“Take them off.” It was an order, and he didn’t pretend otherwise. Not with that stark, nearly guttural tone of voice. Not with that shattering look in his eyes that didn’t look in the least bit lonely now. They looked hot.
White-hot and focused directly on her.
Zara pulled open the top button of her trousers. Her mouth had gone dry, and she licked her lips before she thought better of it, and then her breath stuttered when his gaze moved to her mouth, dark and hungry.
“Did you accept?” she asked before she knew she meant to say something. It took a long time for him to find his way from her mouth, and he’d gone that much wilder when he did. He was taut and hard. She was almost shaking from the sheer insanity of being this close to him, this hot, this eternally hungry, and seeing the same reflected in every line of his beautiful face. “My sister’s lovely offer. When you met.”
He looked blank for a long, deeply satisfying moment. Then his expression went feral. Calculating in a purely sensual, ruthless sort of way that shouldn’t have thrilled her as fully as it did, sweeping through her like light.
“Would it matter if I had?”
More than it should, she realized. She wished she hadn’t asked.
“I’ve made it a strict policy to avoid going where Ariella has forged any kind of path,” Zara told him, fighting to keep her voice smooth and even dry, though she wasn’t sure she succeeded. “Be that a favored vacation spot, a neighborhood in a city, a room in the same house. A man. It helps avoid any confusion.”
Chase laughed. It skittered over her skin, then lodged itself in all of her tender places. Her nipples thrust toward him. Her core tensed and then melted. She shivered. And he’d never looked so wicked, so dangerously sexy, as when he leaned close again and spread his hands out over her belly that she hadn’t known until that moment had been revealed when her sweater rode up.
His palms were hot and faintly coarse against her skin, and he simply held them there for a moment, his gaze narrow and something like amused on hers, and she hated that he could feel her quiver. That he could feel the goose bumps that rose all over her at the fiercely possessive way he held his hands there.
She hated it. She thought she’d die if he stopped.
“Is this confusion?” It was a taunt, and so it shouldn’t have worked through her like liquid heat. “Because it rather feels like something else.”
“Like avoiding the question, you mean?”
He blinked, and as she always did, Zara got the impression she’d surprised him. That most people didn’t speak to this man this way, as if he was something other than lethal and untamable. She wished she could read the light that moved through those eyes of his, then over his remarkable face.
He laughed again. Low and something like indulgent. Then, inexorably, as if he’d never intended to do anything but this from the start, he shifted closer. He twisted one hand around and stroked his way beneath her half-opened trousers.
Zara jolted. Chase knew exactly what he was doing. His fingers found her latest thong covering her and stroked inside, slicking through her folds and then holding her there for a molten instant, hot and wet and in his hand.
“Does it matter?” he asked again, low and too close to her ear, while his fingers began to move. Learning her. Testing her. Then thrusting inside her. “Do you mind where I’ve been?”
Zara’s mind blanked out. There was nothing but the hard hand that wrapped around one hip and held her still and that other one, that wicked one that was breaking her apart with every slick, easy thrust. With the sure pressure of his palm against her center while he used two fingers to drive her up, then up further, then into dizziness.
“If I say yes, will you turn me away?” he whispered, daring her, and then he laughed again. “Right now?”
He did something magical with his hand, a hard, sweet twist, and then Zara was gone. Shattered, that easily and that completely. Thrown apart into so many blissful pieces she was terrified she’d never come back—
But she did.
Eventually, she did, and he was waiting. Watching. That heavy hand still holding her core, his blue eyes intent on her face and dangerously, heart-thumpingly wild.
“No,” he grated at her, fierce and low. “I never touched your sister. She never touched me. I’m not a pig.”
She was still shivering through the aftershocks, and she couldn’t speak. She thought there was an echo still bouncing around the glass in this atrium, and she was terribly afraid it was her. Screaming. Possibly even his name. She watched his mouth twist and that darkness move over his face, and she felt the tension in him them, in all the places they touched.
“Chase…” she managed to say, though she didn’t know where she meant to go afterward.
“I warned you,” he muttered.
And then he moved again. He dispensed with her trousers in a certain, shocking economy of motion that had them down her legs and whisked aside before she could draw a full breath.
“I’m not a good man, Zara,” he told her, but the look on his face was bright and greedy, and he was staring down at the scrap of multicolored lace between her legs. “But if I don’t taste you, I think I might die.”
And like that, the fire swept through her again, tossing her right back into the heat of it. His gaze locked onto hers as he moved, tugging her bottom forward until it was on the edge of the sofa cushion, then crouching down to press her thighs open with the breadth of his shoulders. Her hands were somehow sunk in the rough black silk of his hair, and she didn’t know how that had happened or why she seemed to be completely incapable of letting go of him.
And she was trembling. Everywhere.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Zara whispered.
And he grinned at her, this stunning creature, all raspy jaw and wild blue eyes, his mouth so close to her core that she was sure he could hear the way her pulse beat there. Or taste it.
“I know it’s not,” he agreed.
And then he pushed her thong aside and licked his way into her.
