Hard.
Zara pulled her gloves off, one by one, then the wool hat from her head. She unwrapped her scarf from her neck, and then she shoved it all into her coat pockets. She unzipped her coat and shrugged it off, then tossed it all into a nearby chair, and while she had the kind of buzzing sensation in her ears and at the back of her neck that told her Chase was perfectly aware of her throughout this whole process, he didn’t stop beating the crap out of that bag.
And for some reason she felt every blow. Like he was landing them against her heart.
This is utter stupidity, she told herself. And yes, delusional.
But she didn’t do any of the things she should have. She didn’t leave. Not the room, not the house. She didn’t hightail it back to her own life and to hell with what Chase thought, or her father thought. She didn’t check herself into a nearby psychiatric institution to determine what madness this was that made her care what happened to this man.
That was the trouble, of course. She did care. Because this was her version of “casual,” however pathetic. Married and yearning and caring, despite everything.
Because he looked tortured. That was what that particular wildness was this evening, pouring from him, filling the room like a scent. Like he was tearing himself apart the harder he hit that bag.
Like he was fighting his own demons with every punch he threw and every kick he landed. Fighting for his life.
Your sister offered me a blow job, he’d said. No doubt in precisely the way Zara had imagined Ariella would do such a thing. Zara wasn’t about to compete with that. But she could offer something else. Something that had more to do with that stricken, compelling loneliness that shone so brightly in those eyes of his than with sex.
She wandered a little bit closer and then sat down on the little sofa that had been pushed back almost into the wall of plants, perhaps to make room for what she’d seen before and thought was dancing. She kicked off her boots and pulled her feet up under her.
And then she began to talk.
CHAPTER SIX
CHASE DIDN’T HAVE the slightest idea what she was on about.
The monster in him didn’t care. It wanted her under him, not across the room, and who cared what happened to her when his New Year’s Eve plan went off as intended? When he finally took his revenge? He wanted her, full stop. Now that she was breathing the same air as he was again, making him tight and hard and feral that easily, he couldn’t understand the way he’d shoved her away that night at dinner. Much less the distance he’d kept from her since, no matter how many times Ben Calloway sang those vaguely romantic Christmas carols in his direction.
This is why, he told himself coldly. Because you have no control where this woman is concerned.
But that dark thing in him—sex and grief and hunger and need, heavy and fierce deep down into his bones until he couldn’t tell who he was without it—didn’t care.
He was so much more monster than he was man, and it appalled him. It made him hit the damned bag that much harder. And the more she talked, settling in on that couch as if they were great old friends and this was comfortable, the more he hit. The whole world narrowed down into those two things, like it was all part of the same great rhythm—her lovely voice, rich and warm, and the starkness of the violence he could dish out against inanimate objects he knew were merely stand-ins for him.
He was simply the instrument that linked the two, he told himself. And somehow, that made him feel less monstrous. Lighter. Warmer, the way she was so effortlessly.
“I look like my grandmother,” Zara was saying, as conversationally as if he’d asked her. “She was Irish and always described herself as ‘feisty,’ though I never saw her do anything that wasn’t strictly proper in that very old-money, patrician way. My father loathed her. She’d always liked his older brother much better than him, but Uncle Teddy died young. So when I ended up looking exactly like her, Dad transferred all of those feelings to me.” Then she laughed, and it cascaded over him, sunbeams and heat. Damn her. “Or maybe that’s what I decided to tell myself.”
Chase had thought he’d finally lost it when she’d simply appeared at that door, in a rush of cold air and the darkening winter sky behind her. He thought he’d finally started seeing things, not merely the collection of familiar ghosts who usually cluttered his head.
He didn’t know what to do with that scalding-hot, very nearly bright thing that had wound tight in him when he’d realized she was real. She was here. And despite what had happened between them the last time—what he’d done to her, he was well aware, because he couldn’t seem to handle her the way he would any other woman—she appeared to be staying.
It couldn’t be hope. Not that. He’d lost the last of his hope when he’d been thirteen. This was something different, he told himself grimly.
Because it had to be.
Chase hit the bag with his hands, his elbows, his knees, his feet. He hit and hit and hit, so hard he could feel the shock of it blasting through him, promising he’d regret it later when this raging thing in him wore off—but that only made him go harder. Faster. What didn’t he regret? Why should this, or anything that happened here, be any different?
He could still taste her. It was making him crazy.
Crazier, that was.
“My mother always claimed she was meant to be a great painter, but I think that was something she said to differentiate herself from the rest of the socialites she ran around with who had no aspirations beyond their weekly manicures.”
Zara’s voice had gone wry. Rueful, like she was crinkling up that fine nose of hers as she spoke, no doubt rendering herself dangerously adorable—but he would be damned if he’d look. Chase shuddered, imagining it anyway, and the heat that always graced those lovely cheeks of hers.
