“You are not hearing me,” Constantine thundered at her then. “You are the only thing on this earth I have ever felt for, Molly. First it was guilt. Then it was fury. And now—”
“Constantine,” she said, desperate and greedy, her heart a great clatter. Needy and sure, at last. Absolutely sure what this was—what this had always been. “Shut up.”
Then she launched herself at him.
And he caught her.
Molly might not have known what she was doing, but she knew it felt good.
And this time was different all over again. This time was slow. Constantine put his mouth on every inch of her body, as if committing her to memory, one lick of heat at a time.
He settled between her thighs and drank deep from the heat of her core, until all she could do was sob out his name like a prayer.
It felt that sacred.
Then he set her before him on her hands and knees and took her that way, a slow, delirious rhythm that made every part of her body seem to come alive. Then burn bright.
Only when she was sobbing again—but this time in the grip of that fiery need—did Constantine flip her over, gather her beneath him, and drive them both home.
When she woke again, it was morning.
Daylight poured in through the windows, bright and sweet. Molly felt deliciously battered from head to toe, and as she stretched she laughed as she found so many interesting tugs in new places.
She did not see the note until she sat up and looked around for Constantine. He was nowhere to be found in the vast bedchamber, but the note had been clipped to the pillow beside her.
She picked it up, trying to make sense of the words written across the heavy card stock in a slashing, dark hand.
It was a simple message, direct and to the point.
Molly felt it like a stab wound through her heart.
YOUR DEBT IS PAID IN FULL.
CHAPTER TEN
CONSTANTINE FLEW BACK to his antiseptic penthouse in London, a modern masterpiece of low-slung furniture and strange objects that he found neither artistic nor functional. He hadn’t chosen any of it himself. It was the work of the sort of interior design firm who catered to wealthy clients like the Skalas brothers, as it meant their work was always aspirational. The flat had been the subject of at least six different fawning articles about Constantine’s keen eye and flair for esthetics.
It looked like a bloody surgery, he thought now.
But then, that was why he’d chosen it and let the firm run wild. He didn’t want his home to be anything like the house in Skiathos. Memories lurking behind every door, rooms filled with art and nostalgia and ghosts. Feelings oozing from the walls. He had wanted his primary residence to stand as a visual representation of what he was.
Not the playboy, but the sharp-edged angel of vengeance he had made himself into.
He looked around the clean lines and soulless expanse of the penthouse and told himself he was fine. Terrific, even.
Constantine experimented with that theory upon his return to the Skalas & Sons London headquarters, dedicating himself to his work in a way he never had before. Meaning, visibly. He showed up at the office, did not send his usual proxy to board meetings, and generally turned the place on its ear by destroying the long-held fiction that he was the useless Skalas brother who did nothing at all, as a vocation.
And it was only after his trusted assistant suggested, very carefully, that he rethink his approach to the people who believed the hype about him—that he was lazy, sybaritic, more often to be found facedown in a sea of women than in the boardroom, and if he wished to change this that he do so at a more sedate pace—that Constantine accepted the fact that he was not, in fact, fine.
In any way.
If he was brutally honest with himself, he wasn’t sure that he would ever be anything like fine again.
Because he had excavated entirely too many of his own deep, personal motivations, and the feeling that left in him was unbearable.
Constantine preferred the clarity of revenge. The force and thrust of a life committed to nothing but vengeance. Every temper, every dark feeling, every wild and stormy thing within him—it had all been excused by his focus on getting even with Molly.
And through her, at last, Isabel.
Now all he could think about was Molly. That wasn’t new. But the way he thought of her had changed. Instead of brooding over what he would do to her and the many ways he would crush her and her mother to dust, he woke in the night in a fever of need. Instead of finding ingenious new ways to put pressure on Isabel, he found himself lapsing into daydreams about sunny afternoons in Skiathos and the sheer glory that was Molly on her knees before him, smiling up at him as if she wanted him.
As desperately and comprehensively as he wanted her.
Constantine suspected he had changed. That Molly had changed him, somehow, with her frankness and her laughter and that spirit of hers that had seemed to bloom brighter the more she was tested. The more he had tested her, the stronger she had seemed.
His revenge had backfired spectacularly, loath as he was to admit it, even as one week turned into another, then another still, and he was as unsettled as he’d been when he’d left Molly in Paris.
Because everything was different. He was different, and he disliked it intensely.
It was possible he disliked himself intensely.
Because he’d seen himself too clearly. He could not seem to claw his way back from that.
“You do not sound well, brother,” Balthazar commented when Constantine finally gave in and called him. He told himself it was only because his brother, too, knew the lure of
