But this. This was the exception that proved the truth.
For this was even better than he had imagined it—and he had imagined it in a thousand different variations, year after year.
“Why, I thought what I wanted was obvious,” Constantine said, milking the moment for all it was worth.
Because he had waited all this time. Because his mother lay senseless in a long-term care facility, dead in all but name thanks to what had been done to her. Balthazar had handled the architect of their mother’s downfall, the man who had seduced her then discarded her, then laughed when their father had done the same. Constantine was glad his brother had taken care of that egregious loose end. But for his part, he had never forgiven the woman who had truly imagined she could walk in and take their mother’s place.
“Spell it out for me,” Molly urged him. “I know you can’t want my money, because you have far too much of your own. And anyway, all of my money is gone. Because someone had to take care of my mother’s debts when you ruined her again and again—but I think you already know that. So what is it?”
“I told you when you called me, did I not? I do hate to repeat myself.”
“In the very brief, very obnoxious phone call it took you three weeks to return, you told me that there was a possibility my mother could reclaim her properties and retain her good name, such as it was.” Her blue eyes glinted. “Your words, obviously. I’m betting it will involve intense humiliation for all the world to see, that being your specialty. Just tell me the shape of it.”
“Intensity and humiliation are all a question of degrees,” Constantine mused. Philosophically. “And perspective, do you not think? It should be obvious what I want, Molly.” He smiled. “It is the one thing I am truly known for.”
And he had the great pleasure of watching her face go slack with shock. He saw, very clearly and distinctly, the difference between Molly and Magda, because she lost completely that harder shell he supposed she must have developed over the years. And in its place was the face of a girl he half remembered, wide blue eyes, a sulky mouth, and forever where she didn’t belong.
“You can’t mean...”
“But I do,” he told her, his voice low and deliberate. Revenge served cold, and it made him hot, everywhere. “I want you, Molly. Beneath me. And above me. And in all other ways. Naked, begging, and most of all, completely mine to do with what I wish, for as long as I wish, until your mother’s debt is paid. In full.”
She actually gaped at him. His smile widened.
“Did I not tell you it was a simple thing?” he asked silkily. “You should know this above all else, Molly. I am nothing if not a man of my word.”
CHAPTER TWO
MOLLY PAYNE WANTED to die.
A not unusual occurrence in this man’s presence. Or in the presence of any member of the vile Skalas family, for that matter, though in the years since her mother’s escape from their clutches she had tried to block out her reaction to actually standing before one of them.
She’d obviously grown soft over the past decade.
Because this was much, much worse than her memories.
As far as Molly was concerned, the Skalas family was a scourge upon the earth. A very rich, very powerful scourge. When she’d heard the news that cruel old Demetrius had died, though she did not make a habit of thinking ill of the dead under normal circumstances, Molly and her mother had gone out to a lovely meal in London to celebrate. That mean old bastard deserved a few toasts to speed him along to hell, where he belonged.
But Constantine was a special case.
He had always been the seemingly nice one. Where his father was cruel and his older brother, Balthazar, distant and disapproving, Constantine had been friendly. He had encouraged Molly, ungainly and terribly shy, to open up to him about what it was like to be the daughter of a woman like her mother. And she had told him, to her eternal shame. She had spent sixteen years filled with that desperate, helpless love on the one hand, yet cringing all the time at each and every obvious indication that Isabel Payne would do almost anything if she thought it would serve her ambition.
And the friendlier he was to her, the more Molly had told him things she should have kept to herself. Sacred, secret things she had no business sharing with anyone or anything but her own diary.
Things Constantine had gone right ahead and shared with the tabloids, and yet she had been so overawed by him that it had taken the better part of those terrible two years to fully accept that, yes, she was the source of all those gossipy stories about her mother’s ghastly relationship with Demetrius Skalas. Isabel’s True Face Revealed, and so on.
That was bad enough. Hideous, in fact. But such was his bitter genius that it had taken her many more years to realize that what he’d done to her was far more insidious than merely telling her secrets to a tabloid. Molly had come away from her mother’s unhappy, if profitable, marriage to Demetrius Skalas convinced that she was a plodding, embarrassing bit of blancmange, destined for a quiet life of secretarial work, meals from a greasy local chippie with too much wine from the off-license, and the spiraling claws of despair. Had she not been discovered by a modeling agent on the Tube, of all the absurd stories she would have said were fake if it hadn’t happened to her, she imagined that was precisely the life she would be living right this moment. As if those two short years in the
