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
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?”
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