Zara simply ignited.
Thought fell away. There was nothing but Chase and the hungry way he feasted on her. He used his tongue like a weapon and she was helpless before it. She shook. She broke apart. She spun and she spun, and he only pushed her higher. Further. Deeper.
And when she convulsed around him this time, she heard a high, keening sound, and she didn’t care that it was her. She only wondered how the glass around them didn’t shatter. How the night simply hung there outside the windows without rending itself apart.
When she could move, she found she was limp and soft, sprawled back against the couch with her legs where he’d left them, tremors still chasing themselves across her skin.
She smiled before she thought better of it, wide and sleepy, and only then did she really look at Chase.
He’d sat back, lounging on the floor before the couch in a lazy way that was belied by every tight, hard line of his body and the intent way he watched her. Ruthless and hungry. Waiting. There should have been some kind of power in sitting higher than him, Zara thought, but he was too formidable for that. She doubted it would matter if he’d knelt there before her with his forehead to the floor; he was the least docile creature she’d ever seen. She thought of great, wild animals then, all with that contained force and the same predatory gaze.
Chase didn’t move. He watched. And the more the silence grew heavy, the more Zara felt it like a fist in her belly. Hard and impossible to ignore.
She struggled to sit up, then looked around for her trousers, feeling a whole spinning host of things she really, really didn’t want to feel. She decided to ignore them. She picked up the tangled pile of corduroy from the floor and stood, stepping into them and pulling them back up.
And all the while he lounged there, reminding her of a great big, indolent cat. Except far less cuddly.
“Let me guess,” she said when her trousers were fastened, her cheeks flared so hot she thought she
might run back out into the cold outside to relieve them and she was reasonably certain her voice wouldn’t quake when she spoke. “This was a mistake. You wouldn’t want to confuse me, as that will make me tumble straight off the cliff and find myself violently in love with you. You can get sex anywhere, Ariella was hotter, you’re not really that interested.” She smiled again, but this one was sharp enough to leave marks. “See? I listen.”
He lifted himself up from the floor and onto his feet in a single, smooth jump that made her blink. Then clench hard, deep inside. Lethal grace. Impossible beauty.
She was in so far over her head with this man it was a wonder she could breathe at all, and the worst part was, she could still feel him. That talented mouth of his, like he was still licking heat into the core of her.
“Come,” he muttered, short and dark. Pissed off, if she’d had to characterize it.
“I have to tell you,” she said, because she couldn’t seem to help herself. “If this is all part of some plot to put me in my place by punishing me with oral sex, I have to say, it’s…” She paused when his gaze slammed into hers, looking somehow amused and furious at once. She swallowed. “Working, obviously. I feel very, very punished.”
He muttered something else she couldn’t hear, though it moved over her like his hard, capable hands. Then he jerked his head, bidding her precede him out of the greenhouse and back into the main house. The halls felt drafty and cool after the close heat of the atrium, and she felt it slap against the flush she knew must have turned her bright red.
Chase stalked beside her, his face shut down and forbidding and those blue eyes glittering brighter than the twenty-foot Christmas tree that dominated the front hall. He escorted her in that same tense silence all the way up to her suite, then stopped.
“Thank you,” she said brightly, only half-aware that she was poking at him. And then unable to stop herself when she realized it. “That was fun. Especially the angry walking through the gloomy house. I think that part was my favorite.”
He shifted, making Zara aware that her back was to the door and he was very big, very male, and not looking at her in any way that a wise woman would ignore. Or poke at any further.
But as she had proved a number of times already in her two and a half weeks of arranged marriage with this man, she was anything but wise where he was concerned.
“I am going to have a shower,” he told her, and she had the sense he was biting off each word carefully. Like he couldn’t trust they wouldn’t simply run away with him if he wasn’t vigilant. Or like he was this close to acting on that dark heat she could see shading his gaze, turning that wild blue something nearer to slate. “A very cold one. And then I’ll meet you for the evening meal, as usual.”
“None of this seems to end well,” she pointed out. “Maybe we should stop trying. There’s no law that says we have to cohabitate, you know.”
“Don’t tell me any more stories, Zara.” His voice was low. Not quite angry, though; it was too quiet for that—and somehow he was closer than he should have been. “You don’t want to win me over. I’m no kind of prize, I assure you. More like something you’d be better off endeavoring to avoid at all costs.”
But he reached over and took a long, red wave of her hair in his fingers as he said it, then stared at it for a moment too long as he wrapped the shining strands around his finger. He shifted that stare to her when he tugged, not as gently as he could have done. The stare or the tugging.
“Are you sure about that?” She was whispering as if it hurt, though it didn’t. Or not acutely, anyway.
“I am.” He let go of her hair, and Zara felt bereft when he stepped back, like he’d taken all the heat and light with him. It was gone from his gaze as if it had never been. “Utterly, painfully sure.”
And when he turned abruptly and stalked off down the hall, she stood there for too long, watching him until he disappeared into his own rooms—and told herself that what she felt then was relief.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS RELIEF because it couldn’t be anything else, Zara told herself staunchly as she marched inside her room and started peeling off her clothes. Certainly not longing. Or anything like disappointment.
