My Bought Virgin Wife
CAITLIN CREWS
She’s mine…But will her innocence break all my rules?I’ve never wanted anything like I want heiress Imogen Fitzalan. I married her to secure my empire—but my untouched wife has ignited an undeniable hunger in me. Desire beyond reason wasn’t my plan…yet now I have a new aim: to strip away her obedience and replace it with a fierce passion to match my own…
She’s mine...
But will her innocence break all my rules?
I’ve never wanted anything like I want heiress Imogen Fitzalan. I married her to secure my empire—but my untouched wife has ignited an undeniable hunger in me. Desire beyond reason wasn’t my plan, yet now I have a new aim: to strip away her obedience, and replace it with a fierce passion to match my own...
Feel the heat in this intense marriage of convenience romance
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://www.caitlincrews.com).
Also by Caitlin Crews (#u90cdf2b4-a278-545c-bc4c-04ca6faaf876)
Undone by the Billionaire Duke
A Baby to Bind His Bride
Imprisoned by the Greek’s Ring
Bound to the Desert King collection
Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child
Scandalous Royal Brides miniseries
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
The Billionaire’s Secret Princess
Stolen Brides collection
The Bride’s Baby of Shame
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).
My Bought Virgin Wife
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-08728-5
MY BOUGHT VIRGIN WIFE
© 2018 Caitlin Crews
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#u73197996-a89a-5ed5-aecc-08fd9728fb8c)
Back Cover Text (#uada45d3b-32ed-5b4d-9c30-58924d101f9a)
About the Author (#ud1eff12d-12bf-57b1-a9e6-a0e835a033bf)
Booklist (#ue132e6e8-1e54-578c-9d4e-58dae2a79c03)
Title Page (#u18de35e9-1656-5880-9723-bf28129088c7)
Copyright (#ud8e0245b-6bd9-58dd-9d99-238531a2127d)
CHAPTER ONE (#ub982b49f-be38-5894-af2e-f4f1737ab378)
CHAPTER TWO (#uf1282ea1-09c6-5673-95f5-083aceb098d4)
CHAPTER THREE (#u3d58b0e2-839c-5167-94a3-b0621d8fc74b)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u90cdf2b4-a278-545c-bc4c-04ca6faaf876)
Imogen
IN THE MORNING I was to marry a monster.
It did not matter what I wanted. It certainly did not matter what I felt. I was the youngest daughter of Dermot Fitzalan, bound in duty to my father’s wishes as women in my family had been forever.
I had always known my fate.
But it turned out I was less resigned to it than I’d anticipated when I was younger and far more silly. And when my wedding had not loomed before me, beckoning like some kind of inevitable virus that nothing could keep at bay.
There were no home remedies for my father’s wishes.
“You cannot let Father see you in this state, Imogen,” my half sister, Celeste, told me briskly as she swept in. “It will only make things worse for you.”
I knew she was right. The unfortunate truth was that Celeste was usually right about everything. Elegant, graceful Celeste, who had submitted to her duty with a smile on her face and every appearance of quiet joy. Stunning, universally adored Celeste, who had the willowy blond looks of her late mother and to whom I had forever been compared—and found lacking. My own lost mother had been a titian-haired bombshell, pale of skin and mysteriously emerald of eye, but I resembled her only in the way a fractured reflection, beheld through a mist, might. Next to my half sister, I had always felt like the Fitzalan troll, better suited to a life beneath a bridge somewhere than the grand society life I’d been bred and trained for.
The life Celeste took to with such ease.
Even today, the day before my wedding when theoretically I would be the one looked at, Celeste looked poised and chic in her simple yet elegantly cut clothes. Her pale blond hair was twisted back into an effortless chignon and she’d applied only the faintest hint of cosmetics to enhance her eyes and dramatic cheekbones. While I had yet to change out of my pajamas though it was midday already and I knew without having to look that my curls were in their usual state of disarray.
All of these things seemed filled with more portent than usual, because the monster I was set to marry in the morning had wanted her first.
And likely still wanted her, everyone had whispered.
They had even whispered it to me, and it had surprised me how much it had stung. Because I knew better. My marriage wasn’t romantic. I wasn’t being chosen by anyone—I was the remaining Fitzalan heiress. My inheritance made me an attractive prospect no matter how irrepressible my hair might have been or how often I disappointed my father with my inability to enhance a room with my decorative presence. I was more likely to draw attention for the wrong reasons.
My laugh was too loud and always inappropriate. My clothes were always slightly askew. I preferred books to carefully vetted social occasions where I was expected to play at hostessing duties. And I had never convinced anyone that I was more fascinated by their interests than my own.
It was lucky, then, that my marriage was about convenience—my father’s, not mine. I had never expected anything like a fairy tale.
“Fairy tales are for other families,” my severe grandmother had always told us, slamming her marble-edged cane against the hard floors of this sprawling house in the French countryside, where, the story went, our family had been in residence in one form or another since sometime in the twelfth century. “Fitzalans have a higher purpose.”
As a child, I’d imagined Celeste and me dressed in armor, riding out to gauzy battles beneath old standards, then slaying a dragon or two before our supper. That had seemed like the kind of higher purpose I could get behind. It had taken the austere Austrian nuns years to teach me that dragon slaying was not the primary occupation of girls from excruciatingly well-blooded old families who were sent away to be educated in remote convents. Special girls with impeccable pedigrees and ambitious fathers had a far different role to fill.
Girls like me, who had never been asked what they might like to do with their lives, because it had all been plotted out already without their input.
The word pawn was never used. I had always seen this as a shocking oversight—another opinion of mine that no one had ever solicited and no one wanted to hear.
“You must find purpose and peace in duty, Imogen,” Mother Superior had told me, time and again, when I would find myself red-eyed and furious, gritting out another decade of the rosary to atone for my sins. Pride and unnatural self-regard chief among them. “You must cast aside these doubts and trust that those with your best interests at heart have made certain all is as it should be.”
“Fitzalans have a higher purpose,” Grand-Mère had always said.
By which, I had learned in time, she meant money. Fitzalans hoarded money and made more. This was what had set our family apart across the centuries. Fitzalans were never kings or courtiers. Fitzalans funded kingdoms they liked and overthrew regimes they disparaged, all in service to the expansion of their wealth. This was the grand and glorious purpose that surged in our blood.
“I am not ‘in a state,’” I argued to Celeste now, but I didn’t sit up or attempt to set myself to rights.
And Celeste did not dignify that with a response.
