Читать книгу His for Revenge - CAITLIN CREWS - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTHE HOUSE WAS like something out of a Gothic novel.
Zara had to fight to conceal her shiver of recognition from the man who lounged beside her in the black mood he’d worn throughout the drive.
“Cold?” he asked. Chase’s voice was polite on the surface, but his gaze was a wilderness of blue and almost liquid, somehow, with a kind of sharp heat that speared straight through her. And none of it friendly.
“Not at all,” Zara said, though she was. “Your house isn’t the most welcoming place, is it?”
Gothic, she thought again. She’d read significantly more Gothic novels than the average person and not only because she was writing a master’s thesis on the topic. On some level she should have expected she’d find herself in the middle of one. It was the only thing her absurd wedding day had been missing.
“It’s December.” Chase’s voice was as cold as his estate looked in the beam of the limousine’s headlights. Barren and frozen as far as the eye could see. “Nothing in this part of the country is welcoming at this time of year.”
But it was more than that. Or it was her imagination, Zara amended, which had always been as feverish as the rest of her was practical. The old stone manor rose like an apparition at the top of a long, winding drive through a thick and lonely winter forest of ghostly, stripped-bare trees and unfriendly pines coated with ice and the snowy remains of the last storm. Several inches of snow clung to the roof above the main part of the house, and each of its wings glittered with icicles at the gutters, though the sky above tonight was clear. Thick and almost too dark, but clear.
She tried to imagine the house festooned in spring blossoms or warmed by the summer sun, and failed. Miserably.
For the first time in her life, Zara questioned her addiction to Daphne du Maurier and Phyllis A. Whitney novels. They might have helped her through an awkward adolescence and paved the way toward what she hoped would become her life’s work, but they had also made her entirely too susceptible to the dark possibilities lurking in a scary old mansion, a bridegroom she scarcely knew and whatever rattled around in the gloomy shadows of places like this.
“Are you sure you don’t have any madwomen locked away in the attic?” she asked, appalled when her voice sounded more shaken than wry.
“Making me a convenient bigamist and you therefore free of this mess we’re both stuck in?” he replied, smooth and deadly, and shocking Zara. She wouldn’t have pegged him as a reader of Jane Eyre. Or a reader at all, come to that, when he could be off brooding beautifully somewhere instead. “I’m afraid not. My apologies.”
Chase did not sound remotely sorry. Nor did he sound drunk, which Zara couldn’t quite understand. She’d expected sloppiness when he’d continued to drink from that whiskey bottle throughout the drive, had braced herself for his unconsciousness and his snores. Instead, he simply seemed on edge.
More on edge, that was.
Maybe the place—and the man—was more welcoming in the daylight, Zara thought as diplomatically as possible as the car pulled up to the looming front entrance. Then again, it hardly mattered. She wasn’t here to settle in and make a happy home for herself. She was here because Grams had wanted her to try. She was here because this proved, once and for all, that she was the good daughter. Surely this finally settled the matter. Surely her father would finally have to recognize—
“Come,” her brand-new husband said from much too close beside her, his hand at her side and that disconcerting gaze burning into her as surely as that small contact did, and when she jerked her head around to stare back at him it was even worse. All that irrational, unmanageable fire. “I’d like to get out of these clothes, if you don’t mind. And put this lamentable farce behind me as quickly as possible.”
Zara couldn’t keep herself from imagining beautiful Chase Whitaker without his clothes any more than she could stop herself from breathing her next breath. All that long, lean, smooth muscle. All that ruthlessly contained power—
Get a hold of yourself! she yelped inwardly.
And then she pretended she didn’t see the way his eyes gleamed, like he could read her dirty mind.
Chase ushered her into the grand front hall of the sprawling stone mansion, adorned with art and tapestries and moldings so intricate they almost looked like some kind of architectural frosting, with what felt like more irritation than courtesy. He introduced her to his waiting housekeeper, Mrs. Calloway, without adjusting his stride and then marched Zara up the great stair to the second floor. Zara had the jumbled impression of graceful statues and priceless art, beautifully appointed rooms and long, gleaming hallways, all in a hectic blur as they moved swiftly past.
He didn’t speak. And Zara found she couldn’t. Not only was the house lifted from the pages of the books she studied, but now that she was this close to getting out of her horribly uncomfortable dress at last and, God willing, sinking into a very deep, very hot, restorative bath for about an hour or five, every single step that kept her from it was like sheer torture.
That and the fact that Chase was more than a little forbidding himself. It was that set way he held himself. Contained and furious, even as he prowled along beside her. It seemed particularly obvious in a place like this, all shadows and absence, empty rooms and echoing footsteps.
You’re becoming hysterical.
