The Guardian's Virgin Ward
CAITLIN CREWS
He was her formidable guardian…and she craved his touch!When domineering Spaniard Izar Augustin was made guardian to innocent Liliana Girard Brooks, he couldn’t have known that the passing years would turn this young girl into an alluring woman begging to be shown the unconscious desires of her body.For as long as she can remember, Liliana’s coolly elusive keeper has haunted her fevered imaginations. Hoping to sever the ties that bind them, she recklessly gives into one night of sensual abandon, shattering her naïve fantasies irrevocably. But the consequences of that night will bind them together… for ever!When one night…leads to pregnancy!
He was her formidable guardian...and she craved his touch!
When domineering Spaniard Izar Agustin was made guardian to innocent Liliana Girard Brooks, he couldn’t have known that the passing years would turn this young girl into an alluring woman begging to be shown the unconscious desires of her body.
For as long as she can remember, Liliana’s coolly elusive keeper has haunted her fevered imagination. Hoping to sever the ties that bind them, she recklessly gives in to one night of sensual abandon, shattering her naive fantasies irrevocably. But the consequences of that night will bind them together...forever!
Izar shouldn’t have engaged with her. He shouldn’t have listened to a word she said—because how could it matter? And who cared if the woman who was still his duty had gone and transformed herself into the physical manifestation of his deepest desires?
That he had noticed at all was appalling. But in that moment, Izar did more than notice. He let his eyes drift down to Liliana’s lips and linger there.
“Oh…” she said softly, and the sound was ripe with too many meanings.
Revelation and understanding. Something like wonder. A touch of daring besides. And it poured through him, molten-hot and impossible to resist.
“Honey, not vinegar. I should have realized. The great and terrible Izar Agustin only acts tough.”
She threw herself forward and into him, catching herself with her palms flat against his chest even as his hands came up to grip her upper arms. Automatically, he told himself. To push her away, he told himself but he didn’t.
Her skin was every bit as smooth to the touch as he’d tried not to imagine. The contact was like fire, surging through him, making him insane enough to understand that he was hot and hard and unwilling to do a damn thing to change it.
And then Liliana surged up on her toes and pressed her lips to his.
One Night With Consequences (#ue380795b-0cae-59b8-bc82-3df960f4705f)
When one night...leads to pregnancy!
When succumbing to a night of unbridled desire it’s impossible to think past the morning after!
But, with the sheets barely settled, that little blue line appears on the pregnancy test and it doesn’t take long to realise that one night of white-hot passion has turned into a lifetime of consequences!
Only one question remains:
How do you tell a man you’ve just met that you’re about to share more than just his bed?
Find out in:
Her Nine Month Confession by Kim Lawrence
An Heir Fit for a King by Abby Green
Larenzo’s Christmas Baby by Kate Hewitt
Illicit Night with the Greek by Susanna Carr
A Vow to Secure His Legacy by Annie West
Bound to the Tuscan Billionaire by Susan Stephens
The Shock Cassano Baby by Andie Brock
The Greek’s Nine-Month Redemption by Maisey Yates
An Heir to Make A Marriage by Abby Green
Crowned for the Prince’s Heir by Sharon Kendrick
The Sheikh’s Baby Scandal by Carol Marinelli
A Ring for Vincenzo’s Heir by Jennie Lucas
Claiming His Christmas Consequence by Michelle Smart
Look for more One Night With Consequences coming soon!
The Guardian’s Virgin Ward
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilize the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://caitlincrews.com/).
Books by Caitlin Crews
Mills & Boon Modern Romance
Castelli’s Virgin Widow
At the Count’s Bidding
Undone by the Sultan’s Touch
Not Just the Boss’s Plaything
A Devil in Disguise
The Billionaire’s Legacy
The Return of the Di Sione Wife
Wedlocked!
Expecting a Royal Scandal
The Chatsfield
Greek’s Last Redemption
Scandalous Sheikh Brides
Protecting the Desert Heir
Traded to the Desert Sheikh
Vows of Convenience
His for a Price
His for Revenge
Visit the Author Profile page at millsandboon.co.uk (http://millsandboon.co.uk/) for more titles.
Contents
Cover (#u2e857544-c795-5daa-93e4-2075a5773a0c)
Back Cover Text (#u3e5bfcad-0612-597b-b99e-26361c4e037d)
Introduction (#ud26c5393-ec85-522a-aef8-fbc5ac47d95e)
One Night With Consequences (#uff76c813-9241-521c-87b6-769f49fad0be)
Title Page (#u3ca2be1b-e734-5079-b040-ac5bfe04d331)
About the Author (#udde5cf54-e1bf-5bf5-bc27-6fadfbfdb525)
CHAPTER ONE (#u5018ce07-2547-5a6a-814d-ae2834768dfe)
CHAPTER TWO (#u9f816a6c-4eb3-5725-8e9e-82334ef31926)
CHAPTER THREE (#ucd3e44bf-01eb-578d-b64c-60b685d60b39)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ue380795b-0cae-59b8-bc82-3df960f4705f)
“THIS PARTY IS finally looking like the birthday gift to you it’s supposed to be, Lily!”
Liliana’s roommate Kay was practically shivering with glee as she bounded into the narrow kitchen, which was normal for her even in the middle of the loud, crowded party they were currently hosting in their Bronx, New York apartment.
“The most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my entire life just walked into our living room and asked for you. You promised you were going to change your life, remember?” Kay grinned and let her smile go a little bit salacious. “And believe me when I tell you that doing anything at all with this particular man will not be a hardship.”
Liliana Girard Brooks, who’d gone by Lily Bertrand since she’d started college, to put a little space between her brand-new life and her internationally recognizable name with all that history attached to it, had vowed earlier that chilly November evening that her twenty-third birthday party was going to change her boring, stiflingly barren existence as a latter-day nun once and for all.
She hadn’t really expected to have an opportunity to keep that vow. Especially this early in the night.
“You’re finally going to lose your virginity!” her second roommate Jules had cried over pizza, punching her fist in the air as punctuation. This was also normal. “Welcome to the twenty-first century at last!”
“You don’t have to lose anything,” Kay had countered, frowning at Jules when Liliana had frozen solid where she sat with a slice of pepperoni halfway to her mouth. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“The other side of that being you can do anything you do want to do, once and for all,” Jules had retorted, wholly unchastened.
“Don’t worry,” Liliana had replied, opting not to remind her roommates that she’d only ever been kissed once during their senior year in college, and it had been embarrassing for everyone concerned. They knew that. Sometimes it felt as if the entire population of New York City knew that, too. “My ugly-duckling years are over. I hereby declare that tonight is the night I’ll transform into a swan at last!”
They’d all cheered and hugged, then turned up the music, and Liliana had channeled her shaky certainty into her wineglass, where she’d helped herself to far more white wine than was usual for a girl who had believed it when the terrifying headmistress at her prison-like boarding school in Switzerland had told her wine made women into whores.
“Is that the legacy you wish to build as the last living heir to two mighty bloodlines?” Madame had asked with stern distaste, as if Liliana had already been discovered turning tricks on the shores of Lake Geneva. At that time Liliana had been fourteen and far more concerned with the solo careers of certain former boy band members than mighty bloodlines of any description. Particularly her own. “There are any number of rich, vacuous whores cluttering up the tabloids. It is up to you whether you wish to make a spectacle of yourself in this way or not.”
