by Nora Ash
* * * *
Chapter 4
Mira
I’d never seen so much emotion on a completely blank face before. While every single muscle on my husband-to-be’s face was still, I could practically read his mind from the flashes of shock, fear—and finally anger—that filtered across those stormcloud eyes of his. Yeah, I was about the last person he wanted to see right now.
Not that that was a surprise—the son of London’s biggest crime family had gone to see a therapist, undoubtedly expecting to never be confronted with it again, only to now be forced into marrying the very same woman—possibly the only person in the world who knew that Blaine Steel had a weakness.
And I… I was beyond shocked. Not to mention annoyed at myself for not even bothering to ask who would be waiting for me at the altar. Though to be fair, I’d spent the week locked up in my own flat with no phone or computer access, effectively a prisoner. I’d been too terrified to even think about who I’d be marrying, and neither my father nor my brothers had bothered to inform me of such an unimportant detail. All that mattered to them was that they would now be related to the biggest crime family in the country.
I swallowed thickly as I stared, wide-eyed, up at Blaine. I’d run away from home the day I turned eighteen so I could escape this exact fate—so I wouldn’t end up married to a man as ruthless and dangerous as the ones in my own family. Yet here I was, staring into the eyes of a man I knew without a shadow of a doubt was the living embodiment of every nightmare I’d ever had. My groom.
One of the redheaded groomsmen demonstratively cleared his throat, which made both Blaine and I jolt out of what probably looked like a staring match to the onlookers.
With one final, dark look, Blaine took my arm and turned us toward the altar, where the priest stood ready to bind us together for all eternity.
I didn’t think it was possible to be any more terrified of my fate than I already was, but the look Blaine gave me held so much fury and resentment that the only thing that made me capable of following him the final few steps to the altar was the fresh wave of adrenaline coursing in my blood.
He hated me.
* * *
The ceremony was a blur, and I have no idea how I made it through the entire thing without my anxiety making me break down into a sobbing mess. All I really comprehended through the pomp and circumstance was the sound of my own pulse drumming unsteadily in my ears.
Blaine must have led me through it, though, because when I finally snapped out of it, it was in the middle of the reception. I was seated at a table with a pretty, but untouched, dessert on my plate in a room full of laughing people I mostly didn’t know or had spent years hiding from. Everyone was dressed up, there were flowers everywhere, and music underlined the chattering and laughter.
It looked like the perfect wedding, I numbly realized. Picture perfect, in fact.
If only the guest list wasn’t made up of some of the worst criminals in the country and the bride hadn’t been kidnapped and married off against her will.
A hysterical giggle bubbled out of my chest, only to die in a wheeze.
“You doing okay there?”
I snapped my head around to the speaker, dimly recognizing one of the redheaded groomsmen as he leaned over from a few seats away. The spaces between us were vacated, and I realized the dinner was over and most people must have left their seats for the bar, or perhaps to mingle—or whatever people did at arranged business weddings. Including my groom.
His eyes were the same color as Blaine’s, but light and cheerful rather than broody and angry.
“No.” The same frantic giggle escaped again, and I shook my head to make it stop. “Not even remotely. But the flowers are nice, aren’t they?”
The groomsman cocked his head, his eyes turning slightly less cheerful as they roamed over my face.
“I’m getting Blaine, hang on,” he said before he got up from the table and walked off toward what looked like the bar.
Great. Seeing Blaine was about the last thing I wanted, but extraordinarily poor problem-solving skills aside, at least the redhead tried. It was the first time anyone had shown any consideration for my well-being since I walked in the door to find my father in my flat, and it was enough to shake me out of the shock that had kept me shielded from the world.
It was odd, really. I had spent the entire week so terrified that my mind had shut me away from everything that happened around me, practically leaving me a living doll. I had gone through the motions when my mother arrived to take measurements for my wedding dress and while she and some distant cousins got me ready earlier this morning. I hadn’t even objected while the people I feared most in this world took away my freedom and my choices to sell me off like a farm animal.
