Again, that little crook in his lips that was his version of a smile that Zara found she liked—and looked forward to coaxing out of him—a great deal more than she should. Like it was their own personal version of happiness. Contentment. Newly wedded bliss.
You need to get a grip on yourself, Zara, she told herself then. Right now. You’d be better off chasing ghosts down the hallways, and far more successful at that.
“I’ve spent most of my life in England,” Chase said. He sounded conversational—which was so unlike him that Zara viewed it as a personal victory. “It’s cold here, but dry. It doesn’t get in the bones in quite the same way.”
“Didn’t you grow up here?” she asked, startled. “I thought I was staying in your sister’s childhood bedroom.”
She couldn’t define the expression she saw on his face then. As guarded as it was intent, that hint of any kind of easiness gone as if it had never been. She was certain he wouldn’t answer her—and couldn’t entirely hide her surprise when he did.
“This was my father’s house,” he said, sounding very careful, as if he was making his way across eggshells and glass, and Zara wished she could see them. Or help, somehow. “It was handed down from his grandfather, who built it to compete with the likes of the Rockefellers and all the other grand houses up and down the Hudson River. My parents used this as their primary residence, but I spent the bulk of my time in school in England. Mattie was here far more than I ever was. Especially after our mother died.”
“I read about that.” She’d scoured the internet, in fact, for every tidbit ever written about any member of the Whitaker family. She told herself she couldn’t help it, that she was a researcher at heart, as her master’s degree course proved. That she had no personal stake in any of it, that she felt absolutely nothing when she read this Vanity Fair article about his late mother, Lady Daphne, or that tabloid paean to his overly observed love life. Nothing at all. “I’m sorry.”
She thought there was something hollow in his gaze then, something so broken it made her hurt, but told herself it had to be the shadows all around them. The hour. Those terrible songs that moved in her that made her despair of herself.
When he spoke again his voice was almost too low. “It was a long time ago.”
“My mother isn’t dead,” she said. She didn’t know why. “But she was never quite right after my father divorced her. Grief can take any number of forms, I mean. Even extraordinary selfishness.”
He studied her, and Zara didn’t know why she felt so stricken suddenly. As if everything had shifted all around them and gone somehow wrong.
“They say time cures everything,” he said after a moment, but she knew—she knew—that he wasn’t the least bit cured. That time did nothing for him but pass.
Around them, the library was a vast, high room, but tonight it felt small. Close. Like it was only the two of them in a cave somewhere, warding off the storm. It felt much too intimate.
And that was the last thing she wanted with this man, because Zara knew herself. She didn’t do casual. She didn’t enjoy herself in any of the ways Ariella had meant she should. She couldn’t. She wasn’t built that way—and this marriage wasn’t built to last out the season.
But he isn’t casual at all, a voice inside of her whispered. He’s your husband, no matter how you got to the altar. He is the very definition of not casual.
It was amazing how tempting it was to listen.
But Zara knew better.
“I think it’s time I tried to get some sleep,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. A small scrape against the warmth, the closeness, that look in his eyes and the things that surged in her like an answer she didn’t want to hear.
Like that same song deep inside of her, changing her with every note.
His mouth crooked, and he watched her like he could see all of her confusion right there on her face.
Like it was a challenge. A gauntlet on the floor at her feet.
“Good night, Chase,” she whispered, and then she fled.
CHAPTER FOUR
SHE WAS DRIVING him crazy.
Chase let her race from the room, glancing at the grandfather clock on the far wall and noting it was nearly time for his end of the workday call to Tokyo. He knew Zara thought he rattled around this house all night in some kind of drunken stupor. He encouraged it.
Just as he’d encouraged the British press to portray him as a pretty boy of no depth whatsoever, happy to whore himself around Europe and play at a corporate job in Daddy’s company as it suited him. The great part about having discovered his own dark depths at thirteen, he knew, was that he’d stopped caring very much about any bad reputation he might have thereafter.
So there was no reason at all it should have bothered him that Zara Elliott looked at him like he might well be the very monster he knew he was. That she was the first one who’d ever looked at him as if she knew, as if she could see straight through twenty years of pretense to the truth.
What he didn’t understand was why he wanted her all the more because of it.
“You are a twisted, terrible man,” he muttered, glaring at the fire. But he already knew that.
He might have declared this a honeymoon, but that was mostly so he’d have some breathing room to prepare the counterattack that would rid him of his Amos Elliott problem at last. His merger with his new brother-in-law’s company was moving forward as planned. Nicodemus and he had come to a number of agreements on key issues, which meant everything was falling into place, exactly as he’d planned in the desperate days when he’d realized he and his sister had no choice but to go ahead with these medieval arranged marriages. That it was the only thing that could save the company, and thus the two of them, too. Or their father’s legacy, anyway.
Revenge was going to be more than sweet, Chase thought then. He knew he couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t undo what he’d done. He couldn’t bring back his mother or be the son his father had deserved. But he could save Whitaker Industries. He could preserve the second great love of his father’s life. And he could cut Amos Elliott down to size while he did it.