Here in the safety of their tiny kitchen, Liliana toasted her former prison warden and her roommate’s expectant expression with one lift of her glass, then took a deep pull from it.
Sweet white wine, she thought happily. Maybe too happily. Making ugly ducklings into swans since the first grape was crushed underfoot.
If only in her own head.
“This is the new and improved Lily Bertrand you’re looking at,” she told Kay grandly and with a great deal of confidence she didn’t actually feel. “Beautiful men are nothing but my due.”
“Damn right,” Kay replied. She nudged Liliana with her shoulder. “But you might have to leave the kitchen to collect what’s owed you, you know.”
Liliana did not want to leave the kitchen. The party was loud and silly and as vaguely unsettling as all parties always seemed to her. It was also packed full of the approximately seventeen million friends Kay and Jules had made during their years at Barnard.
Liliana, by contrast, had made exactly two friends at Barnard: Kay and Jules.
Wine, she reminded herself as she forced herself out of the narrow galley kitchen and edged her way into the crowded living room. Wine understands. Wine is here to help.
She took another sip. Okay, maybe it was a gulp. Either way, it made leaving the relative safety of the kitchen feel a whole lot more like a powerful choice she was opting to make instead of a terrifying dare she had no choice but to perform, thanks to her big mouth.
Luckily, the more she drank, the more mellow she felt and the less she cared about the consequences of ill-considered vow-making. Almost as if everything she’d said—and, yes, foolishly vowed—to her roommates tonight was true, instead of little more than wishful thinking. And maybe alcohol didn’t disagree with her after all, the way Liliana had always claimed it did because that minor lie was easier than admitting that a dour Frenchwoman she hadn’t seen since her high school graduation still took up so much real estate in her head.
It’s not just Madame who’s cluttering things up in here, a small voice reminded her then, but she shoved that aside. The last thing she wanted to think about was the impossible, overwhelming guardian who made his presence felt from afar with such ease. Not here. Certainly not now.
The edges of the funky apartment, tucked away in a more creative than strictly safe part of the Bronx, began to blur in a pleasant sort of way. Liliana dared to imagine herself a little bit blurrily, as well, as the carefree and intrepid girl she’d always daydreamed she might have been had she not been locked away in the strictest finishing school in Europe throughout her lonely childhood. The kind of girl who was as easygoing as her roommates, perfectly capable of charging up to a man deemed beautiful by her friends to announce that it was his lucky night, because he’d been declared her birthday present.
Maybe it wasn’t that she was a freak and a weirdo for never really indulging in the kinds of romantic adventures her friends had repeatedly had throughout their college years and were still having this first year after graduation. Maybe it wasn’t that she was gangly and awkward at best when infamous heiresses were meant to be as effortlessly chic and beautiful as her own mother had been, forever standing in as revered muses for fashion designers or draping themselves on the arms of movie stars. Tonight, inching into her own living room despite the fact it was packed with strangers, and letting the wine do its good work this once, Liliana toyed with the notion that maybe—just maybe—she’d simply never given herself the opportunity to explore the less prim and buttoned-up side of herself that she was positive was lurking inside of her somewhere.
It had taken at least two years out of boarding school to stop imagining that Madame would appear the way she always had in the Chateau to strike Liliana down for any and all inappropriate or not entirely ladylike thoughts.
“Your mouth belongs in the gutters,” Madame had always told the girls who’d defied her. “Perhaps it is you who belong there, too.”
It had taken another couple of years for Liliana to relax enough to dare to say the things that she thought, if only to her very few, carefully chosen friends. And it was only now, at the beginning of her sixth month after graduating from Barnard, that Liliana felt as if she finally had the faintest notion of who she really was once she let herself relax into her life.
For one thing, she was no longer the sad, locked-away-in-a-tower heiress. No longer marked by the great Girard and Brooks fortunes she would one day control. She might always be famous for the sudden, shocking loss of her parents and her subsequent banishment to a European boarding school at the direction of the famously ruthless and remote guardian she hardly knew, just as she would always be known for the vast wealth her blue-blooded mother and corporate-giant father had left her.
But Liliana had put a lot of distance between her real life and those pathetic stories of the poor little rich girl she’d been considered all her life, trotted out in every exasperating article or television program and compared to this or that member of the Onassis family. Or sometimes even Rapunzel. She’d deliberately used one of her mother’s little-known family names as her surname these past four-and-a-half years, and she lived well below the radar in the Bronx with her friends, indistinguishable from every other young woman in the throes of her very first job after college.
She wasn’t on a reality show set in the Hollywood wastelands or taking up space on various yachts in Cannes. She was definitely not one of the tabloid heiresses Madame had predicted she’d become if left to her own devices. When magazines inevitably listed her on this or that collection of billionaire heiresses, they almost always referred to her as low-key and sometimes even reclusive, which was exactly what she wanted. The best she could hope for, even.
And if Liliana suspected that really, she was desperate to prove that she wasn’t the useless creature her legal guardian—the eternally disapproving Izar Agustin, beloved by most of Europe and revered like a freshly minted saint in his native Spain, where he also happened to be one of its wealthiest citizens—always intimated she was in the curt and sometimes outright rude letters and emails that served as his preferred form of very distant communication with her over these ten years, well. It didn’t matter why, surely. It only mattered that she was neither cluttering up the tabloids nor making herself a burden on the dark, harsh guardian who still controlled the bulk of her fortune.
From afar, which was likely a blessing, since she hadn’t laid eyes on the man since the terrible day he’d introduced himself as her new legal guardian and had then shipped her off to boarding school. Not in person, anyway.
It turned out that not even wine could protect her from thoughts of Izar. They crept in like the heat from the cranky old radiators in this prewar apartment, almost sullen at first, than with force and authority. A great deal like Izar himself, she imagined, though Liliana doubted he crept anywhere he could stride powerfully, instead.
In her head, he was mighty and overwhelming, like a titan. A god. All-powerful and all-knowing.
Visions of Izar’s trademark black gaze and that cutting, mocking curl of his haughty lips—always splashed across all the tabloids—flashed through her and made something deep inside her flip over, then hum. For years this man she never saw had dominated Liliana’s thoughts and dreams alike, either as she’d fumed over his latest stark, pointed communication or waited months and months for the next.
“No yachts in the Mediterranean. You are not a call girl, to my knowledge,” he’d written when she’d dutifully requested his permission to spend the summer with a few boarding-school friends, exploring the French Riviera and possibly heading on to the Greek isles.
She’d been seventeen. And she’d spent that summer the way she’d spent most of her holidays and breaks, in the halls of the Chateau working on an independent study project with the rest of the forgotten and unwanted students. The upside was she’d had an extraordinary amount of extra credit to dangle before colleges when she’d applied.
For a man she hadn’t seen since the worst day of her life, who’d abandoned her into the care of Madame and the rest of the severe teachers at school, Izar still managed to exert an iron control over her life.
Liliana shuddered, pressing her back to the exposed brick wall that took up one side of her small living room as she gazed out at all the merry, happy people her roommates had invited tonight. If there was a beautiful man who would change her life—or at least make it more interesting—in the tight scrum of them, she couldn’t see him. All she could see was Izar.
The story of her life. And she was sick of it.
