- -
- 100%
- +
He was her formidable guardian...and she craved his touch!
When domineering Spaniard Izar Agustin was made guardian to innocent Liliana Girard Brooks, he couldn’t have known that the passing years would turn this young girl into an alluring woman begging to be shown the unconscious desires of her body.
For as long as she can remember, Liliana’s coolly elusive keeper has haunted her fevered imagination. Hoping to sever the ties that bind them, she recklessly gives in to one night of sensual abandon, shattering her naive fantasies irrevocably. But the consequences of that night will bind them together...forever!
Izar shouldn’t have engaged with her. He shouldn’t have listened to a word she said—because how could it matter? And who cared if the woman who was still his duty had gone and transformed herself into the physical manifestation of his deepest desires?
That he had noticed at all was appalling. But in that moment, Izar did more than notice. He let his eyes drift down to Liliana’s lips and linger there.
“Oh…” she said softly, and the sound was ripe with too many meanings.
Revelation and understanding. Something like wonder. A touch of daring besides. And it poured through him, molten-hot and impossible to resist.
“Honey, not vinegar. I should have realized. The great and terrible Izar Agustin only acts tough.”
She threw herself forward and into him, catching herself with her palms flat against his chest even as his hands came up to grip her upper arms. Automatically, he told himself. To push her away, he told himself but he didn’t.
Her skin was every bit as smooth to the touch as he’d tried not to imagine. The contact was like fire, surging through him, making him insane enough to understand that he was hot and hard and unwilling to do a damn thing to change it.
And then Liliana surged up on her toes and pressed her lips to his.
One Night With Consequences
When one night...leads to pregnancy!
When succumbing to a night of unbridled desire it’s impossible to think past the morning after!
But, with the sheets barely settled, that little blue line appears on the pregnancy test and it doesn’t take long to realise that one night of white-hot passion has turned into a lifetime of consequences!
Only one question remains:
How do you tell a man you’ve just met that you’re about to share more than just his bed?
Find out in:
Her Nine Month Confession by Kim Lawrence
An Heir Fit for a King by Abby Green
Larenzo’s Christmas Baby by Kate Hewitt
Illicit Night with the Greek by Susanna Carr
A Vow to Secure His Legacy by Annie West
Bound to the Tuscan Billionaire by Susan Stephens
The Shock Cassano Baby by Andie Brock
The Greek’s Nine-Month Redemption by Maisey Yates
An Heir to Make A Marriage by Abby Green
Crowned for the Prince’s Heir by Sharon Kendrick
The Sheikh’s Baby Scandal by Carol Marinelli
A Ring for Vincenzo’s Heir by Jennie Lucas
Claiming His Christmas Consequence by Michelle Smart
Look for more One Night With Consequences coming soon!
The Guardian’s Virgin Ward
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilize the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.
Books by Caitlin Crews
Mills & Boon Modern Romance
Castelli’s Virgin Widow
At the Count’s Bidding
Undone by the Sultan’s Touch
Not Just the Boss’s Plaything
A Devil in Disguise
The Billionaire’s Legacy
The Return of the Di Sione Wife
Wedlocked!
Expecting a Royal Scandal
The Chatsfield
Greek’s Last Redemption
Scandalous Sheikh Brides
Protecting the Desert Heir
Traded to the Desert Sheikh
Vows of Convenience
His for a Price
His for Revenge
Visit the Author Profile page at millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.
Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
Introduction
One Night With Consequences
Title Page
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
Extract
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
“THIS PARTY IS finally looking like the birthday gift to you it’s supposed to be, Lily!”
Liliana’s roommate Kay was practically shivering with glee as she bounded into the narrow kitchen, which was normal for her even in the middle of the loud, crowded party they were currently hosting in their Bronx, New York apartment.
“The most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my entire life just walked into our living room and asked for you. You promised you were going to change your life, remember?” Kay grinned and let her smile go a little bit salacious. “And believe me when I tell you that doing anything at all with this particular man will not be a hardship.”
Liliana Girard Brooks, who’d gone by Lily Bertrand since she’d started college, to put a little space between her brand-new life and her internationally recognizable name with all that history attached to it, had vowed earlier that chilly November evening that her twenty-third birthday party was going to change her boring, stiflingly barren existence as a latter-day nun once and for all.
She hadn’t really expected to have an opportunity to keep that vow. Especially this early in the night.
“You’re finally going to lose your virginity!” her second roommate Jules had cried over pizza, punching her fist in the air as punctuation. This was also normal. “Welcome to the twenty-first century at last!”
