Because Molly already knew she would not like what she saw.
CHAPTER SIX
“I BEG YOUR PARDON.” His brother Balthazar’s voice was bright with amusement, and Constantine could practically see the look on his face, even though he was holed up far away on a private island down where the Aegean flirted with the bigger Mediterranean. He and the woman who was the daughter of the man who had destroyed their mother who Balthazar had married and impregnated, though not in that order. “Did you say Molly Payne? Our Molly Payne?”
“Perhaps you know her better as Magda,” Constantine murmured. “Ridiculous as the name might be, and much as it pains me to admit it, she is universally known.”
Balthazar laughed, which was a strange, new thing he did since his wedding. When, by rights, his marriage should have been as cold as the revenge he had always intended to wreak on his bride’s family. Constantine could not get used to a lighter side of his grim older brother. It was...disconcerting.
“I don’t know her at all, brother,” Balthazar said. “No matter what name she uses. Because she was our stepsister for approximately five minutes and then I promptly forgot her.”
“I did not.”
The inadequacy of that statement clung to Constantine as the silence dragged out between Balthazar and him. Inadequacy and the fact that while he’d expected his fascination with Molly to wane after ten days in her constant company here in Skiathos, it had not.
And that, too, was putting it mildly.
His brother didn’t have to know that. Just as Balthazar didn’t need to know that Molly was currently dozing in a sun lounger that she’d pulled up beneath one of the umbrellas near the pool that was cut into the cliff below from the house, making its own level in the steep hill. Or that Molly came to him in the mornings, always naked and defiant, and he made sure to put the sunscreen all over her skin—though there was, sadly, no repeat of her ecstatic first reaction to his touch.
Was she fighting the simmering, greedy thing between them as hard as he was?
And did she understand that what he was doing was getting her not only used to his touch, but dependent on it—so that when she begged him for her release, as he knew she would, she would mean it?
Because sometimes that was all he thought about. Another thing he did not intend to share with his brother.
From his vantage point on the balcony off the master bedroom, he could see her where she lay. He could see how she glowed. She was stretched out on the lounger with a book in one hand and not a stitch on, which she had taken to as if it had been her idea in the first place. She wafted about the estate in the same manner, often frowning at him as if it was bizarre that he was actually wearing clothes.
He hadn’t expected that his nudity decree would humble her—she was a woman who was not in the least ashamed of her body, and he liked that. It made her all the more beautiful. But he had expected some pushback, and there was none.
Her own way of fighting back, he supposed.
Constantine wanted her. Badly.
But the waiting only made the wanting better. And it would make her inevitable destruction better, too. Or so he kept telling himself.
“I wouldn’t have mentioned Molly Payne at all,” Constantine said into his mobile. “But she and I are undergoing a small negotiation that is taking more time than expected. I didn’t want you to worry unduly if you heard mention that I wasn’t in the office.”
He ran the Skalas & Sons operation from their London base, but he traveled so much under usual circumstances that it was not as difficult as it might have been to handle his office from afar. And besides, there were so few members of his staff who understood that he was in no way the character he played for the world. He liked it that way.
But his brother was a different story.
“I did not realize that I was your keeper,” Balthazar said, sounding amused when he was usually anything but. “Or your boss.”
Constantine knew that most of the world was convinced the Skalas brothers hated each other. They had split the company after Demetrius’s death—in the sense of their responsibilities, though too many people seemed convinced it had been a civil war. Balthazar spent most of his time in New York, Constantine in London. And because each one of them had chosen his own city and headquarters, and saw no reason to live in each other’s pockets, this was seen as evidence of their undying loathing for each other.
Neither one of them had ever bothered to set the record straight.
The truth was far less interesting. They had grown up under the foot of a cruel man who’d pitted them against each other. They had not learned how to be close. Neither one of them, therefore, had ever craved it.
And yet, when Balthazar had chosen to marry his enemy’s daughter, a move Constantine grudgingly admired as truly leaning into the long game when it came to revenge, Constantine had stood as witness. He had taken his place at his brother’s side in the traditional role of koumbaro at the wedding and had been fascinated to discover that his always cold, always business-minded brother was far more emotionally involved with his pregnant new wife than Constantine had expected.
More than he’d thought was even possible for a Skalas, for that matter.
And he had found that while he had not known how to be close to Balthazar growing up, or if such a thing was wise with a father who sought always to crush them both—using whatever weapons came to hand—it seemed less a mystery now that they were grown men. He could simply be a brother. Just as Balthazar could in return.
Though it was easier to think such things and far more difficult to know what