No matter how many fawning pseudojournalists wrote him love letters disguised as breathless, flattering profiles in major magazines—and there were always at least three per season, it seemed—Izar remained famously unattainable. A legend. Driven and focused, above all things. Women were candy to him; easily consumed and even more easily forgotten. Some of the corporations he bought and sold were the same.
Of all the independent study projects Liliana had undertaken, her research into Izar Agustin was the one to which she’d devoted the most attention over the years. She knew all of his biographical details by heart and not one of them made his controlling yet hands-off treatment of her any easier to bear.
A Spanish fútbol player in his late teens and early twenties, Izar had dominated the pitch before he’d blown out his knee in the final moments of a dramatic championship match—which that career-ending kick had won, of course. Instead of descending into despair and obscurity, Izar had made what many had considered a strange sort of pivot at the time and had charged into the luxury goods business, instead, joining forces with Liliana’s parents a few years later. Together, they’d controlled the prestigious fashion house that had been in her French mother’s family for generations, the international Brooks wine and tobacco interests that Liliana’s South African grandfather had transitioned into a luxury goods conglomerate, and Izar’s own collection of sports and active lifestyle concerns. Agustin Brooks Girard had rapidly become a force to be reckoned with, and then Liliana’s parents had died in that accident, leaving Izar in charge of everything—including Liliana herself, their only child and heir.
Izar had been her guardian in all ways until she turned twenty-one, a role he’d executed as a dark shadow over her life rather than any kind of part of it. These days he merely controlled the company, in which her parents had left her their equal interest, until she turned twenty-five or was married.
Liliana comforted herself with the knowledge that once she controlled the whole of her own fortune and the shares and responsibilities that came with it, she’d have the opportunity to treat Izar the way he’d always treated her. As if he was little more than an unpleasant thing she’d stepped on en route to something far more worthy of her time and attention. She had involved fantasies of sending him snide notes every seven months or so, the better to demonstrate her patronizing disinterest.
I would rather drink cyanide than support your proposal, she fantasized about writing him one day. But thank you.
Childish, maybe. But that was the point. She’d actually been a child ten years ago. Would it have killed the famously intense and ruthless Izar to be a bit kinder to his late business partners’ daughter that awful day? Liliana been suddenly, cruelly left all alone in the world when her parents’ private plane had gone down somewhere over the Pacific. She’d been twelve years old, made of equal parts puppy fat and terrible pain, and nothing bad had ever happened to her before. She might have been sheltered—but weren’t twelve-year-old girls supposed to be a little bit sheltered, if at all possible? She understood that Izar might have been a bit young for sudden-onset parenting, being just under thirty himself and used to a rather more exciting lifestyle than one including an orphaned preteen, presumably, but had it really been necessary to remove her from the only home she’d known in England to install her in that harsh and hateful school in Switzerland? And then leave her there to rot without a single visit ever after?
“Hate me if you feel you must,” Izar had told her in his cold, measured, immovable way, his native Spanish making the words seem warmer than they were. Right there in the foyer of the house she’d spent her entire life in mere moments after he’d ordered the staff to pack up all her things. Twelve-year-old Liliana had been certain she was looking at the devil himself, all hellfire black eyes, that Roman coin of a nose, and the brooding way he’d stared down at her. A muscle in his lean cheek had clenched once. Then again. “I am your guardian whether you like it or do not, and your feelings cannot affect my decisions. You will do as I say, regardless.”
And she had, of course. What choice had there been?
“Get a hold of yourself,” Liliana muttered to herself now. She only realized she’d spoken out loud when she heard her own voice against the indie darling band currently crooning from the speakers, and she flushed. Then hoped that the music had drowned her out—because her roommates’ friends already thought she was a bit off, she was aware. They didn’t need any further evidence.
Izar had not been impressed with her decision to attend college in the States instead of the horrifying wannabe convent he’d had in mind in the far reaches of the European Alps. He’d grudgingly allowed it when she’d promised him that she was only applying to what few all-women colleges remained in America. Then he had very nearly rescinded his permission entirely, because he certainly hadn’t been pleased at the idea that she’d be living in New York City, known den of iniquity, once she’d made her final choice.
He’d even called, the rare gesture underscoring the depths of his misgivings. Or more accurately, one of his aides had called, then demanded she hold until he could sweep onto the line like a tornado.
“If there is so much as a whisper of scandal connected to you, Liliana, you will regret it,” he’d told her in a quietly menacing tone that had made every hair on her body stand on end. “I will pull you out of that college myself, with my own two hands, and you will not enjoy the consequences. Do you understand me?”
“You rarely leave much room for misunderstanding,” she’d replied, wisely making her voice meek rather than foolishly defiant at the last moment. That she’d dared even that much had made her stomach flip over. “Sir.”
There had been nothing but silence for far too long and she’d been sure that she’d gone too far. That he would consign her to another prison term in another school so far away from the world she’d never learn how to live in it. That there was no escape from the brooding shadow he cast over her life.
“I’ll allow it,” he’d said eventually, so grudging and dark Liliana was amazed the phone receiver in her hand didn’t freeze. “On a provisional basis only.”
She’d marked it as a victory, and who cared if it was a narrow one.
But he was the one winning in the end, she realized now, as she was still standing there like a fool with her back against her own living room wall. Izar had two years left to interfere in her life as he pleased, but he wasn’t here in her apartment tonight. The very idea was laughable. First, she hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about where she was living these days. And second, Izar had never visited her. Ever. He hadn’t made contact in months.
She told herself that hollow sensation, deep inside, was relief.
Why on earth do you want his recognition? a little voice asked from somewhere inside that hollowness. You shouldn’t. You should want him to go away and leave you alone, forever.
She told herself she did, and no matter that such a thing would never happen. Of course she did.
Because she couldn’t possibly want the attention of the man who’d abandoned her as a child. Certainly not. That would be clichéd and silly and deeply, unutterably sad, and Liliana was finished being any of those things.
At that, she launched herself into the crowd, scanning the room for anyone Kay might consider the most beautiful man she’d ever seen in her life. There were any number of contenders, this being New York City and basically ground zero for Kay’s sort of dream man—but no. Jules was over near the bookcase in her usual throng of admirers, and she jerked her head in a wholly unsubtle manner toward the small bit of the L-shaped living room when Liliana caught her eye. That was the part of the common area that led into their three railroad-style bedrooms, stacked one on top of the next so only the farthest back had any real privacy. They’d drawn straws for the back bedroom when they’d moved in and Liliana had won it, which she’d had a lot of time to regret in these past months. The privacy was nice, sure, but it meant that she spent a lot of time creeping through Jules’s and Kay’s bedrooms, pretending with all her might not to see what might or might not be happening in their beds after their giddy nights out.
She waved an acknowledgment at Jules and obediently made her way through the clumps of merrymaking people until she pushed through the first bedroom door. It was quieter in Jules’s room, though only slightly. A large, spirited group of people—including a few women Liliana recognized from Barnard—were piled on the bed, laughing as they watched something on a laptop.
“Keep going,” one of the Barnard women said when she saw Liliana, flashing a knowing sort of grin. “Jules told him to wait for you in private.”
Liliana was beginning to wonder if her roommates had done something unforgivably humiliating, like hire one of those male strippers Jules was always threatening to unleash upon her. Liliana flushed at the very idea. She’d barely survived that sloppy, awful kiss her senior year. A naked, dancing man was likely to send her to the hospital.