She was killing him.
“I never saw her paint a thing, but she picked fights with anyone who suggested that and hid from all the things she didn’t feel like doing in the little guesthouse out back she called her studio. She used to lecture us about independence and personal freedom, but when she and my father finally divorced she demanded a laughably huge settlement. She lives on it to this day in her so-called ‘artist’s retreat’ outside of Santa Fe with her collection of predatory boyfriends.” A low, husky laugh that ripped at his self-control. “She doesn’t encourage her grown daughters to visit her there, mind you. Or anywhere else. Predatory boyfriends require certain levels of care, maintenance and careful lies, and grown daughters make that a challenge, apparently. She claims she’s still grieving the end of her marriage and seeing us only makes it worse. It’s been five years.”
Chase shifted, jumped up and down on the balls of his feet for a moment to recalibrate, then struck out with his knee. Thunk. And Zara’s pretty voice rose and fell in the background, as thick and insistent around him as the humidity in the greenhouse. Making him sweat all the same. More.
Making him wish he could mete out a little justice to the people in her life the way he could to his punching bag.
Because you’re such a hero, a derisive voice taunted him. The perfect dispenser of truth and justice. What a laugh.
He shifted again, then hit the bag with his elbow, hard enough to maim a real person, if never quite hard enough to silence his own demons.
“Ariella was the crowning achievement of my parents’ marriage,” Zara told him. “When we were growing up they would dress us alike and coo over her, telling her how pretty she was, how perfect, how cute. She was exactly the child they’d both secretly expected to have. Blonde and lovely and charming. Instantly beloved by anyone with eyes.” Another low laugh, but this one was rougher, and he felt it like claws across his chest. “I was not.”
Chase realized that growling sound was coming from him, and bit it back. So hard he almost bit off his own tongue.
“They sighed about my hair,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “Which, in fairness, was more orange than red at the time. They told me to sta
nd up straight, to walk softly, to be more careful and much more quiet. They hated when I called attention to myself in any way. Of course, that could mean when I walked into a room. It was hard to figure out the rules. And then it was worse when we were teenagers, because it wasn’t only my parents saying those things.”
But she didn’t sound remotely self-pitying. She sounded faintly amused and analytical. And Chase found that hurt him. It hurt. Like a shot to the gut.
The bag rocked back and forth in front of him, like it was a balloon.
“But that’s adolescence, isn’t it? It’s all wretched, unless you’re pretty like Ariella and calculating enough to take advantage of it.” That laugh again, which he was beginning to think might lodge itself in him forever, like permanent opiates in his bloodstream. What was wrong with him that he liked that idea? “I knew my place was in a book and I liked it there.”
Thunk. Thunk.
But God help him, those greedy little noises she’d made, sprawled in his lap, her hot mouth wild against his. They haunted him. They woke him in the night. They kept him from his work. They’d wedged their way into him and made him ache for more.
He ached.
“My grandmother had always counseled me to give my family another chance. To let them see the real me. And when Ariella disappeared, I was the only one who could help,” she told him, and he heard the change in her voice then. How serious it became, suddenly. “Me, at last. I could do something of value for my father that no one else could. It didn’t matter that I knew exactly what kind of man he is. It didn’t matter that I knew how unlikely it was that he’d ever see me as anything but a problem to solve. I could do the crazy thing that Ariella had walked away from. I know how pathetic that sounds, but for the first time in my whole life, he needed me. So I did it.”
Chase stopped hitting the bag. There was an edginess in him, gnawing at the base of his spine, rushing through his veins. He was…affronted, he realized. That Amos Elliott should have that kind of power. That this woman should have spent a lifetime desperate for that petty little man’s approval. That she was three-dimensional, real, and not the sort of easily digested and quickly dismissed woman he’d been prepared to marry. There was no preparing for Zara. She’d disarmed him from the start.
And Chase was very much afraid he didn’t know who he was without his weapons of choice.
He turned to look at her then, very slowly, and it was worse than he’d thought. Much worse.
She was entirely too pretty, but she was also so cute. He could have resisted a pouty display, a calculation of curves and presentation. He could have resisted that particular cultivated attractiveness that passed for beautiful in his circles, that he could hardly believe he’d accepted all this time now that he’d seen this woman’s perfect, incomparable glory. Now that he knew what she hid beneath clothes that could never do her justice.
Zara sat cross-legged on the couch in dark corduroy trousers and a cocoa-colored turtleneck sweater, her hair in a careless sort of cascade all over her shoulders and not a strand of it orange, her warm, pretty eyes gleaming gold and soft. And that bloody mouth of hers that was the sexiest thing he’d ever tasted was so naked and so carnal, it was like she was begging him to take it. Her. Taste it all over again.