But when I finally snapped out of it again, in the middle of my own wedding reception, fear wasn’t the emotion that rushed through my body and washed away the last tendrils of stupor.
No, it was a refreshing wave of anger.
I wasn’t a bloody doll—and I damn well wasn’t a trinket to be exchanged for power and influence!
“Why don’t you two go up to the suite, eh? Everyone’s had the chance to see the happy couple now, so you may as well spend some time getting acquainted in private.”
I snapped my head in the direction of the speaker in time to see the groomsman from before waggle his ginger eyebrows at me. Behind him, Blaine stood, a glass of amber liquor in one hand and the other shoved down one pocket. Even in a tux he managed to look devil-may-care.
“Sure, may as well get started on securing the proud Steel-Clery lineage. Or should I say Steel-Holler lineage, eh, wifey?”
I got up from my seat with a glare in Blaine’s direction. “You should say whatever you damn well please, because there’s not going to be any lineage-making here, I can tell you that much.”
He whistled and took a swig from his glass. “Your daddy’s gonna be ever so disappointed.”
I repressed a shudder at the reminder of my father and brushed past the two men, intent on getting out of there before I got any more reminders. The one good thing to come out of this disaster of a day was that I would never have to see him or the rest of my family ever again. The worst had already happened, and they’d have no more use for me now that they’d traded me in for better connections.
I blinked as a thought hit me while I waited in the elevator for Blaine to exchange a few words with his groomsman before he joined me, glass still in hand.
In an odd sense, I was free now. I would never again have to look over my shoulder out of fear that my family would find me. They already had, and now there was nothing more they could do to me. They had taken the life I had fought so hard for from me, but in doing so, they had given up their power over me as well. I didn’t know much about Blaine, but I did know that his family was the most powerful crime syndicate in London—or else I wouldn’t have been forced to marry him. Which meant that not even my father, the most brutal and ruthless man in Belfast, would have the power to ever touch me.
For better or worse, I was a Steel now.
And my family could never hurt me again.
Blaine made a sound of protest when I grabbed the glass out of his hand and downed the remaining liquor in one swig. Whiskey. It burned my throat, but I relished the fire. When it hit my—empty—stomach, a pleasant wave of euphoria mixed with my already present anger into a weirdly exhilarating combination of… of power. For the first time in a very long time, I felt strong.
No one was ever going to push me around or make me cower. Yes, the worst had happened, but I was still standing, still alive. And I was free.
“So you lie to your patients about your name. What kind of a quack are you, anyway?”
Well, sort of free. I gave Blaine an irritated look. “My name’s Mira Holler, and it will always be Mira Holler.”
“Well, it’ll be Mira Steel from today,” he said, shrugging as the elevator doors slid open and revealed the penthouse floor of
the hotel we were at. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to notice its name on our way here.
Blaine led the way to the only set of doors on the floor, found the key card in his tux pocket, and let us in.
I trailed after him, having nowhere else to go, and paused at the look of the suite once the door closed behind me. Everything was glass, gold, and white, with fresh flowers adorning all surfaces. Along the far wall, massive windows displayed a striking view of London and the Thames, the curtain of night interrupted by the multitude of lights from the city.
Blaine didn’t give the luxurious surroundings so much as a second look. He went straight for the mini bar and filled two glasses with liquor and ice. He held one out to me while taking a long draw from his own glass.
I walked over to him and snatched the offered glass out of his hand. The burn of whiskey on my tongue was oddly comforting, and I drank deeply. Too deeply, for someone my size who up until today drank maybe once in a blue moon, but I didn’t care much at that point. Getting hideously drunk seemed like a perfectly reasonable response to everything that’d happened.
“You’re not going to like being married to me.” Blaine leaned back against the bar and looked at me with something akin to a challenge in his stormy eyes.
