CAITLIN CREWS - The Guardian's Virgin Ward

It was as if she’d lived all this time in the dark without ever realizing there was another way, but this kiss threw the door wide open. It let in the light, and the light filled her to bursting.

Izar wrenched his mouth from hers and set her back from him, his black eyes blazing and that arrogant mouth of his she knew the taste of, now, in a grim line. His breathing was uneven, too. Liliana tried to catch her own breath as he muttered something in Spanish, low and harsh. She didn’t need to understand the actual words to know it was filthy and likely profane, besides. She could see it in his face.

“This cannot happen,” he gritted out.

“It already has,” she replied simply.

Izar’s hands tightened on her arms—and who knew her arms had been an erogenous zone all this time?—and then he dropped them to his side.

“This is unacceptable.” He ran a hand over his close-cut black hair, his mouth twisting even as his black eyes glittered with more of that light. She recognized it now. She could feel it inside of her, tearing through dark places she hadn’t even known were there. “You are my ward.”

“How dirty,” Liliana said softly, and she only realized after she’d said it that she was teasing him. She was teasing Izar, a man she’d found intimidating when he’d been nothing but autocratic lines on pieces of paper, an email, the occasional text. The world had clearly started spinning in the opposite direction. “How will you bear to look at yourself in the mirror again?”

His mouth flattened. “This is not a joke.”

“If you say so. Sir.”

He actually growled at her.

And Liliana didn’t know what was possessing her tonight. First it had been too much wine, perhaps, though she didn’t feel in the least bit buzzy any longer. Not from alcohol, anyway. Who knew what it was now? She only knew that there was magic in her blood and a dark, delicious need she didn’t entirely understand, and that she’d never felt anything like this before.

It was him. Maybe it had always been him.

Who wanted to suffer through sloppy kisses from floppy-haired Columbia students when there was this? When there was Izar—a man who was actually, legitimately renowned across the globe for his seduction skills?

And her life was already tangled up with his. It always had been, and no matter that she hadn’t been near enough to touch him in a decade. Maybe that was why she wasn’t as surprised by this as she should have been. As he clearly was.

“Guardian, ward—what do words matter at this point?” she asked. Reasonably, she thought. “They’re just words.”

“This is not a debate.” He sounded pained. And something far darker than merely furious. His dark eyes glittered. “It’s bad enough that any of this occurred. We will not now have a discussion about my moral failings, thank you.”

“It’s not as if you’ve ever been any kind of father figure to me,” she pointed out. She still had no idea where this was coming from, her sudden ability to speak to him as if he was anybody else. To stand up to him, even. “Or any kind of family at all, for that matter. You’ve gone out of your way to make sure we have little to no actual relationship.”

Something that seemed, now, to make a lot of sense. To be necessary, even. In the same way that she now knew how he tasted.

“Get your coat,” Izar told her furiously. Or maybe it wasn’t fury that made him tense like that, his hands in fists at his side. Maybe it was something more basic, more elemental. Maybe it matched the thing she could feel spiraling around and around inside of her. “It’s cold outside.”

“Okay,” she said obediently, because that was what he expected of her. The instant obedience of a schoolgirl.

But Liliana wasn’t a schoolgirl any longer. And there was no point telling Izar that. There was no point making proclamations about the fact she was an adult. She couldn’t think of anything more likely to convince him that she was actually still twelve years old, as he clearly believed she was.

Instead of wasting her breath, she reached down to the hem of her tunic, grasped it tight and pulled the whole thing up and over her head. She heard his harsh, indrawn breath as she tossed the filmy thing aside, but she wasn’t done. She pulled the pins out of her hair and shook her head, letting it all tumble down around her.

Then she stood there before her guardian in nothing but over-the-knee boots and a tiny little pair of bright teal panties.

Izar looked...tortured. Frozen solid and torn apart at once. That fascinating muscle pulsed in his jaw. His eyes were blacker than she’d ever imagined eyes could be. So black and so bold her nipples pinched into tight, high points.

He made that growling noise again.

“Put your clothes back on. Now.” He sounded even more furious than before.

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