“I feel sorry for you,” Celeste murmured, after a moment, though her tone did not strike me as the sort one would use if that was true. “Truly, it isn’t fair. How can a naive little thing like you be expected to handle a man like Javier Dos Santos?”
Even his name struck dread through the center of me. I told myself it had to be dread, that thick and too-hot sensation. It hit me in the chest, then spiraled down until it lodged itself low in my belly.
That, I told myself, was a measure of how much I loathed and feared him.
“I thought you hated him,” I reminded my sister. “After what he did to you...”
I remembered the shouting. My father’s deep voice echoing through the house. I remembered Celeste’s sobs. Until now, it had been the only example I’d ever seen of something less than perfection in my half sister—and I had blamed the man who was the cause of it. I had held him responsible for the commotion. The jagged tear in the smooth inevitability that was our life here, so securely beneath our father’s thumb.
More than this, I remembered the one glimpse I’d had of Javier Dos Santos in person. After another bout of screams and sobs and the sort of fighting I’d been taught Fitzalans were above, I had plastered myself to the window over the grand front entrance where I could hide myself in the drapery, and I had gazed down at this monster who had threatened to tear my family apart.
It had been years ago, but my memories remained as vivid as if it had happened yesterday.
He was dark like sin. A stain against the stones. His hair was glossy and black, so dark it looked nearly blue and reminded me of nothing so much as a raven’s wing. His face was cruel and hard, so harsh it took my breath away. He had been made of muscle, hard and dangerous, a striking counterpoint to the genteel men I had been raised with. He was not elegant. He was not graceful.
He had no right to my beautiful sister, I had thought fiercely.
A sentiment my father had echoed in no uncertain terms. Celeste, he had bellowed throughout the manor house, was meant for better.
But it seemed Javier Dos Santos was good enough for me.
“Of course I do not hate him,” Celeste said now, with more of that laughter that seemed to suggest I was very young and foolish. I didn’t care for it, but I couldn’t work out how to ask her to stop. “Where do you get such ideas?”
“From you. When you screamed that you hated him, and would hate him forever, and would never cheapen yourself by succumbing to the kind of dime-store forgiveness—”
“Here is what I can tell you about Javier,” Celeste said, cutting me off. And pronouncing his name as if it was a meal. “He is not like other men. You should know this, going in. Throw out any preconceptions you might have.”
“The only man I know is Father. A handful of priests. And your husband.”
I had not meant to say those words the way I did. Your husband. As if I was pronouncing some kind of judgment.
But Celeste settled farther back against the settee as if she was relaxing. As if this was the moment she could finally retreat from her usual strict perfection and render herself boneless. “Javier is virile. Animalistic, even. He will take what he wants, and worse, you will happily debase yourself to give it to him.”
I frowned. “I have no intention of debasing myself. Much less happily.”
Celeste waved a hand. “You will. He will demean you, insult you, and likely make you cry. And you will thank him for it.”
My heart was pounding so hard it made me feel dizzy. My throat was dry, and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. And that dread seemed to pulse in me, hotter and wilder by the second.
“Why are you telling me these things? The day before I must marry him?”
If Celeste was abashed, she didn’t look it. At all. “I am merely trying to prepare you, Imogen.”
“I already think he is a monster. I’m not certain why you think talk of debasement and insults would improve the situation.”
“You will have to watch that tongue of yours, of course,” she said, almost sadly. “He won’t put up with it. Or the way you run about heedlessly as if you are one of those common women on a treadmill somewhere, sweaty and red-faced.”
Because she was naturally slim and beautiful, of course. She assumed that anyone who had to work for perfection didn’t deserve it.
It had somehow never occurred to me before that this description might apply to me, too.
“You are very lucky, then, that you were spared this,” I said softly. “That I am here to carry this burden for you. For the family.”
I had never seen her look as she did then. Her face flushed with what I could only call some kind of temper. Her chin rose. And her eyes glittered. “Indeed. I count myself lucky daily.”
I found my hands on the hem of my pajama top, fiddling with the fine cotton as if I could worry it into threads. Betraying my anxiety, I knew.
And as strangely as my sister was behaving today, she was still my sister. The only person who had never punished me for asking questions.
This was why I dared to ask the one thing that had worried me the most since my father had announced my engagement to me over Christmas dinner.
“Do you think...?” I cleared my throat. “Will he hurt me?”
For a long moment, Celeste did not speak. And when she did, there was a hard look in her eyes, her lips twisted, and she no longer looked the least bit relaxed.
“You will survive it,” she told me, something bleak and ugly there between us. “You will always survive it, Imogen, for better or worse, and that is what you will hold on to. My advice to you is to get pregnant as quickly as possible. Men like this want heirs. In the end, that is all they want. The sooner you do your duty, the quicker they will leave you alone.”