“You don’t have to lose anything,” Kay had countered, frowning at Jules when Liliana had frozen solid where she sat with a slice of pepperoni halfway to her mouth. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“The other side of that being you can do anything you do want to do, once and for all,” Jules had retorted, wholly unchastened.
“Don’t worry,” Liliana had replied, opting not to remind her roommates that she’d only ever been kissed once during their senior year in college, and it had been embarrassing for everyone concerned. They knew that. Sometimes it felt as if the entire population of New York City knew that, too. “My ugly-duckling years are over. I hereby declare that tonight is the night I’ll transform into a swan at last!”
They’d all cheered and hugged, then turned up the music, and Liliana had channeled her shaky certainty into her wineglass, where she’d helped herself to far more white wine than was usual for a girl who had believed it when the terrifying headmistress at her prison-like boarding school in Switzerland had told her wine made women into whores.
“Is that the legacy you wish to build as the last living heir to two mighty bloodlines?” Madame had asked with stern distaste, as if Liliana had already been discovered turning tricks on the shores of Lake Geneva. At that time Liliana had been fourteen and far more concerned with the solo careers of certain former boy band members than mighty bloodlines of any description. Particularly her own. “There are any number of rich, vacuous whores cluttering up the tabloids. It is up to you whether you wish to make a spectacle of yourself in this way or not.”
Here in the safety of their tiny kitchen, Liliana toasted her former prison warden and her roommate’s expectant expression with one lift of her glass, then took a deep pull from it.
Sweet white wine, she thought happily. Maybe too happily. Making ugly ducklings into swans since the first grape was crushed underfoot.
If only in her own head.
“This is the new and improved Lily Bertrand you’re looking at,” she told Kay grandly and with a great deal of confidence she didn’t actually feel. “Beautiful men are nothing but my due.”
“Damn right,” Kay replied. She nudged Liliana with her shoulder. “But you might have to leave the kitchen to collect what’s owed you, you know.”
Liliana did not want to leave the kitchen. The party was loud and silly and as vaguely unsettling as all parties always seemed to her. It was also packed full of the approximately seventeen million friends Kay and Jules had made during their years at Barnard.
Liliana, by contrast, had made exactly two friends at Barnard: Kay and Jules.
Wine, she reminded herself as she forced herself out of the narrow galley kitchen and edged her way into the crowded living room. Wine understands. Wine is here to help.
She took another sip. Okay, maybe it was a gulp. Either way, it made leaving the relative safety of the kitchen feel a whole lot more like a powerful choice she was opting to make instead of a terrifying dare she had no choice but to perform, thanks to her big mouth.
Luckily, the more she drank, the more mellow she felt and the less she cared about the consequences of ill-considered vow-making. Almost as if everything she’d said—and, yes, foolishly vowed—to her roommates tonight was true, instead of little more than wishful thinking. And maybe alcohol didn’t disagree with her after all, the way Liliana had always claimed it did because that minor lie was easier than admitting that a dour Frenchwoman she hadn’t seen since her high school graduation still took up so much real estate in her head.
It’s not just Madame who’s cluttering things up in here, a small voice reminded her then, but she shoved that aside. The last thing she wanted to think about was the impossible, overwhelming guardian who made his presence felt from afar with such ease. Not here. Certainly not now.
The edges of the funky apartment, tucked away in a more creative than strictly safe part of the Bronx, began to blur in a pleasant sort of way. Liliana dared to imagine herself a little bit blurrily, as well, as the carefree and intrepid girl she’d always daydreamed she might have been had she not been locked away in the strictest finishing school in Europe throughout her lonely childhood. The kind of girl who was as easygoing as her roommates, perfectly capable of charging up to a man deemed beautiful by her friends to announce that it was his lucky night, because he’d been declared her birthday present.
Maybe it wasn’t that she was a freak and a weirdo for never really indulging in the kinds of romantic adventures her friends had repeatedly had throughout their college years and were still having this first year after graduation. Maybe it wasn’t that she was gangly and awkward at best when infamous heiresses were meant to be as effortlessly chic and beautiful as her own mother had been, forever standing in as revered muses for fashion designers or draping themselves on the arms of movie stars. Tonight, inching into her own living room despite the fact it was packed with strangers, and letting the wine do its good work this once, Liliana toyed with the notion that maybe—just maybe—she’d simply never given herself the opportunity to explore the less prim and buttoned-up side of herself that she was positive was lurking inside of her somewhere.
It had taken at least two years out of boarding school to stop imagining that Madame would appear the way she always had in the Chateau to strike Liliana down for any and all inappropriate or not entirely ladylike thoughts.
“Your mouth belongs in the gutters,” Madame had always told the girls who’d defied her. “Perhaps it is you who belong there, too.”