Zara was the key. But she wasn’t behaving the way he’d thought she would. Correction: the way he’d thought her sister would.
He’d understood everything there was to know about Ariella Elliott within three seconds of meeting her. She’d shimmied about before him, all jaded eyes and come-hither lips, and he’d been as bored as if he’d actually dated her for months. It was one of the reasons he’d agreed to Amos’s insane demands so easily. He knew her type. He’d met thousands of Ariellas in his day. Apathetic. Entitled. Awash in a sea of her own self-importance and buoyed in her narcissism by all her father’s money and influence. He couldn’t think of a single thing a woman like Ariella could do that would surprise him.
A long December locked up in this house with Ariella would already have gone differently. That first night in that bathroom would have ended in an entirely more physical manner, Chase was well aware. By now he could have moved on to other things, like the troweled-on compliments and feigned interest that would lead a woman like Ariella to talk. To talk and talk and talk, indiscreet and self-satisfied, secure in her misguided belief that any man she condescended to sleep with remained forever under her spell.
It would have been easy.
But Zara was nothing like her sister.
This Elliott sister required thought, and the more Chase tried to puzzle her out, the more he found himself remembering her standing in that bath, slick and warm and so stunning it still raced through him, hot and wild. And he had the very disconcerting notion that just like that night, if he touched her, he wouldn’t be in control at all.
Not to mention his very real concern that if he tried to use her for information the way he’d planned to do with her sister, she’d know exactly what he was doing. He couldn’t decide if he found that irritating or, much worse, arousing.
He heard her footsteps on the flo
or above him, moving down that long hall to her rooms, no doubt to lock herself away from him the way she should. He heard the storm outside the library windows, hurling itself against the side of the house like it wanted to fight its way in. His usual ghosts took up their positions around him, almost like old friends after all this time. His mother on that last day, laughing the way she’d always done, with her whole body and such easy, captivating delight. His sister the way she’d been back then, young and bright and happy, her little girl’s voice singing a song he’d spent a lifetime trying to forget. His father when he’d still laughed so large, so unfettered, like he had nothing at all to lose, before the day that Chase had proved him wrong forever.
The worst thing about Zara was that she made him remember, if only for moments here and there, what it had felt like to be happy.
Unforgivable, he thought harshly.
Because this time, Chase knew exactly what he’d have to do to her, no matter that she was nothing like that terrible sister of hers who he wouldn’t have minded using as a simple, effective tool to get what he wanted. This time, he knew what it would cost her when he did the thing he needed to do.
And the price he’d have to pay when he did it anyway.
* * *
Chase might have been the perfect Gothic hero, all brooding and dark and occasionally windswept as if to add to his mystique, but Zara spent a lot of her energy during the daylight hours making certain that the rest of this new married life was nothing like the books she studied. The house had a name, it was true, but no one invoked it in ponderous tones or acted like the house itself was alive and/or angry at its occupants.
“It’s called Greenleigh,” Mrs. Calloway, the housekeeper, had told her when she’d asked. “Just wait until spring and you’ll see why. It’s so pretty, with the lawns and the trees stretching out halfway to Poughkeepsie. The original Mr. Whitaker’s wife’s name was Leigh, so he named the place after her as a gift.”
Zara was thrilled to discover that Mrs. Calloway was neither dour nor disapproving. She didn’t waft through the house in shades of black, muttering alarming things about the past. Instead, she was a friendly older woman who bustled rather than walked, insisted upon decking the halls in as much Christmas cheer as it was possible to cram into one house and cooked like a dream. Her husband—who sang Christmas carols as he puttered about, in a surprisingly lovely tenor—had never been in Zara’s presence without also being wreathed in smiles. They lived out in one of the guest cottages that dotted the estate and were more than happy to talk about their cheerful, well-adjusted children and their growing tally of plump grandchildren.
Despite first appearances and the slightest bit of hysteria brought on by impersonating Ariella, she group texted her three best friends from college, who lived all over the place these days and had been universally unimpressed to hear about her sudden wedding on the news, my actual marriage appears to be anything but supernatural.
A conviction that was not shared by the general public, insofar as the tabloids could be held to represent their views.
Society Shocker! they’d screamed that first week, right after the wedding. Hottie Chase Spurns Ariella for Ugly Duckling Sis!
And that was one of the more flattering headlines. When one week became two and neither Chase nor Zara appeared in public, they’d dropped any pretense of “flattery.”
Ariella could have written those headlines herself, her friend Amy texted back staunchly from Denver after Zara shared the worst of them. They’re as nasty as she is.
I suggest you ignore them, Marilee had chimed in from Chicago, and concentrate on that hot husband of yours.
I know I am, Isobel texted from Edinburgh.
Zara laughed out loud in her little sitting area before the fire, which had fast become her favorite part of her bedroom suite.
Relax, ladies, she texted back. It’s not real.
