Whatever it was that people felt when they were crazy in love with each other and not in the least bit afraid to show it.
Chase had never felt it himself, nor anything close. He’d always dated forgettable women, interchangeable women. He knew they’d bore him before they went out on their first date, so he’d always chosen them for other reasons. How their presence on his arm might benefit him. Whether or not they photographed well. Some or other lust, though nothing like what had swamped him tonight. What still beat in him now, heavy and low, testing his control.
He knew what it looked like, though. That kind of love. He’d seen it a very long time ago in his own parents. They’d sparkled when they’d been together, as if they’d been plugged in to their very own electric current. They’d held hands. They’d each smiled bright and happy when the other had walked into the room. They’d glowed.
And then you killed all that, the cold judge who presided over the darkest part of him pronounced. Lest he forget who he was. Or what he’d done. You killed her. And them.
“Now I understand why you married so quickly!” Mrs. Calloway said directly to him as she headed back for the door, snapping him back into the moment with her knowing little chuckle. “Enjoy this, Mr. Chase. You deserve it.”
She might as well have elbowed him in the face, this kindly old woman whom he’d known the whole of his life and whom he knew wished him only good. It was that much of a body blow.
Because Chase knew exactly what he deserved. And it certainly wasn’t whatever romantic fantasy his housekeeper had cooked up in her head. Not to mention what he’d been spinning out in his own.
And then Mrs. Calloway was gone, shutting the door very pointedly behind her as she sang back over her shoulder that there was no need to worry, they wouldn’t be disturbed again. Not tonight.
“How embarrassing,” Zara said as the other woman’s footsteps sounded on the hall floor, then faded away, in that same voice she’d used before, that he’d determined was her nerves in action. He shouldn’t find it adorable, he was well aware, and the fact that he did made him hate himself that much more. “I don’t think I’ve ever been walked in on in my life. I can’t decide if I’m humiliated or oddly—”
“I’m glad she walked in.” Chase cut her off. He didn’t miss the way she stiffened, or the coolness that crept into that gold gaze of hers. He told himself he didn’t care about that. Because God knew, he shouldn’t have. “That was a mistake.”
Zara studied him then, and Chase felt…outsized. As if his skin no longer fit the way it had before. As if he’d lost complete control of himself and all those terrible things in him had burst free, distorting him where he stood.
As if she really could see all of that darkness in him for what it was.
“I’m sorry you think so,” she said after a moment, and he didn’t care that he knew her better now than to believe that calm tone she used. That he could see a far darker truth in the gaze she dropped from his an instant later.
And if I can see that after two weeks and a kiss, he thought, what can she see in me?
Chase felt his hands tightening into fists and ordered himself to breathe. To open them again. To claw back some goddamned control. He wasn’t thirteen anymore. He was twenty years older than he’d been then, and these days, he knew how to handle himself.
Or he had before Zara Elliott had catapulted up that damned church aisle and into his life, dressed like a gazebo and capable of destroying his composure with a single look.
He hadn’t expected this, he thought then, as this wife he hadn’t wanted frowned at the floor like that might bring her clarity. He hadn’t expected her. This all would have been different if he’d been dealing with her sister, who was so unmemorable he couldn’t summon her features in his own head. If this had been Ariella, he wouldn’t have been set on fire like this, even now, like there was a blaze in him that nothing could dim. Like all she need do was reach for him and he’d forget himself all over again.
Chase hadn’t responded to a woman like this in as long as he could remember—perhaps ever—and that awful little fact all but flattened him. It also opened his eyes, at last, to the danger he was in. He had to remember his endgame here.
She was Amos Elliott’s daughter, and that meant he needed to use her. Not succumb to her.
“Let’s be honest for a moment,” he said, not bothering to sound polite.
Zara laughed, a rueful little scrape of sound that Chase knew would haunt him later. He could add it to his expansive collection of ghosts and regrets.
“That’s not an opening sentence that ever leads anywhere good,” she pointed out. “Much like, ‘I want to talk’ or ‘no offense, but…’ Nothing anyone wants to hear ever follows.”
She smiled in a hesitant sort of way, as if encouraging him to do the same, but Chase refused to be amused by her. He refused.
“This isn’t going to last,” he said shortly. Almost aggressively, and he saw that register in the way her body went tight. Too tight. Her arms, still crossed over her middle, stiffened like she was hugging herself. “This marriage is a joke. At best, a convenient vehicle. I need to be certain that when its usefulness has passed, there won’t be any lingering confusion.”
“Lingering confusion?” she repeated. Her head tilted and her gleaming eyes narrowed. “You mean mine, I’m guessing?”
What absurd thing had she said before? Pity sex? Chase could use that.
“You will fall in love.” He shrugged when her glare glazed over into something far more hostile. “It’s inevitable.”
“And why is that?” Her tone was sharp.
“Please,” he said dismissively, and with enough condescension that she stiffened further with obvious outrage. “The truth is, I don’t want the mess. It’s not worth the bother for something as easily obtained and equally forgettable as sex.” He waited until he saw her temper bloom in bright red splashes across her cheeks, then went for the kill shot. “I can get that anywhere, Zara. You must know that. Your sister offered me a blow job within five minutes of our introduction.”
