And knew instantly that she’d made a huge mistake.
Constantine didn’t blow up the way his father would have. He didn’t throw something breakable across the room. He only studied her as if she were an experiment on a slide beneath a microscope—one he intended to dissect—while everything about him went still.
“Do not mention my mother again,” he said quietly. So quietly it was very nearly a whisper, and every hair on Molly’s body seemed to stand on end. “You will find that there are few topics off-limits to me. I’m not a man with any boundaries, and I mean that in every sense. But my mother is off-limits to you.”
“I haven’t agreed to do any of the things you suggested,” she pointed out with a great surge of bravado she only wished she felt. “If I want to talk about your mother and the simple facts about her that every single person on earth knows—”
“I can’t stop you, of course.” He cut her off in that same quiet manner that made her spine hurt because she was standing so straight, so tall, for fear that if she did not, he would see how she shook. “But know this. Every time you mention my mother, I will take it as an invitation to vent my displeasure on yours.”
And as ever, Molly felt that same sick rush of love and shame, frustration and longing that characterized her entire relationship with Isabel. If she could only find a way not to love her mother, her life would be infinitely simpler. If she could only harden herself and stop caring what became of Isabel, she wouldn’t be standing here right now. She could have carried on living a life completely apart from even the faintest hint of the Skalas family, as had been her preference for years now.
But it didn’t matter how many times her mother called her from the middle of what she liked to call her little scrapes. Or how many times Molly swore she would be done, once and for all, cleaning up all of Isabel’s messes.
Oh, Moll, her mother would say in that rueful, smoky voice of hers, I’ve really done it this time.
And despite the number of times she’d received that call, or had grudgingly agreed to let Isabel stay with her until she sorted it, which she never did, Molly still loved her. Molly couldn’t help but love her. That was the whole of the trouble right there.
“Right,” she said now, in Skiathos and in grave danger as well she knew. She kept her tone brisk. “No talk of mothers and I get to be your mistress, not merely a one-off shag. Brilliant. But how does that work, exactly?”
“How do you think it works?” Constantine’s head tilted slightly to one side. Molly had the distinct and unsettling notion that he was less a man in that moment, and instead, some kind of overly large predator more usually found in the nature documentaries she watched when she couldn’t sleep on whatever airplane she was on, jetting off to another job. “Have you not spent many, many years as a mistress to this or that man of appropriate means? What few there are in that tax bracket, of course. I am told it is very difficult to afford you.”
That was possibly meant to be a joke, as there was nothing on earth or in the heavens above that a Skalas couldn’t buy. Twice.
Molly opened her mouth to disabuse him of any notion he might have been harboring that she’d flitted about adorning the arms of the unworthy and unappealing men who thought they deserved her, no matter what the gossips liked to claim. But she caught herself.
Because if this was really going to happen—a possibility she couldn’t quite allow herself to contemplate too closely, because it was too much, and too dangerous on a personal level after all she’d done to climb out of the abyss of her teenage years here—it would suit her far better that he thought of her as her alter ego. Magda.
Magda had been a creation of necessity. Molly Payne, awkward and shy, could not possibly have done the things she had if left to her own blancmange devices. But Magda could do anything. Magda had no fear. She was bright and strong, and when Molly was pretending to be her, the world around her was limitless. And usually hers for the taking besides.
Constantine insisted on calling her Molly, no doubt to remind them both of the power he’d held over her way back when. But clearly, he also believed everything he had heard about Magda. That could only work to her benefit.
Because Magda would think absolutely nothing about launching herself headfirst into a passionate love affair with the devil himself. In point of fact, Magda would find the whole thing unutterably delicious. She would laugh uproariously at the idea that she would ever be diminished by such a liaison. Not Magda. All Magda ever did was glow.
Molly regarded him for moment, collecting herself. Or collecting Magda, as the case might be, because that had always been much easier.
“Every man has a different set of requirements for the trophies he collects,” she said nonchalantly. “And naturally, when the trophy is me, there are different considerations at play. My career is demanding and it will not stop being demanding to please the man in my life. Or even to accommodate him. And, of course, there is no possibility that I will ever waft about, waiting on a man hand and foot as some men long for. I require neither money nor the euphemistic help that such situations are generally made for, suiting all parties. So you see, it is indeed difficult to afford me, but not in the way you mean.”
Well done, she congratulated herself. Maybe next you can open up a brothel and make yourself the madam, since you’re such a believable whore. That will be a terrific use
