His for Revenge
CAITLIN CREWS
The marriage game…Walking down the aisle towards striking but cold CEO Chase Whitaker was never meant to be Zara Elliot’s fate. But to safeguard the family business, she’ll have to play along…Chase is only interested in one thing - his own dark game of revenge against Zara's father. The one thing he hadn’t counted on? Zara's charm and natural beauty unsettling his rock-hard defences.But their wedding night proves to be a game-changer and they both realise they're in over their heads. Losing is never an option for Chase… but winning suddenly takes on a very different meaning!Caitlin Crew’s Vows of Convenience duet:The Whitaker name was once synonymous with power, wealth and control. But with the family business facing certain ruin and its reputation turning into dust, the Whitaker siblings need to make the ultimate sacrifice to safeguard their futures…Book 1 - HIS FOR A PRICEFollowing the death of Mattie Whitaker's father, a merger with Greek tycoon Nicodemus Stathis’ company will go a long way toward fixing her problem, but Nicodemus's help comes at a price…Book 2 - HIS FOR REVENGEChase Whitaker is playing his own dark game of revenge against Zara Elliot’s father, the chairman of his board who he plans to replace-but he has no defences against Zara’s unstudied charm and natural beauty….Praise for Caitlin CrewsHis for Revenge 4.5* RT Book ReviewFrom the first page to the brilliantly defining end, Crews’ gothic tale refines the priceless harrowed-to-healed love story. The festive holiday atmosphere heightens the twisted tale.Caitlin Crews’ RITA Nominated A ROYAL WITHOUT RULESCrews’ tale is intensely dramatic, set in a quaint fictional European principality. The royal repartee is all-consuming, their lovemaking is sensual and volatile and their romance is a nightmare turned fairy tale. 4.5* RT Book ReviewAdd a wonderful Caitlin Crews title to your collection!
And he didn’t know what he meant to do with this woman—he didn’t know how to make her his revenge when he couldn’t seem to make her do anything—but he couldn’t takethisany longer. He couldn’t stand it.
“I’m not empty inside,” Chase blurted out, gravel and steel in his voice, and she jerked in her seat as if he’d smacked her. He hated himself as if he really had.
“What?”
But he was already crossing the room. He was already right there, looming above her, so obviously brutal and dangerous, and yet she still gazed up at him in a kind of wonder. Like she saw all the things in him he’d stopped wishing were there a long, long time ago.
Like she was as much a fool as he was.
“It’s much worse than empty in here,” he gritted out. “It’s murderous dark, vicious and wrong, and there’s no changing it. You should have run away from me when I gave you the chance, Zara. You should have understood that it was a gift, and I don’t know that I’ll hand you another one.”
VOWS OF CONVENIENCE (#ulink_b4ad087d-1200-54a0-b644-84f8391cf6c0)Bound by duty!
The Whitaker name was once synonymous with power, wealth and control. But with the family business facing certain ruin, and its reputation turning into dust, the Whitaker siblings need to make the ultimate sacrifice to safeguard their futures …
HIS FOR A PRICE
Following the death of Mattie Whitaker’s father, a merger with Greek tycoon Nicodemus Stathis’s company will go a long way towards fixing her problem—but Nicodemus’s help comes at a price …
October 2014
HIS FOR REVENGE
Chase Whitaker is playing his own dark game of revenge against Zara Elliot’s father, the chairman of his board. He plans to replace him—but he has no defences against Zara’s unstudied charm and natural beauty …
December 2014
His for Revenge
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouth-watering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.
Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.
She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.
Welcome to the world, Baby Haslam!
Contents
Cover (#u8e3feb57-4f0d-5526-8d08-62ca81e1c2a5)
Introduction (#u0272d300-5ca3-56f4-bb94-fee00a16a0a6)
Vows of Convenience (#ulink_b27ff795-8c92-57ec-9335-e94d1aeb122c)
Title Page (#ud2df39db-8ab2-520c-8a1b-49f2d41e64cf)
About the Author (#ua259b59c-049b-533a-ae0b-c86071857d17)
Dedication (#ubcd588e9-5b2d-5417-bb6a-bee44a4e8efc)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_642e33c2-2446-5d36-a249-6c3510d0be99)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_2b3df5f3-862d-51af-b578-61821382dae5)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_25fdc7d8-103a-5f1a-bcbf-e6e5a4808528)
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)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_970cca9e-4a6f-5604-a52e-7ce06ed134dd)
ZARA ELLIOTT WAS halfway down the aisle of the white-steepled First Congregational Church she’d always thought was a touch too smug for its own good—taking up a whole block on the town green in the center of the sweetly manicured, white clapboard village that her family had lived in since the days of the first Connecticut Colony way back in the 1630s—before the sheer insanity of what she was doing really hit her.
She felt her knees wobble alarmingly beneath her, somewhere underneath all that billowing white fabric that was draped around her and made her look like a lumbering wedding cake, and she almost stopped right there. In front of the hundreds of witnesses her father had decided it was necessary to invite to this circus show.
“Don’t you dare stop now,” her father hissed at her, the genial smile he used in public never dimming in the slightest as his wiry body tensed beside her. “I’ll drag you up this aisle if I have to, Zara, but I won’t be pleased.”
This constituted about as much paternal love and support as she could expect from Amos Elliott, who collected money and power the way other fathers collected stamps, and Zara had never been any good at standing up to him anyway.
That had always been her sister Ariella’s department.
Which was how this was happening in the first place, Zara reminded herself as she dutifully kept moving. Then she had to order herself not to think about her older sister, because the dress might be a preposterous monstrosity of filmy white material, but it was also much—much—too tight. Ariella was at least three inches taller than Zara and had the breasts of a preteen boy, all the better to swan about in bikinis and gravity-defying garments as she pleased. And if Zara let herself get furious, as she would if she thought about any of this too hard, she would pop right out of this secondhand dress that didn’t fit her at all, right here in the middle of the church her ancestors had helped build centuries ago.
It would serve her father right, she thought grimly, but it wouldn’t be worth the price she’d have to pay. And anyway, she was doing this for her late grandmother, who had earnestly believed that Zara should give her father another chance and had made Zara promise to her on her deathbed last summer that Zara would—but had left Zara her cottage on Long Island Sound just in case that chance didn’t go well.
She concentrated on the infamous Chase Whitaker—her groom—instead, as he stood there at the front of the church with his back to her approach. He looked as if he was drawing out the romantic suspense when Zara knew he was much more likely to be concealing his own fury at this wedding he’d made perfectly clear he didn’t want. This wedding that her conniving father had pushed him into in the months since Chase’s own larger-than-life father had died unexpectedly, leaving Amos a distinct weakness in the power structure of Whitaker Industries that he, as chairman of its board of directors, could exploit.
This wedding that Chase would have been opposed to even if Zara had been who she was supposed to be: Ariella, who, in typical Ariella fashion, hadn’t bothered to turn up this morning.
Zara had always prided herself on her practicality, a vastly underused virtue in the Elliott family, but she had to admit that there was a part of her that took in the sight of her waiting groom’s broad, finely carved shoulders and that delicious height he wore so easily and wondered what it would be like if this was real. If she wasn’t a last-minute substitute for the beauty of the family, who had once been breathlessly described in Zara’s hearing as the jewel in the Elliott crown. If a man like Chase Whitaker—worshipped the world over for his dark blue eyes, that thick dark hair and that devastatingly athletic body of his that made women into red-faced, swooning idiots at the very sight of it, to say nothing of that crisp, delicious British accent he wielded with such charm—really was waiting for her at the end of a church aisle.
If, if, if, she scolded herself derisively. You’re an idiot yourself.
