More like the creature Chase had claimed she was than the one she knew, deep down, she truly was.
It was a deep, inky dark outside her windows, and she wasn’t at all surprised to see that it had got late. That it was Christmas Eve, technically, and she couldn’t help her small smile at that. They’d come together twice more in that bed, rolling and laughing and driving each other mad, before she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber.
If it never happened again, she told herself stoutly, she’d be fine. Perfectly fine.
But she felt herself turn crimson anyway, her body calling her a liar. Or, worse, an addict.
She moved to the edge of the bed and pulled herself to standing with a hand on one of the four posts, letting her bare feet hit the chilly floor. Zara shivered and hurried her way across the cold expanse to her walk-in closet. She was reaching for her heaviest pair of winter socks when she heard the door open behind her in the main room.
Chase, she saw when she poked her head out of the closet. A scowling, half-naked Chase, who was holding a tray of food, which Zara found about as unlikely as she’d have found the appearance of a Christmas elf.
For a long moment, they stared at each other.
“Don’t dress on my account,” he growled at her, and then stalked over to the low table in front of the fire and slapped the tray down.
Zara pulled on the nearest things she could find—a pair of lounging trousers and a soft, cashmere sweater on top—and, after a brief and vicious internal struggle that was all about the vanity she’d thought she’d eradicated years before, the ugly socks, as well.
“You brought food?” she asked as she walked over to the couch where he waited, standing there in front of the fire and glaring.
“Is that a question or a statement of fact?”
“A simple yes or no would have sufficed, for future reference, Mr. Grouchy All The Time For Absolutely No Reason, Even On Christmas Eve.”
“It’s a shepherd’s pie,” he said, but there was that telltale crook of his lips. “Mrs. Calloway’s personal recipe, which she’s made for me since I was a boy. It’s good.”
And if he looked faintly astonished by the fact he’d told her something that could have been construed as sentimental—almost as astonished as Zara felt—he covered it with that disgruntled expression of his. She sat down gingerly on the couch, automatically crossing her legs beneath her and wincing slightly as she felt a distant pulling sensation that reminded her what they’d been up to all evening.
“You’re hurt,” he accused at once.
Zara started to roll her eyes, but caught the look on his face. It was more than bad temper. It was much darker. Raw torment, she would have said, and a frozen look in those blue eyes of his that resembled winter now, chilly and bereft.
She made herself smile instead, then let it turn wicked. “Only in the best possible way.”
He continued to stand there as she busied herself with the meal he’d brought. She took off the silver covers and helped herself to one of the plates. And a big gulp from one of the bottles of artisanal beer he’d brought along with them, dark and bitter and perfect. Nothing like socks at all. By the time she took her first bite, he’d moved away from the fire and sat down in the chair at the far end of the table. Jerkily. As if he’d thought better of it but was doing it anyway. Zara thought of wild animals then. Hurt and hungry and physically incapable, despite their own fierce needs, of coming closer.
“I had a kitten when I was little,” she told him without daring to look at him. “She was my one true love and stayed strictly indoors. One day I came home from school to find a screen knocked out and the kitten gone. I searched everywhere. I sang into bushes and called her name up and down the street and into all our neighbor’s properties. Ten days later, while I was calling for her one evening, I heard her reply.”
“While I’m fascinated, of course, by tales of lost kittens and little girls,” Chase said in a thin voice that was about as far from fascinated as it was possible to be without hurting them both on the sharp edge of all that sarcasm, “I think I told you not to tell me any more of your stories, Zara.”
She slid a dark look his way. He looked elegant and dangerous at once, lounging back in the prissy armchair and owning it, somehow. Making it as riotously male as he was. His black hair looked as if he’d raked his fingers through it repeatedly. His laughably perfect chest was still on mouthwatering display, and he’d chosen to wear nothing but a pair of pajamalike bottoms in a black silk that hung very low on his narrow hips. He looked like a lazy, wanton, half-naked king, supernaturally impervious to the weather and that much more attractive because of it.
He made her mouth dry. She took another pull of her beer and ignored the narrow look he was giving her from those demanding blue eyes of his, that, despite his tone of voice, had warmed slightly since she’d started talking.
“She was under the hedge down near the woods on the edge of our lawn,” Zara said, and smiled when he sighed. “I had to lie on my belly in the grass and talk to her, and after a while, she finally crept out. Inch by inch, but she wouldn’t come all the way to me. Eventually I was able to reach out and grab her, and her heart…!” She shook her head, remembering the heat of the little body in her hand and the surge of protectiveness she’d felt then, filling her up to near choking. “It was pounding. So fast. So hard. Like she was terrified of the thing she wanted most.”
Chase was ominously silent. Zara didn’t look at him again. She applied herself to the hearty shepherd’s pie before her, relishing every bite. Mrs. Calloway had outdone herself—and she was so hungry she even ate the peas slathered in gravy, when she normally avoided peas. For a while there was nothing but the sound of cutlery against china and the pop and rush of the fire in its grate.