You should be relieved that someone in this absurdity of a marriage managed to keep his wits about him, a caustic voice inside of her snapped. What were you thinking?
But that was the trouble. She’d never thought less in her life. Her brain didn’t appear to be involved at all when it came to Chase—and Zara hardly knew how to process that revelation. Thinking had always been her refuge. Her escape. Her single and best weapon.
She kicked her trousers off and surveyed the damage—none of it in her thoughts, which careened madly this way and that and offered nothing in the way of solace. She felt tremulous and still a scalding kind of tender between her legs. Her knees seemed wobbly, as if she might topple over at any moment and then crumple to the floor like the turtleneck sweater she swept over her head and then dropped at the foot of her bed. Her breasts ached, her nipples still pushed out taut and hard, and she had no idea why she couldn’t seem to control herself where Chase was concerned.
Or why some part of her didn’t want to control herself.
“Whatever made you think you could wade in and handle him?” she asked herself out loud as she made her way to the sprawling bathroom suite and turned on the water in the large, glassed-in shower. It fell from two separate fixtures like rain. “You can’t handle yourself.”
Zara knew that if she worried over it too much more, she’d explode. So instead, she stepped into the shower and let the heat pound into her. She stood under the spray with her head tipped back and gave herself up to the water. She could have stood there forever.
There were far worse places to hide, if only from herself. Eventually, the water would run cold. And maybe by then she’d have figured out how she could ever trust her own judgment again. Maybe she’d even wash herself clean of all that leftover sensation—
But then the glass door opened, the cooler air gusting in from outside the stall like ice against her heated skin.
She jerked out of the spray, startled if not precisely surprised, as Chase stepped into the glass enclosure. Big and male, formidable and still so beautiful, even while he made the huge shower stall seem puny around him.
His face was drawn. Harsh and intent. His gaze burned. He still wore those exercise trousers of his, but he didn’t seem to care when the hot water soaked them on contact.
Zara knew she should say something. Do something.
But instead she merely stood there, caught as surely as if he’d trapped her between his hands and held her fast. As no small part of her wished he would.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. It did nothing at all to calm her.
“I can’t seem to help myself,” he grated at her, sounding aggrieved and somewhat accusing. “I’ve broken every last one of my rules with you already.”
Zara blinked. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t know why she’d said that, when she was a great many things indeed and not one of them was sorry, but she knew that hard curve in his lethal mouth was all for her. Maybe that was all the why she needed.
“I believe you will be, Zara, and far sooner than you think. But we are both doomed here. Never doubt it.”
He moved closer, taking more of the spray on his wide, strong shoulders, and Zara’s whole world shrank down to this. Him. His reckless blue gaze. His hard mouth. His inky-black hair wet against his head. The water coursing down his long, lean torso, highlighting the flat, hard planes of his chest and the ridged abdomen beneath, all of it dusted with a smattering of dark hair.
That haunted, hungry look on his face.
Again, she didn’t think. She slapped her hands against the wall of his pectoral muscles and ignored the jolt of heat that rebounded back into her palms, arrowing directly into her core.
“Don’t start,” she told him, fearless in her need. If that was wha
t was pounding in her like a drum, incessant and much too loud. A hot, molten pulse. “Not if you plan to stop again. I can’t take the whiplash.”
He ignored her hands. He simply leaned toward her despite them, took her face between his callused palms, and then his mouth was on hers, deep and wild. All of that volcanic heat. All of that terrible, wonderful fire.
Zara wanted to do nothing at all but burn.
“I’m not going to stop,” he said against her mouth, a gruff and hungry thing that shook all the way through her and lit her up, from sex to scalp and back again. “I can’t. But I can’t make you any promises about whiplash.”
* * *
She was wet again, flushed and pretty and red. She was hot and slippery from the water, like a thousand fantasies. And she still tasted too damned good. It wound in him, kicking over barriers and knocking down walls, and all he could do was angle his jaw for a better fit and keep right on kissing her.
This was a terrible idea.
Chase knew it.
He’d known it when he’d stood in his own bedroom, trying to breathe deep and ignore the imperative voice inside him that urged him to turn around and go back to her. To finally get her beneath him, above him, whatever. To sink deep inside her and who cared how?
He’d known it with every step he took down that long hall, and he’d certainly known it when he stood there in that bathroom again, staring at the indistinct impression of her lovely naked body on the other side of the steamed glass. He’d watched her, head tipped back, arms wrapped around her middle, and he could have left then with her none the wiser. He’d stopped his forward momentum, after all. He’d thought better of what he was about to do, and he’d known, with every last fiber in his being, that it was a mistake.
And he’d still walked straight into that shower.
It was a terrible idea that he would deeply regret, he knew as he pulled back. He held her to him, that luscious body flush against his at last, her bright gold eyes slumberous, the water making her glorious hair dark beneath his hands. It was among the worst ideas he’d ever had.
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