But what worried her was how much she wanted it to be real. How much she wished and yearned and longed, like the sad little ugly duckling her sister and the whole world imagined she was already.
It was maddening. It was like being thirteen years old all over again, ungainly and insecure.
“Did I offend you in some way?” Chase asked at their usual dinner that night, cooped up in that tiny little room that seemed smaller all the time.
That was when Zara realized she was scowling at him. She forced herself to stop, to cast around for that polite smile she’d worn so easily before she’d met him. For years.
“Not recently,” she said. “But I’m sure we need only wait a few moments before you remedy that.”
And there was that little crook to those perfect lips of his that she spent more time fantasizing about than she should. Because she remembered all too well how they’d felt against hers in that church. The press of heat. The whisper of power in it. The way it had ricocheted through her body and lodged low in her belly, like a punch.
“No doubt,” he agreed. “Mrs. Calloway tells me you were interrogating her about my ancestors again today. You need only ask me what you want to know, Zara. I’m a walking encyclopedia of all things Whitaker.”
Zara had run into the housekeeper in one of the salons, dusting the forbidding portraits of old, steely-eyed men hanging there. Zara had grown up with a number of similar paintings in her father’s rambling old house in Connecticut, many of them involving those silly Revolutionary War–era wigs she still couldn’t take seriously.
“I very much doubt that the word interrogate was used,” she said now. So we both grew up surrounded by pompous portraits, she told herself derisively. That doesn’t mean a thing. They aren’t a bridge between you—they’re paintings. She really was pathetic, she thought, and sniffed. “And I’m not all that interested in your ancestors. I have far too many of my own. Also, I read your Wikipedia page.”
He leaned back in his chair, looking as if he was actually enjoying himself, and Zara felt a warm sort of glow spill through her. Like that had been her goal all along.
Wasn’t it? that traitorous little voice asked.
Chase was wearing a sweater tonight, a sleek, dark knit that was obviously soft as it pulled against the width of those shoulders of his and drew attention to the easy perfection of his physique. But he was more than simply hot. He exuded something raw and primal, something that kept her belly in a tight knot whenever she was with him. Something that made her breasts heavy and her core slick, and she’d never felt anything like it before.
She was an imperfect Gothic heroine, Zara knew. She wasn’t chaste or virginal. She’d always thought she was as reasonably experienced as anyone her age, after the boyfriend she’d had for the last two years of college and the other one she’d had for about eighteen months before graduate school. Not too much, not too little. She’d thought she’d known what it was to want, to need, to lust, but she’d never met anyone like Chase before.
This—he—was something new.
It was like everything had been the same before she’d met him. Primary colors, bleeding one into the next, indistinguishable from each other. But Chase was rich, deep blacks contrasted by stark whites. Arresting. Incandescent. Moody. He was something deeper than what she’d known. Something more.
And it occurred to her that her friends—and even Ariella and all the mean-spirited tabloids—were right. This was an opportunity, and not one that came along very often. How often did a scholar of Gothic novels get the opportunity to spend this kind of time with her very own Gothic hero?
Zara knew she wasn’t hideous. She’d come to terms with the differences between herself and the Ariellas of the world a long time ago—it had been that or simply succumb to how wretched that gap made her feel. But even so, Chase Whitaker was not the sort of man she’d ever have imagined she’d find herself with, under any circumstances. She preferred men who were more like her. Quirky. Brainy. More interesting than incandescent.
Capable of fading into the background instead of commanding the attention
of the whole room by the simple virtue of entering it.
Chase was wild blue, uncontainable, and she was stuck with him for at least the rest of the month of December. After that party on New Year’s Eve that was obviously important to him for reasons she doubted he’d share with her, she imagined they’d wash their hands of each other. You’ll have your life back, she told herself fiercely to cover that odd little hollow feeling at the thought.
And in the meantime, she didn’t trust him or his motives for this marriage or his seeming obedience to her father’s wishes—but why did she have to? She didn’t want trust. She didn’t want to date him.
She just wanted.
It didn’t matter if she couldn’t do casual under normal circumstances. What was normal here? This marriage had an expiration date on it already. Casual or serious or neither—it would take care of itself.
“Careful,” Chase said then, and Zara realized she’d been staring at his mouth. “I might get the wrong idea.”
She put her knife and fork down on her plate carefully. Very carefully. She lifted her gaze to all that raw blue. She breathed in, then out, and told herself there wasn’t any part of her that might regret this rash decision.
You might as well enjoy yourself after all, that little voice whispered deep inside her, and not only because Ariella is absolutely certain you won’t.
She hadn’t asked to be in this situation. She’d been pushed. Dragged up the aisle, in fact. Why not indulge herself? Why not view this strange marriage of hers as research—and why not get the most out of her primary source while she could?
Zara smiled at him. Her husband, at least for now. And the most beautiful creature she’d ever beheld.
“But what if I want you to get the wrong idea?” she asked as casually as if she was discussing the weather.
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