And long after she swept from my room, I stayed where I was, stricken. And unable to breathe. There was a constriction in my chest and that heavy dread in my gut, and I couldn’t help but think that I had seen my half sister—truly seen her—for the first time today.
It filled me like a kind of grief.
But I was also filled with a kind of restlessness I didn’t understand.
That was what got me up and onto my feet. I dashed the odd moisture from my eyes with hands I knew better than to keep in fists. I started for the door, then imagined—too vividly—my father’s reaction should I be found wandering about the house when it was filled with important wedding guests, clad only in my pajamas with my hair obviously unbrushed.
I went into my bedroom and dressed quickly, pulling on the dress the maids had left out for me, wordlessly encouraging me to clothe myself the way my father preferred. Not to my own taste, which would never have run to dresses at this chilly time of year, no matter that this one was long-sleeved and made of a fine wool. I paired the dress with butter-soft knee-high leather boots, and then found myself in my mirror.
I had not transformed into elegance during my vigil on the settee.
Curls like mine always looked unkempt. Elegance was sleek and smooth, but my hair resisted any and all attempts to tame it. The nuns had done what they could, but even they had been unable to combat my hair’s natural tendency to find its own shape. I ran my fingers through it as best I could, letting the curls do as they would because they always did.
My hair was the bane of my existence. Much as I was the bane of my father’s.
Only then, when I could say that in all honesty I had at least tried to sort myself out into something resembling order, did I leave my room.
I made my way out into the hall in the family wing, then ducked into one of the servants’ back stairs. My father would not approve of his daughter moving about the house like one of the help, but I had never thought that he needed to know how familiar I was with the secret passages in this old pile of stones. Knowing them made life here that much more bearable.
Knowing my wa
y through the shadows allowed me to remain at large when there was a lecture brewing. It permitted me to come in from long walks on the grounds, muddy and disheveled, and make it to my own rooms before the sight of me caused the usual offense, outrage, and threats to curtail my exercise until I learned how to behave like a lady.
I carefully made my way over to the guest wing, skirting around the rooms I knew had been set aside for various family members and my father’s overfed friends. I knew that there was only one possible place my father would have dared put a man as wealthy and powerful as Javier Dos Santos. Only one place suitable for a groom with such a formidable financial reputation.
My father might have turned Javier from the house ten years ago, but now that he was welcome and set to marry the right daughter, Dermot Fitzalan would spare him no possible luxury.
I headed for what was one of the newer additions to the grand old house, a two-story dwelling place appended to the end of the guest wing where my grandmother had lived out her final days. It was more a house all its own, with its own entrance and rooms, but I knew that I could access it on the second level and sneak my way along its private gallery.
I didn’t ask myself why I was doing this. I only knew it was tied to the grief I felt for the sister it turned out I barely knew and that dread inside me that pulsed at me, spurring me on.
I eased my way through the servant’s door that disappeared behind a tapestry at one end of the gallery. I flattened myself to the wall and did my best to keep my ears peeled for any signs of life.
And it was the voice I heard first.
His voice.
Commanding. Dark. Rich like dark chocolate and deep red wine, all wrapped in one.
Beautiful, something in me whispered.
I was horrified with myself. But I didn’t back away.
He was speaking in rapid Spanish, liquid and lovely, out of sight on the floor below me. I inched forward, moving away from the gallery wall so I could look over the open side of the balcony to the great room below.
And for a moment, memory and reality seemed tangled up in each other. Once again, I was gazing down at Javier Dos Santos from afar. From above.
Once again, I was struck by how physical he seemed. Long ago, he had been dressed for the evening in a coat with tails that had only accentuated the simmering brutality he seemed to hold leashed there in his broad shoulders and his granite rock of a torso.
Today he stood in a button-down shirt tucked into trousers that did things I hardly understood to his powerful thighs. I only knew I couldn’t look away.
Once again, my heart beat so hard and so fast I was worried I might be ill.
But I wasn’t.
I knew I wasn’t.
I watched him rake his fingers through that dark hair of his, as black and as glossy as I remembered it, as if even the years dared not defy him. He listened to the mobile he held at one ear for a moment, his head cocked to one side, then replied in another spate of the lyrical Spanish that seem to wind its way around me. Through me. Deep inside me, too.
With my functional Spanish I could pick up the sense of the words, if not every nuance. Business concerns in Wales. Something about the States. And a fiercer debate by far about Japan.
He finished his call abruptly, then tossed his mobile onto the table next to him. It thunked against the hard wood, making me too aware of the silence.
And too conscious of my own breathing and my mad, clattering heart.
Javier Dos Santos stood there a moment, his attention on the papers before him, or possibly his tablet computer.
When he raised his head, he did it swiftly. His dark eyes were fierce and sure, pinning me where I stood. I understood in a sudden red haze of exposure and fear that he had known I was here all along.
He had known.