I had barred myself in the sitting room off my childhood bedchamber, the better to brood at the rain and entertain myself with my enduring fantasies of perfect, beautiful Frederick, who worked in my father’s stables and had dreamy eyes of sweetest blue.
We had spoken once, some years ago. He had taken my horse’s head and led us into the yard as if I’d required the assistance.
I had lived on the smile he’d given me that day for years.
It seemed unbearable to me that I should find myself staring down so many more years when I would have to do the same, but worse, in the company of a man—a husband—who was hated and feared in equal measure across Europe.
Today the historic Fitzalan estate felt like the prison it was. If I was honest, it had never been a home.
My mother had died when I was barely eight, and in my memories of her she was always crying. I had been left to the tender mercies of Grand-Mère, before her death, and my father, who was forever disappointed in me, but still my only remaining parent.
And Celeste, who was ten years older than me. And better at everything.
Having lost my mother, I held fast to what was left of my family, and no matter if that grip often felt a good deal more like a choke hold I was performing on myself. They were all I had.
“You must look to your sister as your guide,” Grand-Mère had told me on more than one occasion. Usually when I’d been discovered running in the corridors of the old house, disheveled and embarrassing, when I should have been sitting decorously somewhere, learning how to cross my ankles and incline my head in sweet subservience.
I had tried. I truly had.
I had watched Celeste come of age before me, elegant and meek in ways I envied and yet failed to understand. She had done it all with grace and beauty, the way she did everything. She had been married on her twentieth birthday to a man closer in age to our father—a hereditary count who claimed the blood of famed kings on both sides, stretching deep into Europe’s gloried past. A man who I had never seen crack so much as the faintest smile.
And in the years since, Celeste had presented her ever-glowering husband with two sons and a daughter. Because while I had been raised to do my duty and knew what was expected of me—despite the dark thoughts I had about it in private while dreaming of Frederick’s blue eyes—Celeste had bloomed in her role as countess.
It was hard to look at all that blooming, I thought uncharitably now. Not the day before I turned twenty-two, came into my fortune, and—not coincidentally, I was well aware—married the man of my father’s choosing, who I had never met. My father felt a meeting was unnecessary and no one argued with Dermot Fitzalan, least of all the daughters he used as disposable pawns.
Happy birthday to me, I told myself darkly.
I would celebrate with a forced march down the aisle with a man whose very name made even the servants in the manor house recoil in horror.
A man I knew all manner of terrible things about.
A man widely regarded as a devil in the flesh.
A man who was not even the member of some or other gentry, as I had expected my eventual husband would be, given my father’s celestially high opinion of himself and all he felt his vaunted pedigree—and thus mine—demanded.
In contrast, Celeste’s husband, the dour count, had a title that ached with age—but had very few lands behind it. Or any money left over after all those centuries of aristocratic splendor, I had heard them whisper.
And this, I knew, was why my father had chosen a man for me who might have lacked gentility and pedigree, but more than made up for both with his astonishing wealth. Because this would surely add to the Fitzalan reach and financial might.
Genteel Celeste, so gentle and fragile, had been married carefully to a title that would sit well on her perfect brow. I was hardier. I could be sold off to a commoner whose coffers only seemed to swell by the year. In this way, my father could have his cake and eat it, merrily.
I knew this. But it didn’t mean I liked it.
Celeste settled herself on the other end of the settee beneath the windows in my sitting room, where I had curled in a miserable ball this gray January day as if my brooding could make time stand still and save me from my fate.
“You will only make yourself ill,” she told me, pragmatically. Or at least, that was how I interpreted the way she gazed at me then, down the length of the aristocratic nose she shared with our father. “And nothing will change either way. It is a wasted effort.”
“I do not wish to marry him, Celeste.”
Celeste let out that lilting laugh that I normally thought sounded like the finest music. Today it clawed at me.
“You do not wish?” She laughed again, and I wondered if I imagined the hardness in her gaze when it faded. “But who, pray, told you that your wishes mattered?”
I noted the year in as grim a tone as I could manage. “Surely my wishes should be consulted, at the very least. Even if nothing I want is taken into account.”
“Fitzalans are not modern, Imogen,” Celeste said with a hint of impatience, as I knew my father would. Though he would not hint. “If what you want is progress and self-determination, I’m afraid you were born into the wrong family.”
“It was hardly my choice.”
“Imogen. This is so childish. You have always known this day would come. You cannot possibly have imagined that you, somehow, would escape what waits for every Fitzalan from birth.”
I turned that over and over in my head, noting it felt more bitter every time. More acrid.
The way she said you, with what sounded a great deal like scorn.
And the way she’d said escape, as if the very notion was fantastical.
It suggested she was neither as effortless nor as joyfully blooming as I had always imagined. And I didn’t know quite how to process that possibility.
I shivered, here in these gloomy rooms built to impress fellow Norman invaders centuries ago en route to their sacking and pillaging of England, not to provide any semblance of comfort for the descendants of those invaders. I stared out the window at the deceptively quiet countryside spread out before me. The gardens that rolled this way and that, dead now, but still scrupulously maintained and manicured. I pretended I didn’t know that the front of the house was decidedly less tranquil today as the family and guests gathered to cheer me on to my doom.
Celeste and her family in from Vienna, our shriveled great uncles from Paris, the impertinent cousins from Germany. My father’s well-fed and sly business associates and rivals from all over the planet.
Not to mention the terrifying groom. The monster I was expected to marry in the morning.
“What is he like?” I asked, my voice cracking.
Celeste was quiet so long that I dragged my gaze from the window to study her expression.
I don’t know what I expected. But it wasn’t what I saw—my sister’s mouth tilted up in the corners, like a cat in the cream.
An unpleasant jolt walloped me in the gut, then shivered through me. I endeavored to shake it off. Or better yet, ignore it.
“Are you sure you wish to know?” Celeste asked, after another long moment of nothing but that self-satisfied half smile that boded all manner of ill, I was sure. It shuddered through me like some kind of fear. “I am not certain that anything is gained by approaching an arranged marriage with an excess of knowledge about a man you must come to terms with, one way or another, no matter what you know ahead of time.”
“You did not marry a monster,” I retorted.
Though when I thought of the count and that expression of his that suggested he had never encountered a scent he did not abhor and never would, I wondered if the term monster might not have a variety of applications.
That smile of hers, if possible, grew ever more smug and made that shuddering thing in me all the more intense.