No one, it went without saying, had ever described Zara as a gemstone of any kind. Though her much-beloved grandmother had called her a brick once or twice before she’d died last summer, in that tone women of Grams’s exalted social status had only ever used to refer to the girls they considered handsome enough and even dependable instead of anything like pretty.
“You’re so dependable,” Ariella had said two days ago, the way she always did, with that little smile and that arch tone that Zara had been choosing to overlook for the better part of her twenty-six years. Ariella had been putting on her makeup for one of her prewedding events, an exercise which took her a rather remarkable amount of time in Zara’s opinion. Not that she’d shared it. “I don’t know how you can bear to do it all the time.”
“Do I have a choice?” Zara had asked, with only the faintest touch of asperity, because the way Ariella had said dependable was anything but complimentary, unlike the way Grams had said it back when. “Are you planning to step up and be dependable at some point?”
Ariella had met Zara’s gaze in the mirror, a bright red lipstick in one languid hand. She’d blinked as if amazed by the question.
“Why would I?” she’d asked after a moment, as light and breezy and dismissive as ever, though her expression had bordered on scornful. “You’re so much better at it.”
That had obviously been a statement of intent, Zara thought now, as she moved closer by the second to the man at the end of the aisle. Who wasn’t waiting forher. Who, given a choice, wouldn’t be there at all.
Zara was glad she was wearing the irksome, heavy veil that hid her away from view so that none of the assembled onlookers could see how foolish her imagination was, which would no doubt be written all over her face. The curse of a natural redhead, she thought balefully. Hair that she only wished was a mysterious shade of glamorous auburn instead of what it really was. Red. And the ridiculously sensitive skin to go along with it.
But then she stopped thinking about her skin and the things that might or might not be splashed across it in all those telling pinks and reds she couldn’t control, because they reached the altar at last.
Amos boomed out his part of the archaic ceremony, announcing to all that he gave away this woman with perhaps an insulting amount of paternal eagerness. Then she was summarily handed over to Chase Whitaker, who had turned to face her but managed to convey the impression that he was still facing in the other direction. As if he was deeply bored. Or so mentally and emotionally removed from this absurd little exercise that he thought he actually was somewhere else entirely.
And Zara remained veiled, as if she was participating in an actual medieval wedding, because—as her father had reminded her no less than seventy-five times in the church lobby already—Chase needed to be legally bound to the family before this little bait and switch was discovered.
“How charming,” Zara had said drily. “A fairy tale of a wedding, indeed.”
Amos had eyed her with that flat, ugly look of his that she went to great lengths to avoid under normal circumstances. Not that waking up to find oneself in the middle of a farcical comedy that involved playing Switch the Arranged Bride with her absentee sister’s unknowing and unwilling fiancé constituted anything like normal.
“You can save the smart remarks for your new husband, assuming you manage to pull this off,” Amos had said coldly. As was his way, especially when talking to the daughter he’d called a waste of Elliott genes when she’d been a particularly ungainly and unattractive thirteen-year-old. “I’m sure he’ll be more receptive to them than I am.”
His expression had suggested he doubted that, and Zara had decided that one smart remark was more than enough. She’d busied herself with practicing her polite, “just married to a complete stranger” smile and pretending she was perfectly fine with the fact Ariella’s dress didn’t fit her at all.
Because what girl didn’t dream of waddling up the aisle in a dress that had been cut down the back to allow her breasts to fit in it, then held together with a hastily sewn-up strip of lace she was afraid her stepmother had ripped off the bottom of the church’s curtains?
Her soon-to-be husband took her hands now, his own large and warm and remarkably strong as they curled around hers. It made her feel oddly light-headed. Zara frowned at the perky boutonniere he wore in his lapel and tried not to think too much about the fact that her father clearly believed that if Chase got wind of the fact that it was Zara he was marrying, he’d run for the hills.
The arranged marriage part was no impediment, was the implication. Just the fact that it was to the less lovely, less fawned over, much less desirable Elliott sister.
It wasn’t until she heard a strange sound that Zara realized she was grinding her teeth. She stopped before her father—glowering at her from the first pew—heard it and did something else to ensure this marriage happened according to his plans. Zara really didn’t want to think about what that something else might entail. Switching one daughter for the next should really be at the outer limits of deceitful behavior, but this was Amos Elliott. He had no outer limits.
The priest droned on about fidelity and love, which verged on insulting under the circumstances. Zara lifted her frown to Chase Whitaker’s famously beautiful profile, so masculine and attractive that it had graced any number of magazine covers in its time, and reminded herself that while this situation might be extreme, it wasn’t anything new. Zara had always been the mousy sister, the dutiful sister. The sister who preferred books to parties and her grandmother’s company to the carousing of a hundred idiotic peers. The quiet sister whose academic aspirations were always swept aside or outright ignored so that Ariella’s various scandals and kaleidoscopic needs could be focused on instead. She’d always been the sister who could be relied upon to do all the unpleasant and responsible and often deadly boring things, so that Ariella could carry on with her “modeling” and her “acting” and whatever else it was she pretended to do that kept her flitting about the globe from one hot spot to the next, answerable to no one and spending their father’s money as she pleased.
Stop thinking about Ariella, Zara ordered herself sharply, when Chase slanted a dark look her way, and she realized she was squeezing his hands too tightly.
She loosened her grip. And she absolutely did not allow herself to think about how warm his hands were, how strong and interestingly callused and yet elegant, holding hers in a manner that suggested his gentleness was only a veneer stretched thinly over a great power he didn’t care to broadcast.
She definitely wasn’t thinking about that.
Then it was her turn to speak, in as even a voice as she could manage, expecting Chase to tear off her veil and denounce her in front of the entire church when the priest slipped in her name instead of Ariella’s, so quickly and quietly that she wasn’t sure anyone even heard it. But he was too busy concentrating on something just to the right of her gaze—and again, she got the sense that he was ruthlessly holding himself in check. That doing so took every ounce of the obvious and considerable strength she could feel in him as he slipped the necessary rings onto her finger.
That, or he was as drunk as the faint scent of whiskey suggested he was, and was trying not to topple over.
He recited his own vows in a low, curt tone, that accent of his making each word seem that much more precise and beautiful, and when it was done, when Zara had slid his own ring into place, she felt dizzy with relief and something else she couldn’t quite name. Was it really that simple? Had she really squeezed herself into an ill-fitting dress she couldn’t zip up and a blindingly opaque veil and pretended to be her sister? For the singular purpose of trapping this poor man in one of her father’s awful little plots, because this had seemed like the chance her adored Grams had advised her to give Amos before she wrote him off forever?
“You may kiss the bride,” the priest intoned.
So it appeared that yes, she had.
Chase sighed. Then he paused, and for a moment, Zara thought he was going to decline. Could he decline? In front of all these people? In any possible way that wouldn’t make her look unwanted and unattractive besides?
She didn’t know if she wanted him to kiss her or not, if she was honest. She didn’t know which would be worse: being kissed by someone who didn’t want to kiss her because he felt he had to do it, or not being kissed by him and thereby shamed in front of the entire congregation. But then he dealt with the situation by reaching over and flipping her veil back, exposing her face for the first time.
Zara held her breath, cringing slightly as she braced for an explosion of his temper. She could feel it, like the slap of an open fire much too close to her, and instinctively shut her eyes against it. She heard an echoing sort of gasp from the front of the church, where someone had finally noticed that glamorous Ariella Elliott was looking markedly shorter and rounder than usual today. But Chase Whitaker, her unwitting groom and now her husband, said nothing, despite the roar of all that fire.
So she braced herself, then opened her eyes and looked at him.
And for a moment everything disappeared.
Zara had seen a million pictures of this man. She’d seen him from across the relatively small rooms they’d both been in. But she’d never been this close to him. So nothing could possibly have prepared her for the wallop of those eyes of his. Dark blue, yes. But they were the color of twilight, moments before the stars appeared. The color of the sea, far out from a lonely shore. There was nothing safe or summery blue about them. There was a wildness about that color, a deep, aching thing that she felt in her like a restless wind.
