He was on his feet, though he didn’t recall when he’d decided to move. Constantine stood over the table, staring down at her, and for all her talk of what was and was not a spell, he felt cursed.
She had haunted him for years. And over the past ten days, that haunting had only grown worse. Because everything had gone according to plan here, except his reaction.
He had wanted her to be lulled into a false sense of security. He had wanted her to stop worrying he might pounce on her at any turn and to embrace both the insistence upon nakedness as well as the sunscreen he ritualistically applied to her body every morning.
But while she seemed to have acclimated with ease, all Constantine seemed to do was lose sleep.
“You seem to have forgotten your place,” he managed to get out.
But Molly rose, too, like a shimmering blue flame. She was a gloriously tall woman, no doubt used to looking men in the eye. Or looking down at them. Yet she had to tilt her chin to manage it with him, and Constantine found he liked that he did not loom over her as he normally did over women.
Because it put her mouth that much closer to his.
“You’d better teach me my place then,” she shot back at him. “Don’t you know? We Payne women have a terrible habit of casting spells on unwary men like witches of yore, then making them do our bidding. Behold my success, for it has made me...your plaything.”
“Shut up,” he growled at her.
And then he took her mouth in a fury.
It had been too long since that last kiss. It had been too long.
He found his hands on the sides of her jaw, holding her mouth right where he needed it. He kissed her and he kissed her, a wild taking. A claiming, possessive and dark.
He kissed her until he realized that if he didn’t stop, he would take her right there, out on the terrace beneath the stars.
And that was not the plan.
Just as the fire that coursed through him was not the plan, because it threatened to undo everything. It got in his head, it made him far too hard, it made his hands move over her as if all he’d been put on this earth to do was worship the glory she wore so easily.
He kissed her until he thought it might break him, and then he thrust her away from him.
And took some solace in the fact that however wrecked he might feel, she looked worse. Her blue eyes had gone dark, needy.
The sound she made was of loss.
“Tonight is our last night here,” he told her. “We have a series of extremely high-profile events to attend, Molly. Remember. This affair will be very, very public.”
“Is it an affair? Or an impromptu bit of theater you’ve set up for your entertainment?”
But she didn’t ask that quite as sharply as she might have. And he could hear the tremor in her voice. He could see the flush on her face and against the fabric of that dress of hers, the telltale press of her hard nipples, giving her away.
“Don’t you worry about when our affair will begin in truth,” Constantine said, dark and hot. “You’ll know. You’ll find yourself on your knees, begging as beautifully as you do anything else.”
And then he left her there, still obviously trying to hide the fact that she was shaken before she could tell that he was, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOLLY SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED, Constantine being Constantine, that the publicity tour he had apparently put together in his spare time—all while seeming to do nothing but drive her to the brink of distraction with his daily sunscreen ritual, then taunt her every evening—was comprehensive. And would catapult them to the forefront of every gossip’s mind, not to mention every tabloid’s main page, with a vengeance.
Because vengeance was his goal, and she needed to remember that. She had almost started to think that his goal was to keep her completely off balance, because he was succeeding at that, and brilliantly.
Though she thought she would rather fling herself from one of the Skiathos cliffs, like the Gothic heroine she told herself she was, than admit it.
That next morning he drove them both in a simmering silence to the Skiathos airport. His jet waited for them there, prepared to whisk them off across the world to Los Angeles, stop one on their world tour. It might look like a romantic interlude to some. It was meant to look like a happy accident of press appearances while engaged in some of that high-profile celebrity charity that famous and infamous people alike used the way teenagers used the hallways in their schools, all see and be seen.
But Molly knew the point of it was neither romance nor charity. It was her eventual humiliation. He’d said so.
“If we are attending some kind of gala event,” Molly remarked as they started their descent into a surprisingly clear day over the Los Angeles basin, “does that mean that you have also selected my wardrobe? Or is this more naked time. That will cause a stir.”
Across from her, Constantine barely looked up from the laptop that had consumed his attention for the whole of their flight. Too busy checking for mention of himself in several languages, she could only assume. Because it was too strange to think of Constantine Skalas actually working. Surely that was what Balthazar was for.
She couldn’t have said what Constantine was for, save her own, personal destruction.
“Your role is simple,” he said now. “Keep your mouth closed and act adoring. Easy enough, no?”
“Easy, yes,” she agreed. “But unusual, certainly. I’m not exactly known as the shy and retiring type.”
Constantine slapped his laptop closed as the jet’s wheels touched the ground. His gaze seemed to touch hers with a similar impact. “But you are besotted,