You really are pathetic, aren’t you? a hard voice that greatly resembled her memory of her guardian’s asked from deep inside her.
She hated that voice.
Liliana wrenched open Kay’s door—but there was no one there. Not a soul on the queen-sized futon that took up almost all the available floor space in the tiny room, so she pulled in a breath that was shakier than she wanted to admit and tiptoed around it toward the door to her own bedroom.
A sense of foreboding swept through her when she put her hand on her own doorknob, a prickling sort of chill that washed over her from her scalp to her heels, then back. Surely her friends wouldn’t embarrass her. They never had in all the time she’d known and lived with them, here or in their suite at college. And Lord knew she’d always been the easiest of targets. She thought back, but she hadn’t seen the faintest shred of that particular, pointed glee in either of her friends’ expressions that might suggest a practical joke was in the offing.
Still, she stood rooted to the spot outside her own bedroom, that odd hum deep in her belly shivering through her, as if her body knew things she didn’t.
Liliana didn’t like that feeling at all.
But she kept going because she’d promised she would. And because she was tired of being the odd one out. The ugly, awkward duckling. The strange creature her friends were forever apologizing for when she would do yet another thing that marked her as different. Unworldly. Naive. Set apart, always.
Liliana wasn’t convinced she’d ever transform into a swan in any real sense. She was the daughter of one of the most beautiful and fashionable women who had ever lived, so she knew what a swan looked like and how far from the mark she was in comparison. Try miles upon miles, and then some. But that was okay. She’d settle for becoming a sparrow. Something with wings and no fear of heights, so she could finally put her family history and her tragic past behind her.
That was the thought that had her throwing open her door and stepping into her own bedroom at last.
Her room was exactly as she’d left it, save the tall figure that stood still and dark at her windows, looking out toward the chaotic street below. With his clothes on, thankfully, and no sign of a telltale boom box like all the movies. Her heart tripped over itself and she glanced around quickly to make sure there was nothing in her private space that would make her seem as much of a weirdo as she knew she was, as everyone always told her she was. Everything seemed in order. Her neatly made bed was on one wall and her desk on the other, with nothing but her laptop and the latest novel she was reading on the surface and more books stacked neatly on the shelves above it. She’d left her closet door half-open earlier, but there was nothing inside but her meticulously hung and carefully folded clothes. No mess, inside the closet or the bedroom itself. No pictures. No art. Just the brick wall on one side and the weathered windows on the other.
It had never occurred to Liliana before that instant that it might as well be one of the dorm rooms she’d lived in over the years. Or a nun’s little cell in a convent, for that matter. Or a prison, a small voice interjected inside of her. It was that stark and without particular character, unlike her roommates’ rooms, which exploded with their dispositions and possessions spilling across every available surface, from their bright comforters to their trinkets and clothes to the posters that decorated their walls.
But she didn’t have time to process that, much less think about what it said about her. Because the man who stood with his back to her, staring out at the Bronx and the mad glitter of Manhattan off in the distance through the half-fogged windows, turned.
And nothing made sense.
Her heart stopped. Then began again, with a kick that made the room spin around and then center somewhere deep in her belly, where she felt raw and hollow at once.
Because it was Izar.
The cruel and terrible Izar that Liliana had only seen in photographs for years. The guardian she’d always found equal parts maddening and horrible no matter how little she heard from him. She’d spent hours upon hours studying the man from afar, looking for proof that he was as terrible as she thought he was. And in all that time she’d never thought of him as anything but the remote and inaccessible bane of her existence. The shadow hanging over her, that was it.
But Kay had called him beautiful.
Izar could not be beautiful. Izar was... Izar. Nothing more.
But the damage was already done.
Suddenly, Liliana found herself completely unable to see the same dark, fairy-tale monster she’d always imagined when she’d thought of this man. She’d told herself she hated him and had imagined herself the wronged innocent in a tale that could only end with the big, bad wolf finally getting his comeuppance. She’d imagined him getting his in a great variety of ways, in fact. And it wasn’t that the real, live Izar was any less a devil than she’d imagined as he stood there, making no attempt to hide his disapproval from her as he frowned at her.
But suddenly—impossibly, irrevocably—all she could see was the fact he was also a man.
Because whatever else Izar was, whatever she’d told herself all this time because she’d needed to believe it as she’d scowled at all those pictures of him, he was indisputably a man.
Something red and furious swept through Liliana then, making her much too hot and suddenly desperately worried that her skin might crack wide open with the force of it. Her head felt light. Her knees seemed weak. And deep in her core, she melted.
Izar was formed like the bronze statue of himself that she knew very well stood in the impoverished Spanish neighborhood where he’d grown up. He was all hard male sinew and restless, brooding grace that shouted out his ingrained athleticism without him having to say a single word or move a muscle. He was dressed in the sort of sleek, impossibly chic and yet relentlessly masculine way he favored, broadcasting the fact he ran an empire that included some of the world’s best-loved couture houses while failing, somehow, to mute that elemental power of his that came off of him in waves.
Most of that was obvious in the pictures she’d seen of him.
In person, he was like a blast of winter wind. Intense. Ruthless. Undeniable.
He was muscled and perfect, and then there was that fallen angel’s face of his—all dark brows and his close-cropped dark hair, the scrape of the day’s beard on his belligerent jaw, and those acrobatic cheekbones that made his arrogant mouth, hard and yet full, nothing short of breathtaking.
Literally, it stole her breath.
He did.
That hum deep inside of her started again, making her skin prickle all over and a giddy sort of shiver wind through her belly, tight and sharp.
Izar didn’t make sense in her bedroom. He’d been bad enough in her head. He was lean for such a big, strong man, reminding her of the clips she’d seen of him on the fútbol pitch, all that hungry and focused grace mixed with impossible speed—
What was happening to her?
His dark gaze fastened on hers and seemed to burn through her. Her cheeks flushed redder and her stomach kept up its maddening shiver and hum, and she was suddenly panicked at the thought of what might happen. What he might do if he ever suspected what was happening to her. What she felt—careening around inside of her, bright and impossible—
“You are no longer twelve,” he bit out, and his voice in person was...better. Richer. Darker. Delicious, somehow.
God help her. She was definitely no longer twelve.
And she refused to act as if she still was, no matter that the fairy-tale shadows in her head had come to life before her eyes...and in a way that was far more raw and real than she ever could have imagined.
“My friends said my birthday present was waiting for me in here,” Liliana said, with an ease that had to be all about the wine she’d been drinking, because it certainly wasn’t her usual way of speaking. To anyone, and especially not to him—not that she’d had much practice with the latter. “If they meant you, it’s official. This is the worst birthday of my life.”
Izar took a step toward her, then stopped abruptly. As if he didn’t quite trust himself to come closer—but that was ridiculous. Still, the odd little notion made her throat go dry and her heart beat at her all the harder.
His black eyes glittered in the buttery light from her desk lamp and the chaotic gleam of the city outside her windows. He held himself still, so still she was entirely too aware of his solid shoulders, which took up the whole of her bedroom, and how he seemed to vibrate with a certain rich, masculine darkness that kicked its way along her limbs and pooled deep in her belly. Then pulsed.
But this wasn’t a letter. This wasn’t one of the few, brief telephone calls they’d had over the years in which he spoke and she was expected to listen gratefully and then quietly obey. This was her bedroom and her birthday party.
This was her life.