And he was beautiful. Not merely handsome or attractive the way he appeared in photographs. Not ruggedly lovely in some stark, masculine way, like dangerous mountain peaks were pretty, though he was decidedly, inarguably male. He was simply beautiful. His cheekbones were a marvel. His hair was a rough black silk and his brows were a great, arched wickedness unto themselves. His wide mouth made her feel much too warm, even flat and expressionless as it was now. And those stunning, arresting eyes, the blue of lost things, of shattered dreams, tore through her.
It took her a moment to register that he was staring down at her, incredulous.
And—as she’d already figured out from that blast of temper that she could still feel butting up against her like a living, breathing thing—he was very, very angry.
Zara went to pull away, not in the least bit interested in remaining this close to that much temper, but her new husband forestalled any attempt to escape with the hand he curled around her neck. She imagined it looked tender from a distance. But she was much closer, and she could feel it for what it was. Threat. Menace.
Fury.
No matter that a bright hot burst of flame danced from the place he touched her and then throughout the rest of her. No matter that a shiver rocked through her or that she felt as if her whole body woke up at the sensation of that hot, male palm against the nape of her neck. Her lungs felt tight and her throat ached. Her knees felt wobbly again, but for a very different reason than they had before.
And then Chase Whitaker, who had been quite clear that he’d never wanted to marry anyone and wouldn’t have chosen her if he had, bent his head and pressed his perfect lips to hers.
It should have been awkward, Zara thought wildly. Even violating.
But instead, it was like her entire body simply…sizzled. Her lips felt seared through, and she felt herself flush what she knew would be a revealing, horrifying red. She felt that simple press of his lips everywhere. In her throat. In that ache between her breasts. In her suddenly too-tight nipples. In that hard knot in her belly, and worse, in the sudden molten heat below it. Chase lifted his head, his remarkable eyes darker than before, and she knew he saw all of that betraying color.
And worse, that he knew what it meant.
There was something taut and electric between them then, something that sparked in the air and then moved inside of her, setting off alarms and making her feel that she really might collapse in the first faint of her life, after all. Like the archaic, bartered bride she was impersonating today. Maybe that would be a nice little vacation from all this, a small voice inside her suggested, while everything else she was or ever had been drowned in those dark blue eyes of his.
And then he looked away and everything sped up.
There was applause, then organ music, then the murmuring of several hundred scandalized guests who’d finally caught on to the fact that Chase Whitaker, president and CEO of Whitaker Industries and one of the world’s most beloved playboy heirs, had just wed the wrong Elliott daughter.
Zara found this as unbelievable as they did, she was certain, but she didn’t have time to reflect on it. Chase was holding her by the arm—in a manner that made her feel rather more like a prisoner than a bride, and yet, somehow, more cherished than when Amos had done the same thing—and they were starting off down the aisle again. She saw her father’s smug face as they strode past him. She saw her stepmother dabbing at her eyes, and thought that ditzy Melissa might in fact be the only person in the church who’d found the ceremony moving, bless her. She saw longtime neighbors and old family friends and the speculative expressions of a hundred strangers, but the only real thing was that hard arm that held her next to his impossibly lean and chiseled body.
And then there was silence. Chase marched them out of the church and down the steps into the searing, brutal cold of the December afternoon, then directly into the back of a waiting limousine.
“Home,” he grated at the driver. “Now.”
“The reception is actually here in the village, not wherever your home is,” Zara said, because she was incapable of keeping her mouth shut.
Chase had thrown himself into the cushy leather seat beside her and when he turned that furious, incredulous gaze of his on her again, it was like being burned alive. She felt charred.
He stared at her. Moments passed, or maybe years. The car drove off from the church. The world could have exploded outside the window, for all she knew. There was nothing but that wild dark blue and the leftover heat where his mouth and his palm had touched her skin, like he’d branded that contact into her flesh.
Then the car jolted to a stop at a light, Chase blinked and looked forward again, and Zara decided she’d imagined that awestruck, spellbound, on fire feeling. It was the oddness of the situation, that was all. It was Ariella’s ridiculous dress, cutting into her like a corset from hell, making it difficult to breathe. There was no reason at all to feel that despite everything, she’d never been more alive in her life than she was right now, in the back of a limousine headed God knew where with an angry, beautiful stranger.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, because they might as well make the best of it. It was what Grams would have done. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.” She smiled as politely as she could at this man, her brand-new husband, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Zara.”
* * *
He was trapped in a nightmare, Chase thought, staring at that outstretched hand in stunned, outraged amazement. There was no other explanation. For any of this.
“I know who you are,” he grated, and when he didn’t take her hand she merely dropped it back in her lap, looking wholly unperturbed. Exactly as she’d looked in the church, when he’d been glaring at her fiercely enough to burn holes through her.
Except for when you kissed her.
But Chase shoved that thought away, along with the image of her flushing that intriguing shade of scarlet in the wake of that kiss he still didn’t know why he’d given her, and scowled at his bride instead.
The truth was, while he’d recognized who she must have been because she’d been ushered up the aisle by his nemesis, he couldn’t remember if they’d ever met before. He wasn’t sure he’d have known her name even if they had, just as he wasn’t sure why that made him feel something like ashamed. He had a vague memory of her in a black dress that had fit her much better than the gown she wore today, and a flash of red hair from across a table. That was it.
Every other interaction he’d had with her family had involved her pain-in-the-ass father and blonde, brittle Ariella, who was apparently even more useless than he’d already imagined she was. And his imagination had been rather detailed in its low opinion of her.
“You tricked me,” he said then, trying to gather his wits, as he’d been noticeably unable to do for some time now. Since Big Bart Whitaker had died six months ago, leaving him neck deep in this mess that got bigger and deeper and swampier every bloody day. Since he’d had to give up his life in London and come back to the States to take his place as president and CEO of Whitaker Industries, where he’d done nothing but clash with Amos Elliott—the driving opposing force on his board of directors and the bane of his existence. And now his father-in-law, for his sins. “I could have you up on fraud charges, to start.”
Zara Elliott did not look alarmed by this possibility. She was awash in masses and masses of a frothy, unflattering white fabric, like a foaming and possibly furious marshmallow had exploded from every side of her while her quietly aristocratic face remained serene. But her eyes—her eyes were a bright, warm gold. The color of late afternoons, of the sun dripping low on the winter horizon.
Where the hell had that come from? He must have had more whiskey for his breakfast than he’d thought.
“I’m three inches shorter than Ariella and at least two sizes larger,” she said. “At a conservative estimate.”
Her voice was smooth and warm, like honey. She sounded, if not happy, something like content. Chase didn’t know how he recognized that note in her voice, given he’d never felt such a thing in his life.
So that was why it took him a moment to process what she’d said. “I don’t follow.”
“Was I tricking you or were you not paying very much attention, if you couldn’t tell the difference the moment I set foot in that church?” She only smiled when he scowled at her. “It’s a reasonable question. One we can ignore, if you like, but which a judge may dwell on in any hypothetical fraud trial.”
“This hypothetical judge might well find himself more interested in the marriage license,” Chase replied. “Which did not have your name on it when I grudgingly signed it.”
Her smile only deepened. “My father imagined that might cause you some concern. He suggested I remind you that the license was obtained right here in this very county, where he’s reigned supreme for decades now, like his father, uncles, grandfather and so on before him. He wanted me to put your mind at ease. That license will read the way it should before the end of the day, he’s quite certain.”