“He is not like anyone you have met, Imogen. It is impossible to prepare for the impact of him, really.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
Again, that tinkling laugh. “I must remind myself you are so young. Sheltered. Untouched, in every possible way.”
“You were younger when you got married. And presumably, equally untouched and sheltered.”
But the way she looked at me then made my heart stutter in my chest. Because if her sly, faintly pitying expression was to be believed, my half sister was not at all who I had believed her to be all this time.
And if Celeste was not Celeste...it was almost as if I forgot who I was, too.
The truth was, I didn’t know what to make of it. I shoved it aside, thinking I’d take it out and look at it again when I could breathe normally again. Sometime in the dim future when I was married and settled and had somehow survived the monster who was already in this house, waiting for me.
“I feel sorry for you,” Celeste murmured, after a moment, though her tone did not strike me as the sort one would use if that was true. “Truly, it isn’t fair. How can a naive little thing like you be expected to handle a man like Javier Dos Santos?”
Even his name struck dread through the center of me. I told myself it had to be dread, that thick and too-hot sensation. It hit me in the chest, then spiraled down until it lodged itself low in my belly.
That, I told myself, was a measure of how much I loathed and feared him.
“I thought you hated him,” I reminded my sister. “After what he did to you...”
I remembered the shouting. My father’s deep voice echoing through the house. I remembered Celeste’s sobs. Until now, it had been the only example I’d ever seen of something less than perfection in my half sister—and I had blamed the man who was the cause of it. I had held him responsible for the commotion. The jagged tear in the smooth inevitability that was our life here, so securely beneath our father’s thumb.
More than this, I remembered the one glimpse I’d had of Javier Dos Santos in person. After another bout of screams and sobs and the sort of fighting I’d been taught Fitzalans were above, I had plastered myself to the window over the grand front entrance where I could hide myself in the drapery, and I had gazed down at this monster who had threatened to tear my family apart.
It had been years ago, but my memories remained as vivid as if it had happened yesterday.
He was dark like sin. A stain against the stones. His hair was glossy and black, so dark it looked nearly blue and reminded me of nothing so much as a raven’s wing. His face was cruel and hard, so harsh it took my breath away. He had been made of muscle, hard and dangerous, a striking counterpoint to the genteel men I had been raised with. He was not elegant. He was not graceful.
He had no right to my beautiful sister, I had thought fiercely.
A sentiment my father had echoed in no uncertain terms. Celeste, he had bellowed throughout the manor house, was meant for better.
But it seemed Javier Dos Santos was good enough for me.
“Of course I do not hate him,” Celeste said now, with more of that laughter that seemed to suggest I was very young and foolish. I didn’t care for it, but I couldn’t work out how to ask her to stop. “Where do you get such ideas?”
“From you. When you screamed that you hated him, and would hate him forever, and would never cheapen yourself by succumbing to the kind of dime-store forgiveness—”
“Here is what I can tell you about Javier,” Celeste said, cutting me off. And pronouncing his name as if it was a meal. “He is not like other men. You should know this, going in. Throw out any preconceptions you might have.”
“The only man I know is Father. A handful of priests. And your husband.”
I had not meant to say those words the way I did. Your husband. As if I was pronouncing some kind of judgment.
But Celeste settled farther back against the settee as if she was relaxing. As if this was the moment she could finally retreat from her usual strict perfection and render herself boneless. “Javier is virile. Animalistic, even. He will take what he wants, and worse, you will happily debase yourself to give it to him.”
I frowned. “I have no intention of debasing myself. Much less happily.”
Celeste waved a hand. “You will. He will demean you, insult you, and likely make you cry. And you will thank him for it.”
My heart was pounding so hard it made me feel dizzy. My throat was dry, and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. And that dread seemed to pulse in me, hotter and wilder by the second.
“Why are you telling me these things? The day before I must marry him?”
If Celeste was abashed, she didn’t look it. At all. “I am merely trying to prepare you, Imogen.”
“I already think he is a monster. I’m not certain why you think talk of debasement and insults would improve the situation.”
“You will have to watch that tongue of yours, of course,” she said, almost sadly. “He won’t put up with it. Or the way you run about heedlessly as if you are one of those common women on a treadmill somewhere, sweaty and red-faced.”
Because she was naturally slim and beautiful, of course. She assumed that anyone who had to work for perfection didn’t deserve it.
It had somehow never occurred to me before that this description might apply to me, too.
“You are very lucky, then, that you were spared this,” I said softly. “That I am here to carry this burden for you. For the family.”
I had never seen her look as she did then. Her face flushed with what I could only call some kind of temper. Her chin rose. And her eyes glittered. “Indeed. I count myself lucky daily.”
I found my hands on the hem of my pajama top, fiddling with the fine cotton as if I could worry it into threads. Betraying my anxiety, I knew.
And as strangely as my sister was behaving today, she was still my sister. The only person who had never punished me for asking questions.
This was why I dared to ask the one thing that had worried me the most since my father had announced my engagement to me over Christmas dinner.
“Do you think...?” I cleared my throat. “Will he hurt me?”
For a long moment, Celeste did not speak. And when she did, there was a hard look in her eyes, her lips twisted, and she no longer looked the least bit relaxed.
“You will survive it,” she told me, something bleak and ugly there between us. “You will always survive it, Imogen, for better or worse, and that is what you will hold on to. My advice to you is to get pregnant as quickly as possible. Men like this want heirs. In the end, that is all they want. The sooner you do your duty, the quicker they will leave you alone.”
And long after she swept from my room, I stayed where I was, stricken. And unable to breathe. There was a constriction in my chest and that heavy dread in my gut, and I couldn’t help but think that I had seen my half sister—truly seen her—for the first time today.
It filled me like a kind of grief.
But I was also filled with a kind of restlessness I didn’t understand.
That was what got me up and onto my feet. I dashed the odd moisture from my eyes with hands I knew better than to keep in fists. I started for the door, then imagined—too vividly—my father’s reaction should I be found wandering about the house when it was filled with important wedding guests, clad only in my pajamas with my hair obviously unbrushed.
I went into my bedroom and dressed quickly, pulling on the dress the maids had left out for me, wordlessly encouraging me to clothe myself the way my father preferred. Not to my own taste, which would never have run to dresses at this chilly time of year, no matter that this one was long-sleeved and made of a fine wool. I paired the dress with butter-soft knee-high leather boots, and then found myself in my mirror.
I had not transformed into elegance during my vigil on the settee.
