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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.