It had taken another couple of years for Liliana to relax enough to dare to say the things that she thought, if only to her very few, carefully chosen friends. And it was only now, at the beginning of her sixth month after graduating from Barnard, that Liliana felt as if she finally had the faintest notion of who she really was once she let herself relax into her life.
For one thing, she was no longer the sad, locked-away-in-a-tower heiress. No longer marked by the great Girard and Brooks fortunes she would one day control. She might always be famous for the sudden, shocking loss of her parents and her subsequent banishment to a European boarding school at the direction of the famously ruthless and remote guardian she hardly knew, just as she would always be known for the vast wealth her blue-blooded mother and corporate-giant father had left her.
But Liliana had put a lot of distance between her real life and those pathetic stories of the poor little rich girl she’d been considered all her life, trotted out in every exasperating article or television program and compared to this or that member of the Onassis family. Or sometimes even Rapunzel. She’d deliberately used one of her mother’s little-known family names as her surname these past four-and-a-half years, and she lived well below the radar in the Bronx with her friends, indistinguishable from every other young woman in the throes of her very first job after college.
She wasn’t on a reality show set in the Hollywood wastelands or taking up space on various yachts in Cannes. She was definitely not one of the tabloid heiresses Madame had predicted she’d become if left to her own devices. When magazines inevitably listed her on this or that collection of billionaire heiresses, they almost always referred to her as low-key and sometimes even reclusive, which was exactly what she wanted. The best she could hope for, even.
And if Liliana suspected that really, she was desperate to prove that she wasn’t the useless creature her legal guardian—the eternally disapproving Izar Agustin, beloved by most of Europe and revered like a freshly minted saint in his native Spain, where he also happened to be one of its wealthiest citizens—always intimated she was in the curt and sometimes outright rude letters and emails that served as his preferred form of very distant communication with her over these ten years, well. It didn’t matter why, surely. It only mattered that she was neither cluttering up the tabloids nor making herself a burden on the dark, harsh guardian who still controlled the bulk of her fortune.
From afar, which was likely a blessing, since she hadn’t laid eyes on the man since the terrible day he’d introduced himself as her new legal guardian and had then shipped her off to boarding school. Not in person, anyway.
It turned out that not even wine could protect her from thoughts of Izar. They crept in like the heat from the cranky old radiators in this prewar apartment, almost sullen at first, than with force and authority. A great deal like Izar himself, she imagined, though Liliana doubted he crept anywhere he could stride powerfully, instead.
In her head, he was mighty and overwhelming, like a titan. A god. All-powerful and all-knowing.
Visions of Izar’s trademark black gaze and that cutting, mocking curl of his haughty lips—always splashed across all the tabloids—flashed through her and made something deep inside her flip over, then hum. For years this man she never saw had dominated Liliana’s thoughts and dreams alike, either as she’d fumed over his latest stark, pointed communication or waited months and months for the next.
“No yachts in the Mediterranean. You are not a call girl, to my knowledge,” he’d written when she’d dutifully requested his permission to spend the summer with a few boarding-school friends, exploring the French Riviera and possibly heading on to the Greek isles.
She’d been seventeen. And she’d spent that summer the way she’d spent most of her holidays and breaks, in the halls of the Chateau working on an independent study project with the rest of the forgotten and unwanted students. The upside was she’d had an extraordinary amount of extra credit to dangle before colleges when she’d applied.
For a man she hadn’t seen since the worst day of her life, who’d abandoned her into the care of Madame and the rest of the severe teachers at school, Izar still managed to exert an iron control over her life.
Liliana shuddered, pressing her back to the exposed brick wall that took up one side of her small living room as she gazed out at all the merry, happy people her roommates had invited tonight. If there was a beautiful man who would change her life—or at least make it more interesting—in the tight scrum of them, she couldn’t see him. All she could see was Izar.
The story of her life. And she was sick of it.
No matter how many fawning pseudojournalists wrote him love letters disguised as breathless, flattering profiles in major magazines—and there were always at least three per season, it seemed—Izar remained famously unattainable. A legend. Driven and focused, above all things. Women were candy to him; easily consumed and even more easily forgotten. Some of the corporations he bought and sold were the same.
Of all the independent study projects Liliana had undertaken, her research into Izar Agustin was the one to which she’d devoted the most attention over the years. She knew all of his biographical details by heart and not one of them made his controlling yet hands-off treatment of her any easier to bear.
