Which was currently also how his life felt around him. Misshapen, because Molly had been in the middle of it.
But then every muscle in him tensed up when Isabel reached out and laid her hand on his arm.
Her gaze on his was far too warm. Far too knowing.
“You should hate me,” he gritted out. “Why don’t you?”
“I have spent too much time being hated myself,” she replied. “I would never inflict it on another. Or myself. What a waste. Might as well chain yourself to whatever you’re hating and leap into the sea. That’s the kind of power you give it.”
Constantine thought of the stories Molly had told him about her childhood, more when she’d been sixteen than now. Back then he’d been far more interested in piecing those stories together to make them scandalous. SAD SINGLE MUM TO SKALAS BRIDE! PREGNANT AT SIXTEEN!
Only now did it occur to him that Molly had not been as naive as he’d imagined her back then. She had already faced all manner of close-minded ignorance. All he’d done was show her that such mean-spiritedness wasn’t the unique province of small country villages.
He kept thinking it was impossible to hate himself more. And in that, too, he was wrong.
Isabel squeezed his arm and he stared down at her hand, still astounded that she had simply...reached out and touched him. As if he was a regular man instead of this monster he’d become.
A monster far too like his father.
“And I want to apologize to you, Constantine,” she said softly. “I should have tried harder to get through to you, but not in my usual clumsy way. I know I only made things worse.”
Constantine couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cope with this. It was as if this woman was a tsunami, ripping into him years ago and now again, and in all this time he still hadn’t figured out how to survive her.
Maybe he never would. Maybe all these years of plotting and planning and honing himself into what he’d thought was the perfect weapon for his revenge had all been leading here, to a quiet care facility and a soft hand on his arm.
Maybe he had always been meant to go out with a whimper, after all.
“Some people aren’t worth these efforts, Isabel,” he managed to say, though everything inside him seemed to rock wildly back and forth. “There’s no getting through to them. No matter what you do, or what you try, it will always be futile. There’s nothing clumsy or elegant that could ever be done to reach them where they’ve gone, and good riddance.”
Isabel squeezed his arm again, as if that was a normal thing that people just...did. And worse, smiled at him. As if she couldn’t see what a monster he was, when she should know better. When she’d been married to his father, the worst monster of all.
“I suppose vengeance can be elegant,” she said as if this was nothing but happy cocktail chatter. “It requires surgical precision, doesn’t it? I think you’ll find that in contrast, love is often clumsy, Constantine. Or it wouldn’t hurt so much, would it?”
And it was not until that moment, with Isabel Payne’s hand on his arm, his own mother there in the same room, and his heart flayed wide open, that Constantine understood at last.
He was in love.
All this time, all these years, all his grand plans...and he was in love.
And the moment that was clear to him, at long last, there was only one place for him to go.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MOLLY WAS ENJOYING a quiet evening in—or more accurately, brooding with wine yet again, because that appeared to be all she did when left to her own devices since she’d returned from Paris—when a terrific pounding started up on her front door downstairs.
She had long since removed any buzzer from her property, because the paparazzi had regularly abused it. Anyone who wished to contact her should have her mobile number, and if they didn’t, they shouldn’t contact her. Packages and other such deliverables she had delivered to her agent’s offices instead. Where they could be picked up at her leisure or delivered by messengers she recognized.
There was no reason anyone should be pounding on her door.
She set her wine aside and stalked across to the windows that opened up onto the balcony that sat up above the street. She stepped out, breathing in the warm air. It was full summer in England. Light held on until late and even though it was just as likely that it would take a cold turn by morning, it was impossible not to feel a bit giddy.
But when Molly peered over the side of her balcony to see who was abusing her front door, she found she did not feel giddy at all.
Because Constantine stood there. Staring up at her as if she had left him, naked in a bed in a different country.
“I thought my debt was paid in full,” she said, her voice going a bit echoey against the cobblestones.
Or maybe she was feeling a bit wobbly herself. She was clinging to the rail, though she told herself it was because it was his neck she would like to wring, not because her knees felt much weaker than they ought to have.
Because Constantine was here. Here, at her door. And he looked even more darkly beautiful than she remembered.
And all she seemed to do was remember him.
She had spent a lot of time imagining him in different places, and different poses—and a thousand different positions because her body longed for him in ways that made her shiver—but she hadn’t imagined him here. All of that simmering Greek glory, out on the cobblestones with London brooding about in the background. Rumpled and hot-eyed and almost too recklessly masculine to look at directly.
It was almost too much to take.
“This isn’t about debts,” he retorted.
A bit loudly, to her surprise.
Almost as if he...felt something.
But this was Constantine Skalas. There was more
