But she had decided, with great deliberation, that she would rather be happy.
Wasn’t that why she’d sought Constantine out? Oh, she’d told herself it was to face down the architect of her mother’s financial ruin. She’d assured herself it had less to do with her own demons and far more to do with protecting Isabel.
Yet she knew better. Deep down, she had known that she was never going to be happy until she either exorcised the devil...or embraced him.
He was staring at her as if she’d sprouted new heads. “The Skalas family has ever been a pit of snakes. I would rather have gone off to war than sit down to a family dinner when I was a child. You were woefully unprepared. Outgunned and outmaneuvered before your plane landed on Skiathos. I had every intention of snapping you like a twig. I wouldn’t have thought about it twice. If anything, your total destruction would have amused me.”
She cleared her throat. “My recollection is that you did precisely that. And happily.”
Constantine let out a small, harsh sound. She could not call it a laugh.
“No, Molly. Not quite. Because you lit up when you talked about your mother.”
Molly’s voice hardly seemed to work any longer. “Is that a bad thing?”
His smile was merciless. “You knew her flaws, but you loved her. It was obvious. It made your whole face change even as you shared your frustrations with me. And the stories you told me, your little village secrets, did something I thought was impossible.” That smile carved a deeper groove on his beautiful face and she understood, then, that his lack of mercy was aimed at himself for once. Not her. “You made me feel sympathy for Isabel, Molly. And I couldn’t forgive it.”
“Constantine...” she whispered.
“I never sold your stories to the tabloids, Molly. I was so determined to punish you for the things you made me feel that I gave them all away. For free.”
Molly sucked in a breath at that. Her head was spinning. She had so many questions she wanted to ask him, but he was still glaring down at her in that stern, uncompromising way that should have made her faint.
Or something better than fainting, maybe. Something to address the way she prickled all over with that heat she now knew all too well.
“I don’t require these confessions from you,” she told him then. “I don’t even want them.”
She wanted to tell him she forgave him, but she didn’t quite dare. Even if, as she let that notion take root in her, she knew it was true. Or she would never have taken off her clothes for him. She would certainly never have writhed about in his hands on that first day, all abandonment.
But there had been something about all those sun-drenched days on the island. Something about baring her skin and letting the breeze and the light find her wherever she was. Something about opening herself wide to Constantine’s gaze and never wavering, never hiding, never falling apart.
Molly had forgiven him, yes. But she’d forgiven herself, too.
“I do not care if you want this confession,” Constantine said tightly, as if this was a fight they were having. He certainly looked as if he was prepared to wade into battle, so tautly did he hold himself. “And despite all that, I’m sure I would have forgotten you in time. Isabel’s relationship with my father didn’t last, because nothing my father touched ever lasted, except the fortunes he hoarded. You were no threat. I could have gone quite happily about my life and never thought of you again, Molly. That was the goal all along.”
She found herself staring back at him at that, mutely, not certain how to respond to that, much less the ferocity she could see stamped all over him.
“But instead, you became Magda. And you were everywhere. It began to feel not only as if you were hunting me, but as if you had played me from the start.” His laugh then was dark. “There I was, the jaded and worldly Skalas son, stamping out an innocent for my amusement the same way my father had always trodden on anything that dared attract his notice. But no. That whole time I thought I was crushing you into the dirt, you had one of the most famous women in the world right there inside of you. Ready to come out the moment you left Skiathos and escaped my family. You became my obsession.”
“I can’t imagine why you would care what happened to me.”
“Can you not?” His voice was a bitter lash. “Because I felt guilty, Molly. Guilty. You are the only thing I have ever felt guilty about in my life. Because for all I have always reveled in sin, for all I have sought out the darkness and the lowest of places, you did not deserve what I did to you. And I knew it.”
Now there was no stopping the way her heart catapulted against her chest. Now there was no hope of doing anything but sitting there, waiting to see what he would lob at her next. What mad grenade. What bomb she wouldn’t see coming.
“Now it turns out that once again, you have shamed me,” he said quietly. Ferociously. “Your innocence is my guilt made new. It proves that all along, I was never who I thought I was. And you... You have been even more pure, from the start, than I imagined anyone could be.”
Molly felt turned inside out. Or maybe she only wished she had been, when all she could see was the rich darkness of his gaze turned bleak.
“This is a lot of talk of guilt and shame,” she said. She found she could move then, so she did, crawling down the length of the bed until once more she could sit there before him, her knees beneath her. “And
