It had been torture, in other words.
A torture he intended to visit upon dear stepsister, Molly, who his staff down at the gate to the estate had informed him had just arrived.
The waiting was exquisite.
After all these years, after all his plotting, after creating the perfect disguise for his true intentions and living it in full view of the world, it was time.
If he was capable of such things, he might have considered himself positively gleeful.
Constantine leaned back in the huge leather chair, itself a monument to a certain kind of overt masculinity. His father’s kind, all bluster and bark, but unlike some of his toxic ilk, with a deadly bite beneath.
His father had died a few years back, and unlike Constantine’s older brother, Balthazar, who had always splayed himself wide open with an unnecessary sense of responsibility, Constantine did not miss him. Perish the thought. The world was a far better place without Demetrius Skalas. His sons, in particular, were incalculably better off without him.
Not to mention, the old man’s absence meant Constantine had finally been able to put the plan closest to his blackened heart into action.
He waited, smiling to himself when he heard the click of very high heels along the hallway floors that led to this study. He had not known which version of his stepsister to expect. But the heels were like a premonition, and then, in the next moment, she appeared.
She stopped in the doorway and regarded him.
Constantine gazed right back, aware of a certain electrical charge that seemed to fill the space between them.
No longer awkward or embarrassing, or anything like gawky, little Molly Payne, the housekeeper’s daughter had transformed herself. She stood before him, framed by the doorway, and stared at him as if she stood atop some kind of catwalk and he was at her feet. It was adorable, truly. And he had seen her blond hair in a number of different styles, but today she had gone for big and lustrous curls, like a cat puffing itself up to make itself seem bigger in the face of a predator.
Poor little kitty, he thought to himself, darkly. Your tricks and claws will not help you here.
Her eyes were a stunning, arctic blue, and today she’d expertly applied the kind of cosmetics that took hours to achieve a barely there look, so that she looked effortlessly sultry, the cold color of those eyes honed to a laser point. Her pout was enough to raze cities to the ground, and that wasn’t getting to her magnificent figure that had been splashed across every magazine cover in existence, then back again.
For awkward little Molly Payne had not had the good manners to fade off into obscurity when her mother’s reprehensible marriage to Constantine’s father had ended. He had imagined she would lead a perfectly unobjectionable porridge sort of life, perhaps away in one of those sad, lesser British cities, where everything was forever gray and depressed. Like she had been.
But no such luck. For instead, his stepsister had gone ahead and had the temerity to become universally, stratospherically famous.
“If it isn’t the eponymous Magda,” Constantine drawled, eventually, using her laughable professional name.
“Hello, Constantine,” she replied.
Like all beautiful women whose looks were widely held to be objective fact, not subject to individual opinion, every inch of her was weaponized. Including that voice. It struck him like his favorite spirit, METAXA, smooth and complex before rolling on into a deeper, hotter intensity.
He had expected to feel the attraction that hammered him then, but it was far worse now that she was in this room than it usually was when he was confronted with her picture. Everywhere.
“I thought you would enjoy this trip down memory lane with me,” he said, lounging back in the chair. His father had been a rigid man, his only excesses brutal. Constantine, by contrast, had created for himself the most dissipated, dissolute alter ego possible. It had started when he was young. He had learned, as his brother never had, that there was no point in attempting to live up to a madman’s expectations. For every time a certain level was achieved, their father made up seven more. No one could possibly scale those heights.
Constantine had stopped trying. Then and now, he took great pleasure in polluting his father’s legacy with his own brand of what he liked to call his libertine approach to rakishness.
The tabloids used other words. He delighted in all of them.
“Is that what this is?” Molly asked. For he refused to think of her as Magda. “Memory lane? Funny, that. This particular road to hell always seemed remarkably unpaved to me.”
“How droll. You’ve become so spiky over the years.”
She did not shift from where she stood, shown to perfection in the doorway to the study. And Constantine had taken on a deep, personal study of the rise of Magda, a modern supermodel in a time when supermodels were widely held to be a thing of the past. He knew she was fully aware that the sun streamed in from without, lighting her beautifully, and dancing all over
