Page 18 of Her Deal with the Greek Devil
But Constantine only smiled. “You will stay in your old bedroom, naturally.”
“Naturally,” she repeated. Because that would be more torture, wouldn’t it? “How appropriate.”
His eyes brightened. “I saw that you brought only one small bag. I brought it in, but you will not need even that. If I wish you to dress, I will provide whatever it is I think you ought to wear. Nightly, we will have dinner and you will wear whatever is left on your bed. And nothing else. Do you understand me?”
“With perfect clarity,” she said. After all, her entire adult life had been about beingsomeone’slife-size dress-up doll. Why not his?
“Wonderful.” The way he looked at her was predatory, though he did not move from the rail behind him. As if he was letting her know he could have. As if he was making sure she knew that everything that happened—or didn’t happen—was entirely of his choosing. “Off you go then, Molly.”
But she didn’t move. She found herself scowling at him instead. “I have to say, I really thought the naked sex object thing would be a lot more about the shagging and a whole lot less about the endless mind games.”
Constantine laughed, throwing his beautiful head back and making the Greek sky dim a bit behind him. “What would be the fun in that?”
“I rather thought the forced shag was the point. And the fun, from some perspectives.”
“Oh, Molly. You’ve read this situation entirely wrong.” Constantine leaned back against the balcony railing, regarding her with more of that deep male satisfaction that made her feel as if the ground beneath her feet was not stable at all. “I have no intention of forcing you to do anything.”
“Except making me come here, then forcing me to prance around naked for your entertainment, you mean.”
That smile of his was...confronting. “I don’t recall kidnapping you to get you here. Or tearing off your clothes. Or, for that matter, forcing you to orgasm while engaged in so prosaic a task as simple sun protection.”
She felt herself flush, and there was no stopping that. “No, of course not. But persuasion is just a pretty word for force, isn’t it?”
“It’s a completely different word,” Constantine said dryly. “And besides, I think the word that is the most germane to our situation isconsequences. You don’t like the consequences of some of your choices, that is all.”
“I don’t like the consequences of any of my choices,” she retorted. And thought,Or my mother’s.
“Such is life,hetaira. And someday, I have no doubt, you will dine out on all the stories of my wickedness. What a monster I am, how terrible, and so on. But between you and me, here and now, let us be clear. I have always given you choices. You always will have choices. And where there is choice, I think you’ll find, there is no force.”
She laughed at that. In disbelief. “Says the man with a sword hanging over my head.”
“But therein lies the truth you’re so desperate not to face,” he replied, with quiet intensity. “That is not my sword. It is yours. By any estimation, you should never have had any money troubles again. And yet here you find yourself, naked before me, because of the choices you made long before you had the faintest idea what was waiting for you here. Blame me all you like. I’m used to it.” He shrugged, the very picture of unconcern. “But when you’re alone, Molly, and can look at yourself honestly, if you dare—remember. Blame yourself first.”
And then he turned his back to her, leaving her to stew in his words for far too long. Before she slunk off inside...to do just about anything but look at herself in a mirror, honestly or not.
Because Molly already knew she would not like what she saw.
CHAPTER SIX
“IBEGYOURPARDON.” His brother Balthazar’s voice was bright with amusement, and Constantine could practically see the look on his face, even though he was holed up far away on a private island down where the Aegean flirted with the bigger Mediterranean. He and the woman who was the daughter of the man who had destroyed their mother who Balthazar had married and impregnated, though not in that order. “Did you say Molly Payne? Our Molly Payne?”
“Perhaps you know her better as Magda,” Constantine murmured. “Ridiculous as the name might be, and much as it pains me to admit it, she is universally known.”
Balthazar laughed, which was a strange, new thing he did since his wedding. When, by rights, his marriage should have been as cold as the revenge he had always intended to wreak on his bride’s family. Constantine could not get used to a lighter side of his grim older brother. It was...disconcerting.
“I don’t know her at all, brother,” Balthazar said. “No matter what name she uses. Because she was our stepsister for approximately five minutes and then I promptly forgot her.”
“I did not.”
The inadequacy of that statement clung to Constantine as the silence dragged out between Balthazar and him. Inadequacy and the fact that while he’d expected his fascination with Molly to wane after ten days in her constant company here in Skiathos, it had not.
And that, too, was putting it mildly.
His brother didn’t have to know that. Just as Balthazar didn’t need to know that Molly was currently dozing in a sun lounger that she’d pulled up beneath one of the umbrellas near the pool that was cut into the cliff below from the house, making its own level in the steep hill. Or that Molly came to him in the mornings, always naked and defiant, and he made sure to put the sunscreen all over her skin—though there was, sadly, no repeat of her ecstatic first reaction to his touch.
Was she fighting the simmering, greedy thing between them as hard as he was?
And did she understand that what he was doing was getting her not only used to his touch, but dependent on it—so that when she begged him for her release, as he knew she would, she would mean it?