Chase muttered something filthy under his breath, which had no discernible effect on her composure. He leaned forward and rummaged around until he found the half-drunk bottle of whiskey in the bar cabinet and then he took a long swig of it, not bothering to use a glass. That sweet, obliterating fire rolled through him, but it was better than the numbness inside of him, so he ignored the scraping flames and took another hefty swig instead.
After a moment, he offered her the bottle. It only seemed polite, under the circumstances.
“No, thank you.” Also polite. Scrupulously so.
“Do you drink?” He didn’t know why he cared. He didn’t care.
“I like wine, sometimes,” she said, as if she was considering the matter in some depth as she spoke. “Red more than white. I’ll admit that beer is a mystery to me. I think it tastes like old socks.”
“This is whiskey. It doesn’t taste of socks. It tastes of peat and fire and the scalding anticipation of regret.”
“Tempting.” Her soft mouth twitched slightly in the corners, and he decided the whiskey was going to his head, because he found that far more fascinating than he should have. He couldn’t recall the last time a woman’s naked mouth had seemed so riveting. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d noticed a woman’s mouth at all, save what it could do in the dark. “How much whiskey did you have before the ceremony?”
He eyed her for a moment, then eyed the bottle. “Half.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “I thought you might be drunk.”
“Why aren’t you?” he asked, not caring that the dark rasp in his voice gave away far too many of the things he needed to keep hidden.
“Sadly, that wasn’t on the list of options I was given when I woke up this morning and was informed Ariella had flown the coop.” Her impossibly golden eyes gleamed with something almost painful Chase didn’t want to understand, but her voice was still perfectly cheerful. It didn’t make any sense. “I had to fight for a single cup of coffee in all the panic and blame. Asking for something alcoholic would have started a war.”
He felt something very much like ashamed again, and he didn’t like it. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might find this marriage as unlikely and unpleasant a prospect as he did, and he didn’t know why something in him wanted to argue the point. Like it made any difference who wanted what. They were both stuck now, weren’t they? Just as her father had intended.
And it didn’t matter to him which Elliott sister was stuck with him in Amos’s handiwork. It made no difference to his plans. No matter what Zara’s mouth did to his peace of mind.
Chase decided he didn’t particularly care for any of these thoughts and took another long pull from the whiskey bottle instead. Oblivion was the only place he truly enjoyed these days. He’d considered permanently relocating there, in fact. How hard would it be to lose himself entirely in this or that bottle?
But he never did it, no matter how many nights he’d tried. Because the fact remained: the only thing he had left of his father, of his parents and his family legacy, was Whitaker Industries. He couldn’t let it fall entirely into Amos Elliott’s greedy hands. He’d already compromised and merged companies with the man his father had considered a better son to him than Chase had ever been. He couldn’t sell it now. He couldn’t step aside.
He couldn’t do anything but this.
Chase took another drink from the bottle, long and hard.
“Where is your sister?” he asked, with what he thought was remarkable calm, under the circumstances.
Those golden eyes cooled considerably. “That’s an excellent question.”
“But you don’t know?” He let his gaze track over that face of hers, her pale skin blending into the white veil that billowed around her, reminding him of a bird’s plumage. He found he was fascinated by the fact her voice remained the same, so unassailably polite, no matter what her gaze told him. Her mouth bothered him, he decided. It was too full. Too soft and tempting. Especially when she smiled. “That’s your position?”
“Chase,” she said, then hesitated. “Can I call you that? Or do you require that your arranged brides address you in a different way?”
He let out a short laugh, which shocked the hell out him. “Chase is fine.”
“Chase,” she said again, more firmly, and he had the strangest sensation then. Like this was a different time and there truly was an intimacy to the use of proper names. Or maybe it was just the way she said it; the way it sounded in that mouth of hers. “If I knew where Ariella was, I wouldn’t have shoehorned myself into this dress and married you in front of three hundred of my father’s closest friends, neighbors and business associates.” She smiled at him, though those impossible eyes were shot through with temper then, and he understood that was where the truth of this woman was. Not in her practiced smiles or her remarkably cheery voice, but in her eyes. Gold like the sunset and as honest. “If I knew where she was I would have gone and found her and dragged her to the church myself. She is, after all, the Elliott sister who agreed to marry you. Not me.”
He watched her mildly enough over his whiskey bottle, and noted the precise moment she realized she’d devolved into something like a rant. That telltale color stole over her cheeks, and he watched it sweep over the rest of her, down her neck and to parts hidden in all that explosive white. He found he was fascinated anew.
“No offense taken,” he said, forestalling the apology he could see forming on her lips. “I didn’t want to marry either one of you. Your father demanded it.”
“As a condition of his agreement to back you and your new COO, yes,” she said. “Your new brother-in-law, if I’m not mistaken?”
“Nicodemus Stathis and I have merged our companies,” Chase said, as thinly and emotionlessly as he could. “And our families, as seems to be going around this season. My sister tells me she’s blissfully happy.” He wondered if Zara could see what a lie that was, if that was what the slight tilt to her head meant. If she knew, somehow, how little he and his younger sister Mattie had talked at all in the long years since they’d lost their mother, much less lately. He shoved on. “Your father is the only remaining thorn in my side. You—this—is nothing more than a thorn-removal procedure.”
That was perhaps a bit too harsh, the part of him that wasn’t deep in a fire of whiskey reflected.
“No offense taken,” she said, her voice as merry as his had been cool, though Chase wasn’t certain he’d have apologized, if she’d given him the chance. Or that she wasn’t offended, come to that. “I’m delighted to be of service.”
“I know why Ariella was doing this—or why she said she was all right with it,” Chase said then, bluntly. “She quite likes a hefty bank account and no commentary on how she empties it. Is that a family trait? Are you in this for the money?”
Did he only imagine that she stiffened? “I have my own money, thank you.”
“You mean you have your father’s.” He toasted her with his bottle. “Don’t we all.”
“The only family money I have came from my grandmother, as a matter of fact, though I try not to touch it,” she replied, still smiling, though that warm gold gaze of hers had iced over again, and Chase knew he should hate the fact he noticed. “My father felt that if I wouldn’t follow his wishes to the letter, which involved significantly less school and a lot more friendly games of things like tennis to attract his friends’ sons as potential boyfriends-slash-merger options, I shouldn’t have access to any of his money.”
“Your sister makes defying your father her chief form of entertainment,” Chase said, focusing on that part of what she’d said instead of the rest, because the rest reminded him of the many steps he’d taken to make sure that, while his father might have employed him, Big Bart had never supported him. Not since the day he’d turned eighteen. And he didn’t want that kind of common ground with this woman. “She told me so herself.”
“Yes,” Zara said calmly, her gaze steady on his. “But Ariella is beautiful. Her defiance lands her on the covers of magazines and the arms of wealthy men. My father may find her antics embarrassing, but he views those things as a certain kind of currency. In that respect, I’m broke.”
Chase blinked. “I’m very wealthy,” he pointed out. “In all forms of currency.”
“I didn’t marry you for your money,” she said gently. “I married you because this way, I can always remind my father that I sacrificed myself for him on command. To a wealthy man he wanted to control. Talk about the kind of currency Amos Elliott appreciates.” Her mouth shifted into that smile of hers that did things to him he didn’t like or understand. “He isn’t a very nice man. It’s better to have leverage.”
Chase felt caught in the endless gold of her eyes then, or perhaps it was the near-winter afternoon outside the window that seemed to be some kind of extension of them, the sun brilliant through the stark trees and already too close to the edge of night.
“Are you looking for a nice man, then?” he asked quietly. From somewhere inside himself he hardly recognized.
“It would be difficult for you to be a worse one than my father,” Zara replied in the same tone. “Unless it was your singular purpose in life and even the briefest Google search online makes it clear that you’ve had other things to do.”
Was she being kind to him? Chase couldn’t fathom it. It made something great and gaping hinge open inside of him, too near to all that darkness he knew better than to let out into the light. He knew better than to let anyone see it. He knew what they’d call him if they did. He called himself that and worse every day.