How could he defend against ghosts like her when she wasn’t a ghost at all? When she was real and alive and here—right here—watching him with so much compassion in her gaze that it stunned him? As surely as if she’d landed a blow to the side of his head and left him spinning?
He had the disconcerting notion that she could see all the way through him, to all that suffocating darkness he carried within. And planned to keep talking to him until he accepted it. Until he surrendered to this inept bridge she was building between them with these stories of hers, like the two of them were at all the same.
He knew better.
Anyone else would have kept their distance from him when he was like this, so obviously on the edge of unhinged. Chase knew that. And yet here she sat, looking wholly unintimidated, telling him these stories about her life. Making him understand her the way he imagined people did when they weren’t the kind of broken he was. When they were getting to know each other in all those ways he assumed normal people must.
When they hadn’t killed their own mother and knew better, therefore, than to risk any more bridges or connections. He knew how these things ended.
But there was something like a howl in him, long and deep and shattering. Chase hurt everywhere, from the bag and from her and from this thing he couldn’t seem to banish. Much less control.
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 take this any longer. He couldn’t stand it.
“I’m not empty inside,” he 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 rasped. “It’s a 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.”
Her eyes had gone wide, but her chin tipped up, in another show of spine and determination he couldn’t understand. What was wrong with this woman? She saw too much, much more than anyone else he’d let near him in years—so why wasn’t she afraid of him the way she should have been?
“So is this,” she said. “Do you think I sit around and tell people my life story, Chase? In all its sad little details? I don’t generally like to hand people ammunition when I know that sooner or later, they’re going to use me as target practice.”
He didn’t deny it. He saw the knowledge of that in the way she tightened her lips, but she still didn’t look away.
“I told you I would ruin you.” He watched her swallow hard, and he didn’t know what it was about that, why it flashed over him like a wave of heat. “You should have listened.”
He sank down on his knees before her, fascinated by the way she flushed. By her slight jerk against the couch, as if she’d had to wrestle herself into submission to keep herself from leaping out of her own skin. He held her gaze as he leaned forward and stuck a fist on either side of her, one at each lush hip.
And then they were close again. Much too close. It was like baiting a tornado, daring it to touch land, and the roar of it filled him. Need. Lust. And that other thing that couldn’t be hope, not even its battered and bruised cousin, but moved in him nonetheless.
“I listened.” Her voice was only slightly breathy, but he felt it as if she’d taken him deep in her mouth. The ache. The sweet burn. “You were as hideous as possible, to be certain I would. But what I don’t understand is why.”
“I told you why. In detail.”
His voice was grittier. Darker. And he was leaning over her, his mouth the scantest breath from hers, and she didn’t have to call him a liar. She didn’t have to say a word. He was proving it.
But this was Zara. She smirked at him.
“You told me something in detail,” she agreed. “But I’m not sure I would call that little performance an explanation. Would you?”
Chase decided he might as well take this collision course he was on—that they were both on and he didn’t understand how that had happened—to its logical conclusion. Or go insane.
More insane.
But he couldn’t care about that the way he knew he should. She was so lush and she was breathing too hard, and he could see the flush of arousal tint her chee
ks pink. He could smell the delicate scent of her skin, like gardenias and vanilla, and he felt it wrap around him like a noose.
Chase gave up. He stopped fighting and let the monster take control, dark and greedy and wild.
He leaned in and slammed his mouth to hers.
* * *
It was like fireworks. Everywhere.
Inside her, around her.
Zara couldn’t breathe. She didn’t care that she couldn’t. She wound her arms around his strong neck as his hands wrapped over her hips and tugged her closer. She dropped her legs to either side of him, and he surged between them as if he belonged there, until she locked her ankles behind him.
And then they were finally plastered together, her aching breasts flat against the wall of his chest, like she’d been crafted to fit against him just like that. She could feel him between her legs, the smooth, solid heft of his finely wrought form, and she shook with a ravenous hunger she’d never, ever felt before. Sensation washed over her, blowing out all her circuits and then lighting them up again, leaving her shaking and greedy and as wild as he felt against her.
This wasn’t a kiss. This wasn’t anything so sweet.
This was possession. Raw and intense.
And she had never wanted anything more.
He tasted of salt and need, passion and demand. And she couldn’t get enough.
“More,” he muttered against her mouth, and then he pulled back from her.
This was when clarity should have asserted itself, Zara thought, as he took her legs from around him and set her feet back on the floor. But then he looked at her, that dark, impossible blue gone brilliant with need, and she didn’t care if she survived this. She didn’t care what happened next, so long as it did.
Just so long as he didn’t stop this time.
It was as if he could read her mind. His surprisingly tough hands, more laborer than CEO, and she assumed it was the martial arts that made them that way, went to the waistband of her trousers. Zara’s heart walloped at her, and her own hands met his there—but to help him or to stop him? She didn’t know.
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