“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