CAITLIN CREWS - The Guardian's Virgin Ward

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.”

“Then you are even more foolish than you appear.”

He saw some sort of strong emotion he couldn’t quite identify wash over her then, making her stand straighter and cross her arms beneath her breasts which was...not at all helpful.

She—is—your—ward, Izar snapped at himself.

What was wrong with him that he couldn’t seem to remember that tonight? She and her stake in the company were his responsibility until she turned twenty-five or married, whatever came first. The weight of that had been at the forefront of his thoughts since the day her parents had died. It was why he’d dedicated himself with such ferocity to the business all this time. Why had it deserted him entirely tonight?

But he knew why. It was the way she stood before him, beautiful and wholly unimpressed with him, which was a true novelty. It was that mouthwatering expanse of her thighs, bared for all the world to see. Worse, for him to see. It was the sad truth that, apparently, he really was that twisted, after all. That ruined, from the inside out, exactly as he’d always suspected.

“I told you I would bodily remove you from this city the moment you became any kind of scandal,” he bit out at her, and it was an effort to keep himself from raising his voice. He didn’t entirely succeed. “Congratulations. You lasted longer than I thought you would, but that day has finally arrived.”

Liliana frowned. “You told me that when I was eighteen and setting off for college. Newsflash, I survived. The city didn’t burn down around me and your precious company is fine. No luxury brands have been harmed by my attempt to have a life, Izar. You can exhale.”

Yet another unfamiliar sensation washed over him then, and once more, it took Izar a long moment to recognize it. It had been a while since anyone had gotten under his skin like this. Or at all. Not since his days on the pitch, in fact, where he’d been a bit of a hothead and his opponents had sometimes used that against him. He’d thought he’d locked that side of himself away for good when he’d left the sport.