Chapter Two #2
Constantine wanted her on her knees, in more ways than one.
“What’s the catch, Constantine?” Aliyah said behind him, her tone shaky at the edge now. “I knew you were ruthless, but I didn’t think you got pleasure out of small cruelties.”
He turned to find her glaring daggers at him.
Still, he took his time finishing his drink while eating up her growing tension as if it were his favorite dessert.
“I do have a price for rendering my services, as you so shrewdly said. Throwing my name and weight behind you means…you actually have to take my name.”
The silence that followed pleased him more than it should have.
She didn’t laugh. Didn’t gasp. Just stared with those big, unblinking eyes. Though that lovely lower lip that he wanted to sink his teeth into quivered and fell open.
“Take your name?” Amber eyes glinted, the only sign that she was processing his words.
“You have to marry me. Become the actual Mrs. Xenakis for you to have the might and power that comes with it.”
Finally, she pressed a hand to her throat, as if she couldn’t get air, swallowed hard. The deer-in-headlights look in her eyes made his conscience falter but only for a second. The deadweight in his chest didn’t even budge.
“You’re serious.”
“Deadly.”
“You want to marry me,” she said, slow and soft as if testing the shape and heft of the words on her lips, “after all this time. After everything that happened, everything that you did…” A gasping breath rattled out of her as she caught herself.
Frustration made him grind his teeth.
What complaints did she have of him when she was the one who had broken her word, betrayed his trust? Ruined a beautiful future that he had needed like air itself?
Whatever tension she had betrayed a moment ago disappeared as that infuriatingly placid expression took its place on her face again. She looked like a solider who had readied herself to face enemy fire. “Why?”
The silence in the office was heavy and he let the moment stretch further.
Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, Athens was glittering in the night, his reflection faintly visible in it.
Hers shone brighter, the glass outlining the contours of her body with faithful affection, as if she were an old friend.
“You still own a fair amount of stock in Andros International. A neat little maneuver orchestrated by Noor to keep me from taking full control of the board. Something even Theo didn’t foresee, while persuading her to give them up to me.”
Aliyah’s brow cleared instantly. “I will sell you those shares right now.” The sudden energy to her movements slowly stilled.
“I had no idea that the only reason Mama gave them to me was to create an obstacle for you. I have no use for them. You can have them tonight. Right now, if you can arrange it.”
Constantine watched the full circle of emotions from worry to hurt to clear relief pan across her features. Did she truly have no interest in her father’s legacy? In the company? In the nice cushion it would provide her pampered, privileged existence for years to come?
Or had her late husband left her enough to live on for the rest of her life? Was that what this whole “I have to protect my stepdaughter” claim was about?
He made a mental note to have a PI look into the old man’s fortune and how much of it would fall to his pretty young widow. “As much as I love your eagerness to be rid of those shares, and me, it is not that simple,” he said, with far too much pleasure.
“Why the hell not?”
“Blame your mother’s hatred of me. For one thing, shares can only pass through bloodline or marital ties.
It’s how Theo deigned to control the original board.
Even if we found a loophole and you transferred them to me, the board or the investors will claim you were a victim of undue influence or manipulation. ”
“By you?” she said, looking shocked by the very idea. “But that suggests a considerable antagonism from the board toward you.”
He shrugged, hating that it had to be the answer.
“They do not like how I run the company, no. These are old, powerful men who have gotten comfortable with the order of the world and don’t like seeing a boy from nothing order them around.
Even the fact that Theo’s heart attack would have left the company in shambles is still not enough for them to embrace me. ”
“How do you own so much stock in the company then?” Her brow tied into a knot, the sharp intelligence in her eyes a keen contrast to the pampered impression he’d nurtured of her for years.
He was so caught in the panorama of expressions running across her face that she answered the question herself.
And in a way that he hated. “Of course, that was your condition with Papa years ago. That he let you have ‘control’ of—” she made quotation marks around the word “—Julian’s stock in exchange for…
” She faltered there, her eyes holding his in a damned duel.