I snorted. “No shit.”
“It’s not too late to get an annulment.”
A jolt of excitement shot through me. “You’d do that?”
“Me? Fuck no.” He downed the rest of his drink and poured himself another, eying me over his shoulder as he did. “If that’d been an option I’d have just said no to this whole bloody arrangement to begin with.”
I stared at him, the anger making itself known again with a heated rush of blood to my cheeks and chest. “You think I would have gone through with this if I’d had a choice? This may come as a shock to you, Mr. Steel, but you’re not exactly Prince Charming. I would quite literally rather marry the homeless guy who reeks of moldy cheese and asks me to suck his cock every time I pass him on my way to work than I would you, but here we are!”
Blaine snorted, emptying half his glass of whiskey in one swig. “Here we are indeed, Mrs. Steel. Guess you’ll just have to get used to sucking my cock instead, huh?”
I blinked. Twice. He was obviously as unhappy about this forced marriage as I was, yet he still found the energy to be a grade-A prick.
“You’re a pig,” I hissed. “Don’t for one second think I’ll put up with any of your crap just because I’m forced to live with you.”
“You’ll put up with exactly what I say you will.” He was angry too, his eyes flashing darkly at me. “I’m your husband now, whether you like it or not, so you better get used to doing as you’re told.”
The same urge to slap him as I’d experienced in our disaster of a therapy session made my palms itch, but despite my—partly alcohol-fueled—bravery, I wasn’t dumb enough to test my luck. Instead, I grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the bar next to him and stomped toward the white-and-gold painted door I presumed led to the bedroom.
“I’m going to bed,” I announced, before I slammed the door behind me with a satisfyingly dramatic bang.
* * * *
Chapter 5
Mira
To my great relief, someone had filled the bedroom wardrobe with clothing, and upon closer inspection, it turned out that half of it was mine. Perhaps I should have felt violated that someone had gone through my personal belongings without my knowledge or consent to bring it here, but it seemed so insignificant compared to everything else my family had done that I was just grateful I could get out of the uncomfortable wedding dress my mother had picked out and into something soft and familiar.
When I walked into the en-suite bathroom and caught a look of myself in the mirror, I was suddenly extra glad I had my own clothes available—I looked like a big, poofy nightmare. My mother had decided on puff sleeves, a full skirt that accentuated my already rounder-than-ideal hips, and so many sequins it looked like a fairy had had an acute round of diarrhea all over me.
But it wasn’t just the dress that composed the horrifying image that stared back at me from the mirror. It was also my face.
It wasn’t so much the makeup—I never bothered to wear much, if any, so the lack of pizazz wasn’t unusual—as it was the red rims underneath my eyes and the pale, taut look of my skin. I looked like an abuse victim—all that was lacking was a badly covered bruise or two.
Angrily, I tore off the dress, ripping it in my haste. I wasn’t a victim—not anymore.
I took a swig of the bottle I’d hijacked from Blaine, and then I went to work.
There were bottles of tonics and lotions on the shelves next to the sink, and I didn’t hold back. I washed and scrubbed and sprayed and smeared until my skin glowed rosy and the woman who looked back from the mirror was closer to who I’d become in the past eight years rather than who I’d been for the first eighteen of my life.
When I loosened my hair from the tight braid it had been in all day and ran my fingers through it, some of the tension in my shoulders finally melted away. My chestnut locks fell over my shoulders in unruly waves, encircling my breasts and upper arms.
I grazed a hand over the white scars on my soft belly as I looked at myself in the mirror. Not that any amount of scrubbing would ever make those go away. The permanent reminder of who I’d been—the unbreakable proof of my inherent weakness. I hated them almost as much as I hated the people who had put them there.
Fighting a shudder, I pulled the nightie I’d brought from the closet over my head and slipped on a pair of panties before taking a final slug of the whiskey. Dwelling on that was not what I needed right now. Blaine Steel was a dangerous man—I knew that on a near-instinctive level, but I couldn’t fall back into my old patterns. I had to be strong enough to get through this, just as I’d somehow made it through the night I’d gotten my scars.
