“Zara.” His voice was so dark, so close. “I can say I’m sorry through the door, but it isn’t the same, is it?”
She didn’t mean to open the damned thing, but she did. And then he was standing there, right there in front of her. The porch light cast him in whites and golds, but that did nothing to mute the effect of those eyes of his that skewered her and made her ache immediately. He looked tired, she thought, though she hated herself for noticing. Tired and drawn, but then again, he was Chase Whitaker. Even his worst was remarkably beautiful.
And that terrible song that was him, only him, swelled inside of her.
“The door’s open,” Zara said as evenly as she could. “Apologize away.”
His gorgeous mouth tilted up in one corner, and those wild, perfectly blue eyes lit with the sort of ruefulness she wished she could share. “Is this the part where I grovel, Zara? Is that what it will take?”
“That all depends on whether or not you feel you have reason to grovel,” she retorted. She leaned against the door frame and pretended she didn’t feel the icy blast of the wind that swept in from Long Island Sound and cut straight through her. She told herself it might keep her focused—less susceptible to him, somehow. “And that is between you and whatever passes for your conscience.”
Chase’s gaze darkened, but he nodded. “I deserve that.”
This was worse, Zara decided. This was worse than what she’d been doing the past few days, which was figuring out the best coping mechanisms for living with a broken heart and the ghost of this man she seemed to cart around with her wherever she went.
Much worse.
“I already told you we don’t need to do this,” she said then. “I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m finished.”
She meant that. She’d said the same thing to her father and Ariella when they’d tracked her down here on New Year’s Day, after she’d failed to respond to the approximately thirty-five thousand texts and voice mail messages they’d left her, all predictably abusive.
She’d opened the door to them, too. And she’d let them storm inside. Ariella had lounged about on the couch while her father had raged. It had gone on and on. Zara had simply stood in front of the fire and watched them both, wondering how she’d ever fooled herself into thinking there was anything there that could be saved. Or why she’d tried so hard to do the saving. You’re the only reason I tried, Grams, she’d thought. But no more.
When her father had wound down, she’d smiled. Not, she’d imagined, a very nice smile.
“Okay,” she’d said calmly. “I heard you. Now, please leave.”
They’d both stared back at her.
“I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation,” Amos had seethed at her. “I sank ten years of my life into Whitaker Industries and you handed it over to the enemy—”
“It’s you who doesn’t understand,” she’d replied, cutting him off, which she knew happened rarely. “The only reason you’re here is because you think I can do something for you. The only reason Ariella is here is because she feeds off cruelty. Neither of those reasons have anything to do with me.”
“This is about our family,” Amos had snapped at her.
“What family is that?” Zara had asked, and she’d known she was doing the right thing, however overdue, because she felt nothing. No upset, no victory. Just an emptiness and her solid, bone-deep conviction that this had to end. “I’d love to have a family. My desire for one is what allowed all of this to happen. My loyalty to Grams, who you hated and Ariella ignored. But she’s dead, and I shouldn’t have to prove myself worthy of love you never give anyway.”
“So melodramatic,” Ariella had murmured. “This is about what happened at The Plaza, isn’t it?”
“I used to hero-worship you, Ariella,” Zara had said quietly. “Now I don’t even know who you are.”
Ariella had rolled her eyes, but Zara had thought that the lack of a toxic reply might have meant she’d hit a nerve. But that, too, hadn’t mattered any longer.
“You listen to me, Zara,” Amos had begun to say, all bluster and volume.
“No,” she’d said very distinctly, and maybe it was the utter lack of fear she felt showing through on her face. She didn’t know, but Amos subsided. “You listen to me for a change. We are done. If you want to regain your place at Whitaker Industries, you can figure that out on your own. I’m officially not interested.”
“Are you choosing a man who would throw you to the wolves over your own family?” he’d asked as if astounded.
“Where do you think I learned how to survive being thrown to the wolves, Dad?” she’d asked coolly. “What Chase did felt like a warm bath in comparison.”
“You’ll regret this,” Amos had promised her.
“No,” she’d replied as they’d gathered their coats and stormed toward the door. “I won’t. But if either of you ever do, you know where to find me.”
The slam of her front door had sounded a lot like finality. But it had also sounded like freedom. She’d decided she welcomed both.
And now she stood before yet another wolf, and this time, she couldn’t pretend that she was empty. She couldn’t pretend she felt nothing. But she didn’t want to let him in, either.
“You might be finished,” Chase said now, his dark blue eyes searching hers. “But I’m in love with you.”
Zara wanted to slam the door in his face, but she didn’t. She turned abruptly and walked back toward the fire, fighting to keep all the things she felt from her face. She heard Chase step inside and close the door behind him.
“I knew there was no way I could get out of marrying your sister,” he said without preamble. Zara scowled at the dancing flames in front of her and told herself she didn’t want to hear this. But she didn’t say anything that might stop him, either. “Your father had worked it all perfectly. I was vulnerable. The deal with Nicodemus was set to go through, but that only meant the company would be more powerful. Amos could still fire me from my own family legacy. And it’s all I had left. It’s all Mattie and I had of our father. It was the thing he loved most, save my mother.”