Curls like mine always looked unkempt. Elegance was sleek and smooth, but my hair resisted any and all attempts to tame it. The nuns had done what they could, but even they had been unable to combat my hair’s natural tendency to find its own shape. I ran my fingers through it as best I could, letting the curls do as they would because they always did.
My hair was the bane of my existence. Much as I was the bane of my father’s.
Only then, when I could say that in all honesty I had at least tried to sort myself out into something resembling order, did I leave my room.
I made my way out into the hall in the family wing, then ducked into one of the servants’ back stairs. My father would not approve of his daughter moving about the house like one of the help, but I had never thought that he needed to know how familiar I was with the secret passages in this old pile of stones. Knowing them made life here that much more bearable.
Knowing my way through the shadows allowed me to remain at large when there was a lecture brewing. It permitted me to come in from long walks on the grounds, muddy and disheveled, and make it to my own rooms before the sight of me caused the usual offense, outrage, and threats to curtail my exercise until I learned how to behave like a lady.
I carefully made my way over to the guest wing, skirting around the rooms I knew had been set aside for various family members and my father’s overfed friends. I knew that there was only one possible place my father would have dared put a man as wealthy and powerful as Javier Dos Santos. Only one place suitable for a groom with such a formidable financial reputation.
My father might have turned Javier from the house ten years ago, but now that he was welcome and set to marry the right daughter, Dermot Fitzalan would spare him no possible luxury.
I headed for what was one of the newer additions to the grand old house, a two-story dwelling place appended to the end of the guest wing where my grandmother had lived out her final days. It was more a house all its own, with its own entrance and rooms, but I knew that I could access it on the second level and sneak my way along its private gallery.
I didn’t ask myself why I was doing this. I only knew it was tied to the grief I felt for the sister it turned out I barely knew and that dread inside me that pulsed at me, spurring me on.
I eased my way through the servant’s door that disappeared behind a tapestry at one end of the gallery. I flattened myself to the wall and did my best to keep my ears peeled for any signs of life.
And it was the voice I heard first.
His voice.
Commanding. Dark. Rich like dark chocolate and deep red wine, all wrapped in one.
Beautiful, something in me whispered.
I was horrified with myself. But I didn’t back away.
He was speaking in rapid Spanish, liquid and lovely, out of sight on the floor below me. I inched forward, moving away from the gallery wall so I could look over the open side of the balcony to the great room below.
And for a moment, memory and reality seemed tangled up in each other. Once again, I was gazing down at Javier Dos Santos from afar. From above.
Once again, I was struck by how physical he seemed. Long ago, he had been dressed for the evening in a coat with tails that had only accentuated the simmering brutality he seemed to hold leashed there in his broad shoulders and his granite rock of a torso.
Today he stood in a button-down shirt tucked into trousers that did things I hardly understood to his powerful thighs. I only knew I couldn’t look away.
Once again, my heart beat so hard and so fast I was worried I might be ill.
But I wasn’t.
I knew I wasn’t.
I watched him rake his fingers through that dark hair of his, as black and as glossy as I remembered it, as if even the years dared not defy him. He listened to the mobile he held at one ear for a moment, his head cocked to one side, then replied in another spate of the lyrical Spanish that seem to wind its way around me. Through me. Deep inside me, too.
With my functional Spanish I could pick up the sense of the words, if not every nuance. Business concerns in Wales. Something about the States. And a fiercer debate by far about Japan.
He finished his call abruptly, then tossed his mobile onto the table next to him. It thunked against the hard wood, making me too aware of the silence.
And too conscious of my own breathing and my mad, clattering heart.
Javier Dos Santos stood there a moment, his attention on the papers before him, or possibly his tablet computer.
When he raised his head, he did it swiftly. His dark eyes were fierce and sure, pinning me where I stood. I understood in a sudden red haze of exposure and fear that he had known I was here all along.
He had known.
“Hello, Imogen,” he said, switching to faintly accented English that made my name sound like some kind of incantation. Or terrible curse. “Do you plan to do something more than stare?”
CHAPTER TWO (#u90cdf2b4-a278-545c-bc4c-04ca6faaf876)
Javier
I WAS A man built from lies.
My faithless father. My weak, codependent mother. The lies they had told—to each other, to the world, to me and my sisters—had made me the man I was today, for good or ill.
I allowed no room in the life I had crafted from nothing for lies like theirs. Not from my employees or associates. Not from my sisters, grown now and beholden to me. Not from a single soul on this earth.
And certainly not from myself.
So there was no hiding from the fact that my first glimpse of my future bride—the unfortunate Fitzalan sister, as she was known—did not strike me the way I had anticipated it would.
I had expected that she would do well enough. She was not Celeste, but she was a Fitzalan. It was her pedigree that mattered, that and the sweet, long-anticipated revenge of forcing her father to give me the very thing he had denied me once already.
I had never done well with denial. Ten years ago it had not taken me to my knees, as I suspected Dermot Fitzalan thought it would. On the contrary, it had led me to go bigger, to strive harder, to make absolutely certain that the next time I came for a Fitzalan daughter, their arrogant, self-satisfied father would not dare deny me.
I had expected that my return to this cold, gloomy mausoleum in the north of France would feel like a victory lap. Because it was.
What I did not expect was the kick of lust that slammed through me at the sight of her.
It made no sense. I had been raised in the gutters of Madrid, but I had always wanted better. Always. As I’d fought my way out of the circumstances of my birth, I’d coveted elegance and collected it wherever I could.
It had made sense for me to pursue Celeste. She was grace personified, elegant from the tips of her fingernails to the line of her neck, and nothing but ice straight through.
It had made sense that I had wanted her to adorn my collection.
The girl before me, who had dared try to sneak up on a man who had been raised in dire pits filled with snakes and jackals and now walked untroubled through packs of wolves dressed as aristocrats, was...unruly.
She had red-gold hair that slithered this way and that and stubborn curls she had made no apparent attempt to tame. There was a spray of freckles over her nose, and I knew that if I could see them from this distance, it likely meant that my eyes were not deceiving me and she had not, in fact, bothered with even the faintest hint of cosmetics in a nod toward civility.
On the one hand, that meant her dark, thick lashes and the berry shade of her full lips were deliciously natural.
But it also showed that she had little to no sense of propriety.
She was otherwise unadorned. She wore a navy blue dress that was unobjectionable enough, with classic lines that nodded toward her generous figure without making too much of it, and leather boots that covered her to her knees.