And she didn’t have to be cowed by this man, no matter the effect he had on her and no matter what parts of her fortune and future he still controlled.
“Did you by any chance happen upon a better-looking man and heave him out the windows? Into the closet?” She smiled at Izar. Coolly. Which was not the snide note of her dreams but felt good all the same. “Because I left my own birthday party for the promise of a hot guy, not you.” She let her smile deepen, trying to look as unimpressed with him as possible. “Sir.”
A muscle in Izar’s lean jaw clenched. And she was not at all prepared for his thunderous scowl. It all seemed directly wired to that pulsing, humming, molten place between her legs.
“Tell me something, Liliana,” her guardian said very distinctly. Fury and something far darker and more dangerous threaded through that quiet voice of his she’d only heard directed at her once or twice in all these years. And never like this, as if he had feelings about her one way or the other. She could hardly breathe through it. “What game do you imagine you are playing?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ue380795b-0cae-59b8-bc82-3df960f4705f)
THE LAST TIME Izar Agustin had seen Liliana Girard Brooks in the flesh, she’d been young and flushed and sobbing her eyes out. Not unreasonable for a girl who had lost her parents, but entirely outside his various areas of expertise. Then, as now, he’d acted entirely in her best interests—none of which could possibly have included welcoming her into his high-profile, business-focused, notably tearless life.
Liliana was the heiress to an unimaginable fortune and half of his company. She was his ward and his responsibility. In his head she had remained that chubby, awkward and sodden-faced child he’d met all those years ago, no matter that he’d been well aware she’d grown older in the interim. And tonight she was standing there before him entirely grown-up and dressed like a common whore.
And, moreover, had just talked back to him in a manner reminiscent of the streetwalking variety of the same, if his ears had not deceived him and his memories of the unsavory neighborhoods of his youth did not fail him.
Izar couldn’t quite take it all in. He couldn’t quite fathom it, because this level of crude defiance spoke to a failure on his part so deep it should have leveled him. And it was a simple fact that Izar was too unaccustomed to the experience of failure to tell one way or the other.
Her attire was not the worst part. Nor was the fact that she was here at all, apparently living in this ramshackle, flea-bitten flat four rickety flights up in a building she could have purchased outright with the change in her pocket—though that factored. It was that she’d deliberately lied to him about where she was living in this sinful city, making Izar’s trek into the hinterland of questionable neighborhoods in the Bronx, of all places, unavoidable on a night he’d intended to spend in more civilized pursuits, such as the theater with one of his current mistresses.
Izar Agustin—who prided himself on his iron control and ruthless focus in all things, from the fútbol pitch of his youth to his current domination of any boardroom he entered—had allowed this situation to get out of control. Clearly. Yes, Liliana had lied to him. Yes, she had gone to some lengths to deliberately mislead him, allowing him to believe that she’d spent these months since her college graduation living in her late parents’ brownstone in the deeply moneyed and far less dangerous West Village in Manhattan rather than here in this grotty hinterland. Still, he could blame no one but himself.
Not even the woman who stood before him, sulky-mouthed and flushed from what appeared to be equal parts defiance and drink, glaring at him as if he was the devil incarnate.
Izar supposed he was. As far as Liliana was concerned, he was far worse. And he was about to rain down a little brimstone all over her to cement that impression.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” He kept his voice soft. Low. He did nothing to conceal the harsh lash of it that regularly made his underlings and associates cower, stammer and fall all over themselves to apologize no matter if they were guilty of anything or not.
His ward only tipped up her chin as if he’d landed a glancing blow at best. And as if she expected—even welcomed—more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything like it. This was not how people treated a man of his stature. Ever.
“Nothing polite,” she retorted.
It took Izar one beat, then another, to understand that it was temper that wound through him, red and wild, at her bored and disinterested tone. Temper, when he hadn’t permitted himself anything close to such a display of emotion since he’d left fútbol behind him.
It was there in his tone when he spoke. “You cannot possibly imagine that adding insults, however vague, to your deceit and your dishonesty—to say nothing of your appalling disregard for your own safety—is the correct way to handle this situation, can you?”
He could hear the fury in his voice slice through the room, but Liliana didn’t flinch. She didn’t crumble or break. Izar had taken down whole companies with a far gentler tone than the one he’d used on her, but Liliana didn’t appear to notice it.
Izar couldn’t decide if he admired her or wanted to throttle her for that. He only knew that neither feeling was the least bit appropriate.
“The only situation I’m aware of is that there’s an uninvited guest lurking in my bedroom,” she replied, with a level of icy hauteur that would have done a queen proud.
It almost diverted his attention from the fact she’d accused him of lurking. He was Izar Agustin. He did not lurk.
Nor was she finished. “I’d like you to leave. Now.”
Liliana wasn’t a child any longer. The grown-up version stood before him with the carriage of the aristocrat she was, though one would hardly know it surrounded by the relentless, depressing squalor of this place. He’d grown up in a shoddy flat a great deal like this one, if across the world in the outskirts of Málaga, Spain, and he’d vowed he’d never sully himself in such places again. That he’d had no choice in the matter tonight only made his temper that much more precarious. Liliana was entirely too soft and vulnerable to be prancing about in a down-market flat in a questionable section of the Bronx, regardless of her net worth. But the fact that she was Liliana Girard Brooks meant that every time she exposed herself on the unpleasant streets in this neighborhood she made herself a juicy target for any enterprising fortune hunter or kidnapper or miscreant of any description who happened along.
It made him well nigh murderous.
But the questionable neighborhood wasn’t the only problem.
Maturity had brought out those pedigreed cheekbones of hers, which in turn made the seemingly haphazard way she’d styled her masses of golden hair on the top of her head look that much more elegant and chic. The kind of effortless style women the world over spent lifetimes trying and failing to attain. She’d shed her youthful roundness altogether and had finally grown into the interesting face that had been far too much for her at twelve, with all those edges and angles the camera would worship. Taller, slimmer, and far more at ease in her own body than he remembered her, Liliana was nothing short of mesmerizing. All her finely etched angles worked with the sophisticated sweep of dark lashes framing her faintly tilted blue eyes and the sleek curves of her lean body, hitting him like a sucker punch. Hard. And then there was that plump, sweet mouth of hers that, God help him, he felt like a carnal wallop in his gut. And lower still.
This could not be happening.
He never thought of Liliana as anything but his responsibility. His task to complete, nothing more. Her parents would have wanted her to have the business and fortune they’d left her, and so Izar had honored them by making sure both not only existed but thrived. Her looks hadn’t signified. She’d been a child in his mind all this time, entrusted to his care and in need of his firm, if distant, guidance.
But she wasn’t a child now.
Liliana was truly and indisputably beautiful, little as he wished to acknowledge such a thing. She was more than simply beautiful, if he was being honest with himself. Without his permission and entirely against his wishes, Liliana had blossomed into one of the most stunning women he’d ever seen in his life. He thought she surpassed even her own mother, the lost and much-lamented style icon Clothilde Girard, who was still held to be one of the great, elegant beauties of her time a decade after her death.
Maybe it was the fact Liliana was flouting his authority by her presence here at all. It was the first shred of defiance he’d ever had from her, ever, and for some reason, it changed everything.
Or perhaps it was only Izar who had changed. Perhaps, he thought with a certain grudging fury at his own failing, he was perverse enough that defiance attracted him. It was, after all, so very rare.