When she felt like herself again, she was sure she’d stop thinking like this. She was sure. And then she’d fish her cell phone out of the bag she fervently hoped was in that limo and she would either listen to the host of apologetic messages Ariella should have left for her today, or, in their far more likely absence, call Ariella until her sister answered and explained this great big mess she’d made.
And then maybe all of this would feel a little bit less Gothic.
Particularly if she got out of this damned dress before it crippled her forever.
“Here,” Chase grunted, pushing open a door.
Zara blinked. Her head spun and her heart began to race and her feet suddenly felt rooted to the floor. “Is this…?”
“Your rooms.” He smirked. “Unless you planned to make this a more traditional marriage? I could no doubt be persuaded. I’ve certainly had enough whiskey to imagine anything is a good idea. My rooms are at the other end of this hall.”
Zara thought she’d rather die than persuade him to do anything of the kind. Or anyone like him who would, she had no doubt, need nothing in the way of persuasion if she was lanky, lovely, effortlessly appealing Ariella.
Not that you want this man either way, she reminded herself. Pointedly. She’d always been allergic to his type: basically, male versions of her sister. Younger versions of her father. Entitled and arrogant and no, thank you.
Despite that thing in her that felt like heat, only far more dangerous.
“Whiskey wears off,” she said crisply. “And more to the point, I haven’t had any.” She brushed past him, determined to sleep in whatever the hell room this was, even if it was a cell and her only option was the floor. “This is perfect, thank you.”
“Zara.” She didn’t want to stop walking, but she did, as if he could command her that easily. You’re tired, she assured herself. That’s all. “I’ll be back later,” he said, his voice dark and, yes, foreboding.
“For what? Persuasion? There won’t be any. No matter when you come back.”
He let out a noise that might have been a laugh, and the madness was that she felt it skim down the length of her spine like a long, lush sweep of his fingers.
There was no reason that she should have felt him the way she did then, like an imprint of fire, large and looming over her from behind, like he could cast a shadow and drown her in it all at once. And there was no reason that her body should react to him the way it did, jolting wide-awake and hungry, just like that.
“I’ll be back,” he said again, a low thread of sound, dark and rough, and she felt that, too. Felt it, like his hands against her skin.
She nodded. Acquiesced. It was that or succumb to panic entirely.
Zara waited until he closed the door behind her, then let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. It came out in a kind of shudder, and she had to blink back all that overwhelming heat from her eyes.
Then she actually looked around her.
The bedroom suite was done in restrained blues accented by geometrical shapes etched in an elegant black, with a lit fireplace against one wall that was already crackling away and an inviting sofa and two chairs in front of it that begged for a book, a cozy throw blanket and a long, rainy afternoon’s read. The bed was a cheerful four-poster affair, with quilts and blankets piled high and a multitude of deep, soft-looking pillows. It was a contented, happy sort of room, and it made all that Gothic fervor ease away, leaving Zara feeling overtired and foolish in its wake.
Her gaze snagged on the set of photographs on the mantel above the fireplace as she walked deeper into the room, all featuring pictures of a very tall, very recognizable black-haired girl, solemn dark eyes and an enigmatic almost-smile on her pretty face. Mattie Whitaker. Chase’s infamous sister.
Zara read the tabloids, and not only when she was stuck in line at the supermarket. Mattie had been all over them recently for her “secret marriage” to “playboy Chase’s greatest rival,” which Zara didn’t think could have been too terribly secret if there were all those pictures of Mattie and her harshly attractive husband gazing at each other in front of a glorious Greek backdrop. Just as Nicodemus Stathis couldn’t possibly be the terrible rival the papers wanted him to be if Chase and he were working on a merger.
Shockingly, she told herself derisively, the papers lie, as your entire life watching Ariella manipulate them to her benefit should have made you well aware.
But it was Mattie Whitaker’s bathroom she cared about then, not the marriage Chase had claimed he’d sold his sister into. Or what the tabloids might have made up about it.
“That,” she said out loud as she headed for the far door across the bedroom, “will be something Mattie and I can bond over across the table at Christmas. Our delightful forced marriages, whether secret or not.”
She lost her train of thought and let out a sigh of delight instead when she walked inside and found the bathtub of her dreams waiting for her, vast and deep enough for a group of people, placed before high windows that looked out into the silken night.
Bliss.
Zara turned on the tap greedily and dumped a capful of the foaming bath salts that sat on the tub’s lip into the warm stream. Then she ripped that veil straight off her head, not caring that it tugged at her hair. That it hurt. It came off with a clatter of hairpins against the floor, and Zara moaned out loud in stark relief as she massaged her way over her abused scalp, pulling out the remaining pins and letting her hair fall free at last.