I could have forgiven the hair and even the lack of cosmetics—which suggested she had not prepared for her first meeting with me the way a woman who planned to make the perfect wife would have.
But it was the way she was scowling at me that suggested she was even less like her sister than I had imagined.
Celeste had never cracked. Not even when she’d been denied what she’d so prettily claimed she wanted. Oh, she’d caused a carefully prepared scene for her father, but there had never been anything but calculation in her gaze. Her mascara had never run. She had never presented anything but perfection, even in the midst of her performance.
The fact it still rankled made it a weakness. I thrust it aside.
“Surely that is not the expression you wish to show your future husband,” I said quietly. “On this, the occasion of our first meeting.”
I had heard her come in and creep along the strange balcony above me the butler had told me was a gallery. Not a very good gallery, I had thought with a derisive glance at the art displayed there. All stodgy old masters and boring ecclesiastical works. Nothing bold. Nothing new.
Until she’d come.
“I want to know why you wish to marry me.” She belted that out, belligerent and bordering on rude. A glance confirmed that she was making fists at her sides. Fists.
I felt my brow raise. “I beg your pardon?”
Her scowl deepened. “I want to know why you want to marry me, when if you are even half as rich and powerful as they say, you could marry anyone.”
I thrust my hands—not in anything resembling fists—into the pockets of my trousers, and considered her.
I should have been outraged. I told myself I was.
But the truth was, there was something about her that tempted me to smile. And I was not a man who smiled easily, if at all.
I told myself it was the very fact that she had come here, when our wedding was not until the morning. It was the fact she seemed to imagine she could put herself between her grasping, snobbish father and me when these were matters that could not possibly concern her. Daughters of men like Dermot Fitzalan always did what they were told, sooner or later.
Yet here she was.
It was the futility of it, I thought. My Don Quixote bride with her wild hair, tilting at windmills and scowling all the while. It made something in my chest tighten.
“I will answer any questions you have,” I told her magnanimously, trying my best to contain my own ferocity. “But you must face me.”
“I’m looking right at you.”
I only raised a hand, then beckoned her to me with two languid fingers.
And then waited, aware that it had been a long time indeed since I had been in the presence of someone...unpredictable.
I saw her hands open, then close again at her sides. I saw the way her chest moved, telling me that she fought to keep her breath even.
I learned a lot about my future bride as the seconds ticked by, and all she did was stare down at me. I learned she was willful. Defiant.
But ultimately yielding.
Because when she moved, it was to the spiral stair that led her down to the stone floor where I stood.
Perhaps not yielding so much as curious, I amended as she drew near, folding her arms over her chest as if she was drawing armor around herself in order to face me.
I took a moment to consider her, this bride I had purchased outright. This girl who was my revenge and my prize, all in one.
She will do, I thought, pleased with myself.
“I suppose,” I said after a moment, in the cool tone I used to reprimand my subordinates, “you cannot help the hair.”
Imogen glowered at me. Her eyes were an unusual shade of brown that looked like old copper coins when they filled with temper, as they did now. It made me wonder how they would look when she was wild with passion instead.
That lust hit me again. Harder this time.
“It is much like being born without a title, I imagine,” she retorted.
It took me a moment to process that. To understand that this messy, unruly girl had thrust such an old knife in so deftly, then twisted it.
I couldn’t think of the last time that had happened. I couldn’t think of the last person who had dared.
“Does it distress you that you must lower yourself to marry a man so far beneath you?” I asked, all silk and threat. “A man who is little more than a mongrel while you have been deliberately bred from blood kept blue enough to burn?”
I could not seem to help but notice that her skin was so fair it was like cream and made me...hungry. And when her eyes glittered, they gleamed copper.
“Does it distress you that I am not my sister?” she asked in return.
I hadn’t expected that.
I felt myself move, only dimly aware that I was squaring my shoulders and changing my stance, as if I found myself engaged in hand-to-hand combat. I supposed I was.
“You cannot imagine that the two of you could be confused,” I murmured, but I was looking at her differently. I was viewing her as less a pawn and more an opponent. First a knife, then a sucker punch.
So far, Imogen Fitzalan was proving to be far more interesting that I had anticipated.
I wasn’t sure I knew where to put that.
“As far as I am aware,” she said coolly, “you are the only one who has ever confused us.”
“I assure you, I am not confused.”
“Perhaps I am. I assume that purchasing my hand in marriage requires at least as much research as the average online dating profile. Did you not see a picture? Were you not made aware that my sister and I share only half our blood?”
“I cannot say I gave the matter of your appearance much thought,” I said, and I expected that to set her back on her heels.
But instead, the odd creature laughed.
“A man like you, not concerned with his own wife’s appearance? How out of character.”
“I cannot imagine what you think you know of my character.”
“I have drawn conclusions about your character based on the way you allow yourself to be photographed.” Her brow lifted. “You are a man who prefers the company of a very particular shape of woman.”
“It is not their shape that concerns me, but whether or not other men covet them.” This was nothing but the truth, and yet something about the words seemed almost...oily. Weighted. As if I should be ashamed of saying such a thing out loud when I had said it many times before.
Though not, I amended, to a woman I intended to make my wife.
“You like a trophy,” she said.
I inclined my head. “I am a collector, Imogen. I like only the finest things.”
She smiled at me, but it struck me as more of a baring of teeth. “You must be disappointed indeed.”
Though she looked as if the notion pleased her.
I moved then, closer to her, enjoying the way she stood fast instead of shrinking away. I could see the way her pulse beat too fast in her neck. I could see the way her copper eyes widened. I reached over and helped myself to one of those red-gold curls, expecting her hair to be coarse. Much as she was.
But the curl was silky against my fingers, sliding over my skin like a caress. And something about that fell through me like a sudden brush fire.
If I was a man who engaged in self-deception, I would have told myself that was not at all what I felt.
But I had built my life and my fortune, step by impossible step in the face of only overwhelming odds, on nothing short of brutal honesty. Toward myself and others, no matter the cost.
I knew I wanted her.
She reached up as if to bat my hand away, but appeared to think better of it, which raised her another notch or two in my estimation. “You have yet to answer the question. You can marry anyone you like. Why on earth would you choose me?”
“Perhaps I am so enamored of the Fitzalan name that I have hungered for nothing but the opportunity to align myself with your father since the day I met your sister. And you should know, Imogen, that I always get what I want.”
She swallowed. I watched the pale column of her neck move when she did. “They say you are a monster.”