No one defied him. He was Izar Agustin. No one dared.
If Liliana had been any other woman alive, Izar would have handled her much differently. He would have used his hands against her bared, silken flesh. He would have sampled that sulky, insolent mouth and he would have had her on her back on that bed without a moment’s pause as he sorted out the variety of ways he disliked being spoken to in that provocative, insulting manner. He would have made her beg and then, when he was good and ready, he’d have made her scream.
But she was his goddamned ward.
Izar told himself the tightness in his chest and that raw expanse inside him were more of that unexpected temper, that was all. He focused on the fact this woman, his ward, who should have been somewhere far, far away from this grimy little apartment and the ghastly party taking place in all the other small, tatty rooms, was choosing to defy him while dressed like a trollop.
It was insult upon injury, really.
Tonight she’d chosen to wear something that was more a gesture toward a tunic than any kind of dress, baring her arms despite the mid-November cold outside. It flowed from a distractingly low neck to graze her upper thighs, leaving an unnecessary expanse of smooth skin between its hem and her over-the-knee boots. Perfect for a bit of pickup trade, he thought sourly. And perhaps unfairly.
That it was how all young women dressed these days wasn’t lost on him. But Liliana wasn’t any young woman. She didn’t have the option to careen about through her early twenties like the rest of them, stacking up questionable evenings and choices and then writing it all off as “experience” once she settled down into a dreary suburban existence somewhere. Her sins would be neither forgiven nor forgotten—they would be trotted out at every opportunity by tabloids and business rivals alike. She wasn’t like all the other, interchangeable girls cluttering up the living areas of this flat.
She was legendary. And she was his.
His responsibility, he amended after a moment. A searing, unhelpful moment with nothing but her intoxicating beauty in his head.
“Is this how one dresses here in the toilet of New York City?” he asked edgily, letting his gaze move with cold disapproval from her face to her toes. Then back. “The better to blend in with less-fortunate women on street corners? I must applaud you. How enterprising to attempt to avoid the predators milling about the gutters out there by dressing as if they could simply buy you instead of bothering to go to the trouble of mugging you.”
Liliana sucked in a breath. Izar felt something like remorse—another emotion he was largely unfamiliar with, and he certainly didn’t care for the experience now—swell in him when her bright gaze dimmed, but she only squared her shoulders. As if she thought she was tough enough to fight him head-on.
Izar didn’t care to examine how that notion careened around inside him. The way it left marks.
Liliana frowned at him but didn’t break the way she would have even six months ago. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just call me a prostitute in the first conversation we’ve had live and in person in a decade.”
“I said you appeared to have dressed like one. Is this a costume party? That could certainly explain the number of tarts on parade, yourself included.”
She pressed her lips together. He didn’t want to think about her lips.
“You’re a very small and unhappy man, aren’t you, Izar?”
“When confronting my wayward ward in a flat built on lies and a fake name she thinks makes her fireproof and somehow invisible at once?” She finally blinked at that. That belligerent chin of hers dropped a few notches. He was aware that there was no reason these things should have given him quite so much satisfaction, as if he’d scored some kind of decisive victory. “Yes. You could call this unhappiness, if you wish. If I were you, I would be less concerned with my happiness and more concerned with your own hide.”
“I’ll be really, really scared when I get your letter on the subject three months from now, I promise,” she told him after a moment. With deep and unmistakable sarcasm and no apparent recognition of the precariousness of her situation.
“Careful,” he warned her, and he hardly recognized his own voice.
She sniffed. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Then you are even more foolish than you appear.”
He saw some sort of strong emotion he couldn’t quite identify wash over her then, making her stand straighter and cross her arms beneath her breasts which was...not at all helpful.
She—is—your—ward, Izar snapped at himself.
What was wrong with him that he couldn’t seem to remember that tonight? She and her stake in the company were his responsibility until she turned twenty-five or married, whatever came first. The weight of that had been at the forefront of his thoughts since the day her parents had died. It was why he’d dedicated himself with such ferocity to the business all this time. Why had it deserted him entirely tonight?
But he knew why. It was the way she stood before him, beautiful and wholly unimpressed with him, which was a true novelty. It was that mouthwatering expanse of her thighs, bared for all the world to see. Worse, for him to see. It was the sad truth that, apparently, he really was that twisted, after all. That ruined, from the inside out, exactly as he’d always suspected.
“I told you I would bodily remove you from this city the moment you became any kind of scandal,” he bit out at her, and it was an effort to keep himself from raising his voice. He didn’t entirely succeed. “Congratulations. You lasted longer than I thought you would, but that day has finally arrived.”
Liliana frowned. “You told me that when I was eighteen and setting off for college. Newsflash, I survived. The city didn’t burn down around me and your precious company is fine. No luxury brands have been harmed by my attempt to have a life, Izar. You can exhale.”
Yet another unfamiliar sensation washed over him then, and once more, it took Izar a long moment to recognize it. It had been a while since anyone had gotten under his skin like this. Or at all. Not since his days on the pitch, in fact, where he’d been a bit of a hothead and his opponents had sometimes used that against him. He’d thought he’d locked that side of himself away for good when he’d left the sport.
Why Liliana, of all people, should have the power to needle him when no one else alive could or would dare, Izar could not imagine.
Nor did he care for it.
When he spoke again his voice rivaled the cutting November winds outside.
“You remain my responsibility, whether you like it or not. That means that you cannot live in an unprotected slum like this, no matter how bohemian you currently imagine yourself to be. You are entirely too wealthy for these games.”
“I’m not bohemian.” She laughed as if he’d told her a joke. “At all.”
“On that we agree. It was one thing to hide behind a false name while you were in school. This is not school any longer, Liliana. How long did you really think it would take for someone to discover who you are and use it against you? And let us be clear. When I say against you, what I mean is against the company, which is the same thing as against me.”
She shook her head at him as if he was being ridiculous. As if he, Izar Agustin, renowned the world over for his business acumen and corporate vision, was capable of being any such thing.
“I moved in here five months ago and, so far, the only undesirable person to discover me is you.”
“That is where you are wrong.” He tried to keep the edge out of his voice, but he saw her stiffen. He tried and failed to regret the fact he clearly got to her, too. “Why do you think I am here?”
“Because you live to stamp on dreams and ruin lives, I assume. Mine in particular. You know, the usual.”
“Of course.” It was amazing how hard it was to hold on to his temper tonight, truly astonishing. “And because I was approached by a piece of tabloid journalist scum who told me he intended to run a vile little article on how I took over the company and consigned the much-adored if seldom-seen Brooks heiress to a life of poverty and toil. Right here in this grimy little hellhole.” Izar did nothing to soften his scowl. He didn’t even try. “I assured him that was not possible, as no one would describe your parents’ perfectly good brownstone in Greenwich Village as grimy, much less a hole of any kind. Imagine my surprise to discover that you did not live there, as you had assured me you did following your graduation. In writing. I was forced to track you down. To this place. Which is so much worse than a mere grimy hole it defies description.”
He didn’t know what he expected. But it wasn’t for Liliana to do nothing for a moment. Then, after another long moment, blow out a breath and roll her eyes as if what he’d said was...annoying. Nothing more than annoying.
He felt his entire body go taut in disbelief.
“The Brooks heiress can go to hell,” she announced, and Izar noticed she swayed ever so slightly on her feet as she made this proclamation. He’d thought she’d looked a bit flushed before, hadn’t he? “And so can you.”