A Spanish fútbol player in his late teens and early twenties, Izar had dominated the pitch before he’d blown out his knee in the final moments of a dramatic championship match—which that career-ending kick had won, of course. Instead of descending into despair and obscurity, Izar had made what many had considered a strange sort of pivot at the time and had charged into the luxury goods business, instead, joining forces with Liliana’s parents a few years later. Together, they’d controlled the prestigious fashion house that had been in her French mother’s family for generations, the international Brooks wine and tobacco interests that Liliana’s South African grandfather had transitioned into a luxury goods conglomerate, and Izar’s own collection of sports and active lifestyle concerns. Agustin Brooks Girard had rapidly become a force to be reckoned with, and then Liliana’s parents had died in that accident, leaving Izar in charge of everything—including Liliana herself, their only child and heir.
Izar had been her guardian in all ways until she turned twenty-one, a role he’d executed as a dark shadow over her life rather than any kind of part of it. These days he merely controlled the company, in which her parents had left her their equal interest, until she turned twenty-five or was married.
Liliana comforted herself with the knowledge that once she controlled the whole of her own fortune and the shares and responsibilities that came with it, she’d have the opportunity to treat Izar the way he’d always treated her. As if he was little more than an unpleasant thing she’d stepped on en route to something far more worthy of her time and attention. She had involved fantasies of sending him snide notes every seven months or so, the better to demonstrate her patronizing disinterest.
I would rather drink cyanide than support your proposal, she fantasized about writing him one day. But thank you.
Childish, maybe. But that was the point. She’d actually been a child ten years ago. Would it have killed the famously intense and ruthless Izar to be a bit kinder to his late business partners’ daughter that awful day? Liliana been suddenly, cruelly left all alone in the world when her parents’ private plane had gone down somewhere over the Pacific. She’d been twelve years old, made of equal parts puppy fat and terrible pain, and nothing bad had ever happened to her before. She might have been sheltered—but weren’t twelve-year-old girls supposed to be a little bit sheltered, if at all possible? She understood that Izar might have been a bit young for sudden-onset parenting, being just under thirty himself and used to a rather more exciting lifestyle than one including an orphaned preteen, presumably, but had it really been necessary to remove her from the only home she’d known in England to install her in that harsh and hateful school in Switzerland? And then leave her there to rot without a single visit ever after?
“Hate me if you feel you must,” Izar had told her in his cold, measured, immovable way, his native Spanish making the words seem warmer than they were. Right there in the foyer of the house she’d spent her entire life in mere moments after he’d ordered the staff to pack up all her things. Twelve-year-old Liliana had been certain she was looking at the devil himself, all hellfire black eyes, that Roman coin of a nose, and the brooding way he’d stared down at her. A muscle in his lean cheek had clenched once. Then again. “I am your guardian whether you like it or do not, and your feelings cannot affect my decisions. You will do as I say, regardless.”
And she had, of course. What choice had there been?
“Get a hold of yourself,” Liliana muttered to herself now. She only realized she’d spoken out loud when she heard her own voice against the indie darling band currently crooning from the speakers, and she flushed. Then hoped that the music had drowned her out—because her roommates’ friends already thought she was a bit off, she was aware. They didn’t need any further evidence.
Izar had not been impressed with her decision to attend college in the States instead of the horrifying wannabe convent he’d had in mind in the far reaches of the European Alps. He’d grudgingly allowed it when she’d promised him that she was only applying to what few all-women colleges remained in America. Then he had very nearly rescinded his permission entirely, because he certainly hadn’t been pleased at the idea that she’d be living in New York City, known den of iniquity, once she’d made her final choice.
He’d even called, the rare gesture underscoring the depths of his misgivings. Or more accurately, one of his aides had called, then demanded she hold until he could sweep onto the line like a tornado.
“If there is so much as a whisper of scandal connected to you, Liliana, you will regret it,” he’d told her in a quietly menacing tone that had made every hair on her body stand on end. “I will pull you out of that college myself, with my own two hands, and you will not enjoy the consequences. Do you understand me?”
“You rarely leave much room for misunderstanding,” she’d replied, wisely making her voice meek rather than foolishly defiant at the last moment. That she’d dared even that much had made her stomach flip over. “Sir.”
There had been nothing but silence for far too long and she’d been sure that she’d gone too far. That he would consign her to another prison term in another school so far away from the world she’d never learn how to live in it. That there was no escape from the brooding shadow he cast over her life.
“I’ll allow it,” he’d said eventually, so grudging and dark Liliana was amazed the phone receiver in her hand didn’t freeze. “On a provisional basis only.”
She’d marked it as a victory, and who cared if it was a narrow one.
But he was the one winning in the end, she realized now, as she was still standing there like a fool with her back against her own living room wall. Izar had two years left to interfere in her life as he pleased, but he wasn’t here in her apartment tonight. The very idea was laughable. First, she hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about where she was living these days. And second, Izar had never visited her. Ever. He hadn’t made contact in months.