I was so busy looking at her mouth and imagining how those plump lips would feel wrapped around the hungriest part of me that I almost missed the way she said that. And more, the look on her face when she did.
As if she was not playing a game, any longer.
As if she was actually afraid of me.
And I had dedicated my life to making certain that as many people as possible were afraid of me, because a healthy fear bred respect and I did not much care if they feared me so long as they respected me.
But somehow, I did not wish this to be true of Imogen Fitzalan. My bride, for her sins.
“Those who say I am a monster are usually poor losers,” I told her, aware that I was too close to her. And yet neither she nor I moved to put more space between us. “It is in their best interests to call me a monster, because who could be expected to prevail against a creature of myth and lore? Their own shortcomings and failures are of no consequence, you understand. Not if I am a monster instead of a man.”
Her gaze searched my face. “You want to be a monster, then. You enjoy it.”
“You can call me whatever you like. I will marry you all the same.”
“Again. Why me?”
“Why does this upset you?” I didn’t fight the urge that came over me then, to reach over and take her chin in my fingers and hold her face where I wanted it. Simply because I could. And because, though she stilled, she did not jerk away. “I know that you have spent your life preparing for this day. Why should it matter if it is me or anyone else?”
“It matters.”
Her voice was fierce and quiet at once. And emotion gleamed in her lovely eyes, though I couldn’t discern what, exactly, that sheen meant.
“Did you have your heart set on another?” I asked, aware as I did so that something I had never felt before stirred to life within me. “Is that why you dare come to me with all this belligerence?”
It was because she was mine, I told myself. That was why I felt that uncharacteristic surge of possessiveness. I had not felt it for a woman before, it was true. Despite how much I had wanted Celeste back in the day and how infuriated I had been when I had lost her to that aristocratic zombie of a count she called her husband.
I had wanted Celeste, yes.
But that was a different thing entirely than knowing she was meant to be mine.
Imogen was mine. There was no argument. I had paid for the privilege—or that was how her father planned to spin this match.
He and I knew the truth. I was a wealthy man, my power and might with few equals. I took care of my sisters and my mother because I prided myself on my honor and did my duty—not because they deserved that consideration. And because I did not want them to be weak links others could use to attack me.
But otherwise I had no ties or obligations, and had thus spent my days dedicating myself to the art of money.
The reality was that Dermot Fitzalan needed my wealth. And better still, my ability to make more with seeming ease. He needed these things far more than I needed his daughter’s pedigree.
But I had decided long ago that I would marry a Fitzalan heiress, these daughters of men who had been the power behind every throne in Europe at one point or another. I had determined that I would make my babies on soft, well-bred thighs, fatten them on blue blood, and raise them not just rich, but cultured.
I had been so young when I had seen Celeste that first time. So raw and unformed. The animal they accused me of being in all the ways that mattered.
I had never seen a woman like her before. All clean lines and beauty. I had never imagined that a person could be...flawless.
It had taken me far longer than it should have—far longer than it would today, that was for certain—to see the truth of Celeste Fitzalan, now a countess of petty dreams and an angry old man’s promises because that was what she had wanted far more than she had wanted me.
But my thirst for my legacy had only grown stronger.
“If there was another,” my confounding betrothed said, a mulish set to that fine mouth and a rebellion in her gaze, “I would hardly be likely to tell you, would I?”
“You can tell me anything you like about others,” I told her, all menace and steel. “Today. I would advise you to take advantage of this offer. Come the morning, I will take a far dimmer view of these things.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” she threw at me, pulling her chin from my grasp.
I assumed we were both well aware that I allowed it.
“I never said that it did. You are the one who came here. Was it only to call me names? To ask me impertinent questions? Or perhaps you had another goal in mind?”
“I don’t know why I came,” Imogen said, and I could tell by the way her voice scraped into the air between us that she meant that.
But there was a fire in me. A need, dark and demanding, and I was not in the habit of denying myself the things I wanted.
More than this, she was to be my wife in the morning.
“Don’t worry,” I told her with all that heat and intent. “I know exactly why you came.”
I hooked my hand around her neck, enjoying the heat of her skin beneath the cover of those wild curls. I pulled her toward me, watching her eyes go wide and her mouth drop open as if she couldn’t help herself. As if she was that artless, that innocent.
I couldn’t understand the things that worked in me. To take her, to possess her, to bury myself in her body when she looked nothing like the women that I usually amused myself with.
But none of that mattered.
Because I already owned her. All that remained was the claiming, and I wanted it. Desperately.
I dropped my mouth to hers.
CHAPTER THREE (#u90cdf2b4-a278-545c-bc4c-04ca6faaf876)
Imogen
HE WAS KISSING ME.
The monster was kissing me.
And I hardly knew what to do.
His mouth was a bruising thing, powerful and hard. It should have hurt, surely. I should have wanted nothing more than to get away from all that intensity. I should have tried. But instead, I found myself pushing up on my toes and leaning toward him...
As if I wanted more.
He cradled the back of my head in one hand and moved his lips over mine.
And I wanted. I wanted...everything.
I had dreamed of kisses half my life. I had longed for a moment like this. A punishing kiss, perhaps. Or something sweet and filled with wonder. Any kind of kiss at all, if I was honest.
But nothing could have prepared me for Javier Dos Santos.
Nothing could have prepared me for this.
I felt his tongue against the seam of my lips, and couldn’t help myself from opening up and giving him entry. And then I thought I would give him anything.
And even though I understood, on some distant level, what he was doing to me—that his tongue was testing mine, dancing here, then retreating—all I could feel was the heat. The heat. Something greedy and wild and impossibly hot, thrilling to life inside me. What I had called dread had melted into something else entirely, something molten. It wound around and around inside my chest, knotted up in my belly, and dripped like honey even lower.
And still he kissed me.
His arms were a marvel. Heavy and hard, they wrapped around me, making me feel things I could hardly understand. Small, yet safe. Entirely surrounded, yet sweet, somehow.
Still Javier’s mouth moved on mine. He bent me backward, over one strong arm. His heavy chest, all steel planes and granite, pressed hard against mine, until I felt my breasts seem to swell in response.
It was like a fever.
The ache was everywhere, prickling and hot, but I knew—somehow I knew—I wasn’t ill.
He bent me back even farther and there was a glory in it. I felt weightless, too caught up in all that fire and honey to worry whether or not my feet still touched the ground.