“Liliana.” Her name was a grim thing in his mouth. “Are you drunk?”
“Certainly not.” She moved across the room and placed the mostly empty wineglass she’d been clutching in one fist on her desktop. With rather more theatric care than was strictly necessary. “I may have had a glass of wine. Like any grown-ass woman over the age of twenty-one in this country, not that it’s any of your concern.”
“I think you’ll find it is, in fact, my concern. As is everything else you do. This is unacceptable, all of this. I trusted you.”
“You did not trust me.” Her back was an unfortunately fascinating line, graceful and supple and—stop this. Now. “You delivered a set of instructions you expected me to obey because I always have before. Your failure to notice that I’m not actually as spineless and obedient as you’d like me to be is your issue, not mine. But that’s what happens when you abandon someone for a decade.”
“Again, it appears I must correct you. My issues are your issues when and if I say they are.”
She turned back to face him then, her gaze dark. “Enjoy yourself while you can, Izar. The clock is ticking. You only have two years left to bully me. What happens when your time runs out?”
He had the urge to put his hands on her and show her exactly what could happen—
But no. Of course he did no such thing. He was her guardian, not an animal. And he hadn’t let passion rule him so completely since he was a small boy kicking footballs against crumbling, graffiti-covered walls in his run-down neighborhood, imagining that might transport him out of his dreary life as the unwanted charity case in his resentful uncle’s overcrowded home.
He wasn’t about to backslide now. Not even for the surprisingly intriguing woman his ward had gone and become without his permission.
“This conversation is over,” he informed her, with the expectation of instant obedience. “I’m taking you out of this place at once. I’d suggest you pack a bag now, while I’m feeling generous.”
She didn’t move. She didn’t react at all, in fact, which was far more intriguing than it ought to have been. An alarm went off inside him, deep and low.
“I’m not a grieving twelve-year-old any longer, Izar,” she said mildly enough, though her blue eyes flashed. “I’m not going to meekly bow my head and let you toss me away into some mausoleum on a mountaintop because you find my existence troublesome. Not again.”
“Will you not?” he asked with soft menace. “Are you quite sure?”
He thought she shivered slightly at that, but if she did she covered it in an instant.
“You control the company. My birthright.” Did he imagine the edge in her voice on that last word? He knew he did not imagine the way her eyes flashed at him. “But you no longer control me.”
Izar could think of any number of ways to control her—but none of them were the least bit appropriate. He gritted his teeth.
“Careful, Liliana. It is up to me, after all, to determine whether or not your claim to your shares should be honored when you turn twenty-five. If I think you’re not up to the challenge of it, I can keep you at arm’s length for another five years. Or did you not bother to read the fine print of the birthright you are suddenly so interested in?”
“Is that a threat?” she threw right back at him. “Somehow, I’m not surprised. It doesn’t matter. Threaten me all you want. I’m not letting you lock me away in another prison. It’s not going to happen.”
“Then throw a fit,” he invited her. “Like the stroppy child you are so determined to pretend you are not. It will not affect the outcome in any way.”
He shrugged as if he didn’t care what she did. Because he never had before and he shouldn’t now, damn it. He slid his phone out of his pocket and dialed his driver, then lifted the phone to his ear.
Only to watch in sheer astonishment as Liliana closed the distance between them as if she wasn’t at all intimidated by him, lifted her slender hand and then swatted his mobile out of his grip.
The phone hurtled through the air, making an arc across the quiet bedroom. It seemed to take a lifetime, or perhaps that was simply his disbelief. But then it hit the hardwood floor with a clattering sound and skidded out of sight beneath the bed.
For a moment they both stood there and stared. Her chest rose and fell, threatening the neckline that was already too low for Izar’s peace of mind. The color was high on her cheeks and there was something hectic in her gaze, making her eyes entirely too blue. She looked wild, untamed. Golden and gorgeous.
She looked like something straight out of his favorite fantasies.
He was losing his grip.
“That,” Izar said distinctly, and through his teeth, “was unwise.”
“I want to live here,” Liliana told him fiercely, too much passion in her voice, her eyes. And she was much too close to him, besides. “In two years I’ll have to take my place at the company the way my parents intended, but until then, I want to be normal. I don’t want to live in a fishbowl. I don’t want the world commenting on every move I make and every piece of clothing I put on as if it’s their business.”
She threw up her hands in emphasis or maybe to illustrate how strongly she felt these things. God help him, but Izar did not want to feel. He did not want to be near anyone who did. Feelings were no good. They led nowhere he wanted to go. He indulged the passions of the flesh because they were easily sated by his ever-revolving selection of mistresses and because he was, after all, a man. But he didn’t feel. He had sex, then moved on. Passion like this was lethal. He’d excised it a long time ago.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so close to someone who fairly oozed it.
And she was still speaking. “I want to be a regular person. I want to complain about my job all week, then stand in loud, tacky bars or binge watch television all weekend with my friends. I want the whole experience. Where’s the harm in that?”
Some distant voice inside him told him to step back. To remove himself from the temptation of such a ferociously earnest expression on such a beautiful face. The way she tilted her head back so she could stand that close to him and still look him in the eye, as if it was necessary she confront him this way. Her faint scent, maddeningly vague, that was somehow a part of the heat of her skin and its softness at the same time, tangling inside of him and making him long for things that were impossible. More than impossible.
He didn’t understand how any of this had happened. But he couldn’t make this situation any worse than it already was tonight. He couldn’t.
“I sympathize.” He did not touch her. He did not bend his head to taste that full mouth and he did not test the smoothness of her bared arms with his palms. But he also did not back away. “But that is not a choice you have.”
“It should be my choice.”
“Perhaps. But, instead, it is mine.”
“I don’t—”
“Do you really think this is wise, Liliana?” he bit out, cutting her off before he stopped remembering why he should. “Do you really think pushing me is going to get you what you want?”
“What will?” she demanded.
And later he might very well rip this moment apart. He might dig through his every motivation and question what the hell he’d been thinking—but here, now, he wasn’t sure he thought at all. It was as if she was a cliff when he’d expected a long, flat, familiar meadow, and he’d plummeted straight over the side without any warning. And there was nothing to be done for it now. He should have shut this down and bundled her off into his waiting car the moment she’d walked into the room and confirmed every last thing that smirking cockroach had told him. He shouldn’t have engaged with her. He shouldn’t have listened to a word she said, because how could it matter? And who cared if the woman who was still his duty had gone and transformed herself into the physical manifestation of his deepest desires? That he noticed at all was appalling. He’d have to add that to his laundry list of reasons to loathe himself. Later.
But in that moment, Izar did more than notice. He let his eyes drift down to her lips and linger there. Almost as if he was powerless to help himself—or stop.
“Oh,” she said softly, and the word was ripe with too many meanings. Revelation and understanding. Something like wonder. A touch of daring besides, and it poured through him, molten hot and impossible to resist. “Honey, not vinegar. I should have realized. The great and terrible Izar Agustin only acts tough.”
She threw herself forward and into him, catching herself with her palms flat against his chest even as his hands came up to grip her upper arms. Automatically, he told himself. To push her away, he told himself—but he didn’t.
Her skin was every bit as smooth to the touch as he’d tried not to imagine. The contact was like fire, surging through him, making him insane enough to understand he was hot and hard and unwilling to do a damn thing to change it—
And then Liliana surged up on her toes and pressed her lips to his.