Monster. Murderer.
He had blood on his hands that he could never wash clean, and this woman with eyes like liquid gold and the softest mouth he’d ever touched was being kind to him. On the very day her vicious father had lashed them together in unholy matrimony.
“I sold my own sister into her marriage because it benefited the company. I sold myself today.” His voice was colder than the December weather outside. Colder than what he kept locked inside. And all those things he hid away swelled up in him then. Those memories. Those terrible choices. The day he’d lost his mother on that South African road where he’d made the choice that defined him, the choice that he still couldn’t live with all these years later. To say nothing of the truth about his relationship with the father he felt he still had to prove himself to, even now, when Big Bart Whitaker would never know the difference. “You’ll want to be careful, Zara. I’ll ruin you, too, if you let me.”
She studied him for a moment, and then she smiled, and he didn’t know how he knew that this one was real. Even if it felt like it drew blood.
“No need to worry about that,” she said quietly. “I won’t.”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_c39e2f7b-f38f-5ab3-902f-c784e13aa960)
THE HOUSE WAS like something out of a Gothic novel.
Zara had to fight to conceal her shiver of recognition from the man who lounged beside her in the black mood he’d worn throughout the drive.
“Cold?” he asked. Chase’s voice was polite on the surface, but his gaze was a wilderness of blue and almost liquid, somehow, with a kind of sharp heat that speared straight through her. And none of it friendly.
“Not at all,” Zara said, though she was. “Your house isn’t the most welcoming place, is it?”
Gothic, she thought again. She’d read significantly more Gothic novels than the average person and not only because she was writing a master’s thesis on the topic. On some level she should have expected she’d find herself in the middle of one. It was the only thing her absurd wedding day had been missing.
“It’s December.” Chase’s voice was as cold as his estate looked in the beam of the limousine’s headlights. Barren and frozen as far as the eye could see. “Nothing in this part of the country is welcoming at this time of year.”
But it was more than that. Or it was her imagination, Zara amended, which had always been as feverish as the rest of her was practical. The old stone manor rose like an apparition at the top of a long, winding drive through a thick and lonely winter forest of ghostly, stripped-bare trees and unfriendly pines coated with ice and the snowy remains of the last storm. Several inches of snow clung to the roof above the main part of the house, and each of its wings glittered with icicles at the gutters, though the sky above tonight was clear. Thick and almost too dark, but clear.
She tried to imagine the house festooned in spring blossoms or warmed by the summer sun, and failed. Miserably.
For the first time in her life, Zara questioned her addiction to Daphne du Maurier and Phyllis A. Whitney novels. They might have helped her through an awkward adolescence and paved the way toward what she hoped would become her life’s work, but they had also made her entirely too susceptible to the dark possibilities lurking in a scary old mansion, a bridegroom she scarcely knew and whatever rattled around in the gloomy shadows of places like this.
“Are you sure you don’t have any madwomen locked away in the attic?” she asked, appalled when her voice sounded more shaken than wry.
“Making me a convenient bigamist and you therefore free of this mess we’re both stuck in?” he replied, smooth and deadly, and shocking Zara. She wouldn’t have pegged him as a reader of Jane Eyre. Or a reader at all, come to that, when he could be off brooding beautifully somewhere instead. “I’m afraid not. My apologies.”
Chase did not sound remotely sorry. Nor did he sound drunk, which Zara couldn’t quite understand. She’d expected sloppiness when he’d continued to drink from that whiskey bottle throughout the drive, had braced herself for his unconsciousness and his snores. Instead, he simply seemed on edge.
More on edge, that was.
Maybe the place—and the man—was more welcoming in the daylight, Zara thought as diplomatically as possible as the car pulled up to the looming front entrance. Then again, it hardly mattered. She wasn’t here to settle in and make a happy home for herself. She was here because Grams had wanted her to try. She was here because this proved, once and for all, that she was the good daughter. Surely this finally settled the matter. Surely her father would finally have to recognize—
“Come,” her brand-new husband said from much too close beside her, his hand at her side and that disconcerting gaze burning into her as surely as that small contact did, and when she jerked her head around to stare back at him it was even worse. All that irrational, unmanageable fire. “I’d like to get out of these clothes, if you don’t mind. And put this lamentable farce behind me as quickly as possible.”
Zara couldn’t keep herself from imagining beautiful Chase Whitaker without his clothes any more than she could stop herself from breathing her next breath. All that long, lean, smooth muscle. All that ruthlessly contained power—
Get a hold of yourself! she yelped inwardly.
And then she pretended she didn’t see the way his eyes gleamed, like he could read her dirty mind.
Chase ushered her into the grand front hall of the sprawling stone mansion, adorned with art and tapestries and moldings so intricate they almost looked like some kind of architectural frosting, with what felt like more irritation than courtesy. He introduced her to his waiting housekeeper, Mrs. Calloway, without adjusting his stride and then marched Zara up the great stair to the second floor. Zara had the jumbled impression of graceful statues and priceless art, beautifully appointed rooms and long, gleaming hallways, all in a hectic blur as they moved swiftly past.
He didn’t speak. And Zara found she couldn’t. Not only was the house lifted from the pages of the books she studied, but now that she was this close to getting out of her horribly uncomfortable dress at last and, God willing, sinking into a very deep, very hot, restorative bath for about an hour or five, every single step that kept her from it was like sheer torture.
That and the fact that Chase was more than a little forbidding himself. It was that set way he held himself. Contained and furious, even as he prowled along beside her. It seemed particularly obvious in a place like this, all shadows and absence, empty rooms and echoing footsteps.
You’re becoming hysterical.
When she felt like herself again, she was sure she’d stop thinking like this. She was sure. And then she’d fish her cell phone out of the bag she fervently hoped was in that limo and she would either listen to the host of apologetic messages Ariella should have left for her today, or, in their far more likely absence, call Ariella until her sister answered and explained this great big mess she’d made.
And then maybe all of this would feel a little bit less Gothic.
Particularly if she got out of this damned dress before it crippled her forever.
“Here,” Chase grunted, pushing open a door.
Zara blinked. Her head spun and her heart began to race and her feet suddenly felt rooted to the floor. “Is this…?”
“Your rooms.” He smirked. “Unless you planned to make this a more traditional marriage? I could no doubt be persuaded. I’ve certainly had enough whiskey to imagine anything is a good idea. My rooms are at the other end of this hall.”
Zara thought she’d rather die than persuade him to do anything of the kind. Or anyone like him who would, she had no doubt, need nothing in the way of persuasion if she was lanky, lovely, effortlessly appealing Ariella.
Not that you want this man either way, she reminded herself. Pointedly. She’d always been allergic to his type: basically, male versions of her sister. Younger versions of her father. Entitled and arrogant and no, thank you.
Despite that thing in her that felt like heat, only far more dangerous.
“Whiskey wears off,” she said crisply. “And more to the point, I haven’t had any.” She brushed past him, determined to sleep in whatever the hell room this was, even if it was a cell and her only option was the floor. “This is perfect, thank you.”
“Zara.” She didn’t want to stop walking, but she did, as if he could command her that easily. You’re tired, she assured herself. That’s all. “I’ll be back later,” he said, his voice dark and, yes, foreboding.
“For what? Persuasion? There won’t be any. No matter when you come back.”
He let out a noise that might have been a laugh, and the madness was that she felt it skim down the length of her spine like a long, lush sweep of his fingers.
There was no reason that she should have felt him the way she did then, like an imprint of fire, large and looming over her from behind, like he could cast a shadow and drown her in it all at once. And there was no reason that her body should react to him the way it did, jolting wide-awake and hungry, just like that.