And then I felt his fingers as they found their way beneath the hem of my dress, a scandalous caress that made my heart stutter. Yet he didn’t stop. He tracked that same sweet flame along the length of my thigh, climbing ever higher.
My brain shorted out. The world went white-hot, then red-hot, then it became nothing at all but need.
His hand was a wonder. Not soft and manicured, like the hands of the very few men whose hands I’d shaken at some point or other, but hard and calloused. Big, and brutally masculine.
He traced some kind of pattern into my skin, and then laughed against my mouth when I shuddered in response.
His taste was like wine. It washed through me in the same way, leaving me flushed, giddy.
And then his fingers toyed with the edge of my panties, until I was sure I stopped breathing.
Not that I cared when he angled his head, taking the kiss deeper. Hotter.
While at the same time, his fingers moved with bold certainty to find my soft heat.
And then, to my wonder and shame, he began to stroke me, there below.
His tongue was in my mouth. His fingers were deep between my legs, and I couldn’t remember why I had ever thought this man was a monster. Or maybe I thought he was a far greater monster than I’d ever imagined.
Either way, I surrendered. And my surrender felt like strength.
It was like some kind of dance. Parry, then retreat. His mouth and his hand, one and then the other, or both at once.
Before I knew it, that fever in me was spreading. I shook, everywhere. I could feel my own body grow stiff in his arms and I felt myself edging ever closer to crisis.
I would have pushed him away if I could. If I could make my hands do anything but grip the front of his shirt as I shook and stiffened and spun further and further off into that blazing need.
I lost myself somewhere between Javier’s hot, hard mouth and his pitiless hand between my legs. I lost myself, and I followed that shaking, and I hardly understood why I was making those greedy, shameful noises in the back of my throat—
“Come apart for me, Imogen,” he growled against my mouth, as if he owned even this. “Now.”
And there was nothing in me but heat and surrender.
I exploded on cue.
And I was only dimly aware of it when Javier set me away from him. He settled me on the lip of the table behind us, ran his hands down my arms as if he was reminding me of the limits of my own body, and even smoothed the skirt of my dress back into place.
I was tempted to find it all sweet, however strange a word that seemed when applied to a man so widely regarded as a monster. A man I still thought of in those terms. But there was a tumult inside of me.
My head spun and everything inside me followed suit. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened.
And when my breathing finally slowed enough that I could think beyond it, Javier was waiting there. He stood in the same position he’d been standing before, his hands thrust into the pockets of the trousers I knew at a glance had been crafted by hand in an atelier in a place like Milan or Paris.
His might seemed more overwhelming now. I had a vague memory of the stable boy’s dreamy blue eyes, but they seemed so insubstantial next to Javier’s relentless masculinity. I felt it like a storm. It buffeted me, battering my skin, until I felt the electricity of it—of him—as if he had left some part of himself inside me.
I told myself I hated him for it.
“You look upset, mi reina,” Javier murmured. I understood the words he used—Spanish for my queen—but stiffened at the dark current of mockery in it. “Surely not. I am certain someone must have prepared you for what goes on between a man and a woman no matter how hard your father has worked to keep you locked up in a tower.”
I was not one of the sacrificial maidens ransomed out of this place in centuries past, despite appearances. I might have lived a sheltered life, but that life came with abundant internet access.
Still, I followed an urge inside of me, a dark insistence I didn’t have it in me to resist.
“I prepared in the usual way,” I told him. “Locked towers might work in fairy tales. They are harder to manage in real life, I think.”
And when his dark gaze turned to fire and burned where it touched me, I only held it. And practiced that half smile I had seen on my sister’s face earlier.
“I will assume you mean that your preparation for marriage took place under the careful tutelage of disinterested nuns as they discussed biology.”
I channeled Celeste. “Assume what you like.”
Right there, before my eyes, Javier...changed. I had thought he was stone before, but he became something harder. Flint and granite, straight through.
I couldn’t tell if the pulse that pounded in me then—in my wrists and my ears, my breasts and between my legs—was fear or something else. Something far more dangerous.
All I knew was that I wanted whatever Celeste had appeared to have on my settee. I wanted that confidence. I even wanted her smugness.
Because it seemed to me that was some measure of power.
I didn’t want to be what they called me. The lesser Fitzalan sister. The unfortunate one. Not here. Not now.
I didn’t want this man—who had broken me wide-open in ways I didn’t know how to explain without, as far as I could tell, so much as breaking a sweat—to know how inexperienced I was. I didn’t want to give him my innocence, particularly if he thought it was his by right.
Just once, I thought defiantly, I wanted to feel sophisticated.
Just once, I wanted to be the sleek one, the graceful one.
I wasn’t sure I could fake my sister’s effortlessness. But I knew that my smirk was getting to him. I could see it in all that stone and metal that made his face so harsh.
“All the better,” Javier growled at me, though he didn’t look anything like pleased. “You should know that I am a man of a great many needs, Imogen. That I will not have to tutor you how best to meet them can only be a boon.”
I didn’t believe him. I didn’t know what it was that whispered to me that he minded a great deal more than he was saying, but I knew it all the same.
Or you want to know it, something whispered in me, leaving marks. You want to affect him, somehow, after he took your breath away like this.
I didn’t want to think such things. I found myself frowning at him instead.
“Careful,” Javier said with a soft menace that made me feel molten and shivery all over again. “If you do not want an example of the sort of appetites I mean, here and now, I’d suggest you go back wherever you came from. There is a wedding in the morning. And an entire marriage before us in which, I promise you, you will have ample time to learn what it is I want and expect. In bed and out.”
And then I felt twisted. As if there was something wrong deep within me. Because the fact he was dismissing me stung, when I knew I should have been grateful for the reprieve. I flushed again, but this time it felt more like poison than that same impossible, irresistible heat.
I was only pretending to be like Celeste—and the look on Javier’s harsh face suggested that I wasn’t doing a particularly good job. I was certain that if he touched me again, I would never be able to keep it up.
And no matter that there was a part of me that shimmered with longing. That wanted nothing more than to feel his hands on me again. And more.
So much more.
I knew I had to take the escape hatch he had offered me—or lose myself even further.
Possibly even lose myself for good.
I slid off the table to find my feet, and fought to keep my expression from betraying how tender I felt where his hand had been between my legs. It felt as if my panties were somehow too tight, as if I was swollen, and I hardly knew how to walk on my own.
Yet I did. I managed it.
I skirted around him as if he was on fire, convinced that I could feel that blistering heat of his from feet away. Convinced that he had branded me, somehow. And entirely too aware of his glittering, arrogant gaze.