She paled, then splashed scarlet again. But she didn’t keel over, this wife of his he wished he didn’t want the way he did, like a searing fire in his blood. He supposed that would haunt him, too.
“Anyone can get sex anywhere, Chase,” she retorted softly, his name a slap. “And a blow job is Ariella’s version of a friendly handshake. I’m sorry if you thought it was something special, just for you.”
So he sighed, and raked his hands through his hair and made a show of not quite rolling his eyes.
“You can’t imagine you’re the first woman to throw herself at me, can you?” he asked, his voice somewhere between patronizing and the sort of beleaguered kindness that he knew would appall her, it was so much like pity. “You’re simply the first I’ve happened to be married to at the time. And I appreciate the thought, Zara. I do.”
Her face was even redder then, and her eyes were so dark he could hardly see their color. But she stood there before him, drawn up to her full height, and he had the impression she was utterly impenetrable then. Like she’d wrapped herself in steel.
It was impossible not to admire her. He didn’t fight it.
“You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen,” she said, and her tone made the skin at the back of his neck tickle, because it was anything but complimentary. “But you’re empty inside, aren’t you? A shell of a thing, dressed up in pretty clothes and those lonely eyes, but really no more than a ghost walking around in the daytime. Like this house. An obsessively well-maintained mausoleum.”
“Or possibly,” he drawled out, his voice flat because he didn’t want to admit the accuracy of the hit she’d just leveled at him or investigate the damage it had left behind, “I’m simply not interested.”
She laughed at him then, and even though he could hear the hurt in it, he couldn’t see it on her face. She’d locked him out and he hated it.
But he had no choice.
If he couldn’t control her—or more to the point, himself, when he touched her—he’d have to keep her at arm’s length and find a different way to get his revenge on her father. Even if it killed him.
He thought, just then, that it might.
“Of course you’re not,” she said, and he thought that might be pity on her face. It set his teeth on edge. “It’s all right, Chase. No need to go to such lengths to be an ass. I got the message.”
She started toward him and something kicked at him, some bright shock of panic that she’d touch him and prove what a liar he was, or maybe it was only a flare of hope that she would—but then he realized he was standing next to the door, and she wasn’t headed for him at all.
He told himself that was relief he felt, like a block of concrete inside him.
“In future,” she said when she drew even with him, with dignity in her voice and every beautiful line of her stunning body, “you can simply say that you’ve changed your mind. No need for all these theatrics.”
Chase said nothing as she walked past him and out into the hall. Nothing as she closed the door behind her with a gentle, admonishing sort of click instead of a great slam that might have indicated that she was as wrecked as he was—and therefore might have made him feel better. Nothing at all as she walked off down the hall, leaving him to his emptiness and his terrible shell, the lonely eyes he avoided in his mirror, his great hulking mausoleum and the dark maw of his regret.
A lifetime’s worth of regret, piling higher all the time.
And nothing left inside him but his ghosts.
* * *
It was Chase’s British accent that had made it so much worse, Zara decided a few days later while she indulged both her dark mood and her restlessness with a long, cold walk around the Whitaker estate. So much more eviscerating than if he’d said all the same things but had sounded as if he was from Weehawken, New Jersey, instead. It would have been embarrassing and upsetting either way, but with that accent of his, he’d been withering.
It played on a constant, deeply cutting cycle in her head.
You can’t imagine you’re the first woman to throw herself at me, can you?
It’s not worth the bother.
And her personal favorite: your sister offered me a blow job within five minutes of our introduction.
He hadn’t mentioned whether or not he’d accepted. Zara shoved her hands down as far as they’d go in her bulky winter coat and stamped harder against the path as she moved, because the crunch of ice and snow and frozen earth was primitively satisfying.
And because she was pretending it was his face.
His beautiful, terrible face, and those lonely eyes the perverse thing inside her still wanted to make better somehow. She was more than simply an idiot, Zara thought then. She was bordering on actively, unforgivably self-destructive.
Is this what you had in mind, Grams? she asked the fading light around her.
She puffed out a long breath, watching the cloud of it disappear in front of her, and scowled up at the massive house that reared up on the top of the barren hill, a dark and imposing silhouette against the night that was coming in too fast on a winter afternoon like this one, two days before Christmas.
A smart woman would have left this place—this marriage—after that scene in the dining room, she was forced to admit to herself, and yet here she was. Stomping about the estate half-frozen on another one of her solitary walks that neither cleared her head nor solved anything. But it was better than sitting in that bedroom suite that had started to feel a bit like a cell, pretending to work on her thesis when all she could think about was the man she knew was lurking about the rattling old house somewhere.
No doubt plotting out new ways to humiliate her.
It’s not worth the bother. Your sister offered me a blow job.
“The facts are simple,” she told herself then, out loud, as if that might banish that vicious loop from her head. She nestled her chin a bit farther into her favorite scarf, still glaring at the house and the lights in the windows, the sparkling Christmas trees and the soft strands of lights along the drive that made it all seem far more welcoming than it was. “You literally threw yourself at this man, and he rejected you.” Her words were clouds against what remained of the daylight, but punched at her like heavy fists. “After kissing you like he thought he might die if he stopped.”