“I’ll be back,” he said again, a low thread of sound, dark and rough, and she felt that, too. Felt it, like his hands against her skin.
She nodded. Acquiesced. It was that or succumb to panic entirely.
Zara waited until he closed the door behind her, then let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. It came out in a kind of shudder, and she had to blink back all that overwhelming heat from her eyes.
Then she actually looked around her.
The bedroom suite was done in restrained blues accented by geometrical shapes etched in an elegant black, with a lit fireplace against one wall that was already crackling away and an inviting sofa and two chairs in front of it that begged for a book, a cozy throw blanket and a long, rainy afternoon’s read. The bed was a cheerful four-poster affair, with quilts and blankets piled high and a multitude of deep, soft-looking pillows. It was a contented, happy sort of room, and it made all that Gothic fervor ease away, leaving Zara feeling overtired and foolish in its wake.
Her gaze snagged on the set of photographs on the mantel above the fireplace as she walked deeper into the room, all featuring pictures of a very tall, very recognizable black-haired girl, solemn dark eyes and an enigmatic almost-smile on her pretty face. Mattie Whitaker. Chase’s infamous sister.
Zara read the tabloids, and not only when she was stuck in line at the supermarket. Mattie had been all over them recently for her “secret marriage” to “playboy Chase’s greatest rival,” which Zara didn’t think could have been too terribly secret if there were all those pictures of Mattie and her harshly attractive husband gazing at each other in front of a glorious Greek backdrop. Just as Nicodemus Stathis couldn’t possibly be the terrible rival the papers wanted him to be if Chase and he were working on a merger.
Shockingly, she told herself derisively, the papers lie, as your entire life watching Ariella manipulate them to her benefit should have made you well aware.
But it was Mattie Whitaker’s bathroom she cared about then, not the marriage Chase had claimed he’d sold his sister into. Or what the tabloids might have made up about it.
“That,” she said out loud as she headed for the far door across the bedroom, “will be something Mattie and I can bond over across the table at Christmas. Our delightful forced marriages, whether secret or not.”
She lost her train of thought and let out a sigh of delight instead when she walked inside and found the bathtub of her dreams waiting for her, vast and deep enough for a group of people, placed before high windows that looked out into the silken night.
Bliss.
Zara turned on the tap greedily and dumped a capful of the foaming bath salts that sat on the tub’s lip into the warm stream. Then she ripped that veil straight off her head, not caring that it tugged at her hair. That it hurt. It came off with a clatter of hairpins against the floor, and Zara moaned out loud in stark relief as she massaged her way over her abused scalp, pulling out the remaining pins and letting her hair fall free at last.
Now it was time to deal with that torturous dress. The water poured into the bath behind her as she tugged and pulled, twisting herself this way and that as she tried to free herself. It was far more difficult than it should have been—but Zara was desperate. She yanked even harder—
And then at last she heard a glorious tearing sound, the fabric finally gave—and she yanked it all off, kicking the tattered remains away as the dress fell to her feet in a voluminous cloud. At first, she hurt more than she had before. Her breasts ached, and she could see the angry lines the built-in corset had left all over them and her belly, red and pronounced because she had the kind of skin that showed every last mark like a neon billboard.
And because the dress had been made for her sister, who better resembled a starving gazelle and had needed that corset to create the illusion of the cleavage she didn’t have rather than tamp down any existing breasts.
It was such a relief to be free of that hideous torture device that Zara’s eyes filled with tears. But she refused to indulge them, not here in this too-Gothic mansion with the whiskey-pounding, possibly dangerous husband she’d never met before the ceremony. Not when she didn’t know that she’d stop. Not when the wedding was only the latest in a long stream of things she could probably cry about, if she let herself.
Not here. Not tonight. Grams had maintained her stiff upper lip to the very last of her days. Zara could do the same with far less provocation.
She toed off the white ballet flats she’d worn all day—thank goodness she and Ariella wore the same size shoes and she hadn’t had to make like one of Cinderella’s unfortunate stepsisters and hack off a toe to fit into them—and shimmied out of the very bright, screaming red thong panties she’d worn beneath it all. The only thing in the whole, long, strange day that was hers.
Zara couldn’t control the deep, atavistic sigh she let out when she slipped into the bath at last. The water was hot and the bubbles were high enough to feel decadent without being so high they became a problem. She piled her hair—wild and thick and incredibly unruly from a day in pins and scraped into submission beneath that veil—up on top of her head in a messy knot as she tried to picture glamorous, couture-draped Mattie Whitaker lounging in this bathtub the way she was now. Mattie Whitaker, who was a good deal like Ariella in Zara’s mind—one of those effortless girls, all long, slender limbs; hot-and-cold-running boyfriends; and the ability to float through life without a single care.
Zara’s life had been charmed in its own way yet was significantly less gleaming, despite the fact she, too, was an Elliott. She’d failed to look the part from birth and hadn’t ever managed to act the part, either, despite the thousands of lectures Amos had delivered on the topic. Even when doing so would have been in her best interests.
Well. She’d acted the part today, hadn’t she? She’d done it. I did what you asked, Grams, she thought then. I gave him one last chance to treat me differently.
She shut her eyes and leaned back against the smooth porcelain, breathing in the jasmine-scented steam as she tried to expel all the tension of the day from her body. As she tried not to think about what had happened earlier in that church. Or what might happen later, because who knew what the expectations were in a situation this twisted? Or what she’d got herself into, marrying a man who was not only a total stranger, but who’d turned up to his own wedding half-drunk and entirely furious, and that had been before he’d seen the switch.
Zara didn’t know how long she sat like that, the water cascading all around her, the jasmine heat like an embrace, soaking all the red marks from the vicious gown away into the ether and her headache along with it. She was lazily contemplating climbing out of the bath and investigating the possibility of dinner when she felt a shift in the air. Everything simply went taut, her skin felt too tight, and she reluctantly opened up her eyes.
To find Chase leaning there in the doorway, looking dark and disreputable, lethally dangerous in a way that made the back of her neck tingle, and nothing at all like drunk.
For a moment Zara stopped breathing. Her heart gave a mighty kick against her ribs and then jackrabbited into high gear. Her ears rang as if someone had screamed, and her throat ached as if she was that someone, but she knew she’d done nothing at all but stare back at the man who shouldn’t have been there.
She needed to say something. She needed to do something. But he was so beautiful it hurt, even more so now that he’d changed out of his wedding suit and was something far more elemental in bare feet that defied the weather beneath a soft-looking button-down shirt he hadn’t bothered to do up properly over a pair of jeans. And his dark blue eyes seemed wilder than before, remote and with that aching thing at once, like some kind of ruthless poetry. She didn’t know what lodged in her chest then, only that it was much too sharp and alarmingly deep.
“Shouldn’t you be passed out on a floor somewhere?” she asked, harsher than she’d meant to sound.
Maybe this was his version of drunken, idiotic behavior. She’d witnessed the bitter end of her parents’ marriage over the course of too many drink-blurred nights, as they’d each got drunker and meaner. Ariella had sneaked out to escape it, while Zara had tried to hide from it in books where all the terrifying goings-on weren’t usually real, in the end. She’d never seen the appeal of getting drunk since.
Though even that looked better than it should on Chase Whitaker.
“I’m not drunk,” he growled at her. “Not nearly enough.”
He shifted so he could prop one of those finely cut shoulders against the doorjamb, and she felt the way he looked at her like a touch. Hot and demanding. And she understood then, that what happened here would set the stage for the whole of their unconventional relationship, however long it lasted, and in whatever form. If he thought he could walk in on her like this, what else would he think he could do?
Zara had been raised on a steady diet of no boundaries. Her father was a tyrant. Her mother cared more about scoring her pound of flesh from him than her own daughters. The older sister she’d hero-worshipped when she was a kid turned nastier by the year. Ariella was on a crash course to becoming their father, a man who truly believed that he got to make whatever rules he felt like following that day by virtue of who he was and how much money and power he had.