“Hello, Imogen,” he said, switching to faintly accented English that made my name sound like some kind of incantation. Or terrible curse. “Do you plan to do something more than stare?”
CHAPTER TWO
Javier
I WAS A man built from lies.
My faithless father. My weak, codependent mother. The lies they had told—to each other, to the world, to me and my sisters—had made me the man I was today, for good or ill.
I allowed no room in the life I had crafted from nothing for lies like theirs. Not from my employees or associates. Not from my sisters, grown now and beholden to me. Not from a single soul on this earth.
And certainly not from myself.
So there was no hiding from the fact that my first glimpse of my future bride—the unfortunate Fitzalan sister, as she was known—did not strike me the way I had anticipated it would.
I had expected that she would do well enough. She was not Celeste, but she was a Fitzalan. It was her pedigree that mattered, that and the sweet, long-anticipated revenge of forcing her father to give me the very thing he had denied me once already.
I had never done well with denial. Ten years ago it had not taken me to my knees, as I suspected Dermot Fitzalan thought it would. On the contrary, it had led me to go bigger, to strive harder, to make absolutely certain that the next time I came for a Fitzalan daughter, their arrogant, self-satisfied father would not dare deny me.
I had expected that my return to this cold, gloomy mausoleum in the north of France would feel like a victory lap. Because it was.
What I did not expect was the kick of lust that slammed through me at the sight of her.
It made no sense. I had been raised in the gutters of Madrid, but I had always wanted better. Always. As I’d fought my way out of the circumstances of my birth, I’d coveted elegance and collected it wherever I could.
It had made sense for me to pursue Celeste. She was grace personified, elegant from the tips of her fingernails to the line of her neck, and nothing but ice straight through.
It had made sense that I had wanted her to adorn my collection.
The girl before me, who had dared try to sneak up on a man who had been raised in dire pits filled with snakes and jackals and now walked untroubled through packs of wolves dressed as aristocrats, was...unruly.
She had red-gold hair that slithered this way and that and stubborn curls she had made no apparent attempt to tame. There was a spray of freckles over her nose, and I knew that if I could see them from this distance, it likely meant that my eyes were not deceiving me and she had not, in fact, bothered with even the faintest hint of cosmetics in a nod toward civility.
On the one hand, that meant her dark, thick lashes and the berry shade of her full lips were deliciously natural.
But it also showed that she had little to no sense of propriety.
She was otherwise unadorned. She wore a navy blue dress that was unobjectionable enough, with classic lines that nodded toward her generous figure without making too much of it, and leather boots that covered her to her knees.
I could have forgiven the hair and even the lack of cosmetics—which suggested she had not prepared for her first meeting with me the way a woman who planned to make the perfect wife would have.
But it was the way she was scowling at me that suggested she was even less like her sister than I had imagined.
Celeste had never cracked. Not even when she’d been denied what she’d so prettily claimed she wanted. Oh, she’d caused a carefully prepared scene for her father, but there had never been anything but calculation in her gaze. Her mascara had never run. She had never presented anything but perfection, even in the midst of her performance.
The fact it still rankled made it a weakness. I thrust it aside.
“Surely that is not the expression you wish to show your future husband,” I said quietly. “On this, the occasion of our first meeting.”
I had heard her come in and creep along the strange balcony above me the butler had told me was a gallery. Not a very good galle
ry, I had thought with a derisive glance at the art displayed there. All stodgy old masters and boring ecclesiastical works. Nothing bold. Nothing new.
Until she’d come.
“I want to know why you wish to marry me.” She belted that out, belligerent and bordering on rude. A glance confirmed that she was making fists at her sides. Fists.
I felt my brow raise. “I beg your pardon?”
Her scowl deepened. “I want to know why you want to marry me, when if you are even half as rich and powerful as they say, you could marry anyone.”
I thrust my hands—not in anything resembling fists—into the pockets of my trousers, and considered her.
I should have been outraged. I told myself I was.
But the truth was, there was something about her that tempted me to smile. And I was not a man who smiled easily, if at all.
I told myself it was the very fact that she had come here, when our wedding was not until the morning. It was the fact she seemed to imagine she could put herself between her grasping, snobbish father and me when these were matters that could not possibly concern her. Daughters of men like Dermot Fitzalan always did what they were told, sooner or later.
Yet here she was.
It was the futility of it, I thought. My Don Quixote bride with her wild hair, tilting at windmills and scowling all the while. It made something in my chest tighten.
“I will answer any questions you have,” I told her magnanimously, trying my best to contain my own ferocity. “But you must face me.”
“I’m looking right at you.”
I only raised a hand, then beckoned her to me with two languid fingers.
And then waited, aware that it had been a long time indeed since I had been in the presence of someone...unpredictable.
I saw her hands open, then close again at her sides. I saw the way her chest moved, telling me that she fought to keep her breath even.
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