She didn’t want to melt. She didn’t want to feel anything at all. She didn’t want to imagine a terrified thirteen-year-old boy and how brave he must have been to try to save his sister on the side of that long-ago road, to stay quiet while he couldn’t save his mother.
“And I believed I’d killed her,” Chase said quietly. “I knew I had. It never occurred to me that there could be another way of looking at what happened. I’m still not sure there is, but thanks to you, there’s doubt. There’s the possibility that I’m not the murderer I’ve always known I was. But none of that was even a glimmer of possibility on any horizon a month ago, as I was set to marry Ariella.”
Zara folded her arms over her middle and turned around then. She had to swallow hard. Chase stood just inside the door, still wearing his coat, ice and wet clinging to his black hair. He was all in black, except those eyes of his, and they were the clearest she’d ever seen them. No ghosts. No lonely seas. Just all that deep, dark blue. And he was looking at her like he never wanted to look at anything else again.
She had to bite her own lip hard to keep from going to him.
“I’d met your sister before. I’d certainly read about her.” His mouth moved into something like a smile. “I’ve met a thousand women just like your sister, and I knew what I was getting into with her. It made it easy to come up with a perfect plan. But then you turned up. You looked ridiculous in that dress, and yet still, you were you. Zara. Undiminished by the dress, the wedding itself, your father. Like none of his dirt could touch you at all. You rose above it.”
“That’s absurd, revisionist history,” she snapped, before she could think better of it. “You were drunk.”
“Then you stood up in that bathtub,” he said, his voice going hoarse. “And you brought me back to life, Zara. In that instant. But I’d set a course. I had a plan. And it had never
occurred to me to factor in emotions. I wasn’t capable of any, I thought, and certainly your sister isn’t. But how could I have planned for you?” His mouth crooked again when she only stared back at him, stricken. “I can’t imagine that anyone could spend any kind of time with you and not fall in love with you. I can’t. I didn’t.”
“This isn’t love, Chase.” She ignored the wild cartwheels of her heart, her stomach. “This is guilt.”
“I haven’t felt anything but guilt in twenty years,” he threw back at her. “I know the difference.”
She shook her head hard.
“It’s too late,” she said quickly before she second-guessed herself. “I gave you everything I had and you chose to waste it by using me as a pawn in your little battle with my father.”
“I regret using you,” he said. His gaze slammed into hers. “But you hardly gave me ‘everything,’ Zara. You only told me that you might have loved me, that you wished you could have done, when you were leaving me.”
“Was that the time to declare my love? Right after you’d showed me that yet again, the only time anyone pretends any interest in me at all is when they need me for their own ends?”
“You’re making my point for me.”
“I am doing no such thing,” she snapped at him, and she didn’t realize she’d advanced on him until his hands came up to grip her shoulders, and then it was too late. “I spent twenty-six years trying to work things out with my father. I’m not going to waste another day playing the same kind of games with a man who’s just like him.”
“Zara.” Chase’s voice was like gravel. “I’m not your bloody father.”
“Tell me what the difference is!” she raged at him. She didn’t realize her hands had curled into fists until she thumped them on his chest. “Tell me how I’m supposed to tell you apart! You both do nothing but use me, tell me whatever lies you think might make me do what you want, never giving one thought to what I might need!”
“The difference is, I’m here.” His voice was low and commanding at once, and it cut through the storm in her, beating it back. He shifted, running his thumbs below her eyes to clear away a wetness she hadn’t even known was there, and her heart clutched in her chest. “The difference is, I’m not going anywhere. I can’t live without you, Zara. I don’t want to try. The house is too big, the bed keeps me awake and it hurts. I don’t care what it takes, I’ll do it. Just come back to me. Let me prove that whatever happened over the past month, whatever happened at that damned party, this marriage is the one good thing to come of it.”
She pulled back from him then, though she couldn’t seem to step away, almost as if her bones had melted and she was stuck right there.
“You’re not meant for someone like me,” she told him, and he would never know how hard that was for her to admit. “I know that. If you don’t know it now, you will. I’m sure the relentlessly negative attention from all those tabloids that adore my sister and yours will help.”
Chase studied her for one of those too-long moments.
“This is what I’m talking about,” he murmured. “Who gives a toss what the tabloids say? They’re a soap opera—this is life. And you’ve spent much too long listening to petty comments from the likes of your sister.”
“And yet, at the end of the day, you’re the one who used me,” she said quietly.
“Just as you used me, Zara,” he pointed out gently. “To work out your Daddy issues. The only difference is that what I did was successful.”
She scowled at him then, and he sighed.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s decide that the rest of this marriage is ours. Just ours, starting now. No outside voices or influences need apply.” His gorgeous eyes bored into hers. “Because they don’t matter. They never will.”
And she wanted to fall forward and trust that he’d catch her. She wanted to believe him this time. God, how she wanted that. But she shook her head again and moved back a step, because the truth was, imagination never got her into anything but trouble. Her heart was a liar. And if she didn’t protect herself now, who would?