But I had a long night ahead of me to fret over such things.
I only understood that I expected him to reach out and take hold of me again when he didn’t. And when I made it to the spiral stair and ran up it as fast as I could on my rubbery legs, the clatter of my heart inside my chest was so loud I was surprised he didn’t hear it and comment on it from below.
I made my way along the second-floor gallery, aware of his gaze on me like a heavy weight—or some kind of chain binding me to him already—but I didn’t turn back. I didn’t dare look back.
Maybe there was a part of me that feared if I did, I might go to him again. That I would sink into that fire of his and burn alive, until there was nothing left of me but ashes.
When I slipped back beneath the tapestry and into the servants’ walkway, there was no relief. It was like I carried Javier with me, in all the places he had touched me and, worse by far, all the places I only wished he had.
It was as if I was already half-consumed by that fire of his I both feared and longed for.
But I would die before I let him know that he had taught me more in those wild, hot moments than I had learned in a lifetime.
The reality was, I thought about what a wedding night with this man might entail and I...thought I might die, full stop.
I knew that was melodramatic, but I indulged in it anyway as I made my way through the shadowy recesses of my father’s house. Why had I gone to Javier in the first place? Why had I been so foolish? What had I imagined might happen? I wanted to sink into a bath and wash it all away, let the water soothe me and hide me. I simply wanted to be back in my rooms again, safe and protected.
Because a deep, feminine wisdom I hadn’t known resided there inside me whispered these final hours before my wedding might be the last bit of safety I would know.
I knew too much now, and none of it things I’d wanted to learn. I had found a magic and a fire, yes. But now I knew how easily I surrendered. I knew how my body betrayed me.
I knew, worst of all, that I wanted things I was terribly afraid only Javier Dos Santos could give me.
And I wasn’t paying sufficient attention when I slipped out from the servants’ hall. I was usually far more careful. I usually listened for a good few minutes, then used the carefully placed eyeholes to be certain that no one was in sight before I slipped back into the house’s main corridors.
But Javier had done something to me. He had used my own body against me, as if he knew what it could do better than I did. He had made me feel as if I belonged to him instead of to myself. Even with all this distance between us, clear on the other side of the rambling old manor house, I could feel his hands on me. Those powerful arms closed around me. His harsh, cruel mouth while it mastered mine.
That was the only excuse I could think of when I stepped out and found myself face-to-face with my father.
For a long, terrible moment, there was nothing but silence between us and the far-off sound of rain against the roof.
Dermot Fitzalan was neither tall nor particularly physically imposing, but he made up for both with the scorn he held for literally every person alive who was not him.
To say nothing of the extra helping he kept in reserve for me.
“Pray tell me that I have taken leave of my senses.” His voice was so cold it made the ancient stone house feel balmy in comparison. I felt goose bumps prickle to life down my arms. “I beg you, Imogen—tell me that I did not witness an heiress to the Fitzalan fortune emerge from the servants’ quarters like an inept housemaid I would happily dismiss on the spot.”
I had imagined myself brave, before. When I had taken off on a whim and found the man my father had chosen for me. When I had tangled with a monster and walked away—changed, perhaps, but whole.
But I realized as I stood there, the focus of my father’s withering scorn as I so often was, that when it counted I wasn’t the least bit brave at all.
“I thought I heard a noise,” I lied, desperately. “I only ducked my head in to see what it was.”
“I beg your pardon.” My father looked at me the way he always did, as if the sight of me was vaguely repulsive. “Why should a lady of this house, a daughter of the Fitzalan line, feel it is incumbent upon her to investigate strange noises? Are you unable to ring for assistance?”
“Father—”
He lifted a hand. That was all.
But that was all that was needed. It silenced me as surely as if he’d wrapped that hand around my throat and squeezed. The hard light in his dark gaze suggested it was not outside the realm of possibility.
“You are an enduring disappointment to me, Imogen.” His voice was cold. Detached. And I already knew this to be so. There was no reason it should have felt like an unexpected slap when he took every opportunity to remind me how often and comprehensively I let him down. And yet my cheeks stung red as if he’d actually struck me. “I do not understand this...willfulness.”
He meant my hair. He meant those curls that had never obeyed anyone. Not him and not me, certainly. Not the relentless nuns, not my old governesses, not the poor maids he hired to attack me with their formulas and their straight irons to no avail.
“You might almost be pretty, if distressingly rough around the edges, were it not for that mess you insist on flaunting.”
My father glared at my curls with such ferocity that I was almost surprised he didn’t reach out and try to tear them off with his hand.
“I can’t help my hair, Father,” I dared to say in a low voice.
It was a mistake.
That ferocious glare left my hair and settled on me. Hard.
“Let me make certain you are aware of how I expect this weekend to go,” he said, his voice lowering in that way of his that made my stomach drop. “In less than twenty-four hours you will be another man’s problem. He will be forced to handle these pointless rebellions of yours, and I wish him good luck. But you will exit this house, and my protection, as befits a Fitzalan.”
I didn’t need to know what, specifically, he meant by that. What I knew about my father was that whenever he began to rant on about the things that befit a member of this family, it always ended badly for me.
Still, I wasn’t the same girl who had foolishly wandered off in search of my husband-to-be. I wasn’t the silly creature who had sat on my own settee staring out at the rain and dreaming of a stable boy. She felt far away to me now, a dream I had once had.
Because Javier Dos Santos had branded me as surely as if he’d pressed hot iron against my skin, and I could still feel the shock of it. The burn.
“What do you suggest I do?” I asked, with the sort of spirit I knew my father would find offensive. I couldn’t seem to help myself. “Shave it all off?”
My father bared his teeth and I shrank back, but it was no use. My back came up hard against the wall. There was nowhere for me to go.
And in any event, it was worse if I ran.
“I suspect you are well aware that I wish no such thing, Imogen.” If possible, my father’s voice dripped with further disdain. “I take it you imagine that your marriage will provide you with some measure of freedom. Perhaps you view it as an escape. If you know what is good for you, girl, you will readjust that attitude before tomorrow morning. Your new husband might not be of the blood, but I assure you, he expects total and complete obedience in all things.”
“I never said—” I began.
My father actually smiled. It was chilling. “In fact, Dos Santos is nothing but a common, rutting creature who handles any and all conflict with the deftness you might expect from an uncivilized beast. I shudder to think how he will choose to handle these displays of yours.”
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