The Guardian's Virgin Ward

She told herself that hollow sensation, deep inside, was relief.

Why on earth do you want his recognition? a little voice asked from somewhere inside that hollowness. You shouldn’t. You should want him to go away and leave you alone, forever.

She told herself she did, and no matter that such a thing would never happen. Of course she did.

Because she couldn’t possibly want the attention of the man who’d abandoned her as a child. Certainly not. That would be clichéd and silly and deeply, unutterably sad, and Liliana was finished being any of those things.

At that, she launched herself into the crowd, scanning the room for anyone Kay might consider the most beautiful man she’d ever seen in her life. There were any number of contenders, this being New York City and basically ground zero for Kay’s sort of dream man—but no. Jules was over near the bookcase in her usual throng of admirers, and she jerked her head in a wholly unsubtle manner toward the small bit of the L-shaped living room when Liliana caught her eye. That was the part of the common area that led into their three railroad-style bedrooms, stacked one on top of the next so only the farthest back had any real privacy. They’d drawn straws for the back bedroom when they’d moved in and Liliana had won it, which she’d had a lot of time to regret in these past months. The privacy was nice, sure, but it meant that she spent a lot of time creeping through Jules’s and Kay’s bedrooms, pretending with all her might not to see what might or might not be happening in their beds after their giddy nights out.

She waved an acknowledgment at Jules and obediently made her way through the clumps of merrymaking people until she pushed through the first bedroom door. It was quieter in Jules’s room, though only slightly. A large, spirited group of people—including a few women Liliana recognized from Barnard—were piled on the bed, laughing as they watched something on a laptop.

“Keep going,” one of the Barnard women said when she saw Liliana, flashing a knowing sort of grin. “Jules told him to wait for you in private.”

Liliana was beginning to wonder if her roommates had done something unforgivably humiliating, like hire one of those male strippers Jules was always threatening to unleash upon her. Liliana flushed at the very idea. She’d barely survived that sloppy, awful kiss her senior year. A naked, dancing man was likely to send her to the hospital.

You really are pathetic, aren’t you? a hard voice that greatly resembled her memory of her guardian’s asked from deep inside her.

She hated that voice.

Liliana wrenched open Kay’s door—but there was no one there. Not a soul on the queen-sized futon that took up almost all the available floor space in the tiny room, so she pulled in a breath that was shakier than she wanted to admit and tiptoed around it toward the door to her own bedroom.

A sense of foreboding swept through her when she put her hand on her own doorknob, a prickling sort of chill that washed over her from her scalp to her heels, then back. Surely her friends wouldn’t embarrass her. They never had in all the time she’d known and lived with them, here or in their suite at college. And Lord knew she’d always been the easiest of targets. She thought back, but she hadn’t seen the faintest shred of that particular, pointed glee in either of her friends’ expressions that might suggest a practical joke was in the offing.

Still, she stood rooted to the spot outside her own bedroom, that odd hum deep in her belly shivering through her, as if her body knew things she didn’t.

Liliana didn’t like that feeling at all.

But she kept going because she’d promised she would. And because she was tired of being the odd one out. The ugly, awkward duckling. The strange creature her friends were forever apologizing for when she would do yet another thing that marked her as different. Unworldly. Naive. Set apart, always.

Liliana wasn’t convinced she’d ever transform into a swan in any real sense. She was the daughter of one of the most beautiful and fashionable women who had ever lived, so she knew what a swan looked like and how far from the mark she was in comparison. Try miles upon miles, and then some. But that was okay. She’d settle for becoming a sparrow. Something with wings and no fear of heights, so she could finally put her family history and her tragic past behind her.

That was the thought that had her throwing open her door and stepping into her own bedroom at last.

Her room was exactly as she’d left it, save the tall figure that stood still and dark at her windows, looking out toward the chaotic street below. With his clothes on, thankfully, and no sign of a telltale boom box like all the movies. Her heart tripped over itself and she glanced around quickly to make sure there was nothing in her private space that would make her seem as much of a weirdo as she knew she was, as everyone always told her she was. Everything seemed in order. Her neatly made bed was on one wall and her desk on the other, with nothing but her laptop and the latest novel she was reading on the surface and more books stacked neatly on the shelves above it. She’d left her closet door half-open earlier, but there was nothing inside but her meticulously hung and carefully folded clothes. No mess, inside the closet or the bedroom itself. No pictures. No art. Just the brick wall on one side and the weathered windows on the other.

It had never occurred to Liliana before that instant that it might as well be one of the dorm rooms she’d lived in over the years. Or a nun’s little cell in a convent, for that matter. Or a prison, a small voice interjected inside of her. It was that stark and without particular character, unlike her roommates’ rooms, which exploded with their dispositions and possessions spilling across every available surface, from their bright comforters to their trinkets and clothes to the posters that decorated their walls.

But she didn’t have time to process that, much less think about what it said about her. Because the man who stood with his back to her, staring out at the Bronx and the mad glitter of Manhattan off in the distance through the half-fogged windows, turned.

And nothing made sense.

Her heart stopped. Then began again, with a kick that made the room spin around and then center somewhere deep in her belly, where she felt raw and hollow at once.

Because it was Izar.

The cruel and terrible Izar that Liliana had only seen in photographs for years. The guardian she’d always found equal parts maddening and horrible no matter how little she heard from him. She’d spent hours upon hours studying the man from afar, looking for proof that he was as terrible as she thought he was. And in all that time she’d never thought of him as anything but the remote and inaccessible bane of her existence. The shadow hanging over her, that was it.

