The Guardian's Virgin Ward

“Oh,” she said softly, and the word 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 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.

CHAPTER THREE (#ue380795b-0cae-59b8-bc82-3df960f4705f)

KISSING IZAR WAS a great deal like leaping from the top of a high building into an endlessly frozen arctic sea. A giddy rush and then the shock of the cold. The feel of his cruel mouth against hers, his taut chest beneath her hands as if she’d slapped them on a blazing radiator, his hard-packed, solid body too close and too big and too much—

Maybe she had been tipsy before. Because she wasn’t now. At all. And she couldn’t imagine what in the name of all that was holy she thought she was doing.

For a moment, they stood there as if turned to stone. Liliana’s heart kicked at her, hard enough to knock her down, though she didn’t let it.

Liliana’s whole life seemed to flash before her in an instant. Most of it revolving around the frustrating man whose large, hard hands gripped her upper arms, whose fresh, clean scent was mixed with something dark and spicy that she suspected was all him, and whose mouth was as hard and unyielding as it had looked in all those tabloid photographs.

Her heart walloped her a second time. Harder, maybe.

The wine she’d drunk seemed to spin around inside her, playing back every single word she’d said to her guardian since she’d walked into this room tonight. Liliana shivered. What in the name of God had she been thinking? Taunting Izar? Was she mad? He was going to throw her into a dark little cell somewhere and never, ever let her out again, and that would be if she was lucky—

But first she had to deal with the fact that on top of all the things she’d said and the fact she’d attacked him and possibly damaged his mobile phone in the bargain, she’d also thrust herself upon him. She hadn’t looked him in the face and now she was touching him. She was standing here in her bedroom with her lips attached to his. How would she ever live that down? How could she possibly begin to apologize for such a lapse in judgment?

Her heart kicked at her a third time.

Liliana tensed, ready to push herself away from him and, if there was a God, disappear through the floor or die on the spot as planned—

But Izar made a low, growling sort of noise. She’d never heard anything like it before, yet it seemed to move through her body, curling around her like smoke. Holding her as tight as he did.

Then he angled his head, hauled her even closer and took control.

And everything exploded.

The world disappeared in the searing flash of it, wild and hot and insane. There was nothing left. No scrap of her at all. There was only the masterful way Izar took her mouth, parting her lips to slip between them and setting her on fire.

He tasted her. He tempted her. He hauled her even closer until she was sprawled against his chest, her breasts flattened against the wall of his torso. And she hardly knew herself, because all she could do was meet him as he pillaged her mouth, winding her arms around his neck and trying to get even closer to him, if that was possible.

There was too much. He was too much. She found her fingers tangling in his crisp, dark hair and could feel even that like a bolt of lightning, searing into her and through her. And she didn’t care if she burned alive as long as she could keep doing this. Forever.

He deepened his kiss and she arched against him, understanding when she rubbed against him what that hardness was. She wanted more. She wanted him.

She wanted everything.

Because, finally, it all made sense. Her whole life. Her long evenings spent tracking pictures of Izar across the globe, from one glittering party tailor-made for the tabloids to the next. Her tense and painful long-distance relationship with this man and his infrequent letters that had cast such a long and dark shadow over the last decade. It seemed so obvious, suddenly, that everything had been leading here, to the exultation of his mouth on hers, urging her on, making her pant and shiver and think she might die if she couldn’t feel the scrape of his marvelous jaw on every part of her skin.

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.