This particular room had been where Demetrius had liked to exercise the worst of his power—and he’d had entirely too much power. He had loved nothing more than calling Molly in to stand before him, her heart pounding in her throat and her stomach in knots, while he shared with her exactly how embarrassing she’d been at whatever dinner had occurred the night before. How gauche and dull, when he’d expected so much more of her.
Constantine unfurling his magnificence before her while he stood in the very same spot where his father had stood before him was like...cognitive dissonance. Everything that had happened here had been dark. Even though she knew it had been typical Greek weather during those years, she always remembered it as if it had been dark and dreary, because inside her, it had. And then there was Constantine, who somehow seemed to blaze with a golden light when he should not have. Especially not now. But it had always been the same. He had all that Greek sunshine bottled up within him and everywhere he went, it was as if he lit up the world with every step he took.
It was annoying enough even when a person didn’t know the truth about his wretched, twisted soul.
And here, of all places, it left her...shuddery.
“I think perhaps you’re willfully misunderstanding me, Molly.”
He sounded casual and almost offhand. To disguise his true intentions, as always. Accordingly, he was dressed like a businessman, instead of the more casual things she’d seen him in over the years. Not that she was looking, ever, but they were often in the same tabloids. His version of a business suit was always...rumpled. That was Constantine. Always slightly in disarray, so it was impossible not to look at him and imagine what bed he had just rolled out of. Or if he’d troubled himself to find a bed at all.
Stop shuddering, she ordered herself, and had to fight not to press her hand to her belly. It would do nothing to quell her internal reaction to him, but it would certainly give her away.
As he rounded the desk, lazy and languid and seeming not to move at all even as he did, she assured herself that it was not that she was uniquely susceptible to him. It didn’t matter that he had pretended to be her friend or not. Or that he clearly was unhinged to have plotted out an elaborate revenge against her poor mother. Those things were factors, but not in the way her body reacted to him.
She couldn’t help it if she was a woman and he was not just a man, but him.
It was a perfectly natural physical, chemical response.
Molly certainly didn’t have to act on it.
“You and I are going to start a flaming, passionate affair,” he told her, oh-so-casually, as if he had summoned her here to chat about the weather. “It is going to be very, very public. I regret to inform you that like most women who become entangled with me, you will likely lose yourself. Fall in love, find yourself shattered, etcetera. It happens all too often.”
“I’m not Icarus and you’re not the sun, Constantine,” she snapped at him. “I’m aware that might come as a shock to you.”
His eyes gleamed. “We shall see. In any case, when I tire of you and your infamous charms, such as they are, I will discard you. Rudely and unfeelingly, I have no doubt. Then it will be up to you what you do afterward. Will you crawl off into obscurity as you should have done a decade ago? Or will you return to take your place on the runway, though you will be forced to accept that everyone who looks at you will no longer see whatever fashions you might be hawking, but my castoffs? Only time will tell.”
Her brain literally would not make sense of any of that, because it all hinged on an impossibility. “You mean this is some kind of act we’re going to put on... Right? Because, in case you’ve forgotten, you hate me. Remember?”
“I can only speak for myself,” he said, sounding lazy and faintly amazed that she was asking. “But I do not act when I make love. And I do not make love, Molly. I make war. In war, I regret to tell you, there can only be one victor.”
She knew she should have laughed at that. At him. It should have been hilarious. If any other man had said such a thing in her presence, she would like as not have broken a rib laughing too hard. She would have raced out of the room, contacted every friend she’d ever made, and invited them to laugh at him, too.
But nothing about Constantine Skalas was funny. Because she believed him. He’d been at war all along, she had simply been too foolish to see it. And deep inside, where she had always and only melted for him, she knew he meant everything he’d just said.
And then some.
“Why would I ever agree to such a plan?” she managed to ask.
He smiled then, devil that he was, and it was heartbreaking. For he looked positively angelic. His eyes looked almost warm, as if he cared deeply about her—or anything—when she knew that was patently false.
“I cannot think of a single reason that you would.” He shook his head, almost sorrowfully. “I would not, if I were in your place. But then, I would have left your mother to rot long ago.”
“The way