And then Chase’s voice, that dark rasp with all its precise British intonation that made her nearly squirm in her seat, cutting through all of that.
“Am I to take it, then, that I am the lost kitten in this scenario?”
Zara bit back her smile. “A much bigger one, of course. And fierce. Very fierce and mighty and male.”
He watched her as if he was a very big cat, indeed.
“And what do you imagine it is I want most?” he asked quietly. “Yet am too terrified to claim?”
Zara picked up her beer bottle, more to hold it in her hands and disguise their tendency to shake than to drink it.
“I can’t imagine,” she said.
But she had imagined it, of course. She had too much imagination when it came to this man, and none of it was likely to help this situation any. It couldn’t make her feel less fragile than she did just then, no matter how hard she fought to pretend otherwise. And it certainly couldn’t compete with the reality of what had happened between them, all of which seemed to play on an endless, erotic loop in her head.
Maybe that was what gave her the courage to square her shoulders and ask the thing she really wanted to ask him instead, because it mattered so much more now. So much more than she was prepared to admit, even to herself. And not because he’d told her she was beautiful—but because she’d been tempted to believe he meant it.
Zara met his gaze and held it. “Why don’t you tell me the truth about why you went along with this ridiculous marriage?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
FOR A MOMENT, Chase thought he’d turned to ice at last.
That he’d finally frozen straight through, even as some part of him thrilled to the notion that she could read him that easily, that completely. That she could see so far into him she already knew what he had planned for New Year’s Eve. His revenge. At last.
But she couldn’t, of course. She might compare him to a lost kitten here in this warm room in the light of a flickering fire, but he wasn’t one. The only thing he had in common with a pet cat were claws, and his, he was well aware, were by far the more damaging.
“I’m sorry,” he said when she continued to look at him in that same expectant manne
r that made him want to tell her whatever it was she wanted to hear, simply to make her smile—a wholly alien notion that should have petrified him. “It’s still the same reason it was before.”
“And I’m sorry, too,” she said, as unapologetically as he had, which might have made him smile had he not understood how serious this all was, whether he wanted it that way or not. She couldn’t know. He shouldn’t want her to know. Her knowing would help nothing, change nothing. “But I don’t believe it.”
“It’s not a matter of belief,” Chase said, very distinctly, in his CEO voice that allowed for no argument, only obedience. “It’s a matter of fact. When I took over the company after my father died, no one was pleased. They’d read too many tabloids and paid too little attention to my actual achievements. Creditors who were content to take my father’s word that they would be paid in due course felt no such allegiance to me, and called their markers. I needed an influx of cash, so I agreed to merge with Nicodemus Stathis, a union my father had always championed. But Nicodemus’s agreement came at a price.”
Zara’s gaze moved over him then to the framed photographs above the fireplace. “Your sister.”
Chase wondered what she saw. Her father had sold her off in much the same way, hadn’t he? Was that what Chase was to her—a man so like her own father they were well-nigh indistinguishable? The very idea sickened him, but there was no denying the fact that this particular shoe fit all too well. Perhaps to beat Amos Elliott, he’d first had to become him. The notion stung.
“My sister, yes,” Chase agreed, his lips twisting as he tasted the depth of how much he hated himself for that. He’d tried to protect Mattie his whole life and then he’d sold her off like a piece of furniture to the man she’d spent years running away from. How proud their mother would have been of him, he thought derisively. “And before you ask, no. She didn’t want to marry him. I made her do it.”
“I saw pictures of their wedding in the papers, like everyone else in the entire world,” Zara said in that light way of hers that managed to wedge its way into him, forcing that brightness into all the places he wanted it least. He hated it. He wished he could hate her, too. It would make all of this so much easier—it would make it what he’d thought it would be when he’d concocted this revenge plan in the first place. It would make everything so much less complicated. “I failed to see a single shot of you standing over her with a gun to her head.”
Chase eyed her, torn between ending this conversation in a way likely to please him most as it involved his mouth on hers, or by simply getting up and leaving as he should. He had no idea why he did neither. Why he continued to sit there before her, as if those golden eyes kept him fastened to the chair.
Maybe they did more than that, because despite everything, he kept talking.
“The other pressing issue was that your father wanted me removed from my position altogether, and of course, he greatly influences how the board votes on such things,” he said instead of any one of the things he could have said that might have been safer. “He insisted I join the happy Elliott family in exchange for his backing off on his campaign to have me removed as president and CEO of my own company.” And then temper crept in, because why was he doing this? She wasn’t a confidante. She was a chess piece. “We’ve already gone over this, haven’t we? I was faintly drunk at our wedding. I didn’t black out. I remember the conversation we had in the limo.”
“Yes,” she said after a too-long moment, and he couldn’t read the expression on her face. “We’ve discussed parts of this before. But there are ways around my father, surely, that don’t require marrying a stranger.”
“Are there?” He raised his brows at her in stark disbelief that she, of all people, would say such a thing, and she flushed slightly. He had a predictable reaction to that, which he ignored. Or ordered himself to ignore, more accurately. “And yet here we both sit.”