“For what?” Constantine said, unable to shake off the edge to his words.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, shoulders slumping. A great sigh gurgled out of her, all earlier animation fading from her eyes.
“You did say you would pay any price to safeguard your stepdaughter and her fortune,” he taunted, disliking the defeat in her posture. He wanted her to taunt him, come at him, make demands of him so that he could show her who had the upper hand. “Have I hit the upper limit then?”
She turned and stared at him, eyes glinting like rare jewels. “I don’t understand how marriage, of all things, solves your optics problem.”
“It looks like a consolidation of power within the family, which of course appeals to the more conservative of the board members, the ones that still don’t trust me.
Plus, a whirlwind romance and a wife transferring her stock to her husband is unity.
” He let a cold smile spread over his lips.
“Besides, we both know how much you love a fairy tale, and I can finally give it to you.”
“More like a horror story,” she said, a very real shudder making her slender shoulders quiver.
Eyes narrowing, he wondered if she was truly horrified by the idea of being married to him or if she was that good of an actress.
All his life, he had climbed each sticky rung out of poverty with his wits, with his ability to read and judge friends and foes alike. It was only with this woman that he’d failed miserably.
And that he still didn’t know what to make of her drove him insane.
He watched, more fascinated than he liked, as she prowled the length of his office, the same restless energy he felt reflected in her movements.
That slow, simmering buzz danced in his blood as he took in how the tight skirt hugged her behind and highlighted the flare of her hips.
As bland and beige as she kept her appearance, that outfit could not hide the lushness of her body.
Her face, while it would always have those classic high cheekbones and angular features, had filled out.
She didn’t look like the lost waif anymore. Neither did she carry herself like that, for all that she was dressed like a postulant nun. There was a poise about her that didn’t come from procedures or money.
Again, that raw claw of jealousy scratched at his insides. Had her dead husband loved her so much that she had flourished under his care? Was there more to her marriage than a beautiful, helpless woman exchanging her body for protection and wealth?
While he had never paid much attention to her career, Noor had crowed enough in front of him—on purpose, no doubt—about Aliyah’s spectacular reputation and renown as a famous concert pianist. Even though both she and Theo had only ever discouraged Aliyah’s “obsession” with the instrument, had only ever neglected her at best and criticized her at worst.
The thought of the man she had married was enough to unravel the last thread of his patience. Pushing up from the desk, he moved to stand in front of her.
“As lovely and entertaining as this reunion has been, I have other demands on my time.”
“You can’t just expect me to say yes to marriage.”
“You did it once, fterouga,” he said. “Married a man three decades older to save your pampered, privileged lifestyle. Why is it any different now? Or is it that you will only bend—” he let the word hang between them, and her eyes flared like glittering embers “—over for a man who is too weak and old to ask for anything back?”
Constantine clocked her hand rise between their bodies almost immediately but did nothing. He waited for the impact of her hand on his cheek, waited for her composure to be shredded, waited for the serene mask to fall away so that he could see the fiery woman beneath.
He wanted her as out of control and twisted as he felt near her.
Tension coiled around them, a force field magnetizing the very air between them. In the end, her palm landed on his chest, her eyes shining with a fury that she didn’t let spread.
Her chin drew down as she flicked nonexistent dust from his shirt. Beneath the flimsy weight of her fingers, his heart thudded. The subtle thread of jasmine and vanilla, warmed by her skin, wrapped around his balls like a leash.
Christos, if he wasn’t careful, she could bloody well lead him around with it.
“It’s clear that you hate me.” Her eyes searched his, even though she said it with doubtless conviction. “Why would you want to be tied to a woman you can barely stand to look at?”
His mouth curled, slow and deliberate. “Why this pretense that feelings, yours or mine, matter?”
She nodded, even though that confusion remained in her expression. “Maybe not the finer ones, but still…what is that you wish to accomplish by binding me to you?”
“Please,” he said, letting the word linger on his lips, even as the idea of binding her to him excited him no end, “don’t assume that you are anything special. I’ve already made it clear that marriage is the only way I can take full control of the board.”
“Can we put a shelf date on it then?” A note of entreaty entered her tone.