and sodden-faced child he’d met all those years ago, no matter that he’d been well aware she’d grown older in the interim. And tonight she was standing there before him entirely grown-up and dressed like a common whore.
And, moreover, had just talked back to him in a manner reminiscent of the streetwalking variety of the same, if his ears had not deceived him and his memories of the unsavory neighborhoods of his youth did not fail him.
Izar couldn’t quite take it all in. He couldn’t quite fathom it, because this level of crude defiance spoke to a failure on his part so deep it should have leveled him. And it was a simple fact that Izar was too unaccustomed to the experience of failure to tell one way or the other.
Her attire was not the worst part. Nor was the fact that she was here at all, apparently living in this ramshackle, flea-bitten flat four rickety flights up in a building she could have purchased outright with the change in her pocket—though that factored. It was that she’d deliberately lied to him about where she was living in this sinful city, making Izar’s trek into the hinterland of questionable neighborhoods in the Bronx, of all places, unavoidable on a night he’d intended to spend in more civilized pursuits, such as the theater with one of his current mistresses.
Izar Agustin—who prided himself on his iron control and ruthless focus in all things, from the fútbol pitch of his youth to his current domination of any boardroom he entered—had allowed this situation to get out of control. Clearly. Yes, Liliana had lied to him. Yes, she had gone to some lengths to deliberately mislead him, allowing him to believe that she’d spent these months since her college graduation living in her late parents’ brownstone in the deeply moneyed and far less dangerous West Village in Manhattan rather than here in this grotty hinterland. Still, he could blame no one but himself.
Not even the woman who stood before him, sulky-mouthed and flushed from what appeared to be equal parts defiance and drink, glaring at him as if he was the devil incarnate.
Izar supposed he was. As far as Liliana was concerned, he was far worse. And he was about to rain down a little brimstone all over her to cement that impression.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” He kept his voice soft. Low. He did nothing to conceal the harsh lash of it that regularly made his underlings and associates cower, stammer and fall all over themselves to apologize no matter if they were guilty of anything or not.
His ward only tipped up her chin as if he’d landed a glancing blow at best. And as if she expected—even welcomed—more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything like it. This was not how people treated a man of his stature. Ever.
“Nothing polite,” she retorted.
It took Izar one beat, then another, to understand that it was temper that wound through him, red and wild, at her bored and disinterested tone. Temper, when he hadn’t permitted himself anything close to such a display of emotion since he’d left fútbol behind him.
It was there in his tone when he spoke. “You cannot possibly imagine that adding insults, however vague, to your deceit and your dishonesty—to say nothing of your appalling disregard for your own safety—is the correct way to handle this situation, can you?”
He could hear the fury in his voice slice through the room, but Liliana didn’t flinch. She didn’t crumble or break. Izar had taken down whole companies with a far gentler tone than the one he’d used on her, but Liliana didn’t appear to notice it.
Izar couldn’t decide if he admired her or wanted to throttle her for that. He only knew that neither feeling was the least bit appropriate.
“The only situation I’m aware of is that there’s an uninvited guest lurking in my bedroom,” she replied, with a level of icy hauteur that would have done a queen proud.
It almost diverted his attention from the fact she’d accused him of lurking. He was Izar Agustin. He did not lurk.
Nor was she finished. “I’d like you to leave. Now.”
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