Zara was fed up with no boundaries.
“You have to leave,” she said, firm and direct. Unmistakable. “Now. I take my privacy very seriously.”
“Are we not cleaved unto one?” Chase’s tone was dark and there was something terrible in his gaze, mocking and harsh. “I’m sure I heard something about that earlier today.”
“We are engaging in mutual thorn-removal, nothing more,” she corrected him, using his phrase and not sure why it made that gaze of his get harsher. Wilder. Untamed in a way that made something deep in her belly coil tight. “And I may have married you, but I didn’t agree to any kind of intimacy. I don’t want any. That’s not negotiable.”
“Has anything about this been negotiable?” he asked, his voice almost idle, though Zara didn’t believe it at all. Not when those eyes of his were on her, intent and arresting. “Because what I recall is your father parading your sister under my nose in a variety of questionable attire and telling me that he’d crush me if I didn’t marry her.”
Zara felt almost outside herself then, as if she was watching this interaction from a great distance. It was the way he’d said questionable attire, maybe, because it summoned Ariella as surely as if she was a genie in a bottle, and Zara wanted nothing more than to smash that bottle against the tile floor. If it had made any kind of sense, she would have thought what she felt was hurt. And something so close to offended it might as well have been the same thing.
“Is that what this is?” she asked with a coolness she didn’t feel at all, not in any part of her, like that wilderness that he carried in him was catching. “You’ve been downgraded from the coveted main attraction to its much less interesting runner-up and you want to see the full extent of that downward spiral? Why didn’t you say so?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Zara didn’t let herself think it through. She slid both her hands out to the high sides of the bath and then she stood up. Water coursed down her body and there was a howling sound inside her head, but she didn’t take her gaze from Chase’s.
Not for a second.
“This is it,” she said, aware that her voice was shaking, and it wasn’t with upset. It was more complicated than that. Challenge and disappointment and fury, and the fact that none of it made sense didn’t make it any better. “Take a good look, because I’m not doing this again, and yes, it really is as bad as you fear. You married me, not Ariella. I’ll never be any fashion designer’s muse. I’ll never be photographed in a bikini unless the goal is to shame me. No one would ever call me skinny and no one has ever claimed I was anything like beautiful. I’ll never fast my way down to Ariella’s weight and even if I did, even if I wanted to, it wouldn’t matter. We’re built completely differently.”
For a moment—or a long, hard year or two—there was nothing but the sound of the water she stood in, still sloshing from how quickly she’d stood. And that pounding thing in her head that made her ears feel thick and her stomach churn.
Chase simply stared.
He was frozen in place, something she couldn’t read at all stamped on his gorgeous face, making him look something other than simply beautiful. Something more. Something so dangerous and so intent, she felt it thud through her, hard. Then he blinked, slowly, and Zara understood that she cared a good deal more about what he might say next than she should.
Which meant she’d made a terrible mistake. As she so often did when she decided to act before she thought. Why could she never seem to learn that lesson?
“Yes,” Chase scraped out into the close heat of the bathroom, in a hoarse voice that shivered over her like warm water but was much, much hotter, a match for that deep, dark blue of his gaze and as irrevocably scalding. “You bloody well are.”
* * *
If she’d taken a sledgehammer to the side of his head, she couldn’t have stunned him more.
She was so…pink. So perfect.
That was all Chase could think for long moments. She’d looked round and solid all draped in white as she’d been; stout and tented, like a gazebo. That’s what he’d thought in the limousine, uncharitably. Perhaps this was his punishment.
Or, a sly voice inside of him, located rather further south than his brain, she is your reward for all of this.
It was hard to argue with that. She was a symphony of curves. Gorgeous, mouthwatering, stunning lushness, from the fine neck he could remember beneath his palm in the church in an almost alarmingly tactile manner to a pair of heavy, perfect breasts, plump and flushed from the damp heat yet marked by fine blue lines that reminded him how fair she was.
And nipples so pert they made his mouth actually ache to taste them. Chase was glad he’d happened to lean against the door, because he wasn’t certain he could stand on his own.
Her waist was the kind of indentation that made him understand, profoundly, whole schools of art he’d never paid much attention to before, particularly with the breathtaking flare of her hips beneath, wide and welcoming and making that trim V between her legs all the more delectable.
He wanted to be there—right there—more than he could remember wanting anything. Ever.
All that and the riot of reds and coppers and strawberry blonds that she’d fastened atop her head somehow, the wet heat making tendrils into curls and spirals that framed her elegant face, making him as hard as a spike and incapable of thinking of anything for long moments but getting his hands in the mess of it, deep. Holding her still while he thrust himself between those perfectly formed thighs, plundered that astonishingly carnal mouth of hers, and happily lost what was left of his mind.
Chase was a product of his time, he understood then, and felt sorry for all the men his age. Like them, he’d always preferred longer, slimmer women by rote, preferably with the smooth leanness that spoke of countless years of deprivation. Women who wore clothes in ways that emphasized their narrow hips and the angular thrust of their collar and hip bones. Women who looked good in photographs, especially the kind that he was always finding himself in, splashed here and there in the harsh glare of the British press.
Women like Zara, he thought in a kind of daze as an ancient, primitive need he’d never felt before pounded through him, should never, ever be confined to anything as foolish as modern clothing. They should never be subjected to a dress like that monstrosity she’d worn today. They should never be contained in photographs that adored angles and punished soft curves. Not with bodies like this, like hers, that were made to be seen whole in all their primal glory. That were created purely to be worshipped.
She was branded into him now, he thought wildly, so red-hot and deep he might never see anything or anyone else again.
And he was so hard it hurt.
“Then we need never repeat this experience,” she was saying, her voice a brittle slap against all that warm heat, and Chase was still knocked senseless. He couldn’t follow what she was saying, not with his heart trying to kick its way out of his chest, so he stayed where he was and watched as she stepped out of the tub and yanked one of the towels from the nearby rack, wrapping that gorgeous body of hers away from view.
He wanted to protest. Loudly.
“You can go now,” she said, her voice even more rigid than before, and when her gaze met his again, those miraculous eyes of hers were smoky with something bleak. “I trust it won’t be necessary for any further object lessons tonight, will it?”
And Chase could think again then. With both his brains. More than that, he remembered himself and what he was doing, something he couldn’t believe he’d lost track of for even a moment. He opted not to analyze that too closely. Not while the wife he didn’t want was still within an easy arm’s reach, her skin still pinkened and softened from her long soak, her warm golden eyes still shooting sparks—
He had to stop. He had to remember that whatever else she was, she was an Elliott. She might have proved herself far more interesting than her shallow, grasping, run-of-the-mill sister, to say nothing of that body, but she was still an Elliott.
Which meant there was only one way this could go.
“I appreciate the show,” he said in a voice that made her jerk where she stood, as surely as if he’d hauled off and slapped her. Exactly as he’d planned, and yet Chase loathed himself at once—and he’d have thought he’d hit his maximum where that was concerned years before. You always have somewhere lower to go, don’t you? He waited until the red blazed across her face, until her gaze turned stormy. “There’s a private dining room on this floor, above the library. Follow the hall to the end and it will be the arched doorway in front of you. You’ve got ten minutes.”
“And you will have to drag my dead body in there,” she said, her voice stiff with a fury he could see all too plainly in her gaze. Fury and whatever that darker, harsher thing was. He told himself it wasn’t his to know. That he didn’t want to know. “As that is the only way I’ll ever spend another moment in your company.”
“Trust me, Zara,” he said, his voice much too low and not nearly polite enough, things he didn’t want to think about all over his face—or so he assumed from the way she stiffened in reaction, and not, he could see too plainly, because she was offended. “You don’t want me to come back here and force the issue. You really don’t.”