Chase reached over and took her hands in his, and then he dropped down before her. Onto one knee. Zara blinked. Then realized she’d stopped breathing.
“What are you doing?” she managed to ask, almost soundlessly.
“Zara Elliott,” he intoned, and his eyes were the blue of summer skies, with only the faintest hint of shadows to mar them. “You’ve already married me. But I want you to be my wife. I want you to honor the vows you made to me when I was a stranger, and I want to dedicate myself to honoring the same vows I made when I’d had a little too much whiskey. I want to spend years sleeping in the same bed with you and waking there, too. I want to build a life from all the little pieces we stitched together in this past month. I want you to tell me stories, and I want to make more of our own. I want you to teach me how to love Christmas the way you do. I want to love you so well and so deeply that when you look back, you’ll forget you ever doubted I could.”
And Zara stopped fighting. She stopped trying to ward him off when he was the one thing she wanted, so desperately it actually made her shake. She couldn’t help the tears that coursed down her cheeks then. She knelt before him, pulling her hands from his to hold his face. His beautiful face, and the far more complicated and fascinated man behind it.
“Chase,” she whispered. “I do love you. I do.”
“I know you do,” he whispered back, fierce and certain and hers, she thought. Finally hers. “And we have all the time in the world to prove it.”
And Zara would never know who moved first, but then they were kissing. Again and again, as if that was the only truth that mattered. That beautiful fire that was only theirs. That wild bright light that burned in both of them.
And would keep on burning, she thought then— holding him close, this man who had been her husband before he became the love of her life—forever.
Christmas Day, one year later…
“This has a certain, horrifying symmetry,” Mattie said as she stood by the window in their father’s office at Greenleigh that Chase had long since claimed as his own. “But if you order me to marry someone else, Nicodemus will have a fit.”
Chase grinned, imagining the reaction his brother-in-law—a man he was beginning to consider a friend, even a good one—might have. One similar to his own, were anyone to suggest he marry someone other than Zara.
His Zara, who he loved more now than he’d ever imagined he could love anyone. He thought it grew by the day, making his shriveled old heart expand every time she smiled at him. And she smiled at him quite a lot.
She’d insisted they celebrate Christmas this year, and so they were. Dutifully, Chase had thought, at least on his part—but it was impossible not to succumb to the infectiousness of Zara’s pure, unadulterated joy. That was true whether the subject was a book, a holiday or life itself. It had been her determination to reach out to Mattie that had created the bridge between Chase and his sister that, in his guilt, he’d never known how to build.
“Of course we’re inviting them for Christmas dinner,” Zara had said, and as she’d been naked at the time and moving her hips against his in a way designed to make him her slave, he’d agreed.
Though secretly, Chase knew he would have agreed anyway. Especially now that the family lawyer had produced that letter.
“Are you ready?” he asked Mattie.
She turned and looked at him, her expression serious. “How can I answer that? Is anyone ever ready for a message from beyond the grave?”
The letter was from Big Bart, their attorney had told Chase when he’d delivered this letter only yesterday. And their father had left very specific instructions about when and how it was to be opened.
When they’re both happy, were the words on the envelope.
“Apparently, the Calloways are the informants,” Chase said now. “We’ve been deemed happy.” He swallowed. “Is that right?”
; Mattie blinked. Then smiled.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I’m happy. You did a good thing, Chase. The truth is, I wish I’d married Nicodemus a long time ago.”
It was another great weight from his back. He nodded. Then he held up the envelope. Mattie inclined her head, indicating that she was ready. Chase thrust his thumb beneath the sealed flap, opening it and pulling two sheets of paper forth, both written on in pen in Big Bart’s distinctive hand. Mattie came to stand next to him, and with another glance at each other, they began to read.
My dearest Chase and Mattie
If you are reading this letter, I am no longer with you and more than that, I left you the same coward I’ve been all these years.
The facts aren’t pretty. Your mother’s death was no one’s fault but mine. She warned me a thousand times not to cross certain lines, but I didn’t listen. I was Big Bart Whitaker. I knew best. Those gunmen were after me, not her—
“Gunmen?” Mattie asked in a horrified whisper.
“I’ll tell you everything I know,” Chase promised, his throat raw. “In a minute.”
Mattie’s eyes were too bright, but she nodded. And Chase felt better than he would have admitted a year ago when she moved even closer, like he really was the big brother he knew he’d never been to her. Maybe this was a new start, too.
—and I’ve never forgiven myself for not being there. For letting my sins catch up to the people I love most. I wish I could have told you both all of this. I wish I knew how. I wish I’d been the father you deserved, but the only way I knew how to be that man was with your mother’s help. Without her, I fear I was nothing but a blowhard. Lost and no good to anyone.
I know you’ve both blamed yourself for that day in your own ways. I hope that this letter finds you truly happy, as you deserve to be. As your mother would have insisted you be. And I want you to know that while I couldn’t save her or protect you from living through the terror of it, I could and did find the men responsible and make certain they, at least, paid for their crimes. I imagine the great hereafter is where I’ll pay for mine.
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