and mad.

  Izar had never believed in love. Not for him.

  But he would accept nothing less for his children and the woman who had given them to him. And slowly he began to believe in it for himself, too. Slowly and surely, one year into the next, until it was hard to remember he’d ever considered himself ruined.

  One afternoon while the children were in school, Izar stopped outside the gleaming office adjoining his that Liliana had claimed years back. She sat at the round table she used for meetings, poring over sketches, and for some reason he remembered that cold night so long ago in that awful little flat in the Bronx. How she’d looked when she’d come through the door, lean and sleek and impossibly tempting. How she’d looked at him, as if she didn’t know if he was a nightmare or a dream.

  Maybe he’d been both. But she’d turned all of his nightmares on their heads, one after the next. She did it every day.

  Liliana Agustin had long since come into her own. She had her mother’s eye for a perfect line and her father’s business sense, which made her indispensable to the company within a very short time. She was the peerless gem Izar had imagined she’d become; she was hailed as a visionary across the whole of the planet, and she only seemed to glow brighter by the day. And yet she was still happy to roll around on the floor in laughing heaps with their children, as if there was nothing the least bit pedigreed about her.

  More than all this, she was his. Always and forever his.

  And she’d been keeping something from him.

  “I know you’re there,” she said without looking up from her work. “You storm beautifully, my love, but never quietly.”