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.”