That was the part she kept mulling over. The reversal.
If he’d simply rejected her outright, it might have been different, or so she’d told herself in these dark, chilly days since it happened, while he’d avoided her completely and she’d had nothing to do but brood about it. Zara hadn’t reached the advanced age of twenty-six without having had her share of rejection. It was never pleasant, was it? Had Chase simply declined her offer, she liked to think she would have gracefully swallowed any stung pride and carried on—
Yeah, right.
She would have been mortified. She would have suffered through the rest of that dinner and then gone back to her room and prayed for immediate death, so she’d never have to face him again. But when the melodrama had passed, she would have been fine. Embarrassed, but fine.
If he’d rejected her in that snide, patronizing way but without any kissing, Zara was fairly certain she would have walked out of that dinner, packed her things, called for a cab and taken herself back home to the little cottage that had once been her grandmother’s in a pretty little village on Long Island Sound, where she could bundle herself up against the cold, light her own fire and hunker down for the long holiday break in peace and quiet. Chase could stay rude and obnoxious all on his own.
Because there was actually no reason that she and Chase had to stay together under one roof. Zara’s life had always been wholly uninteresting to the entire world—no paparazzi dogged her every step, no curious neighbors took pictures of her on the sly and posted them on the internet. No one cared where she was, so she could pretend to be anywhere, couldn’t she?
It was the kissing and then the rejection that she couldn’t get past.
And only partly because calling what had happened kissing might have been technically accurate, but didn’t come close to describing the experience.
Zara couldn’t sleep. Or she did, only to wake gasping and burning up from the searing force of her dreams, all of which featured Chase. She felt him, that rangy body of his all around her, hard and hot and ready. That mouth of his, wicked and seductive in turn. The way he’d pulled her off that table and into his lap, like she was as light as a feather and as easily plucked from the air and then placed wherever he’d wanted her.
She’d never felt anything like it.
And she could still feel it now, she thought crossly, starting to move again because her feet had turned to blocks of ice inside her boots. Her chest was tight. Her breasts simply hurt, heavy and aching, while she could feel the thrust of her nipples against the fabric of her bra, abraded more with every step. And even as she made her way across the frozen lawn, up that hill toward the house, she could feel that desperate, molten heat between her legs.
All this from the memory of his hands on her, of that incandescent kiss, of his mouth like a joy and a curse on hers.
And there was absolutely no way that she could have imagined that he’d been as bowled over by it as she’d been. No way she’d fabricated the thunder of his heart in his chest, the way he’d held her head and her face like he’d never let her go, or God help her, the way he’d taken her apart every time he’d tasted her. Tormented her.
Taken her.
No way, she thought. That had all been real, despite what came after.
Zara trudged up to the top of the hill and then stopped, frowning, when she saw him through the tall, bright windows. She’d come up the north side of sloping lawn and that put her outside the farthest part of the house, where there was an indoor pool, a greenhouse atrium and a fitness area she kept telling herself she’d visit one of these days to work off Mrs. Call
oway’s cooking.
Chase was in the greenhouse, in the wide, central part surrounded by an explosion of well-tended tropical greenery, and at first she thought he was dancing.
He was so graceful. Smooth, athletic movement, one motion blending into the next, and it took her long moments to understand that he wasn’t dancing at all—he was practicing some kind of martial art. She began to see kicks and strikes in the fluidity of his movements. That ruthless, formidable power of his exploding into a stream of controlled, yet lethal attacks.
But mostly, she saw him. Stripped bare to the waist and gleaming with the force of his exertions. Those haunted blue eyes of his and a sexily unshaven jaw, his dark hair much too long to be anything but wild. That he was truly the most beautiful man she’d ever beheld struck her square in the chest. Like one of his kicks.
Zara told herself it was her scholarly nature at work here. She liked research. She liked the compilation of facts, as many facts as she could find, no matter if she used them all or not in her final thesis. She liked to gather them and analyze them, then make her arguments.
This, she acknowledged as if from afar, was why she avoided “casual.” Because she wasn’t any good at it.
You’re not delusional at all, she assured herself as she pushed open the greenhouse door and walked inside, stamping the cold off her boots and pretending not to notice that Chase froze in the middle of all those bright green plants and impossibly summery flowers, like she’d stepped through a portal to a different season altogether.
For a moment, they only stared at each other, and Zara was certain she could feel the weight of all that feral blue pressing into her, like the sudden embrace of the warm, soft air. She could hear the harsh sound of his breathing over the riot of her own pulse. Her skin prickled everywhere. Her cheeks were so hot she thought they might explode.
Then Chase shifted, breaking the connection. He turned his back on her and walked—stalked, really, in nothing but those loose black trousers that only seemed to call attention to the stark power he wore in every inch of those smooth, hard muscles—over to one of those heavy boxing bags that hung from its own metal apparatus that reminded Zara of the game hangman. And then he started to hit it. And kick it.
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