Now it was time to deal with that torturous dress. The water poured into the bath behind her as she tugged and pulled, twisting herself this way and that as she tried to free herself. It was far more difficult than it should have been—but Zara was desperate. She yanked even harder—
And then at last she heard a glorious tearing sound, the fabric finally gave—and she yanked it all off, kicking the tattered remains away as the dress fell to her feet in a voluminous cloud. At first, she hurt more than she had before. Her breasts ached, and she could see the angry lines the built-in corset had left all over them and her belly, red and pronounced because she had the kind of skin that showed every last mark like a neon billboard.
And because the dress had been made for her sister, who better resembled a starving gazelle and had needed that corset to create the illusion of the cleavage she didn’t have rather than tamp down any existing breasts.
It was such a relief to be free of that hideous torture device that Zara’s eyes filled with tears. But she refused to indulge them, not here in this too-Gothic mansion with the whiskey-pounding, possibly dangerous husband she’d never met before the ceremony. Not when she didn’t know that she’d stop. Not when the wedding was only the latest in a long stream of things she could probably cry about, if she let herself.
Not here. Not tonight. Grams had maintained her stiff upper lip to the very last of her days. Zara could do the same with far less provocation.
She toed off the white ballet flats she’d worn all day—thank goodness she and Ariella wore the same size shoes and she hadn’t had to make like one of Cinderella’s unfortunate stepsisters and hack off a toe to fit into them—and shimmied out of the very bright, screaming red thong panties she’d worn beneath it all. The only thing in the whole, long, strange day that was hers.
Zara couldn’t control the deep, atavistic sigh she let out when she slipped into the bath at last. The water was hot and the bubbles were high enough to feel decadent without being so high they became a problem. She piled her hair—wild and thick and incredibly unruly from a day in pins and scraped into submission beneath that veil—up on top of her head in a messy knot as she tried to picture glamorous, couture-draped Mattie Whitaker lounging in this bathtub the way she was now. Mattie Whitaker, who was a good deal like Ariella in Zara’s mind—one of those effortless girls, all long, slender limbs; hot-and-cold-running boyfriends; and the ability to float through life without a single care.
Zara’s life had been charmed in its own way yet was significantly less gleaming, despite the fact she, too, was an Elliott. She’d failed to look the part from birth and hadn’t ever managed to act the part, either, despite the thousands of lectures Amos had delivered on the topic. Even when doing so would have been in her best interests.
Well. She’d acted the part today, hadn’t she? She’d done it. I did what you asked, Grams, she thought then. I gave him one last chance to treat me differently.
She shut her eyes and leaned back against the smooth porcelain, breathing in the jasmine-scented steam as she tried to expel all the tension of the day from her body. As she tried not to think about what had happened earlier in that church. Or what might happen later, because who knew what the expectations were in a situation this twisted? Or what she’d got herself into, marrying a man who was not only a total stranger, but who’d turned up to his own wedding half-drunk and entirely furious, and that had been before he’d seen the switch.
Zara didn’t know how long she sat like that, the water cascading all around her, the jasmine heat like an embrace, soaking all the red marks from the vicious gown away into the ether and her headache along with it. She was lazily contemplating climbing out of the bath and investigating the possibility of dinner when she felt a shift in the air. Everything simply went taut, her skin felt too tight, and she reluctantly opened up her eyes.
To find Chase leaning there in the doorway, looking dark and disreputable, lethally dangerous in a way that made the back of her neck tingle, and nothing at all like drunk.
For a moment Zara stopped breathing. Her heart gave a mighty kick against her ribs and then jackrabbited into high gear. Her ears rang as if someone had screamed, and her throat ached as if she was that someone, but she knew she’d done nothing at all but stare back at the man who shouldn’t have been there.
She needed to say something. She needed to do something. But he was so beautiful it hurt, even more so now that he’d changed out of his wedding suit and was something far more elemental in bare feet that defied the weather beneath a soft-looking button-down shirt he hadn’t bothered to do up properly over a pair of jeans. And his dark blue eyes seemed wilder than before, remote and with that aching thing at once, like some kind of ruthless poetry. She didn’t know what lodged in her chest then, only that it was much too sharp and alarmingly deep.
“Shouldn’t you be passed out on a floor somewhere?” she asked, harsher than she’d meant to sound.
Maybe this was his version of drunken, idiotic behavior. She’d witnessed the bitter end of her parents’ marriage over the course of too many drink-blurred nights, as they’d each got drunker and meaner. Ariella had sneaked out to escape it, while Zara had tried to hide from it in books where all the terrifying goings-on weren’t usually real, in the end. She’d never seen the appeal of getting drunk since.
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.”