CHAPTER THREE (#ue380795b-0cae-59b8-bc82-3df960f4705f)
KISSING IZAR WAS a great deal like leaping from the top of a high building into an endlessly frozen arctic sea. A giddy rush and then the shock of the cold. The feel of his cruel mouth against hers, his taut chest beneath her hands as if she’d slapped them on a blazing radiator, his hard-packed, solid body too close and too big and too much—
Maybe she had been tipsy before. Because she wasn’t now. At all. And she couldn’t imagine what in the name of all that was holy she thought she was doing.
For a moment, they stood there as if turned to stone. Liliana’s heart kicked at her, hard enough to knock her down, though she didn’t let it.
Liliana’s whole life seemed to flash before her in an instant. Most of it revolving around the frustrating man whose large, hard hands gripped her upper arms, whose fresh, clean scent was mixed with something dark and spicy that she suspected was all him, and whose mouth was as hard and unyielding as it had looked in all those tabloid photographs.
Her heart walloped her a second time. Harder, maybe.
The wine she’d drunk seemed to spin around inside her, playing back every single word she’d said to her guardian since she’d walked into this room tonight. Liliana shivered. What in the name of God had she been thinking? Taunting Izar? Was she mad? He was going to throw her into a dark little cell somewhere and never, ever let her out again, and that would be if she was lucky—
But first she had to deal with the fact that on top of all the things she’d said and the fact she’d attacked him and possibly damaged his mobile phone in the bargain, she’d also thrust herself upon him. She hadn’t looked him in the face and now she was touching him. She was standing here in her bedroom with her lips attached to his. How would she ever live that down? How could she possibly begin to apologize for such a lapse in judgment?
Her heart kicked at her a third time.
Liliana tensed, ready to push herself away from him and, if there was a God, disappear through the floor or die on the spot as planned—
But Izar made a low, growling sort of noise. She’d never heard anything like it before, yet it seemed to move through her body, curling around her like smoke. Holding her as tight as he did.
Then he angled his head, hauled her even closer and took control.
And everything exploded.
The world disappeared in the searing flash of it, wild and hot and insane. There was nothing left. No scrap of her at all. There was only the masterful way Izar took her mouth, parting her lips to slip between them and setting her on fire.
He tasted her. He tempted her. He hauled her even closer until she was sprawled against his chest, her breasts flattened against the wall of his torso. And she hardly knew herself, because all she could do was meet him as he pillaged her mouth, winding her arms around his neck and trying to get even closer to him, if that was possible.
There was too much. He was too much. She found her fingers tangling in his crisp, dark hair and could feel even that like a bolt of lightning, searing into her and through her. And she didn’t care if she burned alive as long as she could keep doing this. Forever.
He deepened his kiss and she arched against him, understanding when she rubbed against him what that hardness was. She wanted more. She wanted him.
She wanted everything.
Because, finally, it all made sense. Her whole life. Her long evenings spent tracking pictures of Izar across the globe, from one glittering party tailor-made for the tabloids to the next. Her tense and painful long-distance relationship with this man and his infrequent letters that had cast such a long and dark shadow over the last decade. It seemed so obvious, suddenly, that everything had been leading here, to the exultation of his mouth on hers, urging her on, making her pant and shiver and think she might die if she couldn’t feel the scrape of his marvelous jaw on every part of her skin.
It was as if she’d lived all this time in the dark without ever realizing there was another way, but this kiss threw the door wide open. It let in the light, and the light filled her to bursting.
Izar wrenched his mouth from hers and set her back from him, his black eyes blazing and that arrogant mouth of his she knew the taste of, now, in a grim line. His breathing was uneven, too. Liliana tried to catch her own breath as he muttered something in Spanish, low and harsh. She didn’t need to understand the actual words to know it was filthy and likely profane, besides. She could see it in his face.
“This cannot happen,” he gritted out.
“It already has,” she replied simply.
Izar’s hands tightened on her arms—and who knew her arms had been an erogenous zone all this time?—and then he dropped them to his side.
“This is unacceptable.” He ran a hand over his close-cut black hair, his mouth twisting even as his black eyes glittered with more of that light. She recognized it now. She could feel it inside of her, tearing through dark places she hadn’t even known were there. “You are my ward.”
“How dirty,” Liliana said softly, and she only realized after she’d said it that she was teasing him. She was teasing Izar, a man she’d found intimidating when he’d been nothing but autocratic lines on pieces of paper, an email, the occasional text. The world had clearly started spinning in the opposite direction. “How will you bear to look at yourself in the mirror again?”
His mouth flattened. “This is not a joke.”
“If you say so. Sir.”
He actually growled at her.
And Liliana didn’t know what was possessing her tonight. First it had been too much wine, perhaps, though she didn’t feel in the least bit buzzy any longer. Not from alcohol, anyway. Who knew what it was now? She only knew that there was magic in her blood and a dark, delicious need she didn’t entirely understand, and that she’d never felt anything like this before.
It was him. Maybe it had always been him.
Who wanted to suffer through sloppy kisses from floppy-haired Columbia students when there was this? When there was Izar—a man who was actually, legitimately renowned across the globe for his seduction skills?
And her life was already tangled up with his. It always had been, and no matter that she hadn’t been near enough to touch him in a decade. Maybe that was why she wasn’t as surprised by this as she should have been. As he clearly was.
“Guardian, ward—what do words matter at this point?” she asked. Reasonably, she thought. “They’re just words.”
“This is not a debate.” He sounded pained. And something far darker than merely furious. His dark eyes glittered. “It’s bad enough that any of this occurred. We will not now have a discussion about my moral failings, thank you.”
“It’s not as if you’ve ever been any kind of father figure to me,” she pointed out. She still had no idea where this was coming from, her sudden ability to speak to him as if he was anybody else. To stand up to him, even. “Or any kind of family at all, for that matter. You’ve gone out of your way to make sure we have little to no actual relationship.”
Something that seemed, now, to make a lot of sense. To be necessary, even. In the same way that she now knew how he tasted.
“Get your coat,” Izar told her furiously. Or maybe it wasn’t fury that made him tense like that, his hands in fists at his side. Maybe it was something more basic, more elemental. Maybe it matched the thing she could feel spiraling around and around inside of her. “It’s cold outside.”
“Okay,” she said obediently, because that was what he expected of her. The instant obedience of a schoolgirl.
But Liliana wasn’t a schoolgirl any longer. And there was no point telling Izar that. There was no point making proclamations about the fact she was an adult. She couldn’t think of anything more likely to convince him that she was actually still twelve years old, as he clearly believed she was.
Instead of wasting her breath, she reached down to the hem of her tunic, grasped it tight and pulled the whole thing up and over her head. She heard his harsh, indrawn breath as she tossed the filmy thing aside, but she wasn’t done. She pulled the pins out of her hair and shook her head, letting it all tumble down around her.
Then she stood there before her guardian in nothing but over-the-knee boots and a tiny little pair of bright teal panties.
Izar looked...tortured. Frozen solid and torn apart at once. That fascinating muscle pulsed in his jaw. His eyes were blacker than she’d ever imagined eyes could be. So black and so bold her nipples pinched into tight, high points.
He made that growling noise again.
“Put your clothes back on. Now.” He sounded even more furious than before.
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