closed his grip on her more firmly, subtly, but implacably. Do this, he urged, but even he had his limits when it came to cold-bloodedly achieving his goals. Rather than force the kiss upon her, he brought all his sensual skill to bear and persuaded her to accept it.
* * *
Oh, this rat wasn’t content to threaten her job or break her heart. He had to knock her self-esteem into smithereens. He rocked his mouth across her lips in exactly the way she had fantasized all through her teen years. Confident, hungry, enticing. Like he loved her.
Exactly as he’d just said he did.
She couldn’t let his declaration affect her. It was a lie. She wanted to scratch his eyes out for playing with her like this.
Her own eyes stung, as if they’d been scraped raw behind her eyelids, but her self-control checked out. The besotted girl who had fallen in love so long ago came running out of her room, where she’d been crying into a pillow for five years. She threw herself into Isidora’s body, heart singing with joy. She offered her mouth and drank up the sweet sensations that washed over her as Ramon acted, finally, like he wanted her.
Everywhere they touched, her skin bloomed with heat. Her bones turned pliant and the betrayal of his putting her on the spot like this evaporated. Her, the girl who had crushed so hard on a boy who was too old for her, the girl who had been ignored, rejected, then brutally passed over for her mother, the girl who had dealt with those horrible feelings of treachery and rebuff... She kissed him back.
She wasn’t terribly experienced and that was his fault, too. These were the arms she had wanted from the first. These were the lips. This was the man.
He drew back and she realized he had one possessive hand drawing slow circles on her butt. That’s why flutters of excitement were working up her lower back and into her loins. The fireworks that had been going off behind her closed eyelids were actually flashes. The roar in her ears was excited laughter and cheering. Sly jeering.
At her expense.
Oh, this mean bastard of a man. He didn’t even let her go when she pressed her weak arms against his chest and tried to make space to catch her breath.
His embrace tightened to keep her smeared across his front. All she could do was hide her face by resting her ear against his chest and look toward the back wall—where Etienne stared at her with his lip curled in contempt.
* * *
“You—” So many filthy names crowded her tongue as Ramon closed them into his office minutes later that she couldn’t pick one. “How could you?”
Her chest was tight, her voice fractured. Her entire world was topsy-turvy and it didn’t help that she was in the mirror image of Henri’s office, situated on the other side of a pair of connecting doors to her right. She definitely felt as though she stood on the wrong side of a looking glass.
Ramon threw off his jacket and slung it over the back of the sofa as he passed the conversation lounge. He dug his ringing phone from the pocket of his pants on his way to his desk in front of the tall windows.
“I need to take this. Stay here until you can find a suitable glow of delight. You looked like hell as we left. Good thing they only saw the back of you. Hola.”
“Are you serious?” a woman’s voice said. It sounded like Trella, but she and Angelique sounded very similar.
Ramon propped the phone against his laptop dock and glared at it. “This is your fault. Say ‘thank you.’”
Definitely Trella.
“Why would you do something like that to poor Isidora? She didn’t know it was coming, did she?”
“Did I take you by surprise, mi amor?” He turned his head to glance at where she stood like a whipped dog, hovering inside the closed door, trying to find her bearings among the cool masculine colors and implacable lines of the décor.
“Izzy’s with you? I’m so sorry, Izzy.” Trella was one of the few people who could get away with calling her that.
“It’s fine,” Isidora lied, forcing herself to move until she was close enough to see both Trella and Angelique in the screen, but not so close she joined Ramon in the tiny window. “I should have found a way to defuse those photos before they became more than we could contain. But we’ll need a statement from you. There’s no more avoiding it.”
“It’s not your fault.” Trella spoke in the same pained tone she had used each time Isidora had tried coaxing her toward a disclosure. “I know I have to cop to eating for two, but I don’t want...”
To tell the father. That was obvious, since she refused to name him even to her family. They all had a very good idea, however. Isidora had concluded herself that the man in question had to be Prince Xavier of Elazar, who had been photographed kissing “Angelique” earlier this year.
As Ramon had said himself, Isidora had never had a problem telling the twins apart. She had known straight away that Trella had been caught kissing that particular prince, while Angelique was the twin in the photos with Kasim.
Did Prince Xavier know which twin he had kissed? That was a question for another day. She imagined Angelique’s fiancé, now King Kasim, must have some opinions on the matter as well, since his intended appeared to have two-timed him. But Angelique had never said a word on the topic. Today, she showed nothing but loving protectiveness as she looped an arm around her sister and gave Trella a comforting hug.
“Why don’t I walk over right now and we can discuss some angles,” Isidora suggested. She could use an excuse to leave the building and get some air.
“Pahahaha!” Trella sputtered.
“You can’t!” Angelique cried at the same time, urgently shaking her head.
“Why not? Is there something going on at the design house—?”
“You’re one of us now, moza amiga.” Trella leaned forward as though speaking to a child. “You travel by armored tank and avoid leading the hunters to the door. Seriously, hermano. What were you thinking?”
“What do you mean?” Isidora asked, even as reality began to sink in. Declaring a fake engagement, putting her on the spot in front of the cameras like that, had been awful, but the greater ramifications began to strike her consciousness.
No. The explosion of excitement downstairs had been for Ramon. Hadn’t it? The paparazzi wouldn’t think they had found a fresh target in her, would they?
She had never thought of herself as naive, but suddenly saw herself as the world’s most gullible idiot.
“Have you talked to your parents?” Angelique asked with concern, voicing what was finally hitting Isidora’s sluggish brain. “They’re probably getting calls.”
Her mother.
Isidora touched her brow. All those years she had spent lying to the world, including to her own father, spinning and downplaying her mother’s affairs so their family wouldn’t be talked about and vilified. Now every single tryst would be dug up. Her mother’s past lovers might even throw their names into the ring of fame, just to have their moment in the spotlight. It didn’t matter