“I have Daddy issues, obviously,” Zara countered in that rueful way of hers that was his undoing. Every time. “What’s your excuse?”
Chase let out a laugh, however little humor it had in it.
“I suppose I have Daddy issues of my own,” he admitted.
He couldn’t look at her then. He thought that warm gaze of hers must have some kind of sorcery to it, and it was making him say things he’d never, ever said to another living being. He glared at the fire instead, determined to resist her, and to keep himself from saying another word.
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of, Chase.” Her voice was warmer than the fire. Brighter. Dangerous. “I think you’ll find that all children of powerful men have issues one way or another, even in the happiest and healthiest of families. It’s the natural order of things.”
“My father and I were never close,” he was astounded to hear himself say, as if he was the kind of man who shared confidences. Who talked about things to the women he bedded. Or at all, to anyone. Ever. “I was a grave disappointment to him in all ways.”
“How can that be?” she asked, and there was no judgment in her voice. Nothing knowing or insinuating, nothing sarcastic. She simply asked. “You’re his successor. You worked in his company and your job wasn’t all for show.”
“You have no idea if it was or wasn’t.”
“In fact, I do.” There was no malice in the way she said that despite his tone, just that quiet confidence of hers that he found more and more addictive each time he heard it. “I’m an excellent researcher, Chase. I know what your job was in London.”
“Nonetheless, he felt my exploits were not a credit to the family name,” Chase said stiffly, unwilling to dig any deeper into what she’d said, because it sounded like excuses. And lord knew he was filled to the brim with those, wasn’t he?
He hadn’t been a successor to his father in the way she meant. He’d been the cause of his father’s worst nightmare. No amount of self-imposed exile in his mother’s country or quiet competence in the family company was penance enough for his sins. He knew that too well. He’d been living it for the past twenty years.
“Exploits?” Zara asked him mildly. “That sounds exciting.”
“It was too exciting for my father. My sister and I spent far too much time in the tabloids for his peace of mind,” Chase said matter-of-factly. And then he kept going because why not? He’d already said too much. Why not compound the error? “He preferred Nicodemus to me. He said many times that Nicodemus was the son he wished he’d had instead.”
He heard her shift in her seat and didn’t want to hear whatever she might say next. He didn’t want forgiveness. He didn’t want absolution. He deserved neither.
“And I agreed with him, Zara. After he died, the only thing left was the company. I would do anything to save it.” He looked at her then, and he knew it was a cold look. Harsh. Another warning she should heed—but she didn’t flinch. Of course she didn’t. Not Zara, who was afraid of being lifted but not in the least concerned by anyone else’s demons. “I have. I will.”
She stood then, surprising him. Then he told himself it was a good thing that she had the presence of mind to stop this train wreck of a conversation. He couldn’t seem to walk away, so she would have to do it for the both of them—
Except Zara didn’t storm off. She didn’t move her gaze from his. She simply walked to him as if there was nothing more natural in the world. Then she threw a leg over him and sat herself down astride his lap, looping her arms around his neck as if they’d sat like this a thousand times before. As if she’d been made just for him.
As if they fit, key to lock. Perfectly crafted for each other, from head to toe.
He groaned, telling himself he was annoyed even as his hands moved to hold her there, pressed up against his sex so he could feel her softness. Annoyed, he reminded himself sharply as he moved to balance her better, to help her slide in and press those stunning breasts of hers closer to him.
“Tell me more about the things you have to do to save the company,” she murmured, looking dow
n at him in a way that made him burn much brighter than that piddling fire beside them. White-hot. Deep. “Did you have to sacrifice your body?”
“I did,” he said, a low rasp, and she grinned. It was wicked and lovely, a promise that seared through him, making him hard and desperate for her that quickly. That completely. “It was terrible.”
“You poor thing.” She rolled her hips, making them both catch their breath, and then she laughed, throaty and low and designed to make him lose his mind. It would have worked, had he still possessed a mind to lose. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”
He tilted his head back and she angled hers down, until their lips were only the scantest breath apart and her hair swirled around them, cocooning them in the fragrance of it, red and sweet. As perfect as she was.
Mine, he thought. He felt it everywhere. Like a prophecy punched into his skin. All mine.
Zara smiled and shifted even closer. “I have all night.”
Chase grinned back at her then. He forgot all the reasons he shouldn’t succumb to this. Why he shouldn’t allow the situation to get any worse than it already was. Why he shouldn’t blur all these lines that much further than they already had, and when he knew where this was headed. Where it would have to end.
Instead, he took her at her word.
* * *
Zara walked out of the shower the next morning feeling very pleased with herself. With life in general, come to that. Certainly with the long, dark, wild night she’d had with Chase. So pleased, in fact, that she was humming a little “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” as she toweled off, which was why it took her longer than it otherwise might have to hear the other melody that kept intruding on her admittedly off-key rendition of the happy carol.
Her cell phone, she realized when she heard the voice mail chime go off a moment later. She started toward the bedside table where she’d plugged it in, frowning when it started ringing again scant seconds later.
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