The bedroom was dark when I finally stepped out of the bathroom. I frowned into the shadows, not remembering when I’d turned the lights off, but I was a bit too drunk to give it a second thought.
Instead, I fumbled my way to the large bed I could vaguely make out in the small bit of light that made its way through the curtains, intent on falling into a deep, dreamless sleep. Tomorrow was a new day, and I was planning on spending it teaching Blaine that he wouldn’t be pushing me around.
I found my way to the big bed without stubbing my toes on the wooden frame and—with a bit more fumbling—located a nightstand where I dropped off my glasses and the bottle of whiskey, and then climbed in.
The soft embrace of the mattress and duvets was heaven. I sighed at the feel of cool sheets wrapping around my body, and again as I rolled over to bury myself good and proper in the middle of the luxurious sensation.
And that’s when my hand hit something hard and warm and decidedly skin-like.
I’ve never shrieked quite like I did then. The mixed shock of realizing I wasn’t alone in the room—or even the bed—and the unexpectedness at touching someone made me lift at least half a foot off the sheets.
“What the actual fuck!” I rolled to the bedside table and searched wildly for a lamp until my fingers finally connected with a button and I illuminated the room.
Blaine—topless Blaine—squinted at me from the other side of the bed. “Fuck, you could deafen dogs with that scream.”
I stared at him, mouth halfway open, as my addled brain tried to process the situation. Which unfortunately included the full view of Blaine’s ridiculously chiseled, tattoo-covered torso. I couldn’t stop my eyes from following the pattern of swirling lines until he cleared his throat demonstratively, and I realized I’d been ogling him for a good thirty seconds at least.
“Changed your mind about that shag, then?”
It was impressive, really. He had a gift for sounding equal parts annoyed and smug, and the result was absolutely infuriating.
“Get out of my bed!” I was all too aware of the heat in my cheeks, but I did my be
st to push the embarrassment aside and focus on the indignity of finding him near-naked in bed with me. I pulled the duvet up to cover my chest, but regretted it the next second. Apparently, he wasn’t just near-naked.
“Jesus Christ!” I clamped my mouth shut, but not before my startled exclamation made it impossible to pretend like I hadn’t seen anything.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that I was now staring at his cock. No, it was made so much worse—and it was freaking enormous. And semi-erect.
Blaine stretched out, folding his arms behind his head. He was obviously enjoying my flustered state. “I’m not going anywhere. This is my bed too, if you remember—wifey.”
“You’re not going to sleep next to me, you creep!” I hissed, doing my best not to look below his navel again. The problem was that restriction either left me with his hard abs and chiseled pecs, or his smirking face. With as much dignity as I could muster I turned around so I could no longer see him at all. “There’s a perfectly good couch in the lounge.”
“Sorry love, I’m gonna be way too hungover tomorrow to wake up on a couch. You’re just gonna have to deal with it.” He yawned and stretched in what I was certain was the most provocative way possible, making every defined muscle in his body roll. “Turn off the light, will ya?”
“No! Get out!”
“Not a chance. But no one’s stopping you from sleeping on the couch, are they?”
There was just enough challenge in his rumbly voice to make me see red. Perhaps in hindsight, I should have just given in and slept on the damn couch, but his arrogance—and possibly the vast amounts of whiskey—got to me. And it got to me good.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’m telling you right now, you’re not going to boss me around in this marriage, you absolute… twat!” I gave him a baleful glare, which I immediately regretted when my eyes caught sight of his absurdly huge cock again. Either I was hindered by my lack of glasses, or the damn thing was even bigger now than it’d been before. My cheeks flushed with heat, and I quickly tore my gaze away and flopped down on my back, arms folded over my chest. “I’m staying here—and you need to leave.”