But Kay had called him beautiful.

Izar could not be beautiful. Izar was... Izar. Nothing more.

But the damage was already done.

Suddenly, Liliana found herself completely unable to see the same dark, fairy-tale monster she’d always imagined when she’d thought of this man. She’d told herself she hated him and had imagined herself the wronged innocent in a tale that could only end with the big, bad wolf finally getting his comeuppance. She’d imagined him getting his in a great variety of ways, in fact. And it wasn’t that the real, live Izar was any less a devil than she’d imagined as he stood there, making no attempt to hide his disapproval from her as he frowned at her.

But suddenly—impossibly, irrevocably—all she could see was the fact he was also a man.

Because whatever else Izar was, whatever she’d told herself all this time because she’d needed to believe it as she’d scowled at all those pictures of him, he was indisputably a man.

Something red and furious swept through Liliana then, making her much too hot and suddenly desperately worried that her skin might crack wide open with the force of it. Her head felt light. Her knees seemed weak. And deep in her core, she melted.

Izar was formed like the bronze statue of himself that she knew very well stood in the impoverished Spanish neighborhood where he’d grown up. He was all hard male sinew and restless, brooding grace that shouted out his ingrained athleticism without him having to say a single word or move a muscle. He was dressed in the sort of sleek, impossibly chic and yet relentlessly masculine way he favored, broadcasting the fact he ran an empire that included some of the world’s best-loved couture houses while failing, somehow, to mute that elemental power of his that came off of him in waves.

Most of that was obvious in the pictures she’d seen of him.

In person, he was like a blast of winter wind. Intense. Ruthless. Undeniable.

He was muscled and perfect, and then there was that fallen angel’s face of his—all dark brows and his close-cropped dark hair, the scrape of the day’s beard on his belligerent jaw, and those acrobatic cheekbones that made his arrogant mouth, hard and yet full, nothing short of breathtaking.

Literally, it stole her breath.

He did.

That hum deep inside of her started again, making her skin prickle all over and a giddy sort of shiver wind through her belly, tight and sharp.

Izar didn’t make sense in her bedroom. He’d been bad enough in her head. He was lean for such a big, strong man, reminding her of the clips she’d seen of him on the fútbol pitch, all that hungry and focused grace mixed with impossible speed—

What was happening to her?

His dark gaze fastened on hers and seemed to burn through her. Her cheeks flushed redder and her stomach kept up its maddening shiver and hum, and she was suddenly panicked at the thought of what might happen. What he might do if he ever suspected what was happening to her. What she felt—careening around inside of her, bright and impossible—

“You are no longer twelve,” he bit out, and his voice in person was...better. Richer. Darker. Delicious, somehow.

God help her. She was definitely no longer twelve.

And she refused to act as if she still was, no matter that the fairy-tale shadows in her head had come to life before her eyes...and in a way that was far more raw and real than she ever could have imagined.

“My friends said my birthday present was waiting for me in here,” Liliana said, with an ease that had to be all about the wine she’d been drinking, because it certainly wasn’t her usual way of speaking. To anyone, and especially not to him—not that she’d had much practice with the latter. “If they meant you, it’s official. This is the worst birthday of my life.”

Izar took a step toward her, then stopped abruptly. As if he didn’t quite trust himself to come closer—but that was ridiculous. Still, the odd little notion made her throat go dry and her heart beat at her all the harder.

His black eyes glittered in the buttery light from her desk lamp and the chaotic gleam of the city outside her windows. He held himself still, so still she was entirely too aware of his solid shoulders, which took up the whole of her bedroom, and how he seemed to vibrate with a certain rich, masculine darkness that kicked its way along her limbs and pooled deep in her belly. Then pulsed.

But this wasn’t a letter. This wasn’t one of the few, brief telephone calls they’d had over the years in which he spoke and she was expected to listen gratefully and then quietly obey. This was her bedroom and her birthday party.

This was her life.

And she didn’t have to be cowed by this man, no matter the effect he had on her and no matter what parts of her fortune and future he still controlled.

“Did you by any chance happen upon a better-looking man and heave him out the windows? Into the closet?” She smiled at Izar. Coolly. Which was not the snide note of her dreams but felt good all the same. “Because I left my own birthday party for the promise of a hot guy, not you.” She let her smile deepen, trying to look as unimpressed with him as possible. “Sir.”

A muscle in Izar’s lean jaw clenched. And she was not at all prepared for his thunderous scowl. It all seemed directly wired to that pulsing, humming, molten place between her legs.

“Tell me something, Liliana,” her guardian said very distinctly. Fury and something far darker and more dangerous threaded through that quiet voice of his she’d only heard directed at her once or twice in all these years. And never like this, as if he had feelings about her one way or the other. She could hardly breathe through it. “What game do you imagine you are playing?”

CHAPTER TWO

THE LAST TIME Izar Agustin had seen Liliana Girard Brooks in the flesh, she’d been young and flushed and sobbing her eyes out. Not unreasonable for a girl who had lost her parents, but entirely outside his various areas of expertise. Then, as now, he’d acted entirely in her best interests—none of which could possibly have included welcoming her into his high-profile, business-focused, notably tearless life.

Liliana was the heiress to an unimaginable fortune and half of his company. She was his ward and his responsibility. In his head she had remained that chubby, awkward 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 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.”