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_0cc8e906-38f2-5f23-b285-03cfb69aade6)
CHASE WAITED FOR HER in the small dining room, the place Big Bart had reserved for immediate family alone. There was a huge, formal dining room downstairs near the old-fashioned ballroom that now housed a grand piano Chase’s mother had once played, and another medium-sized dining room that his father had used for smaller gatherings, but this one had always been off-limits. It was close. Intimate.
Exactly what Zara had indicated she didn’t want.
His mouth twisted in derision, and Chase moved away from the window before he could look too closely at his own reflection there against the dark night beyond. He already knew what he’d see, and there was no point in it. There was nothing he could change now. It was done.
Going into that suite hadn’t helped. It had only underscored the scope of his own failures. He’d never spent much time in his sister’s rooms, not even when he and Mattie had been small and far happier. Not even before.
Even now, all these years after she’d moved out and despite what she’d sacrificed two months ago for the family and the company by marrying Nicodemus Stathis, he couldn’t think about his sister without losing another great chunk of himself in all that guilt. It cut too deep, left him nothing but gutted and useless. It had always seemed a kindness to simply keep his distance instead. To let her grow up without the dark weight of the secrets he carried. To let Mattie, at least, be free.
Not that it had worked.
I’m guessing you don’t wake up every night of your life screaming then, Mattie had said the last time they’d spoken. She’d sounded raw. Unlike herself. He’d been as unable to face that as anything else. A coward down to his bones, but that hadn’t been news. Calling out for Mum again and again.
Chase didn’t wake up in the night, he thought now as he found himself by the window again, looking out toward the Hudson River at the low end of the property even though he couldn’t see it with the dark December night pressing in on all sides. Nightmares would have been beside the point. He carried his ghosts around with him in the light.
He never forgot what he’d done.
And neither had his father.
Maybe that was why Big Bart Whitaker had left his empire in such disarray. It was so unlike him, after all. Chase had always been Bart’s heir, and because of that he’d spent the past decade working his way up the ranks until he’d achieved the VP slot in the London office. He’d never minded that his future had been so mapped out for him. He’d enjoyed the challenge of proving he wasn’t just his surname, but a capable businessman in his own right, no matter what the papers intimated. Everyone had always assumed that he’d move from London to the Whitaker Industries corporate headquarters in New York and transition into his eventual leadership of the company. That had always been the plan, except it had never been the right time, had it? Bart had always had other things to do first. Chase had always found a different reason to stay in London.
The truth, he acknowledged now, was that they’d been a good deal more comfortable with each other when there was a nice, wide ocean between them.
Maybe the fact that Bart had left Chase to fend for himself wasn’t a mistake. Maybe Bart had thought that if Chase couldn’t hold on to Whitaker Industries against the tiresome machinations of Amos Elliott or the cash flow issues that the merger with his brand-new brother-in-law would solve, he didn’t deserve it.
And Chase couldn’t find it in him to disagree.
He’d forgotten where he was, he realized when he heard a light step on the old floors behind him and scented the faintest hint of jasmine in the air.
“I don’t understand what this is,” Zara said from the doorway, her voice tight. But she’d still come on time, he noted. “I don’t understand what you want.”
Neither did he, and that should have alarmed him. It did. But it also occurred to him that the only time in the past six months—hell, in the past twenty years—that he’d actually forgotten about that lonely stretch of South African road and what he’d done there, what he’d become and what that had done to his family, was when Zara Elliott held his gaze and did her best to confound him, one way or another. In the bath, yes. God help him, the bath. But in the limo, as well.
He didn’t want that to mean anything. But he couldn’t seem to ignore it, either. And that spelled nothing but doom for them both.
Chase turned, slowly, and felt a deep, purely masculine regret lodge beneath his ribs when he saw she’d dressed. Of course she had. Black, stretchy pants that clung to those marvelous hips and her well-formed legs and what looked like a particularly soft sweater on top, a bit slouchy and roomy, so that her softly rounded shoulder peeked out when she moved. Her wild, glorious hair was combed through and fixed neatly at the nape of her neck, and he wanted the other Zara back. That powerful, compelling goddess creature he wanted to taste. Everywhere. With his teeth. That stunning woman he had the agony of knowing was just there, now hidden beneath clothes that couldn’t possibly flatter her as much as no clothes at all did. Nothing could.
This was his bride. His wife. His wedding night, some darkness inside him reminded him.
Good lord, but he was still hard.
“This is our marriage,” he told her, his voice a grating thing, harsh and a little too mean. He thought she’d flinch again, but her gleaming eyes only narrowed.
“This had better also be dinner,” she said as crisply as if she was discussing the weather of a distant city. And as if she’d put on a sheet of armor beneath her clothes. “Or I may collapse from starvation. And while I might view that as a handy escape from all this excitement, I doubt that’s what you have in mind.”
“I’ve never had an arranged marriage before,” he said grimly as she moved farther into the room with a wariness she made no effort to hide, then perched on the edge of the chair nearest the door. “Perhaps nightly collapses are but par for the course.”
She eyed him. “Arranged marriages are really quite stable,” she said after a moment. “Historically speaking. More so than romantic marriages.”
“Because the arrangements are so well orchestrated by fathers like yours? Lovingly and with great concern for the participants? Or because neither party cares very much?”
“The latter, I’d think,” she said, ignoring the sardonic way he’d asked that, though he could see by that gleam in her gaze that she’d heard it. “In our case, anyway. Once you’ve overcome your shock at finding the wrong sister at the altar, of course.”
Her gaze then was as arid as her voice, and Chase couldn’t understand why he cared. When he knew he shouldn’t.
“I was surprised to learn the notorious Ariella Elliott had a sister in the first place,” he said, with some attempt to make his voice less rough. “Somehow, that never came up in all those discussions with your father. Or in any of the articles I’ve seen about your sister over the years. Though there was no attempt to hide you at any of the dinners we both attended.”
He still stood by the window, watching her as if doing so would lead to some grand revelation, and countered that restless thing in him that wanted things he refused to acknowledge by shoving his hands in the pockets of his trousers. Quite as if he worried he’d otherwise have to fight to keep them from her.
Zara smiled. It was a slap of perfectly courteous ice and told him a number of things he didn’t wish to know about her.
“I don’t date musicians or actors. I don’t attend the sorts of parties that the paparazzi cover, much less stagger out of them under the influence of unsavory substances at ungodly hours of the morning. I like books better than people. None of that makes for interesting gossip, I’m afraid.”
He regarded her with what he wished was a dispassionate cool. “What would the gossips say about you, then? Interesting or otherwise?”
There was something vulnerable about her soft mouth then, a darker sheen to her golden eyes, but her chin edged high and she didn’t drop her gaze from his.
“Is this a little bit of friendly, husbandly interest?” she asked. “Or are you merely gathering ammunition?”
She wasn’t at all what he’d expected. That turned in him like heat. Like need.
“Everything is ammunition, Zara. But only if you’re at war.”
A ghost of a smile flirted with her mouth then, and was gone in the next instant. “And we, of course, are not at war.”
“This is our wedding night, is it not?”
She studied him for a moment, and he wished that things were different. That he was, to start. That she was anyone other than who she was. An Elliott and his wife.
“I’m writing a master’s thesis in English Literature,” she said after a moment. “My field of study is Gothic novels in popular culture. It’s my father’s opinion that I’d be better served getting a degree in something that made for better cocktail party conversation. Everybody has an opinion about Romeo and Juliet, for example. Why not study that instead of stupid books only hysterical women read?”
Chase was sidetracked from his own dark thoughts. “Your father has an objection to advanced degrees? Surely most parents would be proud.” His own, for example.
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