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
